Dostoevsky in Red Hook

You can tell when fall has arrived in New York; the last of the air-conditioners come out of the windows, the heat comes on for the first time in six months and both of our city's baseball teams are absent from the Series. (Can't say I was excited about the Cardinals' victory; as Henry Kissinger said of the Iran-Iraq war, "It is a pity that both sides cannot lose.") Tomorrow we turn the clocks back, hastening the sense that darkness is falling across the land.

Not content with external darkness I went to a matinee of the remarkable -- and remarkably painful -- film, Half Nelson. There are finally other films in theaters that I want to see, but I had heard great things about Half Nelson and suspected it would be hard to find in the near future. Sure enough, there were four other people at the matinee I attended in the Village -- and two of them left before the film was half over.

Ryan Gosling plays an eighth grade public school history teacher in Brooklyn, but that is the least of his character's problems. He is also a junkie who arrives to class, and the basketball court where he coaches a girls' team, in a just barely functioning state. Shareeka Epps plays one of his students and best players who knows his secret. She lives by the Red Hook projects and has her own issues: a mother who works constantly, an absent father, a brother in jail for dealing and her brother's old kingpin who wants her to start working for him...

None of which really does justice to the story. It's many things beyond that -- includiing a surprising indictment of sixties radicalism and the hide-bound public school system -- but for anyone who knows addiction it is more painful than a horror film. I saw much of the movie through my fingers, actually saying "No, no," each time Gosling's character picked up, each time Epps took a ride with her "friend." The final scene is as strangely painful and hopeful as any I've seen in a movie this year, and recalled for me the children who haunt the great books of Dostoevsky -- Crime and Punishment, The Demons, parts of the Brothers K. Their existence, and the existence of innocence itself, is a reminder, a reprimand, an apparition and a goad. When the lights come up, the darkness remains. Don't see it alone.

posted by Sean Elder @ 1:56 PM  0 comments

A friend writes

Long time New Yorker readers will recognize that opener as one that used to grace the Talk of the Town section on a regular basis. It was the magazine's way of including dispatches from such far flung locations as Madison, Wisconsin or Marin County and disguised the fact that the friend in question could be some famous writer or just someone off the map (the New Yorker map that is) who had a good tale and a way with words. (Now the pieces in Talk are all signed and half of them seem to be the by-product of some press release, as if Sidney Falco were now editing the section.)

I always liked the anyomous nature of the setup -- whose friend wrote? It implied that Talk's friend was your friend, which I found oddly comforting. So I was moved to open an email from a name I did not recognize with the subject line "Hello old friend." (I've been feeling in need of a friend lately.)

It was spam. Damned clever spam, I guess (I don't remember what penny stock it was hawking) but I felt preyed upon. Maybe it's the loneliness of my middle-aged, internet connected existence but it made me think I'm not that far removed from those grannies who sign their savings over to some con artist selling South African coins just because he was nice to them on the phone.

I was determined not to be had again and almost deleted another email I got just 24 hours later from another address I did not recognize. "Just catching up with you" this one said -- right! How many times have you fell for that? But I opened it anyway and this one turned out to actually be from and old friend (okay, an old girlfriend but I'll take what I can get) who had found me on the internet. And I found that oddly comforting, too. I grew up with the sense that everything had to be taken away from you, eventually -- home, family, especially friends -- and it's nice to think that we can all come boomeranging back out of the wild blue yonder.

But you won't believe what the former president of Nigeria is going to do for me...

posted by Sean Elder @ 11:37 PM  2 comments

But the malady lingers on

I went to the Tower Records on Broadway for the store's final, going-out-of-business, everything-must-go sale on Thursday and the scene was pretty much what you would expect: A bunch of middle-aged guys like me poring over the CDs and walking around the aisles carrying their payloads in a protective crouch, like pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers carrying their pods.

And I don't mean iPods.

I wrote about my early love affair with Tower and don't mean to wax nostalgic anymore for the days of wax and jimmy shands. Technology moved on, like it or not, and the downloading phenomenon (legal or extralegal) separated the men from the boys (and I didn't see many women or girls in Tower Thursday) years ago. Even Bob Dylan, whose albums were among the first I bought at (yes) Tower in Sacramento, recently gave his jaded blessing to the free download phenomenon. In a conversation with Jonathan Lethem that appeared in Rolling Stone last month, the sage of Hibbing weighed in on the controversy in his own unique way. "I remember when that Napster guy came up across," Bob told the novelist, "it was like, 'Everybody's gettin' music for free.' I was like, 'Well, why not? It ain't worth nothin' anyway.'"

That's easier to say when you've moved tens of millions of units yourself and your brand is now so ubiquitous that you can get away with doing Victoria's Secret ads and Twyla Tharp shows without anyone saying boo. But the man, as usual, has a point: I probably could have got most of my haul (eight CDs and one LP, a birthday gift for my friend Jeremy, the name of which I cannot reveal at this time) online for nothin' -- but would I have thought to get the History of Township Music if I hadn't seen it on display? Or the double album package of Jerry Lee Lewis's first country records, Another Place, Another Time and She Still Comes Around (To See What's Left of Me)? Without record stores how will we find the random music we never knew or forgot we wanted?

