On McClellan’s Memoir

Over on my other blog, I’ve got a long, long post up about former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s new book.  In it, I describe McClellan as “a guy who will flack for whichever cheese is paying his fee.”  If you want to know what the hell that means, please, by all means, read it!

Let’s Bring Back Novels! (Updated)*

Memoirs are great, if they’re well-written, tell a compelling story and…are true! 

If you’re Margaret B. Jones Seltzer, here’s the situation with which you were faced:  You’ve been “working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles,” and spent a brief time in a school gangster types attended, despite your generally affluent existence.  So you’ve had a glimpse of that kind of life.  And you’re a writer. You’ve got an imagination.  

Imagination is nothing to be ashamed of.  

Until about 10 years ago, when the memoir trend hit the publishing industry, you’d write a novel that combined what you know with what you imagined.  You might be like Tom Wolfe, and imbue it with the fruits of journalistic research.  Or you might pin your observations to a genre — crime fiction, say.  As a novelist, you’ve got license to tell your story however you want, as long as it’s labeled “fiction.”

But now, publishers want truth.  Or what they can sell as the truth. As a serious novel,  Seltzer’s Love and Consequences wouldn’t have had much of a commercial prospect.  But as a memoir, it looked like a big seller.

James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, another false memoir, says he initially tried to peddle his writing about life as a drug addict as a novel, but no one bit.  Since this was a novel based on his life experiences at least in part, it didn’t seem like a stretch to change the book into a memoir.  But he left in the parts he made up.

“I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require,” Mr. Frey said in an author’s note released yesterday that will be included in future editions of the book. “I altered events all the way through the book,” he added.

Because that’s what we do when we tell stories.  We don’t sit and recite facts and expect the audience to stay interested.   Even if all the materials we’re working with are in fact true, we shape them.  It occured to many writers to go beyond mere “shaping,” but that’s okay, they could call it fiction. 

At its inception as a communications medium, the novel was a fundamentally journalistic exercise; truth, but not literally true.  Daniel Defoe, by most accounts the father of the English novel, was originally a journalist and pamphleteer whose most famous fictions, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders were extensions of his journalistic activism — Crusoe, an adventure-filled parable, and Flanders, a tour of different tiers of London society in the mid-1700s.   Flanders’ saga reflected what Defoe knew of the streets he worked as a political tribune.  Crusoe’s tale a reflection of his thinking on colonialism, economics, morality and faith.  The things he described didn’t happen, but they reflected a lifetime observing things that did.

Margaret Seltzer’s observations of the 21st century equivalent of London’s demi-monde could have been valuable.  She comes off as a sincere social critic:

“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

Seltzer bowed to publishing realities and turned herself into someone who will have a hard time ever being believed again.  She’s a fool and a liar and all that.  But her story strikes me as tragic, too.  A different publishing ethic might have prevented Seltzer from travelling a dark path.  I haven’t read the book — and won’t, since it’s been withdrawn by the publisher — but I suspect it had the makings of a decent novel.  But nobody wants novels like that anymore, or so publishers think.

*UPDATE, 3/4:  If you want a good laugh at Seltzer’s expense, read this cringeworthy interview from her publicity materials.  It was posted on Gawker.  A sample:

Q: How did this book originate?

A: During my senior year of college one of my professors told me a friend of hers was working on a book and wanted to interview me. I declined. I wasn’t interested in the whole “South-Central-as-petting-zoo” thing. Then my home girl said the teacher might mess around and fail me for rejecting her friend, so I ended up calling the author and doing the interview. She was real nice and asked me if I had ever written anything. I ended up giving her one of a number of short stories I had written for my brothers’ kids and for the kids of my homies serving life sentences.

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:

The Emerald Isle, Land of the Dork and the Doozy

…and the gimmick and the scam and the sucker and the geezer, where you “cry uncle,” have a knack for malarkey and the mug of a slob.

I had no idea how many of my favorite American slang words, the old ones, apparently come from Ireland, according to author Daniel Cassidy, interviewed this week in the NY Times.  

“The whole project started with a hunch — hunch, from the Irish word ‘aithint,’ meaning recognition or perception,” the verbose Mr. Cassidy said in an interview on Monday at O’Lunney’s, a bar and restaurant on West 45th Street. He has worked as a merchant seaman, a labor organizer and a screenwriter, and he lives in San Francisco, where he teaches Irish studies at the New College of California.

He pulled out his pocket Irish dictionary and began pointing out words that he said had been Americanized by the millions of Irish immigrants who turned New York into an extension of the Ghaeltacht, or Irish-speaking regions of Ireland.

“Even growing up around it, little shards of the language stayed alive in our mouths and came out as slang,” he said, spouting a string of words that sounded straight out of a James Cagney movie.

“Snazzy” comes from “snasach,” which means polished, glossy or elegant. The word “scram” comes from “scaraim,” meaning “I get away.” The word “swell” comes from “sóúil,” meaning luxurious, rich and prosperous, and “sucker” comes from “sách úr,” or, loosely, fat cat.

Out here in California, I do my bit to keep a lot of these words alive.  I say “gee whiz” and get looks as if I’ve just stepped out of an episode of “Leave to Beaver.”  But that’s from the Gaelic.  It’s not (as many assume) a sanitized way to avoid taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Of course, living near the beach, I couldn’t help but pick up a little surfer talk.  I’ve been known to call someone a “dude.”   So, what a surprise to learn this:

“Even the word ‘dude’ comes from the Irish word ‘dúid,’ or a foolish-looking fellow, a dolt,” Mr. Cassidy said. “They called the guys dudes who came down to the Five Points section of Manhattan to chase the colleens.”

He showed a passage in his book that notes that the Feb. 25, 1883, edition of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported the coining of the word “dude,” referring to, among other things, a man who “wears trousers of extreme tightness.”

“You dig?” he said. “‘Dig,’ as in ‘tuig,’ or understand.”

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.  

Thank You

Sometime in the past 24 hours, From the Desert to the Sea’s total “hits” passed 200,000.

It means so much to me that so many visitors come read what I have to say every day. So thank you.

This blog will keep going. However, the frequency of posts will slow, and the focus of them will be more personal. This is because I’ve started a new blog for the company for which I work, Dolan Media, and I need to prioritize writing there.

Dolan is a publisher of business and legal information and so the new blog — called From 50,000 Feet — is completely focused on those topics. My role will be more like a reporter and editor, sharing things I think will be of interest to people in the business and legal realms. I will also share with you some of the best of our company’s reporting and blogging.

I can’t help being me, so the new blog will probably have a disproportionate focus on the business and legal subjects with which I am most familiar — environmental issues, the practice of PR, business and public policy — but I can stretch. That’s one great thing about the blogging medium. It’s not my job always to have the best information or ideas; just to point you there.

Dolan has newspapers and related websites in New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arizona, Colorado, Wisconsin, Missouri, Michigan, Oregon, Idaho and Minnesota. There are links to all of them here, and on my new blog. The new blog also links to all of our affiliated blogs, where you’ll find a wealth of good writing.

I’m working with a fearless group of editors and web designers. We’re in the process of bringing the tools of social media to our readers in what we believe will be new and useful ways. I’m grateful for the opportunity the company has given me to explore and help create the future of news and information.

But I’m also so grateful for being able to talk to the readers of this blog for the past two years–and for all your support. I’m proud of a lot of the work I’ve done here, and I’m not done with it yet. But please visit my new thing, make a comment if you’re so moved, and tell your friends.

Thanks again.

The Last Great Rock Band Performs

If you’ve seen the commercials for the University of Phoenix, you might have noticed the background music is this odd, distinctive clip of what sounds like a Phil Spectorish choir singing “hey-la, hey-la” over a fierce rock beat complete with flailing, Keith Moon-style drums. You’re hearing The New Pornographers. This is the most exciting moment from the most exciting song on the most exciting pop/rock album of the 2000s, in my opinion, Twin Cinema (2005).

As befits the waning power of formal structures that characterizes this era, the New Pornographers are more of a “project” than a band, although onstage Wednesday night at Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood, they fit snugly in the pocket as if they’d been playing together nonstop for 10 years.  But looking at their history and personnel, you get the feeling they could vanish at any time, without rancor, just because the key members found something else to do.

So that’s one reason I made sure to go to their show this week promoting the new album Challengers. Neko Case’s solo career, which preceded her joining the NPs, has now achieved a level of esteem and is showing inklings of commercial viability, so she might not stick around. They already are forced to tour without her sometimes. In fact, her replacement, Kathleen Calder, is already a member of the band and on Wednesday night she helped fill out the big co-ed vocal sound that is the hallmark of this band.

“End of Summer”

My wife stopped me in my tracks this morning when she read me the following poem, which is in the current New Yorker:

End of Summer
by James Richardson

Just an uncommon lull in the traffic

so you hear some guy in an apron, sleeves rolled up,

with his brusque sweep brusque sweep of the sidewalk,

and the slap shut of a too thin rental van,

and I told him no a gust has snatched from a conversation

and brought to you, loud.

                                    It would be so different

if any of these were missing is the feeling

you always have on the first day of autumn,

no, the first day you think of autumn, when somehow

the sun singling out high windows,

a waiter settling a billow of white cloth

with glasses and silver, and the sparrows

shattering to nowhere are the Summer

waving that here is where it turns

and will no longer be walking with you,

traveller, who now leave all of this behind,

carrying only what it has made of you.

Already the crowds seem darker and more hurried

and the slang grows stranger and stranger,

and you do not understand what you love,

yet here, rounding a corner in mild sunset,

is the world again, wide-eyed as a child

holding up a toy even you can fix.

                                                 How light your step

down the narrowing avenue to the cross streets,

October, small November, barely legible December.

Sure enough, I went down to the beach late this afternoon, the same beach where only four days ago hung with the vapors of a moist, southern heat wave; and instead of the balminess I remembered, I saw clear, blue cloudless skies and felt a cool, almost chilly breeze.  Only the warmth of the water carried the reminder of the tropics that so recently drifted through here. 

It almost feels like the poem brought the change in the weather.  It certainly set the scene for the day.  

Why do I miss that icky, sticky heat wave?  Well, I really don’t.  It kept me awake and made it hard to concentrate on anything, especially work.   But the beach was amazing in a way it probably won’t be again for a long time.  I wish I’d thought to spend more time there.

