The singer not the song

Can we allow ourselves a moment to feel optimistic about the candidacy of Barack Obama? What with the blowout in South Carolina on Saturday, and the endorsement of Caroline Kennedy yesterday, followed by that of Ted Kennedy today, I'm starting to think we might actually win this thing.

I know: with hope comes the very real danger of disappointment. But how odd it is to find the naysayers to be people within our own party. Of course we should have expected the Clintons to fight dirty (see below) when Obama started to look like a real threat to her presumed nomination, and it must be maddening for Hillary and her camp to suddenly find themselves playing a centrist Hubert Humphrey role to Obama's Bobby Kennedy, trying like crazy to kill whatever buzz there seems to be in the air about the possibility of a president who actually inspires people. But now we are seeing that very same don't-dare-dream mantra coming from some on the left as well.

Today it's Paul Krugman, the Times's resident Marxist economist, telling Obama supporters not to kid themselves. No one can transcend partisanship, he argues; this is one of the lessons of the Clinton administration. "Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1)."

In other words: your man may be clean but they're still going to play dirty. (And we in the media aren't goiing to do anything to level the playing field either.) Fair enough. I don't really believe anyone in Obama's tents really think that the dark forces of the right are going to lay down their arms should he get the nomination, let alone make it to the White House. And Krugman's complaints with the candidate are substantive in nature, as well: Hillary's health care plan is truly universal, for instance, and she has a record of fighting.

And fighting. Which is the point: people are sick of it. Sick enough that someone preaching transcendence of the red-blue inertia might actually appeal to the general electorate in ways that anyone with the Clinton name cannot. The Obama opponents act offended that he inspires people -- how cynical is that? "You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose," she scolded the candidate in New Hampshire (uh, could we do a matchup of her and Obama's books?), sounding very much like the ant taking the grasshopper to task for making music when he should have been hoarding grain.

But the goals of the two candidates are not that dissimilar, health care mandates aside, and from this perch it looks like Obama is the more likely candidate to win enough votes to actually try and achieve them. So why not let the grasshopper take the lead here? We've all heard your singing.

This weekend I had dinner with my friends Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson, whose Big Dance Theaterhas just been commisioned by the French Institute Alliance Francaise to create a piece in residence at Lyon this summer. (Sounds like a typical French trap: "We will give you money to create an avant garde theater piece but you must live in France and eat our food and drink our wine while you do it!") The commission stipulated that the piece be based on a classic French film and Paul and Annie-B decided they wanted to use one they had not seen, just to make things interesting. So they read a lot of scripts and discovered that most of the screenplays of those great French New Wave films really weren't very good. It was the way they were made -- the performances, the direction, the cinematography -- that made them memorable and magic.

In other words: don't shoot the piano player, okay?

posted by Sean Elder @ 11:53 AM  1 comments

Same As It Ever Was

I was down by flu this week and uncompelled to blog though I thought it noteworthy that the two indy films I voiced only qualified enthusiasm for (below) were both nominated for Oscars. Draw your own conclusions; do not cheat by looking at the conclusions being drawn by the person sitting next to you.

The political needle moved little in that time. (I speak here of the Democratic primaries; the GOP has its own hell to raise.) The last debate was an embarrassing mudfest, good only for allowing Edwards to emerge with some dignity which is how he will be remembered as he exits the stage in the next few weeks. My man Obama looked a bit flustered caught between him and Hillary and I got a glimpse of how he might be manhandled if he were to become our party's candidate. He looked young, and lord knows how our political system likes to exterminate youth.

But the desperation of the Clinton camp has become quite galling, and only serves to motivate those of us who would like to see some young blood in charge for a change. Forget about Bill's maddog approach -- I think part of him always wished he was a thug, a backroom brawler, and now in the guise of defending his wife's honor, he is getting to act out another fantasy: that of the caring husband. I speak of the mudslinging being done on Hil's behalf by other members of her posse.

In Bob Herbert's column in the Times today, he quotes Andrew Young saying, “Bill is every bit as black as Barack. He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack.” We are not talking about Bill's premarital dating history, of course. This would be tasteless enough if the ex-president himself hadn't used Young as a reference to establish his black-like-me (or me-like-black) bonafides. (By this logic, Robert De Niro should win the nomination.)

Then Herbert (who is, by the way, black) found this gem from former US Senator (and current New School president) Bob Kerrey: “It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.”

This from a man who admits to murdering unarmed civilians during the Vietnam war; should that experience be considered a big deal?