I know, the Limewired will say you can scroll for your favorites there and there are professional precogs working at the download sites who can tell you what you want before you want it -- but what are the chances you will stumble on the Killer in that purple velour nehru jacket? For some action you've still got to leave home, providing you can find a record store that hasn't become a Starbucks.

That's where I bought the new Dylan.

posted by Sean Elder @ 10:48 AM  3 comments

Anger is an energy

We went to DC this weekend to see my friend Charles in the Roundabout Theater Company's traveling production of Twelve Angry Men. You probably remember the 1957 movie version (directed by Sidney Lumet); it was black and white and full of sweat and fury.

It was also a lesson in democracy and like the play on which it was based a sort of ham-fisted yet durable testament to the legal system. What made Reginald Rose's story so innovative then was its concentration on the jury; until then courtroom dramas centered on the trial itself and the only important players were the defendants, the witnesses and possibly the lawyers. The judge was just an black robe and the jury was just a set of pawns, who filed back into the courtroom at the trial's end with few surprises and no hint of having suffered in deliberation. Who knew what went on back in that jury room? Who cared?

Rose, a regular writer in the golden age of early TV drama, had served on a New York jury and was moved to recreate the experience in a real-time staged environment. The big clock on the jury room wall ticks for actors and audience alike and the heated deliberations over the evidence that will send a kid to the electric chair for murdering his father reach a boiling point several times in the course of the production, keeping everyone on their toes. "That play's just like a carnival ride," Charles -- who plays the blue-collar mediator, Juror No. 6 -- said after the performance. "Once you get on, it just takes off."

Despite the rather stock characters -- the advertising weasel, the blowhard bigot, the well-meaning foreigner -- the prejudice that is at the heart of the play (and the trial) remains a timely topic. The Other on trial is a race of people (Puerto Ricans in Rose's day) that could just as easily be -- I dunno -- illegal aliens or suspected Arab terrorists today. In fact, Charles said that the Secret Service had swept the theater the night before because Condi Rice and Alberto Gonzalez were in attendance. I hope they were listening when Juror No. 9 asks the bigoted Juror No. 10, "Do you think you were born with a monopoly on the truth?"

posted by Sean Elder @ 9:38 PM  0 comments

Don't follow me, I'm Lost, too

I had resisted the call of yet another TV series for the last two years because life is too short and Tivo will only hold so much. But lately my wife and I have joined the cult and started watching the first season of ABC's Lost on DVD. Abandon hope, all ye who tune in here.

Lots of people recommend shows to me but by the time I finally get around to watching them, they seem kind of lame. Fans insist that's because I didn't catch the wave early and that the show jumped the proverbial shark back on episode 23, or something. (The West Wing always seemed like on elaborate puppet how to me-- one voice, many faces -- albeit one done with a steadicam, though fans assure me that back in the day...)

But thanks to DVD, you can now go back and see what the big deal was without waiting or watching commercials. So Peggy and I watched the first four episodes last weekend...and I'm embarrassed to say that we are almost through the first season, one week later. "How addictive is Lost?" the Mephistopholes behind the counter of my local video store said as I came back for the second disc. He was in recovery himself, having watched the first two seasons in about two weeks.

It's not like we don't have lives: she runs a magazine, with all the attendant responsibilities (TV, travel, schmoozing and endless meetings with advertisers, partners, bureaucrats and bean-counters) and I'm writing, teaching, running the house and raising our daughter. Maybe our daytime busy-ness makes it easy to hook up to something so otherly other at night. People keep mentioning Gilligan's Island but I am reminded of No Exit. (Didn't Bob Denver play Jean-Paul Sartre in Dobie Gillis?)

The hard part now is getting people not to talk about the show even as I Tivo the current, short season. My brother Brian sent me a parody he had written of the "Gilligan's Island Theme" with new lyrics related to Lost -- but I'm afraid to read it again since it might give something away! My son Adam, another addict, already said something I'm trying to forget, and just looking the show up on Jump the Shark (most voters say it has not jumped the shark yet) I read something I wished I hadn't.

So please, if you have any theories, keep them to yourself. As Maynard G. Krebs said, "The G stands for Walter."

posted by Sean Elder @ 11:50 AM  1 comments

Where's this place called Lonely Street?

I heard the Everly Brothers asking that question in my kitchen last night when I remembered: "Heartbreak Hotel" was at the end of Lonely Street. Did it intersect with "Lonely Avenue," where Ray Charles did some time? ("My pillow is made of lead/My cover is made of stone...") And is it anywhere near the "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" that both Tony Bennett and Green Day have walked upon, though not at the same time?

