Raine on Hitler's Parade

Raine on Hitler’s Parade
The misspelling of the word bastard in the title of “Inglorious Basterds” was strictly a mistake or whim of director Quentin Taratino, for which he has not offered a rational explanation.
The story had several chapters; each with a heading, very much like in a novel. It also had three main characters. They were: Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), the name a tribute to actor Aldo Ray who was in several war movies in the 1950s; Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a canny SS officer nicknamed “the Jew Hunter”; and Shosanna Dryfus (Melanie Laurent), the lone survivor of a family exterminated by Col. Landa—she is bent on revenge at all costs. The ‘Basterds’ were a Jewish death squad that, like the members of “The Dirty Dozen,” were a collection of quasi-crazed killers led by Lt. Raine that had been dropped behind enemy lines to terrorize the soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Two of the disconcerting things they do were to scalp dead Germans and kill the uncooperative officers with a baseball bat. Taratino, in a daring move, mixes fable with revisionist history, which I found engaging and a fantasy that didn’t come true but oh, if only it had…
The opening scene in the film involves Colonel Landa’s unannounced visit to a French farmer to question him about a Jewish family from the region who are unaccounted for, a mystery the SS spokesman wished to clear up. Landa was a slick fellow, full of guile and compliments, but he was a good detective with a nose for the truth. He’s not called “the Jew Hunter” for nothing. He figures out the missing family was under the farmer’s floor boards. He brings in three soldiers with machine guns who fire into the floor, killing four of the five members. Only Shosanna survived and ran like the blazes to some woods a couple of hundred yards away. Landa saw her running but decides to let her escape. Nor does Taratino inform us of the consequences for the French farmer and his three daughters. One wonders about that. It’s one crack in the solidity of the film.
Then we are introduced to the Jewish Death Squad. We witness them scalping some dead soldiers—Lt. Raine was part Indian—and a Jewish soldier called “Jew Bear” take a Louisville Slugger to the head of uncooperative German officer. The one soldier left alive was spared to be sent back to camp branded by Raine’s Bowie knife (another reminder that the story resembled an American Western), as he carved a swastika in the man’s forehead, which the soldier later showed to Hitler. The Basterds not only resembled “The Dirty Dozen,” but they act like the “The Wild Bunch.”
When Shosanna showed up again four years later she is the owner of a cinema in Paris, a business she inherited from a deceased Aunt and Uncle. She was on a ladder removing a name from the marquee, which coincidently was featuring one of Leni Riefenstahl’s earlier popular mountain climbing epics from the 1920s. She was of course the German filmmaker who became famous as “Hitler Filmmaker,” the Director of “Olympiad” and “Triumph of the Will,” two films that were both propaganda and filmmaking of high quality. While on the ladder she was approached by a young German soldier who obviously likes her but she brushes him off. Then she discovered he is a national hero for killing scores of American soldiers from a church Bell Tower, which repulses her. His name was Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl) and he persudes Joseph Goebbels to make a movie about his heroic experience, with Zoller in the movie playing himself, like Audie Murphy playing himself in “To Hell and Back.” Moreover, when the film is completed they agreed to hold its grand premier at Ms. Mimieux (Shosanna’s new name) theater with not only members of the Nazi elite in attendance. Later on, Hitler decided he should be there too..
The British horned in on the proceedings by sending Lt. Hicox (Michael Fassbender) to France to meet with a German actress named Brigit von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) who was a double agent. Hicox was selected because he was a scholar of pre-war German film but proves to be an inept spy. The rendezvous takes place in a basement bar full of drunken German soldiers Raine doesn’t like the idea at all but sends a couple of Basterds to the meeting. When Hicox blows his cover a ferocious gun battle explodes and all are killed but the actress who is shot in the leg. Raine rescued her, but Cinderella forgot her fancy high heels shoes and Col. Landa finds them when he examines the scene. He saves them as evidence.
Now the plot was clear: Both Ms. Mimieux and Lt. Raine, without knowledge of what the other was planning, will try to kill Hitler and as many Nazis as possible inside the theater while they watched the movie at its premier. Ms. Mimieux plan was to ignite some very flammable film while her partner, a black man who was her lover as well as projectionist, would have locked all the doors so no one would escape the flames. They would die too, but they didn’t care. Raine’s plan was to get inside by accompanying the German actress with the four remaining Basterds carrying dynamite strapped to their legs. They pose as Italian diplomats, which was silly but no matter. Col. Landa grabs Hammmersmark. Forces her to try on the shoes she had left behind, when they fit, he strangles her on the spot. Then he has Raine and one of his associates grabbed and hauled away, but he takes one of the bundles of dynamite and shoves it under Goebbels chair. At that point I wondered what the hell was going on.
Well, I found out soon enough. He had his two captives removed to another location for interrogation, and while they have a dialog all hell breaks loose in the theater; there are explosions, a hysterical crowd that can’t get away from the flames or the machine gun fire of the two last Basterds up in the balcony, and finally the building blows to smithereens, killing Hitler and all his henchmen, effectively ending the war with a flourish. Who could not wish but that was so? Knowing that would be the likely scenario Landa tries to make a deal with the astonished Raine and his military superiors who he contacted by phone. Not only will he save their lives, he wants to go to America, be given a house on Cape Cod, and be forgiven of past crimes against humanity and start life over a free man. Raine is told to accept the deal and he does, with one exception: he carves a swastika in the forehead of Landa so everyone will know what he was during the war.
At Cannes, where the film premiered, Christoph Waltz walked off with the award as Best Actor for his performance as Colonel Landa. As far as I am concerned he stole the show with his outstanding, even flashy, performance. Brad Pitt’s characterization of Lt. Raine was good but seemed more artificial next to Waltz’s. Melanie Laurent was radiant as Shosanna/Ms. Mimieux. Taratino makes her and Ms. Hammersmark rather like two femme fatales. Laurent fakes a sexual invitation to Zoller up in the projection booth in order to distract him while she gets her gun out of her purse to shoot him; Kruger shoots the remaining German soldier in the basement shoot-out after he had surrendered his machine gun to Lt. Raine. When Raine inquired what happened to the actress Landa said,” Let’s just say she got what she deserved.”
‘Inglorious Basterds” was ten years in the making; it went through many permutations until it found its final form. Taratino changed his mind a number of times about who would play what part, and there were the inevitable conflicts of schedules. But the core group he ended up with was solid and preformed well. The Golden Globes came out last week and the film was nominated for four awards, including Best Drama, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor, to Christoph Waltz.