None of this rear-guard action kept the Times from endorsing Hillary yesterday, even if their endorsement was somewhat tepid. Like Captain Hook, they would like to pull the plug on this whole youth & optimism thing before it gets out of hand. They are probably hoping that she will be elected (the paper's endorsement of McCain was even more half-hearted) so they can recycle some of those old headlines: Clinton Blocks Investigation, Clinton Targets Enemies, who knows? maybe even Clinton Courts Impeachment. Nothing like a familiar refrain.

posted by Sean Elder @ 11:19 AM  0 comments

Jonesing for indy

I've been to see two touted independent films in the last 48 hours (Juno and The Savages) and despite the relative merits of each, I find myself jonesing for some big Hollywood style escapism. Not that the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise promises to be all that (Harrison Ford being older than Sean Connery was when he played Indy's father in the last IJ movie, and tell me, does Shia LaBeouf own a piece of Vanity Fair (or vice versa)? It's the second time he's been on the magazine's cover in a year and we all know what that kind of exposure did for Gretchen Mol...)

Juno, as you have doubtless heard, takes on the touchy subject of teen pregnancy with a fair amount of wit and sympathy, if a little too much fairy-tale gauziness for my taste. No harm, no foul is all I can say without giving away too much of the plot (that's the trailer's job). It's at the soft end of the indy film rainbow, that previously inhabited by films like Little Miss Sunshine. Most of the women I know were more moved by it than that, for perhaps obvious reasons, though I can add that I was touched by the realtionship between the girl and her father. It's the kind we all wished we'd had with our dads, and that I would like to emulate with my own daughter.

But between the dead-pan cinematography (a staple of ironic indy films elevated to some kind of formalism in the precious self-referential films of indy hero Wes Anderson and the cringe-inducingsongs by Kimya Dawson and the aptly named Moldy Peaches, I found myself getting what the cable commercials might call restless leg syndrome. Juno is supposed to be a punk rock fan, extolling the superiority of Iggy and the Stooges to the would-be adoptive father, a former indy musician who now writes advertising jingles. Fair enough -- so why not throw some Stooges or Ramones into the mix to get this party started? And how about moving the goddamn camera?

The Savages, written and directed by Slums of Beverly Hills auteur Tamara Jenkins is about the grown children (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney) of a nasty old man that are forced to care for him in his demented dotage. Dang, I just gave away the whole plot. It's at the far more realistic end of the indy spectrum -- the bed-pan end, you might even say. And as good as Hoffman and Linney are (as they are in everything), there is a lot left out of this tragicomic gruel. Dad was supposed to have been abusive and neglectful when they were kids (this is made explicit in a scene from one of Linney's character's autobiographical plays, which looks just bad enough to be a real off-off Broadway production) -- but he also took care of them when their mother left. There is clearly some dimension to dad that is unexamined in this story -- and it's not like there isn't pleny of opportunity in each real-time scene to explore those contradictions. (In one of the film's best scenes, Dad reacts violently to a scene of an abusive father in 1927's The Jazz Singer, hinting at his own troubled upbringing. But that's all you get.)

This is probably the place to make some argument for the importance of independent film, how it allows artists to explore taboo subjects and difficult emotions that there is little room for in the kiss-kiss, bang-bang world of Hollywood cinema. And it certainly fills the theaters in cities in like New York, where people are always on the lookout for a representation of some life more miserable than their own. (Locations are played for laughs, too: though filmed in British Columbia, Juno is supposed to take place in Dancing Elk, Minnesota, while The Savages takes us from the retirement complex of Sun City, AZ to Buffalo, NY -- from one vision of hell to another -- presumably to make people paying $2000/mo to live on the Lower East Side feel better about their lot.) But couldn't we get a shake with those fries? I know the budgets of such flicks prohibit things blowing up, and most Hollywood movies are nothing but -- but is it too much to ask for a bit of adventure, action, intrigue even real romance (to say nothing of sex) in these still lifes? Between the dead pan and the bed pan I would settle for a little slapstick even. I'm all for being waken and shaken, but a different kind of human touch could take us from our daily concerns.

Tell you what: you throw me the idol and I'll throw you the whip...

posted by Sean Elder @ 11:21 AM  0 comments

Spare change?

I watched the 116th Democratic debate last night, since I have no life and it was not much of a crowd scene: Biden and Richardson have fallen from the fray and Kucinich was blocked due to lack of popularity. It must be hard being told you can't sit at the same cafeteria table as the cool kids when you've got the hottest spouse of them all. (And yes, I include Bill in that.)

