Movie Idea from 2007

I have a file on my computer where I keep the various drafts of my screenplay, a few other screenplays I’ve started or at least outlined, and then some half-started notions for screenplay ideas that I saved and then forgot about.

Here’s one from 2007 that seems timely:

“A guy is encouraged by his friends to start a blog. He starts one called sandwichblog.com, in which he talks about sandwiches he likes. Before he knows it, he is being wooed by some of the biggest corporations in America – fast food restaurants, markets, various exotic ethnic food purveyors, all wanting him to write favorably about their sandwiches.”

There’s a lot missing from this idea, such as:

What guy?
What’s the problem?
Where’s the conflict?
– Man vs. Corporate America?
– Man vs. close friend/girlfriend who doesn’t want him to sell out?
– Man vs. close friend/girlfriend who DOES want him to sell out?
– What sandwiches?

I suppose it could be the male equivalent of that excellent little movie from a few years ago, “Waitress.” Guys, well some guys, pride themselves on their ability to make sandwiches, not pies.

I have to admit, this idea might be a little dated. Maybe I should save it for 20 years, when it might seem like an amusing nostalgic reflection of the ’00s.

I have better ideas, but I thought I’d start with this one and work my way up.

All Blogs Go To Heaven

Does it seem like maybe this one has? Do blogs that have been basically quiet for almost a year ever come back? Do I still have things to say? Is blogging still relevant for individuals not addressing a niche audience?

I’m still pondering

John’s Busier Blog Has a New Name

Before the election, I called it “Politics and Profits:  Business and the 2008 Election.”  Now it’s called “Politics and Profits: The Meltdown.“  In a “rebranding post,” I explain the new direction.

Did You Watch “Journey to Palomar?”

Hope you did.  “Journey to Palomar” is playing on PBS stations all over the country between now and the end of the year.  The DVD comes out tomorrow.

Here’s what I wrote about a screening of an early edit I was fortunate enough to see back in May 2006:

At the end of the special showing of “The Journey to Palomar” at Cal-Tech Friday, the applause was long and loud. The auditorium was mostly comprised of men and women who looked to be in their 60s, 70s and 80s. My family was there because the documentary film was the labor of love of two of my best friends, Todd and Robin Mason.

It was the first public showing of a completed version of the film — a film whose progress my wife and I have tracked for about five years. The subject is George Ellery Hale, a solar astronomer who was also an impresario of astronomical science, the man without whom the giant telescopes at Mt. Wilson and Palomar would never have been built.

As told by the Masons, Hale’s story has elements of P.T. Barnum, Albert Einstein and “A Beautiful Mind.” Hale was the son of a Chicago industrialist, and he brought to his scientific endeavors an entrepreneurial zeal one generally does not associate with astrophysicists.

Among Hale’s patrons were Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, President Woodrow Wilson. Hale was not afraid to shake down these powerhouses of politics and captains of industry for the money needed for his projects — for the development of Cal Tech itself, and for the telescopes that would eventually validate the idea of an expanding universe, measure the immensity of the universe and the distance between galaxies, and discover such faraway phenomena as quasars, the unimaginably bright objects hundreds of millions of light years away that devour suns by the thousands.

The centerpiece of the story is the Palomar Observatory, for decades the largest telescope on earth with its legendary 200-inch diameter mirror. The final decades of Hale’s life were dedicated to the creation of this great tool of discovery, beginning with his success in persuading an offshoot of the Rockefeller foundation to fund a telescope of this size in 1928.

The observatory was not completed until 1948, ten years after Hale’s death.

Particularly fascinating is the story of its enormous mirror, which was made from Pyrex by Corning Glass Works in a process that gives a whole new definition to the word “arduous.” There’s a little PR story in all this. The nation got very excited about this mirror, and followed its saga from the New York-based factory’s giant ladles full of superheated molten glass, to its cross-country trainride to Pasadena for polishing, to its climb up Mt. Palomar to be placed in the telescope structure where it is still used today.

Imagine it: People lined up alongside the train tracks to watch this huge mirror packaged for travel go rolling by. Platforms were built at Corning to allow VIPs to see the glass being poured. It was a publicity bonanza for Corning, although, as the film shows, they finally had to remove the audience to allow the workmen to concentrate on the mirror.

Hale put everything on the line to make the Palomar Observatory a reality — including his sanity. To use terminology of the times, Hale suffered from neurasthenia, which probably referred to a combination of extreme stress and chronic fatigue syndrome. Hale is presented in the documentary as a man of great charm, energy and persuasive power, but the effort to maintain that luminous personality caused several nervous breakdowns, frightening hallucinations, and periods during which Hale retreated from the whirlwind of activity he himself had created.

I knew the film was going to be great, having had pieces of it screened in my living room or on my computer over the past few years. But seeing it whole, with a gray-haired audience at Cal Tech, was unexpectedly moving. To most Americans, Hale is a forgotten man — hence the need for “Journey to Palomar.” To the 300 500 people in the audience Friday, I imagine Hale is a kind of saint, an icon of the religion of science.

Hale is one of that small group of men — along with Einstein, Lemaitre, Hubble, Gamow, Friedemann, to drop a few names — who gave us our understanding of the universe and, in doing so, answered (for some of us) the fundamental questions that religion tries to address: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?