Pre-Mortem Autopsy for The New Republic

From reading Richard Miniter’s lengthy analysis of how The New Republic allowed falsified dispatches from a soldier in Iraq to be published, and why it continues to defend them, you get a picture of an insular organization with varying standards based on insider relationships, and with an alarmingly low threshold for fact-checking.

The scandal does not seem driven by ideology so much as maniacal ambition on the part of the writer, and a cozy credulity on the part of the magazine’s editorial leadership.

The writer/soldier, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, still has his defenders, but as this piece from the Huffington Post demonstrates, they are becoming increasingly desperate.

I’m probably the last blogger to address this story — I tend not to avoid well-trodden paths — but the Miniter piece has great human interest, elevating the story to some kind of tragicomedy.  Here’s a sample:

Here’s What “John From Cincinnati” Means

I get it.  The fact that I get it doesn’t make “John From Cincinnati” a good show, but if you’re wondering what it’s all about, it’s simple.

“John From Cincinnati” tried to answer the question of what would happen if the most potent figures from the New Testament, akin to John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Joseph and Mary and of course, Jesus Christ, were to emerge in a contemporary setting.  What would the people around them do? 

The show asks:  Do you believe the New Testament?  Do you take it as a matter of not just faith but fact that Jesus performed miracles like raising the dead and walking on water?  Was the purpose of these miraculous feats to persuade the people of his times to believe he was divine, and that his words were prophecies? 

If you do believe these things, why would you find “John From Cincinnati” implausible? Isn’t there supposed to be a return?  Well, then, it could happen like it does on the show, couldn’t it?

The show was rife with Christian mystical symbolism, but I don’t think the point of the show was to bring us all to Jesus.  It was, instead, a what-if, a fantasy, a film noir Second Coming. And yet, within the universe of the show, we are to believe that this particular Second Coming is a very good thing — for the characters in the show, and for humanity in general.  The crisis precipitated by 9/11 is “huge,” as John says.  Bigger than what we believe it to be already.  An existential threat that will require divine force to save us mere, frail humans from turning it into an apocalypse.

Bring on the Clicks; I’m Blogging About “John From Cincinnati”

I wrote a nothing post about “The Sopranos” last year and forgot about it. But the word “spoilers” was in the title, and even though I made it clear I didn’t have any spoilers, and didn’t want any spoilers, it got thousands of clicks when the series ran its final nine episodes this spring. Well, I like “The Sopranos” a lot, I’m with those who think it’s the best television series in history, so I kept writing about it, and kept getting bunches of hits. Who knows how far anyone read into my musings — the mania was for spoilers. But it drew a crowd.

Will history repeat itself when I write about “John from Cincinnati,” HBO’s “Sopranos” successor?

Seemingly, no. “John From Cincinnati,” or JFC as its rabid fans would call it if the show had any rabid fans, is the weirdest, most off-putting show I’ve ever seen on television. And yet, I’ve stuck by it to the end, which comes — ah, relief — this Sunday night. I can’t imagine HBO picking up this show for another season, so if the writers have any explanation for themselves, it will probably have to come Sunday.

What do I hate about this show? Rebecca de Mornay’s character spends most of every show screaming and cursing in a voice that reminds you of worn-out brakes. “John,” the mystical idiot savant who doesn’t mind being stabbed because it heals right away, stands like he always needs to pee — which is ironic, since the first clue that John isn’t normal is that he never “dumps out” — alleged surfer talk for making #2.

The remaining characters all play like out-of-place refugees from “NYPD Blue,” show co-creator David Milch’s fondly remembered cop drama. They talk in that kind of ornate, faux-Damon Runyon style that is Milch’s trademark, but where it worked on “NYPD Blue” and “Deadwood,” it seems completely wrong here. I haven’t read the novels of the other co-creator, Kem Nunn, but he has a lot of credibility as a chronicler of surfer culture, and the show’s surf atmospherics seem right. But there’s not enough footage in the water!

The opening credits are the best part of the show, but they are a tease.

The song is “Johnny Appleseed” by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, from the album Global A-Go-Go. I am grateful to “John From Cincinnati” for introducing me to the song by the late co-leader of the Clash. But all those great vintage surfing shots? Why can’t we have more of those?

The show’s HBO website does have one valuable feature, the “Inside the Episode” essays by writer Steven Hawk. They’re weird, but compelling. They go so far “inside” the episode, you hardly recognize it. Regarding last week’s show, he said this:

I was enthralled during the shooting of the scene in the Snug Harbor parking lot when Ramon (Luis Guzman) shows Barry and Doctor Smith (Garret Dillahunt) the Avon catalog he received from Rosa the friendly rose-growing neighbor. Ramon, as excited as we’ve ever seen him, urges his two friends to turn to the catalog’s middle spread, which is sprinkled with the mysterious stick-man figure that’s been increasingly prominent in recent episodes. As Smith dashes off to get his own catalog, Ramon nearly pleads with Barry:

RAMON: Listen to me! Look at this!

BARRY: I am looking, I am seeing Avon in an entirely new light…

RAMON: This is big. This is huge.

BARRY: I think it very well could be.

RAMON: I want to cook something.

BARRY: I could eat.

Doctor Smith arrives, shows his catalog to Ramon and Barry.

SMITH: Look.

BARRY: Those same marvelous figures.

SMITH (to Ramon): What did she tell you about these?

RAMON: Nothing.

SMITH: This is huge.

“Big” and “huge,” of course, are words John said repeatedly during his strange, hypnotic parking lot speech at the end of Episode Six. And don’t forget that Ramon cooked for everyone during that speech. But my favorite aspect of this scene is the threesome’s inexplicable sense of joy and purpose. Here’s what Milch told the actors during rehearsal: “What’s happening is, all these subliminal cues are being activated without your knowing it. Essentially what you’re doing is activating neural connections. They know [the appearance of the stick figures in the catalog] is huge simply because they’ve trusted their intuitions. A wave of purposefulness is carrying all of you, even while you’re thinking, ‘I don’t know what’s happening here…’”

In other words, you need not know exactly what’s going on to be moved by the universe.

Good to know!

If the show works at all, it probably does work on the subliminal level Milch was suggesting. Why are these people happy? Why are these people mad? Why don’t these people notice how cracked everyone else around them is, and run away?

Maybe after Sunday night, the dozens of odd mysteries about which I’m not all that curious will be resolved. Or maybe they won’t, but my “neural connections” will be clicking away, causing an unaccountable improvement to my life. There must be some point to this show.

New Civil Libertarians?

Radar working overtime, I’ve noticed that the trials of Lewis Libby, Conrad Black and the Duke University lacrosse players have generated new recruits to the cause of civil liberties – a cause that used to be embraced by liberals and the news media, but has been an orphan lately for all save those incarcerated at Gitmo. Well, seeing a political hero like Libby and a business hero like Black fall into the grasp of federal prosecutors has awakened the right wing to the need for due process — and the government’s faltering observance of it.

Best recent example is writer Mark Steyn’s blog post of last week reflecting on the Black trial:

Here’s just a random half-dozen reforms the US justice system would benefit from:

1) An end to the near universal reliance on plea bargains, a feature unknown to most other countries in the Common Law tradition. This assures that a convicted man is doubly penalized, first for the crime and second for insisting on his right to trial by jury. The principal casualty of this plea-coppers’ parade is justice itself: for when two men commit the same act but the first is jailed for the rest of his life and dies in prison while the second does six months of golf therapy and community theatre on a British Columbia farm and then resumes his business career, the one thing that can be said with certainty is that such an outcome is unjust.

Listening to Maria McKee, the Willard Grant Conspiracy and Nick Lowe

So I came back from the Maria McKee/Willard Grant Conspiracy concert at McCabe’s week before last with three CDs:

• Maria McKee’s most recent, “Late December.”
• Also by McKee, “Live in Hamburg”
• The Willard Grant Conspiracy’s “Let it Roll”

And since then, I’ve picked up another one I’d like to talk about, too: Nick Lowe’s “At My Age.”

“…the Apparent Double Suicide…” *UPDATED

A rank odor rises from the LA Times’ belated coverage of blogger/filmmaker Theresa Duncan’s death and the subsequent disappearance of her boyfriend, the artist Jeremy Blake. After rehashing what everyone else said days ago — the deaths were “confounding,” the art world is in shock — writer Chris Lee gropes in the dark for explanations that are clearly beyond the facts in his notebook, and in doing so, inflicts needless damage to their reputations.

If someone knows why two talented, popular people with the world on a string would kill themselves, they can choose to tell that story. When it comes to prominent people — and there’s no question Duncan and Blake courted attention — the trade-off between violating the privacy of the deceased and offering a coherent narrative to explain a senseless act tends to favor telling the story. But only if you have a story to tell. Lee doesn’t. He has a hodge-podge of disquieting details that add up to a big, contradictory blob of nothing that perhaps tells us more about Lee than his subjects.

I Never Knew Theresa Duncan

I never knew Theresa Duncan, author of the blog The Wit of the Staircase among many other creative accomplishments. But I happened to get a note from an admirer of hers last week, asking if I could confirm her death.

Our connection was LA Observed. Kevin Roderick loved Duncan’s blog, and he says nice things about this one, too. Somehow, the e-mailer thought we might know each other, and hoped I might be able to dispel what was then just a rumor.

This thread led me on a search through the Internet to find out what had happened. The facts are unbelievably sad and frankly bewildering. Not only is Duncan gone, but so is her boyfriend of 12 years, the well-known artist Jeremy Blake, who apparently drowned himself a few days after finding Duncan’s body in their New York apartment.

The New York papers have all now weighed in. The most straightforward account appeared in Saturday’s New York Daily News:

Officer Rutten on the Media Beat: No Embargoes for Wizards

Last week, LA Times media columnist Tim Rutten instructed the LA news media that the only real issue in Mayor Villaraigosa’s extramarital affair was “the fact that (girlfriend Mirthala) Salinas continued to report on the mayor while they were involved in this fashion….”

Since that column, the Times’ reporters have dutifully focused on that aspect, writing the ultimate “who cares?” story today:

Mirthala Salinas was a rising star at one of Los Angeles’ premier Spanish-language television stations before she came to be known as the other woman in Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s life.