The "Dead End Street" that the Kinks sang of is close to the "Backstreets" Bruce Springsteen rumbled and wailed on. (The Tenth Avenue of "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" was a real street, like the Fourth Street of Bob Dylan's "Positively Fourth Street," and hence has no place in my mythical miserable musical town.) There is no Sunny Side to any of these streets so tell the the Pogues not to even try.

A lot of these streets could cross in "A Town without Pity". There's not much to do there though the "Sad Cafe" would be happy to take your money. Don't expect any change.

You can try to leave though taking the train will probably leave you "Waiting at the Station." Best head back to your "Blue Hotel" and don't worry, you won't need to set your alarm. She'll Even Wake You Up To Say Goodbye.

posted by Sean Elder @ 3:05 PM  2 comments

Shooting gallery

The latest senseless school shooting in Pennsylvania in what is invariably described as "a rash of school shootings," as if calamine lotion were the solution, reminded me of another rash of school shootings, back in the late 1980s. This was long before Columbine, the mother of all school shootings that made us forget previous guns-and-playground episodes. In 1989 Patrick Edward Purdy, one of a rash of three-named-drifters-cum-mass-murderers, went to a shoolyard in Stockton, CA and opened fire on the kids playing there. Five died, and 29 more were injured.

Speculation at the time centered around the race of the victims, many of whom were Cambodian immigrants. Rumors did not fly as quickly in the days before the internet but I remember people saying Purdy was a vet, or had lost his job to some Asian. (Even in this instant media age, disinformation is the norm. Last week, one day after a drifter killed and molested some girls at a school in Colorado, a father told me he had heard the man found the kids on MySpace -- completely false but an instant urban legend!)

Purdy was neither a vet nor disgruntled former employee; he was a moron with drug and alcohol problems and a car trunk full of automatic weapons. (He had inscribed the words "Hezbollah" and "freedom" on his rifle, while his jacket read "Death to the Great Satin," presumably one of the Five Satins.) But he had also attended that school as a child and lord knows how that experience got twisted in his brain. Many of the schoolyard shooters had bad experiences at school; the Columbine killers seemed to put an exclamation mark on the new trend of kids who don't wait twenty years to let their wounds fester.

Look for lots of Op-Eds and everything from permissive parenting to video games to be blamed again. School security will be increased, again, and the NRA will go into its default defensive posture before it goes back to handing out guns at roadside stands in North Carolina. President Bush has even threatened to get involved, though given his track record in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans you may want to tell your kids to duck.

The heartbreaking aspect of the Pennsylvania shootings, of course, is that those girls were Amish. It was a one-room schoolhouse, the kind Tom and Becky held hands in. Most amazingly, the Amish community has taken up money for the families of the victims -- as well as the family of the man who did the killing. What Jesus had on tap is still stronger than dirt.

posted by Sean Elder @ 4:17 PM  0 comments

Foley's follies

The story of Republican representative Mark Foley of Florida and the emails he sent to a congressional page is growing and changing faster than a Sea Monkey in water, or one of those dinosaurs in a capsule my son loved when he was little, probably for the same reason. Contents under pressure, dying to come out (so to speak). (I'll leave others to handle the closeted-Washington angle, though I think it's fair to say that the gays I have met in DC are more flamboyant after hours, as it were, than their NY counterparts because they have to save it up. You can do Dorothy all day in the West Village and no one bats a lacquered eyelash.)

Now we're on to the what-did-they-know-and-when-did-they-know-it part of the cycle, with the GOP sweating on getting their story straight on the question of whether or not they looked the other way when presented with evidence that one of theirs assigned to the job of protecting exploited children might have been the wrong man for the job. Did Hastert et al do a Sgt. Schultz when confronted with Foley's overly friendly email to the 16-year-old because they were worried about losing another seat in the House?

If so, they may wish to revist the cover-up strategy in the future. True, Foley asking the kid what he wants for his birthday and requesting a recent pic smacks of Peter Graves in the cockpit of Airplane! ("Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?"), but I guarantee that what is to follow is worse. Rumors of more explicit IM's beg the question: what was Foley thinking? Just as Jeanine Pirro might have imagined Bernie Kerik was under surveilance when she asked him for help bugging her husband's love boat (see below), I think everyone should assume that not only is no email or even instant message private (ask the folks at Enron, the live ones anyway), it will live forever. Imagine not just that anything you write will be read by others but that it will be broadcast from the jumbo screens in Times Square, just like Madama Butterfly.

So what fun is email if you can't say something suggestive? None whatsoever. What I suggest is that you adapt a disclaimer, similar to your signature line, on everything you write. "Any reference in the above material to floggings, nipple-clamps or patent leather is intended to be purely ironic." If you work in academia you may want to try the "queer theory" approach: "Sexual deviance is a social and political statement and the reader should not assume that the writer engages in any of the practices mentioned in this email but stands in solidarity with those who do." Or there is always the Pete Townshend defense: "In an effort to better understand the sexual tendencies of others the writer of this email may express an interest in certain activities purely for research purposes." Just assume there is no privacy. Alberto Gonzalez does.

posted by Sean Elder @ 11:53 AM  0 comments