Some of these great scientists answered these questions theoretically, using mathematical equations. Others found answers through observations of the sky that penetrated the veils of time — all the time that has ever existed. For many years, Hale’s telescope at Palomar was the essential tool for making those observations, and discovering the answers to those ancient questions. It was a great scientific achievement, but also a colossal, exhausting feat of schmoozing and cajoling to make it happen.

Hence, the long, loud applause by the Cal Tech alums. In their youth, I imagine some of them spent cold nights at Palomar, a mountain in San Diego County just a little west of the Anza-Borrego desert. Or they helped with research, performed critical calculations, or analyzed spectroscopic data for red-shift.

Today’s astrophysicists stand on the shoulders of giants, but the ladies and gentlemen at I met Friday at Cal-Tech stood by their sides, and lifted these giants skyward. I felt very grateful that Todd and Robin had done so much to honor what they had accomplished in their paean to George E. Hale.

P.S.: The story of 20th Century astronomy is very much a California story, in particular a Pasadena story. California ought to have a holiday to honor our state’s proud heritage as a center of scientific understanding. I don’t mean another day off for ski weekends — I mean a day when everyone, especially students, would be encouraged to learn about California’s legacy of scientific achievement, and pay homage to the men and women who worked, mostly in obscurity, to bring them about. It would be great if each year’s celebration included a showing of “Journey to Palomar” on public television.

Come On Over to My New Blog

I’ve rebooted my blog for Dolan Media Company.  From 50,000 Feet… is on ice.  For now, I’m going to focus on Politics and Profits: Business and the 2008 Election. My theory is, political reporters don’t usually write much about business, and business reporters write even less about politics.  The business of America still being business, I think we need a lens that can encompass both.  So I’m writing about business issues that politicos are either addressing or avoiding but should be addressing.  And about political issues that affect business, and about how business looks after itself when politics happens.

I have to say, I’m having fun with this one.  My passion for blogging had flagged a little.  Now it’s back.  Please come over and give it a read.

I’m Still Here…

…even though I’ve gone nearly a month since my last post.

Do I still want to be a blogger?  I enjoy writing, in fact I need to write.  I’m writing all the time, commenting quite frequently on a couple of blogs (Dodger Thoughts and Althouse) and sporadically on others, sometimes using my real name, sometimes one of a couple aliases.   I have a screenplay I’ve been working on since 2005, which I’m still editing (and of which a few friends are waiting to see drafts — coming!)  I’ve been arguing with or trying to entertain (sometimes hard to tell the difference) a few friends and family members concerning the election.  And, most importantly, I’ve been working.

As some might recall, this blog began during a long period of unemployment caused by my shocking encounter at the crossroads of politics and the criminal justice system.  The blog was my lifeline during that period.  It was how I maintained my voice in the communities of which i had long been a part.  It was also a kind of journal of that period, although a journal in only the most oblique sense, since I could not discuss my case except superficially (and still can’t, since the case is still on appeal.)  It was also my personal exploration of the blogging medium.  And it was my refrigerator, serving the same function of providing a white space where I could tape an article where my housemates could see it, except now my house is the virtual world.

For the first year or so, I wrote in this blog almost compulsively, posting every day, sometimes two or three times a day, writing about things I understood–like Los Angeles, politics, PR and marketing, the environment and related public policy issues, sports and music–and things I didn’t.  No one could tell me not to write whatever I wanted.  That freedom is the essence of blogging.

Part of that freedom is also…not to write.  Or to write something or somewhere else.  And then come back to this.

If you like reading my stuff or want to keep up with me, here’s what I think I’ll do.  I’ll put an RSS feed of this blog on my page on Facebook.  I’m on Facebook. You’re probably also on Facebook, whoever is reading this. The feed will show you when I’ve updated this blog.  I will also leave a note if there is a particularly noteworthy (notes for the noteworthy? What a concept) post.  The rhythm will be arhythmic, but you’ll never feel like you’re reading filler.  That’s my only guarantee.

The “Silver Lining in High Gas Prices”: A Boost for Telecommuting

When I worked in Mayor Bradley’s office in the 1990s, I was part of a task force designed to increase city workers’ telecommuting.  At that time, oil was cheap, but traffic was horrible and air quality still (then as now) the worst in the nation.

We were mindful of the 1984 Olympics traffic experience, when just an 8 percent drop in the amount of cars on the road resulted in traffic that flowed like midnight.  Small changes can have a big impact on the traffic.  Less traffic idling was another anti-smog strategy.  So, we thought it should be possible for City Hall to set an example for the business community.

How silly.  When it comes to management, Los Angeles’ city government will never “lead the way” on anything.

Both management and labor perceived telecommuting as a threat.  Department heads didn’t want anyone out of their sightlines for any longer than was absolutely necessary.  They assumed the worst of their employees.  The unions demanded that telecommuting become a bargaining issue.  Typical of how city unions work, the labor appointee to our task force missed the first two meetings, then came late to the third and asked to speak with me privately.  She said, “We’re not sure if telecommuting is a way for managers to unfairly reward or unfairly punish our members, but either way, we’re going to oppose it.”  Then she sat at the table with the rest of the task force, repeating a few platitudes, knowing she’d killed the idea.

What emerged instead were 9/80 and 4/40 schemes to give some city employees the option of two to four weekdays off per month in return for a longer workday.  What it meant in practice was employees would work the same eight hours worth of tasks, stretched into nine- or ten-hour days, except with an extra day off every week or two.  It was nice for them, but chaotic when it was time to schedule meetings.  Most workers chose Friday to stay home, so Fridays went dead.  Add to that the introduction of casual Fridays — which started after I left the mayor’s office — and the end of each week became a world where Charles Bukowski would have fit right in:  Hardly anyone there, and those who did show up wearing sweats, old T-shirts and shoes you might use for wading into flooded basement.