A respected and aggressive journalist, she anchored a newscast that won two local Emmy Awards at KVEA-TV Channel 52 during her 10 years at the Telemundo station. She earned a Golden Mike broadcasting award as well.

“She was very smart and always had her finger on the pulse of the community,” said one former Telemundo executive, who recalled the 35-year-old newscaster as poised and articulate.

(Where was her finger again?)

Now, Salinas’ career hangs in the balance as Telemundo executives decide as early as Monday whether to fire her for having a romantic relationship with Villaraigosa while she was covering him as a political reporter.

The City Hall beat’s course thusly corrected, Rutten has moved on to Harry Potter, specifically the controversy over two book reviewers — the NY Times‘ Michiko Kakutani, the Baltimore Sun’s Mary Carole McCauley — publishing reviews in advance of the release of the final novel in the series early this morning. There was an agreement of some kind with media getting advance copies that they would not do this.

Rutten wants us all to know that, from his Olympian perch, he sees nothing wrong with what the reviewers did.

Usually, what the public trusts a newspaper to do is to tell things, not withhold information, but maybe those rules don’t apply to “the boy who lived” any more than the laws of nature do.

(snip)

(Author J.K. Rowling) told the British press that she was “staggered that some American newspapers have decided to publish purported spoilers in the form of reviews in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children, who wanted to reach Harry’s final destination by themselves, in their own time. I am incredibly grateful to all those newspapers, booksellers and others who have chosen not to attempt to spoil Harry’s last adventure for fans.”

Fair enough. She’s the author, and she’s entitled. The fact of the matter is, though, that both Kakutani and the Sun’s Mary Carole McCauley are accomplished critics whose reviews scrupulously avoided giving away anything that could be considered a plot spoiler. Even the most passionate Potterites could read their pieces without fear of compromising their pleasure in this new book.

Really? How does Rutten know this? Both reviews made it pretty clear that, to answer one big question in fans’ minds, Harry does not die. You had to read between the lines, but the tone and carefully chosen words in both reviews could only lead you to one conclusion.

From the Sun:

So, while we really can’t divulge the ending of Book 7, we can tell you this much:

As the series draws to a close, Rowling gives her favorite character a rare and precious gift, a treasure that outshines any other boon she can imagine — including immortality.

She gives Harry a family.

The Times’ Kakutani is more circumspect about the ending, but her descriptions of the novel tell readers what to expect along the way to it:

No wonder then that Harry often seems overwhelmed with disillusionment and doubt in the final installment of this seven-volume bildungsroman. He continues to struggle to control his temper, and as he and Ron and Hermione search for the missing Horcruxes (secret magical objects in which Voldemort has stashed parts of his soul, objects that Harry must destroy if he hopes to kill the evil lord), he literally enters a dark wood, in which he must do battle not only with the Death Eaters, but also with the temptations of hubris and despair.

Rutten wants us to know that Rowling — who, he emphasizes, has become a billionaire from her writings — isn’t really concerned, as she says, about “children, who wanted to reach Harry’s final destination by themselves, in their own time.” Nope. Rutten has deduced that “it’s about money.” After acknowledging there are bad guys — on the Internet! — who posted PDFs of the book, he goes on to make an obvious but pointless distinction.

Embargoes on reviews and discussions are another matter. All the outrage surrounding this particular book notwithstanding, contemporary publishers impose these blackouts not in the interest of readers but to protect the carefully planned publicity campaigns they create for books on which they have advanced large sums of money.

This is the economic imperative that leads publishers to withhold the contents of even nonfiction manuscripts that contain news that the public has a vital interest in knowing.

It’s also why newspapers, including this one, routinely break those embargoes without any pang of conscience. Our first and most compelling obligation is to our readers’ right to know and not to the commercial interests of publishers.

That’s right, everybody. It takes guts for journalists to ferret out the news from…uh, their own desks. You, my readers, have a right to know plot points in a work of fiction that was sent to me by the publisher. It’s my solemn duty to report this information, even though I agreed not to.

What Rutten is alluding to are the embargoes of non-fiction books written by journalists on the payroll of a newspaper, where legitimate news is squirreled away for maximum commercial impact, to the detriment of the public’s interest. The Washington Post, in particular, is famous for doing this, keeping accounts of secret White House deliberations under wraps so as not to spoil a book launch.

How is the Harry Potter series anything like that? Rutten is being excruciatingly literal here. But he also fails to support his case. How is money implicated? Spoiling the surprises wouldn’t have stopped readers from buying “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” As Rutten himself reports, some 1.8 million readers had already advance-ordered it from Amazon alone.

No; the only result of spoiling the surprises is spoiling the surprises.

Rowling is an artist of suspense. She knows what she wants readers to experience and when. But because Tim Rutten doesn’t get that, he’s let the word go forth that journalists have a right, nay a duty, to break embargoes for works of fiction. Just as he has ruled that Mayor Villaraigosa’s private life is none of our business, unless it creates a conflict of interest for a member of the sacred class of journalists.

Okay, Rutten, so what about this: What if an elected official was married to a novelist, and the novelist told the elected official the ending to his or her next book, not knowing that the elected official was also sleeping with a reporter? Would it be appropriate for the reporter to review the novel?

Did David Chase Tell Journey’s Lead Singer What the Sopranos Ending Meant?

I thought I was done writing about “The Sopranos,” but this is waaay too interesting to pass up:

Rocker STEVE PERRY refused to let THE SOPRANOS creator DAVID CHASE use his classic song DON’T STOP BELIEVIN’ in the mob show’s final scene until he knew the fate of the drama’s leading characters.
The ex-Journey frontman kept Chase waiting until three days before the long-awaited finale aired in America on Sunday (10Jun07).
Perry is a huge Sopranos fan and feared his 1981 rock anthem would be remembered as the soundtrack to the death of James Gandolfini’s character Tony Soprano – until Chase assured him that wouldn’t be the case.
Perry says, “The request came in a few weeks ago and it wasn’t until Thursday that it got approval, because I was concerned.
“I was not excited about (the possibility of) the Soprano family being whacked to Don’t Stop Believin’. Unless I know what happens – and I will swear to secrecy – I can’t in good conscience feel good about its use.”

From another version of the story:

The songwriters of Journey’s power ballad “Don’t Stop Believin”‘ were “jumping up and down” when they learned a few weeks ago it had been licensed for use in the final episode of “The Sopranos.” But even they couldn’t believe how it would prove so integral to one of the most memorable final scenes in television history.

“It was better than anything I would have ever hoped for,” said Jonathan Cain, Journey keyboard player, who watched at home with his wife and family.

Tony Soprano chose the song after flipping through a jukebox at a New Jersey restaurant where he dined with his family. The song played in the background as ominous characters flitted about and, right as Steve Perry was singing “don’t stop,” the HBO series did exactly that, for good. The ending infuriated some fans, amused others and intrigued all.

Cain, who wrote the song with Perry and Neal Schon, didn’t know how it would be used when they agreed to the licensing. Cain kept the fact that it was going to be in at all a secret, then watched the episode with his family.

“I didn’t want to blow it,” he told The Associated Press on Monday. “Even my wife didn’t know. She looked at me and said, ‘You knew that and you didn’t tell me?”‘

Journey released the song in 1981, and it reached No. 9 on the singles chart. It has taken a life of its own since then, often reflecting the attitude people had toward Journey itself. “Don’t Stop Believin”‘ brings back fond memories for many but is unbearably cheesy for others.

It’s easy to imagine Tony Soprano, back in the day, taking a young Carmella to a Journey concert.

What does this do to your particular pet theory about the show’s ending?

What song do you think Chase would have used if Steve Perry said no?

Do you think Chase was so committed to using “Don’t Stop Believin’” that he changed the ending to suit Steve Perry?

*UPDATE: I’ve partially replaced the linked story with a different version. Apparently, the one I quoted, which I found here, was edited erroneously to make it seem as if Steve Perry was the one whose wife said, “You knew that and you didn’t tell me?” It was the song’s co-writer Jonathan Cain who describes the scene with his wife, as the second story I’ve linked to now has it.

“Each Day is a Gift” — Advice from Tony Soprano*

That’s what Tony Soprano said after miraculously surviving a gunshot in the belly as he was leaving the hospital in the third episode of the sixth season of “The Sopranos,” which ended last night. He said that, and then went about proving over the remaining 18 shows that the gifts come with strings attached, and some of them are pretty lousy.

I’ve been leading that one-day-at-a-time lifestyle ever since my 15-month sentence was pronounced back in January — with a surrender date of March 30.

I thought it would be obvious to the judicial system that I should be able to stay out of incarceration while my appeal was being considered, so I didn’t really expect I would go away on that date. Now I know that at the federal district level, asking a judge to grant bail for appeal on a case over which he presided is tantamount to asking him to second-guess his own trial rulings. Others reviewing the record might conclude judicial errors resulted in an unfair trial, but that’s not something one’s trial judge is likely to perceive.

While he considered the bail motion, the judge moved my surrender date back to April 27th. When he turned me down, that became the date I expected to have to report unless the appellate court reversed him quickly.  I started shopping for prison clothes.  But now, while the appellate court considers my request, there is no surrender date. The process has no proscribed ending.  I could find out what’s going to happen five minutes after I post this. Or, in two weeks, maybe longer. The appellate judges who will make this decision have very full plates.

If the decision goes against me, I would head off to Taft within a few weeks after that. If not, I will wait out the appeal while conducting my life — working, supporting my family, living like everyone else. There will still be an anvil over my head, but my time horizon will be a little more expansive. I won’t be a “day-to-day” guy. Maybe a “month-to-month” guy. And, if the court agrees with me, a guy whose conviction gets reversed.

Anyway, you might ask, how does this tie into “The Sopranos?”

First of all, what happened last night was about the last thing I would have expected when this 9-episode conclusion began last April 7. No I’m not talking about the sudden blackout in the middle of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” that had much of America screaming their cable had gone out at the worst time. I actually predicted “no final resolution,” like Gilligan’s Island, two months ago.

No, what I mean is the fact that I got to see the final episode at all.

I envisioned my wife or one of my brothers coming to Taft to see me on visiting day, saying, “Do you really want to know? Wouldn’t you rather wait to watch the DVD after you get released?” “Well, yeah, but can you give me a hint?” Within the inmate population, I imagined there would be a no-spoiler omerta. But woe unto him who sang.