And yes, it was rather collegial as debates have gone; the boys did not gang up on Hillary and no one cried. In fact an embarrassing amount of time was spent early on talking about Hillary tearing up in NH and Obama's "likeable enough" line in the last debate, to the point where my wife complained about insider baseball questions from interlocutors Brian Williams and Tim Russert. As you may have heard, both Clinton and Obama had already elected to play nice and avoid race issues and the whole question of who liked black people more, all of which was reminding people why they had gotten sick of Dems in the first place. An audience member, who heckled the moderators for their "race based" questions was escorted from the chambers. (My wife was allowed to stay.)

At the end of the two hour show, which was broadcast on the little-watched MSNBC opposite NBC's own two-hour special edition of America's Biggest Loser, Keith Olbermann declared the debate "substantial and substantive" and I had to agree: I could vote for any of these three. (MSNBC's resident blowhard, Chris Matthews declared Hillary the victor and next president, reminding of me nothing more than the Fox commentators this past Sunday who warned at halftime, when the playoff game was tied 14-14, that there was no way the Giants could beat the Cowboys.)

I did worry, though: While I have made my affinity for Obama known, he may be too smart for the country. When he parsed the distance between a difference and a distinction in the answer to one question, I saw America collectively rolling its eyes. Hillary, whose husband defines modern political parsing, has a tendency to shout no matter what size the audience (prompting Williams to remind the candidates that he and Russert were only seven feet away from them) -- and she talks too much. And Edwards' populist politics come close to embracing protectionism, a dead end in my opinion, and by appealing to our concern for the underdog he overlooks the lessons of Reagan.

For Reagan, while mentioned in every GOP debate, is too often overlooked by the Dems. His was a message of hope, whether you bought it or not; he moved a lot of people and left our party in the wilderness (the same one the GOP wandered in after Goldwater) for years. I call it the lesson of the Russian cabdriver: I remember arguing with a Reagan-loving hack in LA in the eighties: He doesn't care about you, I said, he only cares about the rich.

"Soon I will be rich!" this guy said. It's the American dream, or one of them. "Here you can be anything."

Call it coincidence but yesterday, on Brian Lehrer's show on WNYC, I heard another Russian (this one from Brighton Beach) talking about Obama, whom he had gone to hear speak. He was suspicious; Hillary had been a friend to his community, and he clearly bought some of the rumors about Obama (he had been raised a Muslim etc.). But he liked the fact that the candidate talked about personal transformation; in his book, that wide-open immigrant's book like the one the lady in the harbor holds, the personal trumped the political and America's great promise was change.

There's that word again.

posted by Sean Elder @ 9:35 AM  0 comments

Lost In Flight

About three months ago my friend Jeffery hooked me up with an email distribution list an old buddy of his does called "Tune of the Day." It's pretty much what it sounds like: his buddy (who prefers his anonymity) has a stupendous music collection and sends out a different track every day -- mostly guitar based rock from the sixties and seventies -- in an email that includes a bit of context, historical or personal, for each song. A lot of it is stuff I have never heard, or not heard in so long I all but forgot about it. When it comes to the music I was listening to in high school, I remember what I was listening to but not always why.

Take Traffic. Their second album was on my turntable pretty much my entire sixteenth year, though now I have to wonder what I was thinking, if not smoking. I recalled that year when TOTD dropped "Forty Thousand Headmen" into my queue a few weeks ago. I honestly have no idea what I thought that song meant then, though I listened to it repeatedly, on the headphones. That and a song called "Cryin to Be Heard" really made me feel lonely, or maybe that was just me being sixteen.

Within the year I had discovered country music, in the backwards way most of us did; the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo sent me to Merle Haggard, and from him I must have gotten interested in Hank Williams. There was an ad on TV then for an album of Hank's greatest hits that I sent away for, and soon I was listening to that the way I had listened to Traffic. My loneliness had found its true expression in a song of Hank's called "May You Never Be Alone Like Me": "Like a bird that's lost its mate in flight/I'm alone and o so blue tonight/Like a piece of driftwood on the sea/May you never be alone like me..."

You could argue that both Winwood and Williams were coming from a drug-addled place that compounded the lows (Hank liked booze, benzedrine and barbituates, while I suspect Stevie was doing whatever was going around; check out this picture of Traffic with Jimi and members of the Who for a visual confirmation) though I think Hank spoke from a despair deeper than mere detox could deal with. As Leonard Cohen sang in "Tower of Song," "I said to Hank Williams: How lonely does it get?/Hank Williams hasn't answered me yet."