I don’t know if that’s still the case over there; I haven’t been in City Hall for over four years.  But I digress.

In Southern California, every weekday there are tens of thousands of commuters who drive epic distances to get to work centers in LA and Orange counties.  In the 1990s, the Inland Empire land boom was just beginning.  My last commute was about 30 miles each way and that seemed painful and expensive enough.  Now gas prices have doubled since 2004, and many people are driving west from places like Temecula.   Temecula is almost 90 miles from downtown LA, and more than 65 miles from Santa Ana. Do the math.  If your car gets 20 miles per gallon, pretty good for a beep-n-creep voyage on crowded freeways, it’s costing you nine gallons per day to go back and forth from work = $36 per day just for gas.

I can’t imagine that at least some of those people, and the merciful among their bosses would want to alleviate that.  So, all of a sudden, telecommuting looks less scary, maybe necessary, and perhaps something that will be embraced in a rush.  That’s what Computerworld’s blogger Mike Elgan thinks:

One thing leads to another. High gas prices prompt employers (including the federal government) to allow employees to work from home once a week. Once that’s accepted culturally, an elephant appears in the boardroom: If it’s OK once a week, why isn’t it OK five times a week? (This is what happened with “casual Friday” — its once-a-week acceptance lead to the current trend of casual wear every day.) Once telecommuting is accepted, “extreme telecommuting” — working from the Bahamas or Paris or an internet-connected shack on the Australian Outback — becomes acceptable, too. After all, once you’re out of the office and connecting to the company over the Internet, it doesn’t really matter where you are, does it?

The last remaining barrier to the general acceptance of “extreme telecommuting” is purely cultural — it’s our irrational clinging to obsolete rules for how we work. As the cultural barriers fall, more of us will be freed to work from wherever we please, something which mobile technology and Internet communication already enables.

To me, that’s the silver lining in high gas prices.

Seth Godin, writing about the higher standards business meetings and conferences must meet to make it worth the (increasingly expensive) trip puts the onus on managers to make going to the office a value-added experience, or else:

If you’re a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn’t make you come to the (expensive) office every day unless there’s something there that makes it worth your trip. She needs to provide you with resources or interactions or energy you can’t find at home or at Starbucks. And if she does invite you in, don’t bother showing up if you’re just going to sit quietly.

I’ve worked in three companies that had lots of people and lots of cubes, and I spent the entire day walking around. I figured that was my job. The days where I sat down and did what looked like work were my least effective days. It’s hard for me to see why you’d bother having someone come all the way to an office just to sit in a cube and type.

The new rule seems to be that if you’re going to spend the time and the money to see someone face to face, be in their face. Interact or stay home!

How long before companies in Los Angeles, where the distance of commutes is among the most acute in the nation, adopt this kind of thinking?  I’m not sure they have a choice.

There’s probably money to be made in telling managers how to manage a virtual workforce, because a lot of companies will need to make this shift soon or they’ll lose valuable employees.

(A different version of this post appears on the blog I write for Dolan Media, From 50,000 Feet.)

Obama the Wiki-Man?

On my other blog, From 50,000 Feet, I wrote today about Obama’s campaign management, its ingenious use of the Web, the connection to Facebook, and the implications for his potential Administration and for business management in the years to come.  If you are interested, click here.

Oklahoma City Memorial — Rainy

Here’s the rainy version of the monument shown in the post below:

I took this photo on my way to a reception that I was surprised to see anyone attended, seeing as how a tornado had (possibly) just struck Oklahoma. Just an hour or two earlier, sirens were blaring, and I saw this kind of stuff on my hotel TV:

They shrug these things off in Oklahoma City, but first they have to go into full-scale panic mode on the TV news. That curled appendage above Britton — what the meteorologist called a “hook echo” — was the alleged tornado, one of two. But my colleagues at this conference never saw this, and blithely got on a bus heading to the Memorial Museum.

I waited til the tornado watch was over, and then took off by foot, carrying a borrowed umbrella. Took me so long to get there, I missed the reception. My friends were surprised when I told them about the tornado, although they admitted hearing a couple of sirens.

I’ll admit it: I’m more afraid of tornados than earthquakes. That’s probably why I live here and not there. I was in a tornado once, when I lived in Barrington, Illinois. Deep in my psyche, I have post-tornado traumatic stress syndrome. I was too young to remember anything about it, but my mother says she took me and my brother, then a baby, into the cellar to wait it out. The cellar was flooded. I stood in the water next to my mother while she held the baby. There was a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, flickering on and off. My mom thought if she could just reach the lightbulb and tighten it, it would stay on.

But she couldn’t quite reach it, and that’s why all three of us are alive today. Happy Mother’s Day!

Oklahoma Monument — Sunny

I’m jumping around the timeline now.  I was in Oklahoma last week.  The day I arrived, within about an hour, Oklahoma experienced a tornado. But a couple days later, all was sunny.  I saw the Memorial to the victims of the Murrah Federal Building bomb attack on both the rainy day and the sunny day.  On the sunny day, I was looking north.

Visiting the memorial museum was, of course, intense. It explores the bombing and its aftermath in very specific, detailed ways, using every medium available. It is the ultimate “found art” museum, and since all the found objects were thrown off by this horrific attack, they connect you directly to the lives of the victims — and their murderers.