Considering that “each day is a gift,” I spent way too much time I’ll never get back this weekend on Television Without Pity’s Sopranos community site, offering up my pre- and post-show perceptions of last night’s episode and the series as a whole. Meanwhile, I’ve neglected this blog, even though lately most of my readers now go to one of my other Sopranos posts.

So here, for your consideration, are a few of the things I wrote last night and early this morning, most of them in response to posters who were furious about the indeterminate final scene. A number of the other posters on this site were expecting a bigger finish; Tony dead, or in the Witness Protection Program, or forced to endure the agony of seeing one of his children die, or his wife. Instead, onion rings, Journey, Meadow trying to parallel park and…over. So you’ll see a lot of back and forth here:

A half hour after the show was over:

OTHER POSTER: 9 Years invested in this? What kind of ending is that????

ME: It’s straight out of Larry David. No hugging. No learning. No getting whacked.

Fifteen minutes later, someone offers the theory that the blackout meant Tony was dead. He was shot by the guy who went into the men’s room. Like Phil Leotardo at the Oyster Bay gas station, Tony never saw it coming. Suddenly, consciousness just stopped and all went dark. But, as was the case with Phil, Tony’s family had to watch. At least according to the theory:

OTHER POSTER: I don’t think there is any ambiguity in the ending and it doesn’t leave the door open for anything further. A faithful viewer should take this to mean Tony is dead.

ME: This is tempting, but I think it’s false. Who ordered the hit and why? Phil’s dead. Butchie is a businessman and made an agreement not just with Tony, but also Lil’ Carmine. Business wins — that’s one of the messages of this ending.

The spoilers suggesting an insane personal revenge motive for Butchie are clearly wrong. He was fed up with Phil.

Carlo is in (Witness Protection.) The Russian’s grudge is with Paulie.

Tony’s only enemy at the moment is the federal government, which is going to grind him down like his mother ground down Johnny-boy, not shoot him in a diner.

Another poster objected that the ending was disappointing because Tony hadn’t been punished for his lifelong crime and murder spree, the proceeds of which sent his daughter to Columbia and decorated his wife with endless bling. I pointed out that his lawyer told him he was almost sure to be indicted.

Other poster: (I don’t) think it is clear that Tony has been punished…

Me: He’s going to prison. He’s going to grow old in prison. Or at least that’s what’s likely to occur. There were three possible endings.

• Life goes on.
• Tony gets whacked.
• Tony gets arrested.

Chase gave us a combination of 1 and 3. What’s the problem?

Then this morning, I just riffed for awhile after reading a few dozen other posts:

ME: After sleeping on it…

Going back to Greek tragedy and Aristotle’s analysis of the structure of drama, on up to the three-act structure taught in every screenwriting class at UCLA, we know how a “play” is supposed to end.

There is no similar body of knowledge about how a TV series is supposed to end. I don’t care what David Chase or Aaron Sorkin or J.J. Abrams says, when they start one of these series, they have no idea if they’re going to get to do even a second episode, and they certainly have no clue if they’re doing 22 or 122. It all depends on factors outside their control — ratings, the actors’ careers, etc. There is no science to this, no successful model of “how to end a TV series” that Chase could consult.

Lots of beloved series from the past had no ending at all. The last episode could have been the third episode. Or they tie up one arc that started in the final season. Or they just stagger to the end, the stories having been drained of any potential long before.

The two best TV endings I can think of were of MASH and Six Feet Under. But both of those series had built-in conclusions that guided their writers. For MASH, we all know the Korean war ended, so an episode about what everybody was going to do next made perfect sense. And the way Six Feet Under focused on death made its last sequence a perfect coda: “You’ve seen Nate die, now let’s see how everyone else is going to die.”

Chase didn’t have an ending like that available to him unless he wanted to kill off Tony. Apparently, he didn’t think that ending made any sense. It would have been too easy, and it wasn’t consistent with Tony’s strengths as a character. He might be a lousy boss, but he’s a survivor, he’s strong in protecting his family, and he’s a good negotiator. All that worked in his favor. Getting (Tony) killed at the end would have felt arbitrary.

(snip)

But a lot got accomplished in this final episode. The Junior v. Tony story that started with episode 1 played out to a beautiful, sad, meaningful and ironic conclusion. Meadow and AJ’s rationalizations for staying in the orbit of their corrupt parents were organic to the story, but also perfect representation’s of Chase’s cynical view of life. That the brilliant Meadow could delude herself that her father was a victim of racism? And yet, ironically, she’s right. The state does have the power to crush the individual, and the individual needs an advocate like Meadow to have any chance. If you see it up close (I have), it’s hard to root for the FBI….

(snip)

The show also closed the loop on Tony/Melfi. Her harsh treatment of him in “Blue Comet” is reflected of course in Tony’s boo-hooing to AJ’s therapist, but I think the real end to that story is near the end, when he’s raking leaves and hears the ducks flying overhead. He seems at peace, for the moment. Maybe Melfi helped him, or maybe it was just the passage of time.

The scene in Holstein’s was a denouement. There was no more story to tell. It was Chase’s opportunity to address the audience directly. Life is dangerous, life is tense, life can be snapped away in a moment, but not necessarily this moment. The onion ring is the perfect symbol — a circle, like the roulette wheel, and an onion — layers.

Someone else pointed out that the family ate the onion rings differently than most people do. They didn’t bite into them, they swallowed them whole. First AJ, then Carmela, then Tony. Putting a piping hot onion ring in your mouth all at once can be painful. But the image of AJ, Tony and Carmela swallowing circles related for me back to the scene a couple episodes ago when Tony is on drugs, watching a roulette wheel, and says to the hooker who gave him peyote: “It works on the same principle as the solar system.”

A lot of posters hated the Journey song. They turn their noses up at Journey as a band from the depths of the 1970s, a mullet-head band. But one poster made a great connection:

OTHER POSTER: “Don’t Stop Believing” was perfect. As Chase has said, and many of us have pointed out, 90 percent of what comes out of the characters’ mouths are lies. I think the song was a nod to that trait in the characters: Don’t stop believing your own lies, because you couldn’t if you tried.

ME: Thank you. I think this is the most satisfying explanation of the final song. It’s the lies we tell ourselves that keep us doing what we’re doing — that keep despair at arm’s length. Mobsters and their families are no different from the rest of us.

It also makes sense for David Chase, the music encyclopedia, that the essence of the show’s ending would be a pop tune. If he wasn’t a TV producer, he’d be a guy who makes personalized mix CDs for everybody he knows.

The only honest character at the end? Junior. Who doesn’t remember anything and thinks he’s being talked to by aliens. But at least he doesn’t lie to Tony, and that reassures Tony that the shooting wasn’t personal.

But the debate about whether Tony was dead or not raged on. I just don’t think he is.

OTHER POSTER: The bathroom guy was at the counter when Tony came in. There is no reason why bathroom guy wouldn’t already have a gun in his pocket and do the job before Tony’s entire family came in either.

ME: I don’t think hit men whack people in crowded family diners in front of Boy Scouts and other children, after they’ve spoken to waitresses who could identify them. Someone with a firmer grasp of Mob lore might correct me, but that would seem like an idiotic place and manner to do the hit, if one was ordered. Tony arrived alone, would probably leave alone, so if it was to happen that night, it could happen while he’s driving. Or any other night, somewhere else. Tony was no longer in hiding.

Because the idea of Tony getting whacked in the diner is so illogical, I disagree that the purpose of the blackout was to make everyone speculate on what happens next. Nothing happens next.

It’s the “life goes on” ending, just edited in a more arty way.

Indeed, life goes on. It feels a little different today, however. After living inside David Chase’s head for all these hours, you start to hear yourself breathe like Tony and you feel your face tighten up into that confused squint at the absurdity of everything that happens.

I envy those, like my son, who have never watched the show. They have 86 hours of the best writing about America of this decade, performed by skilled actors and captured by brilliant cinematographers, still to watch. I’m sure I’ll see them all again sometime, but to see them for the first time…

*UPDATE: One of the finest TV critics on the Sopranos, the Newark Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall, gets the exclusive post-show interview with David Chase:

“I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there,” he says of the final scene.

“No one was trying to be audacious, honest to god,” he adds. “We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people’s minds, or thinking, ‘Wow, this’ll (tick) them off.’ People get the impression that you’re trying to (mess) with them and it’s not true. You’re trying to entertain them.”

(snip)

One detail about the final scene that he’ll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” as the song on the jukebox.

“It didn’t take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I’d never done before: in the location van, with the crew, I was saying, ‘What do you think?’ When I said, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’,’ people went, ‘What? Oh my god!’ I said, ‘I know, I know, just give a listen,’ and little by little, people started coming around.”

Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the finale as a whole, Chase doesn’t know. (“I hear some people were very angry, and others were not, which is what I expected.”) He’s relaxing in France, then he’ll try to make movies.

“It’s been the greatest career experience of my life,” he says. “There’s nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say.”

Washed My &%*@ In Muddy Water

I thought of that old Johnny Rivers tune:

I washed my hands in muddy water
I washed my hands, but they didn’t come clean
I tried to do like my daddy told me, now
I must have washed my hands in a muddy stream

as I was reading about a new book co-authored by an old friend of mine, Dean Calbreath.  Dean is part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the San Diego Union-Tribune that exposed Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s elaborate and shameless schemes to solicit bribes from military contractors bidding on classified projects. 

The team has published a book about Cunningham, The Wrong Stuff: The Extraordinary Saga of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the Most Corrupt Congressman Ever Caught, and TPM Muckracker’s Paul Kiel calls it today’s “Must Read.”  Kiel quotes the following unforgettable (in a bad way) passage:

…even (lobbyist Brent) Wilkes drew a line on what he would do for the congressman. For one thing, Wilkes was totally disgusted by the hot tub Cunningham put on the boat’s deck during the autumn and winter. What repelled Wilkes — and others invited to the parties — was both the water Cunningham put in the hot tub and the congressman’s penchant for using it while naked, even if everybody else at the party was clothed. Cunningham used water siphoned directly from the polluted Potomac River and never changed it out during the season. “Wilkes thought it was unbelievably dirty and joked if you got in there it would leave a dark water line on your chest,” said one person familiar with the parties. “The water was so gross that very few people were willing to get into the hot tub other than Duke and his paramour.” That was a reference to Cunningham’s most frequently seen girlfriend, a flight attendant who lived in Maryland.One of these parties started at the Capital Grille with Cunningham ordering his usual filet mignon — very well done — with iceberg lettuce salad and White Oak. Wilkes used the dinner to update Cunningham on the appropriations he wanted. Cunningham then took the whole group back to the boat where they drank more wine, sitting on white leather sofas while Cunningham told more war stories. Cunningham then took his clothes off and invited all to join him in the polluted hot tub that was hidden from the neighbors by a white tarp. There were no takers.