I still have both that Traffic album and that Hank Williams collection; they're in a box somewhere in my basement. Let me know when you're coming by; I'll dust them off and bring them upstairs. I don't feel so lonely anymore.

posted by Sean Elder @ 5:28 PM  0 comments

Carved up

I was traveling when my friend BK wrote and asked me if I had seen the New Yorker piece about Gordon Lish's editing of Raymond Carver's stories. That winter fiction issue hadn't arrived by the time we left (you have to allow the postman time to read your magazines) so it was news to me. But BK was my first and best editor; she knew I liked Carver and that I had the same occasional misgivings about editing that all writers do. (Also her husband Charlie had actually studied with Carver and swore I was the spitting image of the man; her subject line was "Well, I still think he looks like you," though my wife disagrees.)

I read the piece upon my return last week. Some of the controversy was familiar to me: that Carver's widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, wanted to reprint all of her late husband's stories in their unedited, pre-Lish fashion; and that Lish, in turn, felt offended and betrayed by the whole contretemps. As the fiction editor at Esquire in the seventies, he gave Carver entree to the world of high class magazine publishing and it was his editing of his first two collections (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) that put them on the literary map.

Now it seems that Lish's hand may have been what made those early pieces "Carveresque"; that spare laconic style was imposed on him, to a large degree, by an editor who definitely thought less was more. And that as he gained confidence (helped in part by his sobriety, to say nothing of the critical acclaim What We Talk About received) he demanded less redaction and even reprinted one of his better known stories (A Small Good Thing) the way he wrote it in his third collection, Cathedral. I always thought the later "true" version was baggier and more sentimental. But it is Gallagher's contention, backed up by a collection of letters Carver sent to Lish, that the heavy cutting of his prose was anguishing for him, to the point that he begged Lish to help cancel the publication of his second book.

Anguish, of course, is relative. Writing is anguishing, for many good writers anyway, and being edited is an alogether different kind of torture. Even when it's good for you. Which is the question the Gish-Carver relationship raises: not just did he make the writer's stories better but did he make them truer to the writer's intentions? Is the "minimalist" style (a word Carver hated) the true Carver? (And then there's the anguish of the alcoholic; reading Carver's freakout letter was painful for me, because that life-or-death sense of melodrama seems awfully close and personal.)

Now the New Yorker has published, online at least, the edited version of Carver's story "Beginners" with all of Lish's cuts and additions clearly marked. The edited version became the title story, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." The editor removed forty percent of the writer's prose, including a whole backstory about an old couple who were nearly killed in a car accident, and several final moments of drunken epiphany experienced by the narrator. You can't really say that Lish has altered the feeling, or meaning, of Carver's story but he certainly gets you there quicker. I'll leave it for you to decide if that's a good thing.

posted by Sean Elder @ 6:54 PM  0 comments

They didn't start the fire

I was still on Roman time the night of the Iowa caucuses and fell asleep to the sights and sounds of election results being posted on CNN. When I awoke, a few hours later, Barack Obama had been declared the winner and as I struggled for consciousness (not to mention some firm footing), I saw his victory speech. Five minutes into it I was tempted to wake my wife and kids but couldn't be bothered to pause the Tivo to roust them. When Peggy finally watched it on YouTube the next day she said, "I know I'm jet-lagged but that brought tears to my eyes three times."

And how often in her years of following HRC, whom she has been supporting, has the until-recently presumptive party front runner done that? "Never," Peggy allowed.

Getting votes and being president should be about more than just movng people, you say; a candidate has to do more than just stir the pot. But did our big melting pot of a nation ever need stirring more? When Obama said, "We are one nation, we are one people and our time for change has come," he wasn't just preaching to the converted. He was talking to you.

The junior senator from Illinois plainly gave some thought to this address. It had elements of his standard stump speech (which we've only seen in bits and pieces on the evening news) but it had reach as well. He knew this was his largest national audience since he spoke at the Democratic convention in 2004 and he showed them how it was done, with a hint of gospel rhythm even, and some rock star touches. When he asked the crowd to "give it up" for his wife Michelle and pointed at her offstage saying, "You! you!" I thought he might burst into song.

What has been funny watching the news since is the sense of discomfort his decisive 38% victory has caused, not just among the Clintonistas but the traditional news commentators. Forget about the usual suspects, the party apartchiks like Paul Begala and William Bennet who are paid to carry water for the establishment. Even the ordinarily even-handed commentators like Jeffrey Toobin sounded as if they were defending the castle, suggesting that any negative campaigning Clinton would do against Obama was more than justified. Circle the wagons, boys.