I saw a datebook, all scuffed and crumpled, open to April 1995. The owner of the book died. For some reason I found it quite moving that he had put a yellow sticker on April 15 to mark the full moon — the last one he was alive to see.  I saw the famous axle from Timothy McVeigh’s rented truck, the one bearing the VIN number that helped the FBI finger him.  I heard a recording of a water board meeting in a nearby office, which picked up the sound of the loud explosion.  I saw shreds of clothing, shoes, watches, jewelry recovered from the blast, often damaged, and now on display.

These little items are the only way to understand what happened.

This museum has hundreds of such items, plus photos, TV clips, and lots of text explaining the various things that happened. The writing is clear and restrained, and never indulges in the bathos of political posturing. The only place you see that kind of thing is on the contemporaneous video clips — mostly from Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose “feel your pain” exercises apparently worked for them back then, but seem like self-parody from this distance.

When the bombing happened in 1995, my son was 4.  I still remember his little toys from back then.  We got a lot of Disney stuff, some of it from McDonalds, promoting movies like Winnie-the-Pooh and The Lion King.  The last room of the exhibit is for photos of those who were killed, each one inside a clear plastic box with a little ledge for personal items family members might have wanted to include.  Many of the kids from the day-care center who died had Disney toys just like my son’s in their boxes. Seeing those things was a blow to the gut.  Thinking, my boy’s almost 18 now, ready to graduate from high school, thank God, something those Oklahoma children never got to experience.  The whole world was made up of these toys. That’s what they knew.

In Bolinas

The estuary there was at low tide.  This was from the same trip as the de Young photos. My wife and I drove a rented Prius out to see Bolinas and have dinner in Stinson Beach.

I’ll post a picture or two of the main attractions of this estuary — birds and other wildlife.  But I wanted to show this one first.

Falling Embers

This was a powerful representation of the civil rights era:  A sculpture made from the charred remains of a torched church from, I believe, Birmingham, Alabama in the early 60s.  The pieces of wood dangled in a precise arrangement from the ceiling. 

Update:  Thanks to a commenter I can now credit the artist: Cornelia Parker.

Portals of Andromeda

Jon Kuhn’s kaleidoscopic, prismatic sculpture at the DeYoung.

Does the title refer to the mythical Greek character punished for her mother’s pride in her beauty?  Or to the constellation?  Or to the galaxy nearest to ours, containing a trillion stars?

Apparently, He Disapproves…

…but of what?  And people who wear a suit like that might not want to be so judgmental.

Another sculpture from the DeYoung.

Nature Nook at DeYoung

From the outside, it isn’t easy to see how the museum’s designers have created these little open-air nooks that have mossy landscaping…

I like the picture enough to show it to you, even though there’s a reflection from the window.   Also note the bumpy surface of the museum’s exterior walls, like someone stamped the wall tens of thousands of times with a spoon.

Hanging Sculpture and its Shadows

Floating and falling are unconscious themes in a lot of the art we saw at the DeYoung…

I’m in this picture somewhere…

Detail from a sculpture at the DeYoung…

Enough Politics, Time For Pictures

From the new de Young Museum in San Francisco, specifically the tower, which is like a new hill from which to see San Francisco:

More to come after Mother’s Day festivities…

Only Churchgoers Need Apply

Thinking about Barack Obama’s problem with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I was reminded of why, despite an interest in politics that goes back to when I was eight years old, I never considered running for office.

It seemed like all politicians went to church – like you just had to be a practicing something-or-other in order to get elected.   I didn’t go to church.  I’ve never gone regularly, and if you add up all the Sundays in my life, I’m sure I haven’t spent more than one percent of them in a pew.  I just wasn’t raised that way. 

My mother, feeling pangs of guilt, sent me to an Episcopal church in Connecticut for about six months when I was about 10, but she tells me I was impatient with Sunday school and asked to be relieved of it.  What I mostly remember  was a little store across the street from the church where I could buy flavored wax lips while waiting (and waiting) for my parents to pick me up.  In my adult life, I’ve attended church sporadically, usually at someone’s invitation.  My late wife got me to go to a Methodist church for awhile, but only because they had this great jazz-gospel organist. Repeating my own pattern, however, my son’s reasonable objections to Sunday School ended that.  

My beliefs about God veer from hopeful agnosticism to “gimme a break” atheism.  To anticipate what my wife now would say, yes I feel life on earth is a miracle, a holy thing, full of mysteries.  But there’s another side to me that says: Every spiritual experience, every act of prophecy or other-awareness is, one day, going to be explained by physics.  And maybe physics leads to God.  But I won’t live long enough to find out.

But I digress.  The point is, I figured early on that if I didn’t go to church, I could never successfully run for office. For some reason, it never occurred to me to do what Barack Obama and probably thousands of other politicians did, just expediently join a church and sit there every Sunday and pretend to agree.  In Obama’s case, he chose a church in the heart of the community he hoped would elect him to public office.  Poignantly, he also apparently chose this church because he wanted to understand African-American culture — a culture everyone assumed he was part of even though he really wasn’t. 

But Obama’s strategem really was no different from what a white would-be politico of no particular religious upbringing would probably do.  It’s just never occured to the news media to find out what the politician’s minister was really saying.  I’m guessing Obama is being held accountable for statements he not only didn’t believe,  but were probably said when he was out a side door, smoking a butt and politicking.  Or maybe even sleeping. Church is a great place for a sitting-up nap, almost as good as the movies. 