Talk about a cesspool of corruption…Bleah!

Two updates, or Why Bloggers are Better than Hack Journalists

1.  Could anything be more cliched than this?  Riffing off the same article about minimum-security prisons in The American that I wrote about here, a lazy-minded writer named Peter Carlson goes on autopilot and comes up with a column that soothes every liberal prejudice without engaging any of the issues honestly.  To get himself off — a vulgar way of putting it, I realize, but that’s the way the story feels — he is forced to recast Luke Mullins’ story as an apologia for rich, crooked CEOs by a magazine sponsored by a think-tank devoted to “the welfare of the rich.”

Missing the point entirely, Carlson apparently thinks the story was about this:

Now, white-collar miscreants are forced to mingle with common street-level dope dealers. And they have to work for seven hours a day — sometimes at jobs that are boring and unfulfilling and beneath them. And some of these former country clubs no longer have a tennis court — or even a bocce court! And inmates are forced to wear tacky prison garb instead of their stylish street clothes.

The horror! The horror!

Okay, Carlson, are you feeling better now?  Then why don’t you ponder for a minute or two why the “dope dealers” are in these prisons.  You have to put two and two together.  Minimum security prisons are reserved for non-violent federal felons.  Why are non-violent “dope dealers” doing federal time at all?  Obviously, you’re amused by the notion of white-collar convicts being forced to mix with them, but the “dope-dealers” are human, too — not just characters in your hack morality play.  Have you done any reading about the human consequences of the war on drugs? Didn’t think so.  

And while I’m sure you had a ball mocking the “high-class folks” now being warehoused at taxpayers’ expense, aren’t  you the least bit curious about how many of these supposed powerhouses of capitalism actually belong there — and how many of them are actually “rich?” 

Mullins didn’t interview any CEOs; my guess is because he didn’t run into any.  The way our system works now, the CEOs generally aren’t the prosecutors’ targets.  CEOs are too wealthy, too well-insulated and, if they were aware they were doing something wrong, they made sure not to get their hands dirty.  In a typical white collar case of the past five years, the ”higher-ups” work with the government to nail the “lower-downs,” which makes the government’s job so much easier. The feds get to look like they’re doing something important, while the stockholders interests are protected.

Obviously, I’m sensitive on this subject, but it burns me that a prestigious newspaper like the Washington Post publishes the writings of a pampered fool like Peter Carlson who, instead of doing any real thinking or reporting, just rolls out the creaky boxcars of received wisdom.   If it’s my fate to go to a minimum security prison in the near or distant future, it doesn’t scare me in the least; and I certainly don’t plan on going in with an attitude that I’m better than any of my fellow inmates.  But there’s a side of me — petty, to be sure — that wishes for the same fate for a Peter Carlson, a scribe who thinks he’s above everyone — CEO and “dope dealer” alike.  How long would that snarky smile last?  Measurable in seconds.

2.  It took her almost a week, but it was worth the wait:  Ann Althouse took a careful, Tivo-aided look at last Sunday’s episode of “The Sopranos,” the one in which Tony kills Christopher after a car accident.  It’s a tour de force, and I say that even though I disagree with her ultimate conclusion — that Tony is now dead.

I post these paragraphs just as a sample.  You should read all of it:

Carmela makes Tony a cup of coffee with that expensive expresso machine Paulie gave her in the April 22 episode. Tony says “It’s good.” At least something is good. They have a conversation that brings out the mother theme. (I note that Paulie’s aunt/mother Nucci also dies in this episode, and there’s a fair amount of childish whining by Paulie on the subject.) Carmela, crying over Christopher’s death, says that when Tony was in the hospital — back during that coma-dream — “It was Christopher who held me.” This mother-son image prompts Tony to bring up the baby seat in the SUV after the crash. It had a tree limb in it, so if the baby had been in the car, it would have been “mangled beyond recognition.” Carmela stomps off, and Tony is left holding out his empty arms toward her in a way that says this boy has no mother.

The following scene is Tony’s real session with Melfi, and he’s talking about mothering. He’s disgusted that Christopher’s mother is showing up now and soaking up all the sympathy, when she didn’t mother him well during his life. He says, “I hand carried him through the worse crisis he ever had.” “Hand carried” is an odd expression, but it conveys the image of a mother carrying a baby. Of course, it’s completely ridiculous for Tony to think he ought to be getting the sympathy when he’s the murderer. Tony thinks Chris was ungrateful, that his hand carrying only inspired hate. Well, yeah. It consisted of offing Adriana.

This sequence of mother-themed scenes culminates in a gathering of various mothers in the Soprano living room. Tony wanders out of his bedroom and looks down on them from the upstairs railing. Christopher’s baby is there. Christopher’s mother says: “She doesn’t know. Isn’t God wonderful that way?” Christopher’s wife pulls out her large breast and as the baby takes it, Tony snaps open the cell phone. He’s calling some guy in Las Vegas. “I need a suite.” The guy offers a plane too. Enough of the female. Bring on the phallic symbol. Escape from the family sphere into the realm of sin.

“Kennedy and Heidi,” and Chris-ta-fah, R.I.P.

Last night’s “Sopranos” episode cinches it for me.  The baby-boom generation has finally produced its Great American Novel, and this is it. 

More than any novel or movie I can think of, “The Sopranos” is an honest, faithful reflection of the heart of American culture.  It’s about everything we’ve learned and lost growing up with the H-bomb, the Cold War, the assassinations, the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan, Woodstock, drugs, TV, classic rock, yuppie consumer culture, New Age, Prozac, the dot-com bubble, Bill Clinton, global trade, 9/11 — all of that and probably more. “The Sopranos” has no detectable political agenda, but it speaks eloquently to the corruption that has seeped into all our relationships, our business dealings, our culture, our consciousness. 

The brilliant irony of how Christopher Moltisanti met his maker!  Sure, Tony delivered the coup de grâce, strangling him by pinching his nose after the accident.  But the accident was caused by two seemingly nice, decent girls driving a late model car, who preferred to let the unknown victims of a horrible accident die than risk what would have been a minor sanction against their driving privileges.  We have grown to loathe and fear the moral relativism of Tony and his crew as they justify dozens of murders and ruined lives. But what Chase is saying here is that, under the right circumstances, Tony’s ethics are everyone’s, including our children’s.

Like our country’s greatest writer, William Faulkner (whose stories seldom left a small fictional region of Mississippi called Yoknapatawpha County) David Chase and his writing crew display America through the eyes of a geographic sub-culture, New Jersey Italian-American criminals. ”The Sopranos” gets a lot of its comedy from putting our culture’s evasive buzzwords in the mouths of these thugs.  Like this exchange from Season 5:

Tony Blundetto: It’s hard to believe. My cousin in the old man’s seat.
Paulie ‘Walnuts’ Gualtieri: It’s like “Sun-Tuh-Zoo” says: a good leader is benevolent and unconcerned with fame.
Tony Blundetto: What?
Paulie ‘Walnuts’ Gualtieri: “Sun-Tuh-Zoo”. He’s Chinese Prince Matchabelli.
Silvio Dante: “Zoo”! “Zoo”! “Sun-Zoo”, you fucking ass-kiss!

It helps if you’re old enough to remember that Prince Matchabelli was the name of a perfume company that advertised on TV a lot in the 1960s.  Paulie was not the first to mix that name up with Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”  But what really makes it funny is the idea of mobsters elevating themselves by citing Sun-Tzu, a chic cite for all enlightened corporate executives. 

Again and again, Chase has rubbed our faces in the sheer evil and vulgarity of Tony Soprano and his associates, through some of the most violent and ugly scenes ever depicted.  Then he shows just how well Tony fits into the upper-class milieu –worrying about his kids, enjoying sushi, engaging in comforting nostalgia about his ethnic roots and, of course, medicating himself under a psychiatrist’s direction.  He’s just another executive who made it to the top of his chosen profession.  He has what so many Americans have, and what most Americans want.  Was his rise to the top that much dirtier than others who are lauded by our culture? 

It’s a horrible question, an insulting question.  But that’s what Chase has been asking through 83 episodes of “The Sopranos,” never more starkly than last night.  For all our ideals and pretensions–and our hallucinations of enlightenment–are we baby boomers so sure we haven’t passed the ethics of sheer expediency onto our children?  

The Iraq War Books to Come

George Tenet, the head of the CIA from 1997-2004, has just published a book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA.  He was interviewed about it on 60 Minutes last night, and will be on Larry King tonight.  I’m sure we’ll see him soon on Charlie Rose, The View, Live with Regis and Kelly, Jon Stewart’s show, and, if it was still on the air, you might see Tenet in animated form on Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

You probably know what this book’s all about, what makes it newsworthy:  Tenet’s claim to have opposed the invasion of Iraq, and his denial that when he told President Bush that evidence of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs was a “slam dunk” that he really meant it was true.  The NY Times’ Michiko Kakutani reviewed the book:

Alternately withholding and aggrieved, earnest and disingenuous, “At the Center of the Storm” is interesting less for any stunning new revelations than for fleshing out a portrait of the Bush White House already sketched by reporters and former administration members. Mr. Tenet depicts an administration riven by factional fighting between the State and Defense Departments, hard-liners and more pragmatic realists, an administration given to out-of-channels policymaking, and ad hoc, improvisatory decision-making.

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” he writes of a war that has already resulted in more than 3,300 American military deaths, at least 60,000 Iraqi civilian deaths and already cost more than $420 billion. Nor, he adds, was there “a significant discussion regarding enhanced containment or the costs and benefits of such an approach versus full-out planning for overt and covert regime change.”