It reminds me of the early days of punk, when the mainstream rockers derided the new sounds; "oi bands" is how Mick Jagger described the Clash et al; Billy Joel gave an "angry" interview in Rolling Stone and everywhere the lament was the same: New fads come and go but once consumers have tired of this latest hula hoop, they'll come back for professionalism, musicianship and ten-minute guitar solos. Thirty years later and Mick has called London Calling a great rock album, and Billy Joel is driving off the road out in Long Island.

Joe Strummer is dead, of course, but as anyone who saw Julien Temple's documentary, The Future Is Unwritten can testify, his spirit lives on. He was no simple punk, not just an anarchist here to ring in a new order. He was an ex-hippie, a Woody Guthrie admirer whose first band was made up of fellow squatters; like Obama, Joe lived in foreign lands growing up and he was forever collecting and indulging in new sounds. He was a uniter, not a divider. And his message could move you to tears.

posted by Sean Elder @ 10:24 AM  0 comments

Smoke and mirrors

I just got back from vacation in Rome, having done the old house swap routine again, which afforded me the opportunity to finallly read Denis Johnson's new novel Tree of Smoke. My friend Jess had given it to me for my birthday, two months ago now, and there it sat by my bed, all 624 pages of it, waiting for the kind of time that only travel and jet lag allows.

Tree of Smoke is, as you have probably read, a novel about Vietnam, though that seems like a rather paltry description, like saying Anna Karenina is novel about a woman having an affair. Not that Johnson is a Tolstoy, or that he even has that much affinity for the Russians. But like the Count, and his dark sibling Dostoevsky, he is interested less in the surface of things (this world and its evils) than the people who struggle for grace in the grip of it. I won't bore you with a detailed account except to say that the war is seen through the experiences of a host of individuals -- a CIA operative, a couple of soldiers, a woman missionary who has lost her faith, a VC soldier who becomes a double agent -- and that gives even the most jaded reader of Vietnam books some fresh perspectives. (The Tet Offensive of 1968, for instance, is seen from multiple perspectives and the overall effect is like looking into both sides of a fractured mirror.) There are some passages I would like to read again for fun, some just to see how he pulled them off, and some that I would like to memorize to read at a funeral.

Because death is both booby prize and ultimate gift in this book. As in his first novel Angels, Johnson makes room for the misbeggotten, men whose roads seem marked for a shallow grave almost from the beginning. In that book a man on death row sees a line from a Wallace Stevens' poem written (rather improbably) in the gas chamber: "Death is the mother of all beauty." In Tree of Smoke, tortured souls torture themselves (and sometimes, literally, other people) in search of fun or freedom or the face of God, which appears, and disappears, in many guises. By the book's end I was reminded of another writer's story: Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." That bit of comic grotesquery ends when an escaped convict called The Misfit murders a grandma who won't shut up:

"She would have been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
"Some fun!" Bobby Lee said.
"Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life."

Like O'Connor, Johnson is a Catholic; he converted late in life, after overcoming the alcoholism and addictions that color the characters of many of his works (the central figure of Jesus' Son, known chiefly as Fuckhead, is a DJ stand-in; his arch from delirium to recovery mirrors the writer's own). IIn that sense, Rome was actually the perfect place to read Tree of Smoke; much of the imagery is Biblical and angels and demons get their turns at bat.

I gather from press reports that Johnson doesn't give many interviews these days, so I feel doubly blessed to have been able to spend a few days with him about 20 years ago, after the publication of his third book, The Stars At Noon . I asked him then about Catholicism, and the whole hell thing. "There is a hell," he told me, "and we can go there all the time. I've been there by total selfishness." His answer weighed on my soul; it was years before I confronted my own alcoholism and the story I wrote (for the Sunday magaine of the SF Examiner) resonated in other ways. It was the only story of mine that my father -- a troubled soul and failed writer who took his own life -- ever praised.

I have no idea if Johnson liked the story. It had one of those stupid coverlines -- "The Soul of a Young Writer" -- that some editor must have signed off on but that looks, in retrospect, like the kind of message you write with refrigerator magnets. For all I know my story was what convinced him to stop talking to the press. But it brought me into his world, in many senses, and it's one I have been happy as hell to return to.

posted by Sean Elder @ 8:01 AM  0 comments