I just couldn’t do it, I guess.  The indignity of having to do as John McCain did, describing some obvious whacko as a “spiritual advisor,” just seemed like more than I could ever bear.  Some of the things Obama has said, about how Wright “brought me to Christ” make me queasy, now that we know what the Rev. Wright’s all about.  Hillary has said plainly unbelievable things about her faith, too.  I mean, we all know she’s hardly a pious person.  Her reputation for foul mouthed vindictiveness, dishonesty and gargantuan ego does not track with what we’ve been led to believe religious people are all about.  But she gets credit for being a churchgoer.  For some voters, not going to church is a dealbreaker.  To me, attending church insincerely is profane. 

None of this is said to forgive Obama’s condoning of Wright’s poisonous lie that the government created and launched HIV as a genocidal plot against blacks.  The idea that someone would take their children someplace they could hear such statements is inexcusable, especially if the point was mere political networking.  Much as I want to, I can’t make it go away.  If I vote for him in November, I’ll have to do so in spite of this.

The Obama and McCain Buddy-Cop Show

A month ago, I tossed off a comment on Althouse that included the following lines:

So that leaves Obama and McCain. I wish they could run together. They’d be like one of those old 1970s cop shows. The crusty old seen-it-all guy who goes by his gut, partnered with the brilliant rookie whose got courage to match his brains.

They both seem like leaders to me. Contrary to extremely popular belief, the presidency is not an ideological office. The needed skills are inertia-busting on the domestic front, and strategic courage on the international front. Plus the right kind of ego, an ego strong enough to surround themselves with very smart advisors and encourage candor from them.

Both seem to have these skills. If they end up running against each other, I don’t yet know which way I’d go. But if only one of them is in the race, that’s the one I’m voting for.

I was sort of kidding.  In the same comment, I discussed briefly my distaste for Hillary Clinton and at greater length my dislike of Mitt Romney. 

Recently, Salon’s Edward McClelland wrote a column suggesting that guys are supporting Obama and/or McCain — just to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House.  His take-off point was my post:

John Stodder, a 52-year-old blogger from Palos Verdes Peninsula, Calif., looks at the presidential field and sees another buddy-cop pairing: John McCain and Barack Obama, supposed mavericks who break their parties’ rules, bound together by a common mission — keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House.

“I wish they could run together,” Stodder swoons. “They’d be like one of those old 1970s cop shows. The crusty old seen-it-all guy who goes by his gut, partnered with the brilliant rookie who’s got courage to match his brains.

I give McClelland huge props for crediting me with the line.  I think it’s funny.  I don’t actually think the White House is like a grungy detective precinct in a gritty urban core.  The fact that I like both candidates (Obama more than McCain) is incidental. 

The fact that they’re both men has nothing to do with why I like them.  I was prepared to vote for Sen. Clinton until this year despite some misgivings, until her campaign’s empty-headed and scurrilous nature became apparent. 

You hear a lot about the failure of the Clinton “inevitability” strategy.  In America, what else could such a strategy do but fail?  “Vote for me because you have no choice” might work in Cuba or Iran, but not here. 

Anyway, my little brainstorm got another push into potential meme-dom today on NPR’s “Wait…Wait…Don’t Tell Me.”  Listen to the first couple of minutes.  (And thank you to my wife’s aunt for happening across the show.)

It makes me want to blog some more!

Blogger, Interrupted

Sorry for the delay in posting. I’ve been on two business trips this past two weeks, to Phoenix, Arizona and to Richmond, Virginia.  I didn’t bring my camera to AZ, but I had it in Richmond, a city I’d never seen before.   I spent most of my time there in the ER at Virginia Commonwealth University Hospital, which was not the plan, obviously.

After discharge and navigating through a Soviet-style pharmacy, I decided to walk back to my hotel. 

Here is a plaque on a building near the hospital.  It seemed strange that I would get a serious diagnosis at such an historical location:

Then I saw this great old building, which wouldn’t look too out of place in San Francisco.  It was on Governor’s Road, not too far from the Virginia governor’s mansion:

A little further away from all the Commonwealth’s majesty, I found this odd salute to the classical style of the old city:

I rested up and reunited with my colleagues for dinner at a restaurant that unabashedly bears the name, “The Tobacco Company.”  You walk in, it smells like smoke.  It has cigarette girls.  You almost want to embrace and love all the tradition.  Almost. My own condition is the result of overyielding the seductive calls of bad food.  The evil of the American diet is in the vast amounts of sugar hidden in it. Tobacco is right out there, telling its users, “I’m killing you.”  Maybe that’s part of its appeal.  If James Dean had a chocolate-chip cookie hanging out of his mouth instead of a cigarette, how many posters would he sell?

So I told my dinner companions about my day at the hospital, then wandered out into the cobblestone street on a cool evening, immersing myself in this curiously timeless little city for the few minutes I had left to enjoy it. 

I would have to get up at 3:30 a.m. to catch my flight — 12:30 a.m. Los Angeles time, which is my approximate bedtime.  The cab driver who took us to the airport is a local historian who regaled us with tales of the Byrd family and what a close call the ratification of the Constitution had been.  That unassuming plaque commemorates a pivotal moment in the nation’s history, it turns out.  Only fitting that a pivotal moment in my life take place on the same site.