Mr. Tenet’s book also ratifies the view articulated by former military, intelligence and Coalition Provisional Authority insiders that the White House repeatedly ignored or rebuffed early warnings about the deteriorating situation in post-invasion Iraq. Mr. Tenet writes that the C.I.A.’s senior officer in Iraq was dismissed as a “defeatist” for warning in 2003 of the dangers of a growing Iraqi insurgency, though it was already clear then that United States political and economic strategies were failing. Although the trends were clear, he adds, those in charge of policy “operated within a closed loop.” In that atmosphere, he says, bad news was ignored: the agency’s subsequent reporting, which would prove “spot-on,” was dismissed.

 Tenet’s book has not gone down well with either Bush supporters or Bush foes.  Arianna Huffington is one of many to ask the sensible question, “Why Didn’t George Tenet Just Resign?”

Poor George Tenet. Flogging his book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, on 60 Minutes, Tenet tells Scott Pelley about how his phrase “slam dunk” was misused by the Bush administration. Tenet, you see, didn’t mean it was a “slam dunk” that Hussein actually had WMD, he only meant it was a “slam dunk” that a public case could be made that Hussein had WMD.

I can’t really see that the distinction matters, but Tenet apparently does. “I became campaign talk,” Tenet tells Pelley, “I was a talking point. ‘Look at what the idiot told us, and we decided to go to war.’ Well, let’s not be so disingenuous. Let’s stand up. This is why we did it. This is why, this is how we did it. And let’s tell, let’s everybody tell the truth.”

Great — except he’s about four years too late. Tenet seems to believe there’s a major distinction between lying and standing by silently while others lie, and then proudly receiving a Medal of Freedom from the liars.

And Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his Slate review that Tenet was not just ineffectual and wrong about the invasion of Iraq; he was ineffectual and wrong about 9/11.  Hitchens recalls one of the creepiest things I remember reading about the immediate post 9/11 response. It was in Bush At War by Bob Woodward.  Hitchens uses that quote as a launching pad for an irate attack on Tenet’s credibility and character:

…(I)t was a very favorably disposed chronicler (Woodward) who wrote this, in describing Tenet’s reaction on the terrible morning of Sept. 11, 2001:

“This has bin Laden all over it,” Tenet told Boren. “I’ve got to go.” He also had another reaction, one that raised the real possibility that the CIA and the FBI had not done all that could have been done to prevent the terrorist attack. “I wonder,” Tenet said, “if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.”

Notice the direct quotes that make it clear who is the author of this brilliant insight. And then pause for a second. The author is almost the only man who could have known of Zacarias Moussaoui and his co-conspirators—the very man who positively knew they were among us, in flight schools, and then decided to leave them alone. In his latest effusion, he writes: “I do know one thing in my gut. Al-Qaeda is here and waiting.” Well, we all know that much by now. But Tenet is one of the few who knew it then, and not just in his “gut” but in his small brain, and who left us all under open skies. His ridiculous agency, supposedly committed to “HUMINT” under his leadership, could not even do what John Walker Lindh had done—namely, infiltrate the Taliban and the Bin Laden circle. It’s for this reason that the CIA now has to rely on torturing the few suspects it can catch, a policy, incidentally, that Tenet’s book warmly defends.

So, the only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was “not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept” this honor. But it seems that he allowed or persuaded himself to do so, given that the citation didn’t mention Iraq. You could imagine that Tenet had never sat directly behind Colin Powell at the United Nations, beaming like an overfed cat, as the secretary of state went through his rather ill-starred presentation. And who cares whether his “slam dunk” vulgarity was misquoted or not? We have better evidence than that. Here is what Tenet told the relevant Senate committee in February 2002:

Iraq … has also had contacts with al-Qaida. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides’ mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible, even though Saddam is well aware that such activity would carry serious consequences.

As even the notion of it certainly should have done. At around the same time, on another nontrivial matter, Tenet informed the Senate armed services committee that: “We believe that Saddam never abandoned his nuclear weapons program.” It is a little bit late for him to pose as if Iraq was a threat concocted in some crepuscular corner of the vice president’s office. And it’s pathetic for him to say, even in the feeble way that he chooses to phrase it, that “there was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.” (Emphasis added.) There had been a very serious debate over the course of at least three preceding administrations, whether Tenet “knew” of it or not. (He was only an intelligence specialist, after all.)
Despite this assault, Tenet stands to profit handsomely from this book, a fact that will not go unnoticed by others currently still serving the Administration.  If a policy goes wrong or becomes unpopular, Tenet’s success shows that no mea culpas are necessary; anyone can distance themselves from unpopular decisions they helped make, even someone as high up as the Director of the CIA.

Still to come: 

The Army I Wanted Wasn’t the Army I Had: Unknown Unknowns Known, By Donald Rumsfeld

Paul Wolfowitz: It Ain’t All About the WMDs, by Paul Wolfowitz

More Years of Magical Thinking, by Laura Bush

The Audacity of Audacity, by Dick Cheney

and…

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy President, by George W. Bush

And it turns out none of them wanted to invade Iraq.  Who knew!?

David Halberstam, R.I.P.*

Two of David Halberstam’s books made a huge impact on me: The Best and the Brightest, and The Powers that Be. I don’t think a writer has captured the way bad governmental decisions can metastasize from good intentions into political manipulation better than Halberstam did in Best…. The Powers That Be, an intertwined narrative history of four big news organizations (CBS, Time, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times), contains a superb introductory history of Los Angeles.

Then, Halberstam started to mix books about sports into his public affairs writing career, focusing on particular moments in sports that allowed him to talk about social change in America, without departing too far from the drama of the games and personalities. I particularly recommend October 1964, which happens to be about the first World Series I was really able to follow, pitting the “establishment” New York Yankees against a St. Louis Cardinal team that was dominated by three of the greatest black players of that era: Bob Gibson, Curt Flood and Lou Brock. The morality play isn’t always so neat and tidy, but it gives him a theme to ride as he tells stories about so many baseball legends and follows the Series’ intensely competitive course.

Sadly, David Halberstam was killed an automobile accident Monday morning in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco. He was being driven to an interview with another sports hero, former New York Giant quarterback Y.A. Tittle, a participant in the NFL’s “greatest game,” the Giants’ 1958 championship game against the Baltimore Colts. Halberstam was the only person who died from the accident — he was dead at the scene. A UC Berkeley graduate student in journalism was driving the car, which was broadsided while making a left turn.

Halberstam was a more traditional reporter than some of his 1960s-era counterparts like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, but he had just as big an impact on the era’s journalism. He was critical of the leaders whose misrule resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers in Vietnam, but he built his case not with invective, but with thorough reporting and engrossing storytelling. His passing should prompt interest in his entire catalogue, which will only make him more of an inspiration to non-fiction writers of any era.

*UPDATE, 4/24/07:  Sheesh. Shouldn’t Slate’s Jack Shafer wait til Halberstam’s grave is dug before throwing dirt on him? 

Yeah, okay, he wasn’t a great stylist.  But his sports books were good, less prey to his windy tendencies.  It was interesting to look at a list of Halberstam’s works.  I was under the misimpression that all his books after about 1985 were sports-related.  Just all his best books, I guess.  The sports books, his NY Times Vietnam war reporting and especially The Best and The Brightest will be his legacy.   

**UPDATE, 4/25/07:  This is better.  The Washington Post’s Henry Allen writes affectionally about Halberstam’s unique style, notes that he had detractors, but shows how the style was a reflection of the man, his values and, yes, his ego:

He started working in the mid-’50s, before journalism was hip. He covered big stories: civil rights in the South, war in Africa, and Vietnam when John Kennedy was getting us into it with the help of “The Best and the Brightest,” as Halberstam called the elite and arrogant aides whose folly brought on our failure there.

He was not cool. He spewed sentences whose dependent clauses piled up into midden heaps of outrage or joy.

As part of an interview at lunch in 1979, he gave me this reaction to a bad review of his 1979 media book, “The Powers That Be.”

“Naturally, you want a book to live and be liked, it’s like children, but there’s a law of averages — you want the book to live. Some people aren’t going to like the book. Some people aren’t going to like you. Some are not going to like the success which — your anticipated success. And, after all, I’m not Tolstoy. It’s a very unusual book, unusual in its conception, unusual in its execution, unusual in its organization.”

All of this erupted from a fierce scrim of incantatory facial gestures, eyebrows divebombing his big nose, his lower lip jutting to show lower teeth but never upper ones while he oraculated to a reporter.

This was in The Summerhouse, a discreetly upscale restaurant just down the street from his townhouse on the Upper East Side. (“This is a wonderful neighborhood, I love living here, a truly remarkable place, one of the last strongholds of the middle class in Manhattan.” I wondered: Middle class? On 91st between Park and Madison?)

His schoolboy earnestness seemed preposterous in a man this famous, sophisticated and well connected, but it was the preposterousness that made him likable rather than insufferable. It even made him lovable unless you were on his enemies list, which was not short.

How he could roar on, gaining sincerity with every word. The New Republic satirized the same book: “David Halberstam. Halberstam, that was what everybody called him (after all, it was his name). They always said that what Halberstam needed was a good editor, his sentences ran on and on, he piled phrase upon phrase and clause upon clause, he used commas the way other men used periods.”

He was only following the writing teacher’s advice by writing the way he talked. He talked that way enough that his friends called him Rolling Thunder, Jehovah and Ahab.

It’s hard to stop quoting.  Just read the whole thing.

The Best Posts About the Sopranos

Since so many of my readers have been coming here lately in search of Sopranos spoilers, and presumably clicking away disappointed in the lack of dish, I’ll do the next best thing:  Here are some of my favorite places to read about the Sopranos, especially the most recent episodes:

• Slate’s TV Club dialogues on the Sopranos.  In the past, they’ve had organized crime experts and psychologists.  This half-season, they’re just using a couple of good writers, Timothy Noah and Jeffrey Goldberg.
• The Television Without Pity forum on the latest episode.
• A brief post by Ann Althouse, plus some good comments.
• MSNBC’s “Sopranos Body Count.”
• TV Squad has a contemplative take.

What everyone seems to be picking up is:  The overt references to The Godfather (Tony with his tomato plants, the christening scene in the previous episode, the brief reign of the New York boss ending with a bullet in the eye like Moe Green got),  the eerie resemblance of the young Asian man incarcerated with Uncle Junior to the Virginia Tech madman, and the prevailing sense that things might end “not with a bang, but a whimper.”