Union Station, Cathedral of Rail

After dropping my son off Thursday evening for his annual winter trip to San Diego, I walked back to my car, turned around, and saw this:

Isn’t it cool how Metro has revived this architectural gem? The lobby was full of people.  I remember when going to Union Station felt like coming to a Greyhound station.  My son’s 17.  Seventy years from now, he’ll remember it not as a museum, but as that lively place where he caught the train to Nana’s.

Mysterious Holiday Self-Portrait

It Must Be December in Southern California

….because that’s when the sky looks like this.

Taking Stock on Christmas

This Christmas is the perfect illustration of the truth that life is long and things change, sometimes for the better. 

A year ago, I thought I was going spend this Christmas in a prison camp while the people who gained various benefits from my prosecution would be free to enjoy lavish holidays.  I thought I would miss my son’s last year in high school.  I would, of course, have to give up my job and leave my wife having to scramble to keep my family from a desperate situation. 

To enjoy Christmas 2006 required all my powers of denial.  I did take a nice picture.  But that was a moment created outside of me, by the sea, wind and sun.  Inside, I was edgy and angry.

Now, a year later, I’m free pending appeal thanks to the wisdom of the Ninth Circuit; and will be free for awhile, perhaps forever.  Renewed freedom opened so many doors.  For example, my son wrote a musical for his senior project. I got to watch the staged reading of it last week — and it was incredible.  (Check out his website for the project here.)  He and his writing partner only started working on it this summer.  He only began writing music a little over a year ago.  Despite a few years of piano lessons, I wasn’t even sure he could read music, much less write it.  Much less write lyrics, create characters, write dialogue…it was an unbelievable experience.  His music is astonishing. 

And I would have missed it.  Who knows, maybe with all the chaos resulting from my absence, he wouldn’t have written it. But I was here, he did write it and I got to hear it. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.

Thanks to the Ninth Circuit, I’ll be able to see him graduate and get him started on his life.  He worked at a grocery store and earned 2/3rds of what he needed for a new notebook computer to facilitate his creative endeavors.  Thanks to the job I was able to keep, for Christmas, we were able to make up the rest, and now, as I write, he’s setting it up.  Meanwhile, my wife, son and I were able to help my parents do their usual Christmas at their home, which means a lot to them, especially now.  I couldn’t have helped them from a bunk bed in Kern County.

It took a while for my family to adjust to this period of freedom. It’s hard to stop looking up to see if the anvil is still hanging over your head.  But we’re breathing again, more or less normally. 

Timing is everything.  It could turn out I will still have to spend a year in Tracy at some point in the future.  I believe in my innocence. I believe in what justice should mean, and I will never stop fighting for it.   But if my appeal doesn’t turn out like I expect?  Not like I want to, but if I had to, I could handle the stretch in 2009 or 2010. My son will be more independent. Other things in my life will reach a certain balance that I’m still trying to create.  I’ve been given time to overcome the reckless destruction of my previous career and to get a new one off the ground.

Thanks to my family, all my family, to my friends, to the people I work for, and to everyone who made it possible for me to enjoy this blessed day.  Merry Christmas to all of you.

Watching Marshall Crenshaw in Bed With A Cold

Nothing like a cold to make me feel useless…Two things guaranteed to depress me are lack of sleep and being sick. It’s not a terrible thing to be depressed, though.  I’m more likely to be too optimistic than the opposite, so getting sick and falling into a torpor is mental and spiritual correction, perhaps.

I’m watching Marshall Crenshaw, the singer/songwriter, on a program on the less-well-known PBS station KLCS on this Saturday night.  He’s singing solo with a slighly amplified hollow-body guitar, intercut with interview clips.  He’s talking about how he built up a following — the spark and determination it took “to make yourself known in the world” — and I’m glad he’s proud.  But the fact is, he got pigeon-holed back when he emerged in the early 1980s as a “power-pop” performer, and that turned out to be an obstacle he could never overcome. 

Why does the music media automatically dismiss the best contemporary songwriters?  The best craftspeople in this most soulful of art forms?  Crenshaw should be performing in front of a band, with at least three singers who can support his somewhat thin but expressive voice and more importantly can perform the brilliant vocal arrangements you can hear on so many of his recorded songs. But there is no budget for him to do this anymore.  He’s a power-popper, and those guys are supposed to be selling insurance now.

Now (as I’m watching) he’s admitting he expected to be more successful.  He seems to be blaming himself, claiming that he cultivated attention, but once he got it, it overwhelmed him.  That’s not what I think went wrong.  For the past 30 years, the rock press and the industry’s promotional machine is always biased toward artists who make big gestures, like U2, or who have some obvious PR hook, like the grunge-rockers.  Song craftspersons are treated with suspicion if the craft doesn’t come with a Dionysian kind of persona.

If you saw tonight’s Marshall Crenshaw TV show and want to know what the fuss is all about, the answer is in his studio recordings.   Here (after the jump) are the songs I suggest you download first.  He wrote all but four of them:

Norman Mailer, R.I.P.

Two writers obsessed me in my youth, and inspired me to want to write:  William Faulkner, who was long dead by the time I first heard his name, and Norman Mailer, who died today at 84. 

I admit I felt a little queasy when my wife announced this to me, as shocked as one can be when an elderly hero dies.  I was sure he would roll on for another decade.  His latest book, a novelized treatment of Adolph Hitler’s early life, was supposed to be the first in a trilogy.  To announce a trilogy is a kind of vow.  Maybe Mailer thought making this vow would buy him a little more time.  