That line is originally from T.S. Eliot, by the way, and that’s what “The Sopranos” reminds me of:  Being an English major.   For all its violence, comedy and great characterizations, what’s most notable “The Sopranos” is the richness of its symbolism, the subconscious parallels between two things that seem unrelated, but connect in our minds and in the characters’ minds, especially Tony, Carmela and Christopher. 

We see the three of them try to make sense out of their world on this deeper level in a way that compares with how we follow another trio’s subconscious thoughts: Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, the main characters in Ulysses.  Part of the joke, though, is that the poet in Tony is the same psychic realm from where his murderous thoughts seem to arise.  Tony vents his rage verbally, but he is most dangerous when he is listening and watching.  Tony is a great listener and watcher

Like last night: For some reason Tony wanted to know if it was Paulie who, years earlier, told Johnny Sack about an offensive joke made at the expense of Sack’s wife, leading to all kinds of headaches for Tony.  What made him think of it?  Listening to Paulie prattle on about his mob life with some prostitutes.  Then listening to one of the prostitutes repeat some of the information back to him in bed.   Somehow, these and other observations come together in his mind; and as a result, he almost murders Paulie on the boat, because sharing the joke with Johnny Sac was a sign of Paulie’s disloyalty.  With war looming with the New York family that Johnny Sac once headed, this is a detail that suddenly alarms Tony.

Water is everywhere in “The Sopranos,” always has been, but especially in these past three episodes.  Tony and Bobby and their wives on the lake.  The FBI interested in what Tony might be learning about Muslim terrorism at the Port of Newark.  Tony and Paulie on a fishing boat.  Tony and Beansie chatting by a swimming pool. Even Junior pissing his pants.  He has to take medicine to control his bladder, but the medicine leaves him too sleepy.

Tony can only control the flow of words from Paulie’s mouth by killing him, but he doesn’t do it.  Water is where bodies are dumped, where bad memories are forgotten, only to float back up again.  Keep an eye on the way water is used in the remaining episodes if you want clues (er, I mean ”spoilers”) to how it’s all going to end.    

The Virginia Tech Tragedy: Blame vs. Accountability

There is no shortage of commentary in the media and blogosphere saying, in effect, Let’s not blame anyone but the killer for the massacre at Virginia Tech yesterday morning. This commentary often decries the tendency to look for scapegoats when something horrible happens. The mature attitude is supposed to be Life is unfair. There are crazy people out there. You can’t do anything about them. The traumatized students who are criticizing the administration are understandably upset. But they’re wrong. Tsk Tsk.

Up to a point, of course I agree. Perfect safety, perfect security, does not exist.

But isn’t the opposite tendency just as telling about our culture? Why the rapid closing of ranks around university and police officials? To me, that is just as premature, and just as sad a reflection on our culture as the rush to assign blame or to exploit the issue for political gain.

Instead of a scapegoat, the students at VT see an emperor with no clothes.

“I don’t know why they let people stay in classrooms,” Sean Glennon, a junior from Centreville and the quarterback on the Hokies football team, said Monday. “A lot of people are angry that campus wasn’t evacuated a little earlier.”

There was a double-homicide on campus. Based on statements made by officials yesterday, the U. decided to treat it as a “domestic dispute” with no possible further ramifications, even though the killer was still at large, still armed, and had killed at least one person who was not a party to the alleged love triangle that drove this student over the edge.

The university also decided not to take advantage of the instantaneous communications available to them for more than two hours. If for no other reason than rumor control, I would have advised them to move much more quickly.

Should they have foreseen 31 more murders? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have reacted differently. If they had, would lives have been saved? No one can say that for sure. But officials’ assumption that the crisis was over, despite awareness of a killer still in the wind, seems like muddled and misguided thinking. The traumatized students as well as the victims’ survivors, deserve to understand what went into that thinking.

One term I haven’t seen used anywhere regarding the university’s responsibility: ‘In loco parentis.’ It’s a concept dating back to British common law. We parents send our students to school for several hours each day, or for months at a time if the child goes off to college. We do this in the belief that the university will act as a parent would act. That’s why campuses can have rules that go beyond state or federal law. For example, in Virginia, it’s legal to carry a firearm. But not at Virginia Tech. The university’s administration has decided it needs extra protection to make sure its students are safe. Schools are allowed to search lockers without a search warrant, to censor free speech in the campus newspaper, to prohibit alcohol even for those of legal drinking age.

Much of the case law on ‘in loco parentis’ seems to be focused on whether it is okay to invade students’ constitutional rights (generally the answer is yes.) But isn’t the spirit behind the concept a need for increased vigilance to protect the students, since the parents aren’t there to provide it?

Would a parent have been so slow in notifying their own kids about a killer on the loose in their immediate midst? Just to be safe, and even if it was inconvenient or disruptive, wouldn’t a parent have taken the addition step of telling the child to return home or find a secure location, at least until the situation was under control?

Don’t blame me for the problems of the world is not, to me, an acceptable position for a university president, or any other top school official.

Here’s another thing that bugged me. From the Washington Post, emphasis mine:

Lucinda Roy, an English professor who taught a creative writing class that Cho attended, told CNN that she grew so concerned by some of his writings in the fall of 2005 that she went to university officials to see if anything could be done. She said authorities told her there was nothing they could do because the writings, while disturbing, did not point to an immediate threat and because they did not want to violate Cho’s free speech rights. Roy told the network that she decided to teach him one-on-one for a semester and urged him to get counseling.

“Several of us became concerned,” she said. “I contacted some people to try to get some help for him because I was deeply concerned myself.” She declined to give details of the troubling passages in his written work, citing a request by investigators.

This seems deeply, deeply confused. His “free speech rights” were not the issue. It’s almost absurd. Professor Roy was not talking about censoring Cho, or locking him up for what he said. She was concerned about his well-being and the safety of others.

Did no one at VT think to notify Cho’s parents? They would have been completely within their rights to send the writing samples to the parents and to urge them to get their child help.

Protecting free speech does not equate to being completely numb to the content of the speech. Not all speech is equal. Speech sometimes precedes action — action that could be dangerous and violent. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment to use it as a barrier against acting to pursue possible criminal activity.

Here, from the LA Times, is a description of Cho’s writing, and a fellow student’s reaction following the murders:

“His writing, the plays, were really morbid and grotesque,” (Stephanie) Derry said.

“I remember one of them very well. It was about a son who hated his stepfather. In the play the boy threw a chainsaw around, and hammers at him. But the play ended with the boy violently suffocating the father with a Rice Krispy treat,” she said.

“When I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling,” Derry said. “I kept having to tell myself there is no way we could have known this was coming. I was just so frustrated that we saw all the signs, but never thought this could happen.“

What Derry is describing is an outgrowth of our culture. Clearly, many of Cho’s fellow students and teachers had a visceral reaction to his writing, and sensed danger. And then suppressed these feelings, believing that to do otherwise would be considered judgmental.

Blame is cheap. There is a lot of blaming going on around this incident that is very cheap. But accountability is precious. The university officials, professors and the police need to be held to account for the decisions they made, decisions they made in loco parentis, beginning with the decision not to react to the disturbing writings. I just want them to explain why they did what they did, not hide behind platitudes. Where their thinking was unsound, I want to highlight it so others can learn from it. Don’t let the leadership off the hook so easily.

Watching the Odometer

If present trends hold — unless all of a sudden people stop reading my blog — my total page views should hit 100,000 in the next 24 hours.

A hundred thousand hits in 16 months only makes me a multicellular microorganism in the blogosphere — up from an insignificant microbe! — but if you’d told me I’d ever hit 100,000 views when I started this thing, I wouldn’t have believed it.

To be perfectly honest, I’m sure many of my views have been the result of my humiliating encounter with the federal legal system over the past two years.  I wish I could’ve talked about it more.  The experience is one that begs to be shared in real time. Someday, I’ll be able to say more. I feel obliged to share what I’ve learned.

I also know I have Elliot Mintz and his client Paris Hilton, Tony Soprano, Al Gore, Saul Levine, “Walk Away Renee” Fladen-Kamm, Wendy McCaw, a baby giant squid, the people who park their cars illegally near Pinkberry in West Hollywood, George Allen and his can of black spray paint, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe to credit for a lot of my hits.  If you write about things readers are interested in, they find you.

I should also give a huge hat tip to the blogs that have linked to me, especially LA Observed, the Aesthetic, Here in Van Nuys and Todd And(rlik) on whose list I’ve fallen a bit because I haven’t written enough about PR.   (But see my next post!)

For those of you who came here initially to find out about my trial or one of above celebrities, and then kept coming back because they liked what I do — much thanks.  The encouragement you’ve given me to keep writing will stay with me forever. 

My productivity here is down, I realize.  I have to fit this into a full-time job, a lot more travel, and the slow, steady milling process called the law.  But there are 434 posts here, most of them still somewhat timely, so if I’m having a slow week, please continue to explore and react.

Now, onward and upward to 1 million!    

Cathy Seipp, R.I.P.

One of Los Angeles’ top bloggers, Cathy Seipp, died this afternoon at the unfathomably young age of 49. 

I didn’t know her, but during the blogging phase of her long journalistic career, she made it possible for me and all her regular readers to feel as if we did.   Her style of mixing commentary with anecdote, her way of boosting her friends and those she admired and, frankly, ridiculing those she considered pretentious or dishonest, created the most pleasing illusion that I was listening to her hold forth at a dinner party.  That’s an art.

In starting this blog, Cathy Seipp was one of my biggest inspirations.  She’s normally associated with the right, but I always thought that particular pigeonhole wasn’t a good fit for her.  Yes, she wrote for National Review Online and the Independent Women’s Forum.  But unlike the vast majority of politically conservative bloggers, Cathy showed no interest in being a water-carrier for Bush or anyone else in the GOP. 

The question most right-wing bloggers seem to ask before they start writing is:  “How can I help the Republicans today?”  Cathy merely seemed committed to the truth as she saw it.  She was a contrarian.  She was impatient with the politically correct fog that descended on mainstream journalism, especially at the LA Times.  But her focus was on life, not elections.  

The greatest tribute I can think of to Cathy Seipp as a writer is that she is impossible to summarize or encapsulate.  She breathed, walked, raved and laughed, and you didn’t feel like you were reading it, you were experiencing it.