Mailer was a guilty pleasure, in several ways.  First, his sentences were literally delicious.  Other writers might have had a more powerful style — Faulkner for example — but few seemed to take such joy at constructing great sentences.  His ideas might even be absurd, but his sentences kept you on board.  He wrote like a combination of Muhammad Ali and Gene Kelly.  Strength, style, grace and a wily humor. Reading Mailer at his best was almost too much fun, especially for an English major who was expected to get through The Faerie Queen or Henry James. 

At the time I started reading him, he was widely reviled, especially in Berkeley, as a “male chauvinist pig” — an epithet that feminist author Kate Millet invented initially just to describe him.  I don’t think Mailer is sexist.  I think he is, or was, a provocateur battling the future, a “left conservative” whose problem with the prevailing feminist ideology was not its call for justice, but its claim to remake society abruptly, based only on a handful of observations and principles.  For Mailer, at one time a Marxist, feminism simply did not explain enough, and had not wrestled with its contradictions in the way, he might argue, socialism had.  

Mailer was, as I recall, a fan of Edmund Burke, and no Burkian could tolerate a revolution based on what was then a new movement that left so many questions unanswered.  In Mailer’s mind, revolutions of that kind end up dehumanizing everyone. His most scorned essay The Prisoner of Sex was, as I recall it, less an assertion of male privilege than of creative freedom, the right of an artist to draw upon his (or her) individualism, including their sexual identity, as a source of ideas, without fear of censorship or official opprobrium.  Looking back, it was the first cry against political correctness.  Even though it had its fair share of stupid statements, I loved it. But I kept quiet about my enthusiasm.

Mailer wrote so much about his aspirations as a novelist.  To him, to be a novelist was not just a craft, it was an entire worldview, a powerful combination of intellectual and artistic gifts that he used to understand anything and everything.  Early in his career, he claimed he might outdo Melville, Twain and Hemingway, and saw his own career as a battle with his novel-writing contemporaries, most of whom he snidely dismissed.  Ironically, at the outset of his greatest period of non-fiction writing, Mailer wrote this:

“If I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendahl, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.”

But I didn’t really like his novels, and that was another source of guilt.  If I’d ever met him, I’d have to admit I mostly couldn’t finish them. For all his gifts, I think he had a difficult time inventing believable characters who weren’t him.  Dialogue was another weak spot, because that involved more than one character, and they couldn’t both be him.  And, as was the case with many novelists of his generation, his imagination didn’t measure up to the true stories of his lifetime, the real events he covered so well in his non-fiction writing.  Think of the people he wrote about:  John F. Kennedy.  Ali.  Marilyn Monroe. Gary Gilmore, the murderer who was the subject of his greatest book, The Executioner’s Song. Lee Harvey Oswald. Adolph Hitler. Jesus Christ.

What Mailer offered during his most fertile period is the opportunity to engage with the real world of our own imaginations–the fantastical and rapidly changing world we mostly absorbed through the media–processed by a fascinating, sometimes perverse dreamer/intellectual/participant/bullshitter; one who constantly delivered the most surprising and elegant sentences to encapsulate his ever-evolving thoughts and perceptions. 

I started to believe I had outgrown him at some point in the 80s, so I must confess I don’t know much of his work past The Executioner’s Song. He seemed to have decided that if he was going to be America’s greatest novelist, he’d better devote his precious time to novels; but from the perspective of a Mailer non-fiction fan, it was kind of like he’d retired.  Some day, I’ll have to catch up on the novels he wrote during the past 25 years to see if he even came close to what envisioned himself capable of.   Here’s a “no” vote, FWIW.

To get into the Mailer who thrilled me, read Advertisements for Myself, The Presidential Papers, Cannibals and Christians, The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of A Fire on the Moon, Marilyn, The Fight and The Executioner’s Song.  He has a pretty good book on the craft of writing, The Spooky Art, which came much later.  That’s the book I’m going to pull off my shelf today in his honor. 

If you’ve got time for only one book, that would have to be The Armies of the Night, a memoir of his involvement in a famous protest against the Vietnam War.  It is the book where everything he’s got comes together.  His plays his massive ego for laughs. The grandeur of his speculations  is matched by the apocalyptic moment he describes.  He captures the political furies unleashed by that war as well as anyone, simultaneously deflating the pomposity of the phalanx of intellectuals who, like himself, could not escape the accusation of posturing from a safe distance about a bloody battle far away.

If you want to read about Mailer the WWII novelist, Mailer the drunken wife-stabber, Mailer writing for the money, Mailer biting off part of actor Rip Torn’s ear, more about Mailer battling feminists, or Mailer the advocate for the release of a killer who then killed again, it’s all here in the New York Times obituary.  I found the obit’s final grafs affecting:

Interviewed at his house in Provincetown, Mass., shortly before (his final) book’s publication, Mr. Mailer, frail but cheerful, said he hoped his failing eyesight would hold out long enough for him to complete a sequel. His knees were shot, he added, holding up the two canes he walked with, and he had begun doing daily crossword puzzles to refresh his word hoard.

On the other hand, he said, writing was now easier for him in at least one respect.

“The waste is less,” he said. “The elements of mania and depression are diminished. Writing is a serious and sober activity for me now compared to when I was younger. The question of how good are you is one that really good novelists obsess about more than poor ones. Good novelists are always terribly affected by the fear that they’re not as good as they thought and why are they doing it, what are they up to?

“It’s such an odd notion, particularly in this technological society, of whether your life is justified by being a novelist,” he continued. “And the nice thing about getting older is that I no longer worry about that. I’ve come to the simple recognition that would have saved me much woe 30 or 40 or 50 years ago — that one’s eventual reputation has very little to do with one’s talent. History determines it, not the order of your words.”

Shaking his head, he added: “In two years I will have been a published novelist for 60 years. That’s not true for very many of us.” And he recalled something he had said at the National Book Award ceremony in 2005, when he was given a lifetime achievement award: that he felt like an old coachmaker who looks with horror at the turn of the 20th century, watching automobiles roar by with their fumes.

“I think the novel is on the way out,” he said. “I also believe, because it’s natural to take one’s own occupation more seriously than others, that the world may be the less for that.”

Mailer died in New York City’s Mt. Sinai Hospital of acute renal failure, just a few weeks after he had surgery to remove scar tissue from his lung. He was previously hospitalized in September for asthma, checking himself out to attend his youngest daughter’s wedding.  He had heart bypass surgery in 2005.  

Biofuel and Starvation

Occasionally, I might invite you over to read a post at my other blog, From 50,000 Feet.  This is a good time to go over there, if only to read this post about biofuel.  Biofuel is gaining popularity, but it is quickly showing itself to be a rather frightening menace to the people of the developing world. Not enough attention on this issue for sure. So please read it and if you think anything of it, pass it along.   

Herr Russert, der Fuhrer?

One thing that’s new about this presidential election:  Candidates being urged by their potential followers to refuse to participate on certain mass media outlets, even though the exposure will help them.   Democratic candidates’ collective withdrawal from a Fox News-sponsored debate struck me as “vanity politics” earlier this year.  Now, the blogosphere is hunting down NBC’s Tim Russert for being … well, read this from The New Republic’s blogger Linda Hirshman:  

Last summer the Nevada Democrats pulled out of a debate sponsored by Fox News.  Loaded, racist and all the rest, the Dems

(Not to be a stickler for grammar, but the phrase “loaded, racist and all the rest,” which she intended to apply to Fox News, she mistakenly applies to “the Dems.”)  

decided it was incoherent for them to pretend Fox was a media outlet like any other.

Tim Russert is worse,

What??  Worse than “racist?” (I’m not sure what she means by “loaded.”  Stoned?) Even if you accept the rather extreme premise that Fox News is “racist,” what can it possibly mean for a news anchor and debate moderator to be worse than a racist?  Well, stay tuned:

because he has the mantle of the venerable NBC, network of Nipper, the radio dog. Bulletin to Democrats: Just Say No to Russert. 

See my piece at the Guardian.

I’d like to but the link doesn’t work.

Then she lists a number of other blogospheric attacks on Russert from sources like The American Prospect, Firedoglake and Ezra Klein.  One might think these posts would support the “worse than racist” charge.  But no, actually they don’t. 

There is sharp criticism of Russert’s style of questioning from The American Prospect’s Paul Waldman, but his post is hardly even partisan.  Taylor Marsh accuses Russert of being unfair and possibly sexist, and to prove her point she counts up the number of questions Hillary got in the recent debate; but Marsh is easy to refute.  The fact is, Hillary Clinton has a 31-point lead in the polls.  She is far and away the front-runner.  Given that, if a moderator distributed the questions evenly among all the candidates, they would be giving the front-runner an enormous advantage. 

If Joe Biden is asked to respond to the campaign positions taken by Dennis Kucinich, who cares? The fact is, it’s Sen. Clinton’s race to lose now, and there is a great public interest in finding out more about her.  She has earned the added scrutiny by the likelihood of her success.

Which makes Tim Russert, according to Ms. Hirshman, writing under the imprimatur of the venerable New Republic, a…wait for it…Nazi!!!!  Here, read for yourself:

Shredding

I took three bags full of paper to a postal store last night on Torrance Boulevard that advertised that they do document destruction. 

Like anyone else who reads this blog, we have so many pieces of paper in our home that have our address or other personal information, and we don’t want that to fall into the hands of identity thieves who pick through trash and recycling bins. 

We have a little shredder here at home, but it can only handle so much paper before it starts begging for mercy.  If we’d fed it a little every day, we wouldn’t have gotten into this position, but everyone procrastinates, and before you know it, you’ve got three trash bags full of these bits of paper.

The gentleman at the postal store weighed my bags.  Two were 11 pounds, and one was 13 pounds.  Document destruction costs $1.95 per pound.  So we paid $68.25 to get rid of our potential identity thief bounty.  It was probably almost a year’s worth, but still….

After the weigh-in, the postal store guy started stuffing my paper into a narrow slot on top of a locked, wheeled trash bin.  He swore he didn’t have the key.  The idea was, I would watch him jam this stuff into the bin, which Weyerhauser would pick up later.  It took him about 10 minutes.

It ended up being kind of a social occasion.  We talked a lot about paper, shredders, and the things people mail us that create vulnerability.  Like credit-card offers.  You’d think it would be illegal by now to send out credit card applications with pre-printed addresses. This is an open invitation to identity theft and destruction of your credit rating.  Catalogues embed your name and address not just on the mailing label, but also the order form deep inside.  If you’re like me, your first reaction at seeing this part of the order form filled out was, “aren’t they clever?”  It’s not clever. Getting too much of this kind of unsolicited mail can cost you $68.25.