There are many better tributes than this one out there to read tonight.  After you’ve read a few of them, I hope you are impelled to look at her blog, whose archives will, I assume, stay up indefinitely.  It is a tremendous body of work, a reflection of our times and of a singular sensibility.

I Did Not Know the Term “Tar Baby” is Racist

I was surfing through MSNBC today and saw a headline that made me do a double-take:  “McCain uses term ‘tar baby’: Later says he regrets it.” 

Here’s what presidential candidate John McCain said, according to the AP:

Answering questions at a town hall meeting, the Arizona senator was discussing federal involvement in custody cases when he said, “For me to stand here and … say I’m going to declare divorces invalid because of someone who feels they weren’t treated fairly in court, we are getting into a tar baby of enormous proportions and I don’t know how you get out of that.”

I’ve used the expression ”tar baby” lots of times.  It is one of the most useful literary metaphors in the American idiom.  What other two-word expression exists to describe a situation where the more you try to fight your way out of a situation, you just get more trapped by it?   

But, according to the AP story on MSNBC, ‘tar baby’ “is considered by some a racial epithet.” 

Really? 

From one perspective, I suppose, everything in “Uncle Remus,” the most recognized source of the “tar baby” story, is racially suspect.  A collection of fables told by an ex-slave, transcribed in a recognizably old-south African-American dialect by a white journalist, Joel Chandler Harris, these were folk tales about the trickster B’rer Rabbit and his battles of wits with B’rer Fox and B’rer Bear.    The stories aren’t racist at all, but the dialect in which they are told is highly stereotypical.  In fact, that dialect might be the source of certain stereotypes that persisted for decades.

The “tar baby” story was the most memorable, giving us not only the one expression, but also, “please don’t throw me in that briar patch!” Which is a way of saying you hope your adversary tries to hurt you by doing something you secretly know will benefit you.  The briar patch was how B’rer Rabbit escaped from the “tar baby” trap. I’ve heard that expression dozens of times in business settings.  It came into wide use in the 1990s.  

The manner in which ”Uncle Remus” is offensive is a little bit contradictory.  The tale-teller’s dialect is considered by some to be demeaning and offensive.  But also, according to Wikipedia,

Alice Walker accused Harris of “stealing a good part of my heritage” in a searing essay called “Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine.” Toni Morrison wrote a novel called “Tar Baby” based on the folktale recorded by Harris. In interviews, she has claimed she learned the story from family, and owes no debt to Harris.

So, in one respect, Uncle Remus is a demeaning stereotype.  In another respect, he is a repository of African American culture that was misappropriated by whites and should be returned to its rightful owners.

It’s certainly not a factor one can ignore:  Could an African-American writer have published a book like Uncle Remus in the 1880s?  Definitely not.  

Wikipedia goes on to provide another perspective:

Black folklorist Julius Lester holds a somewhat kinder view of Harris. He sees the Uncle Remus stories as important records of Black Folklore, and has rewritten many of the Harris’ stories in an effort to elevate the subversive elements over the racist ones.

In fact, Harris does appear to have been somewhat of a folklorist himself, albeit one limited by his race, culture and moment in history.  He was born poor and illegimate in Georgia and grew up to become a journalist in Atlanta.  It was in the Atlanta Constitution where the tales first appeared.

In 1999, a Random House word-of-the-day site provided a definition of “tar baby,” first talking about the tar-baby folk tale, Uncle Remus, and so forth, but then adding this:

The expression tar baby is also used occasionally as a derogatory term for black people (in the U.S. it refers to African-Americans; in New Zealand it refers to Maoris), or among blacks as a term for a particularly dark-skinned person. As a result, some people suggest avoiding the use of the term in any context.

I’ve never heard it used that way.  It’s pretty clear from the context that Senator McCain didn’t mean it that way. It would make no sense.

But given all the controversy around the expression, I think the prudent thing is to stop making further references to Uncle Remus as anything but an historical benchmark. This is the position the Walt Disney Company has taken in refusing to release on video the 1946 film, “Song of the South,” based on Uncle Remus.  At a 2006 shareholders’ meeting, Disney CEO Robert Iger explained the decision this way:

“I screened it fairly recently because I hadn’t seen it since I was a child, and I have to tell you after I watched it, even considering the context that it was made, I had some concerns about it because of what it depicted. And though it’s quite possible that people wouldn’t consider it in the context that it was made, and there were some… [long pause] depictions that I mentioned earlier in the film that I think would be bothersome to a lot of people. And so, owing to the sensitivity that exists in our culture, balancing it with the desire to, uh, maybe increase our earnings a bit, but never putting that in front of what we thought were our ethics and our integrity, we made the decision not to re-release it. Not a decision that is made forever, I imagine this is going to continue to come up, but for now we simply don’t have plans to bring it back because of the sensitivities that I mentioned.”

Where I started with this post was a discussion of the American idiom.  John McCain unthinkingly used a term that was nearly universally recognized as part of it, with a meaning that transcends its cultural origins.  It didn’t make him or any of us a racist for using it.  Like I said, it was an extremely useful and humorous short-hand.

But now we’re on notice. Unless and until the folk tale in question finds its way back into the American idiom via a more authentic source, “tar baby” is out.

What Artists Can Do

The HBO mini-series Rome is the stuff of nightmares.  Murder was done routinely to achieve political as well as financial ends during the period depicted in the show — a period of civil war that accelerated the bloodletting, to be sure. If the historians consulted for that show are correct, Rome’s elite routinely consigned innocent people including loyal soldiers to an early death merely to acquire what they wanted, and faced no sanction.  Further down the social ladder, slaves, prostitutes, even children were frequently sacrificed for the most trivial of reasons, their murderers also seemingly unpunished.

In America today, and in the countries that also built their governments and judicial systems on Enlightenment principles, the life of every individual is seen as deserving of full protection by the state.  Even if a murder victim is a criminal in the act of committing a crime, our system is supposed to work to redeem that lost life.  In war, the common understanding now is that a soldier’s death is an unusual event, a breakdown in the system, to be avoided whenever possible. 

The jihadists’ willingness to sacrifice themselves as well as the lives of innocents is what avowedly gives them whatever advantage they’ve got.  That we cherish the lives of individuals is interpreted as a sign of our weakness and decadance, says Osama Bin Laden.  The jihadists know they can use our belief that every person has a fundamental right to life against us.  They draw on a more ancient understanding of justice, one that relatively devalues individual life, remorselessly sacrificing thousands of people in the name of crusades for God and power.

How did we get from there to here?  From Rome to the U.S. Constitution?  From the Dark Ages to today?  From nightmares to dreams? 

According to this review on WSJ.com, author Lynn Hunt suggests (in “Inventing Human Rights”) literature made a crucial contribution:

The definition of human rights, she argues, “indeed their very existence, depends on emotions as much as on reason.” Accordingly, rights continue to evolve “because their emotional basis continues to shift.” Jefferson’s assertions resonated, she says, thanks to “brain changes” that had occurred in the 18th century. “Ordinary people had . . . new understandings that came from new kinds of feelings.”

But where did these new feelings come from? Ms. Hunt offers two answers. First, new forms of art, especially the epistolary novel, focused on the lives of ordinary people and thus encouraged a broadening and deepening of empathy. “Can it be coincidental,” she asks, “that the three greatest novels of psychological identification of the eighteenth century–Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48) and Rousseau’s Julie (1761)–were all published in the period that immediately preceded the appearance of the concept of ‘the rights of man’?” Second, the public felt a growing revulsion toward judicial torture, a practice she describes in grisly detail. This revulsion, in turn, stemmed from a new respect for the human body, in particular its individuality.

The reviewer, Joshua Muravchik, finds her theory “not entirely convincing,” by the way. It feels right to me, however.  Who better than an artist, a writer, to go outside the hierarchy of power to show in memorable ways what “the little people” normally trampled by history think and feel; to educate our imaginations to see souls, not masses?

The jihadis need a good novelist.  Or a mini-series.   

Do People Still Read Kurt Vonnegut?

I think they do.  This column from Philly.com’s Sandy Bauers is a sort of reminisence of reading Kurt Vonnegut, the humorist/science fiction/political novelist and essayist.  Bauer’s hook is the release of some new audio versions of Vonnegut’s work, but the writer nicely recaptures the pleasure of reading him back in the day. 

Until I read Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, no novel made me laugh harder than Breakfast of Champions.  Reading Slaughterhouse-Five at age 14 influenced my attitudes just as much as the Kinks, the Beatles or R. Crumb.

Vonnegut’s politics put him squarely in the progressive protest camp, but with a sense of irony, skepticism and empathy totally lacking in today’s desperately bitter progressive “netroots.”  Vonnegut is never embittered by his adversaries; he’s more amused by them, even when they hold the power to destroy the world (and in some of his novels, do so).  And, as Bauers illustrates in this byte, Vonnegut is a bit shy about making utopian pronouncements of what would happen if, perchance, he were to win the day:

In Breakfast of Champions, which Stanley Tucci reads with delicious cunning, the obscure author Kilgore Trout visits a Midwest arts festival.

“Oh, Mr. Trout,” the hotel clerk gushes. “Teach us to sing and dance and laugh and cry. We’ve tried to survive so long on money and sex and envy and real estate and football and basketball and automobiles and television and alcohol and sawdust and broken glass.”

Trout, disheveled, the pockets of his oversized and threadbare tuxedo bulging with mothballs, is incredulous. “Open your eyes,” he says. “Would a man nourished by beauty look like this? You have nothing but desolation and desperation here.”

“I see exactly what I expect to see,” the clerk retorts. “I see a man who is terribly wounded because he has dared to pass through the fires of truth to the other side.”

I also recall an exchange from Slaughterhouse-Five where Vonnegut depicts himself telling someone he is writing an anti-war novel.   ”Why don’t you write an anti-glacier novel instead?”  This was at the height of the Vietnam War protests, and sure, they were plenty angry.  But Vonnegut’s gentle fatalism about humanity was part of the scene, in a way you never see now.  

Imagine Kos or Atrios or their commenters having Vonnegut’s humility and sense of humor.  You can’t.  The netroots is a field where no irony grows.  But without that leavening ability to see the ridiculousness on all sides, they are left preaching to their increasingly rabid choir and with zero influence outside of it.