Fako and some Movies

12/12/2009 Journal notes on Fako and movies.
Fako continued to harass me this morning, and then in the afternoon he said he all along was just trying to get my dander up. So my feelings were just his playthings for a week. I should shoot the bastard.
To an extent he reminded me of my problems with Dick Wist who had a similar hostility toward me and my work. Wist, who was the Art Historian at UNLV when I was there, said to me “You draw witches and lack universality,” and then he’d stab me with “You have to have legs to run.” In other words I don’t have what it takes to make a mark on the world of “serious” Art. I am poor cripple who doesn’t have the stuff that it takes to soar. Christ, its tough enough to wrestle with aesthetic solutions to an inner complex that is compelling you to search for a form to reveal what you know in your heart of hearts, let alone having to listen to the critical ravings of outsiders who have no appreciation of the dynamic you have been swept up by. Fako’s contention is without endurance & public acknowledgement an artist is just a nowhere man. He has no understanding of the compulsion to create and the intrinsic value of creativity. My relationship with Wist died on the vine 40 years ago and if Fako keeps it up ours will too.
I saw “Julia and Julie” two nights ago, a comfort movie built around food and two women goony about cooking. Meryl Streep has done it again—what a performance! She was spot on in terms of sounding just like Ms. Child, and she also moved like she did. Nora Ephron, the writer and director also had her wearing elevator shoes because the real Julia was 6’2” (and her sister was 6’5”.) Amy Adams, who is a cute as can be, is adequate in her role but her skills can’t be compared to the fluid authority of Streep as an actress who can inhabit a character so completely. Julie’s story is interesting, but like her cooking, it lives in the shadow of the master cook. One aspect of her story that I paid some interest to was how she did with her blog. At first no one seemed to be reading it; then a few people, so on and so forth until a mass of people were reading it and reacting to it. I am in that first stage and it looks doubtful I’ll ever go beyond it.
The biggest surprise in the Julia Childs section was how sexual her relationship to her husband Paul was. Once more Streep was teamed with Stanley Tucci, like in “The Devil Loves Prada.” He’s perfect as Paul, loving, encouraging, and apparently the perfect sex partner. The chemistry between them could not be better. He was some kind of low level diplomat in Paris, which enabled her to go to cooking school in Paris and to eventually begin working on her book THE MASTERING OF FRENCH COOKING, which made her reputation, along with the popular PBS program on which she spread the word. Prior to catching on at the cooking school, she was at a loss what to do with herself. It took a while for things to come together for her, but getting there was half the fun. Julie was about 30 when she found herself as both cook and writer. Incidentally, the two women never met. Paul Child died at 91 about ten years before his wife who was 90 when she passed away. I’m sure that when she got to heaven she went in the door marked “French Eatery,” and Paul was there waiting for her.
“The Other Man” I had never heard of it but it had a good cast so I thought I’d give it a look. It was a downbeat movie about the ravages of male jealousy. A businessman, played by Liam Neeson, discovers that his wife had a passionate love affair before she died of cancer. One night he decides to check her laptop and he comes across a file named LOVE, but he doesn’t know the password. He tries many things and finally remembers her trips to Lake Como on business (she was a shoe designer.) Lake Como was it. He is shocked to see his beloved wife naked in bed and cavorting with her lover, played by Antonio Banderas. Laura Linney played the wife, but was actually seen little in the movie. You can see the rage well up inside Neeson’s emotional body. By the next morning he is totally in the grip of a madness he can’t get beyond. Due to love notes from the man he knows his name is Ralph; he asks his security person at his firm to find who he is and she does. His address is in Milan, so off he goes to confront the guy with murder in his heart.
When he gets there he follows the guy around for a few days, discovering that he likes to go to a particular bar and restaurant with a room for people who want to play chess. He strkes up a conversation with Ralph (pronounced Raf) and the two men start to play chess together, and while they play Raf starts to talk about his love for the other man’s wife. At one point he has a hammer in hand and considers killing Raf. But he refrains. He also discovers the guy is a sham, heavily in debt, only posing as a man with money and style, actually living on the cheap. He was not what he seemed to be, a bon vivant and high roller. But Neeson can’t resist setting a trap for the poor bastard. Since he doesn’t know the wife has died so Neeson pretends to write him for a get-together, just like old times, something Rav has been dreaming about. But it is him waiting in the restaurant and he lays the truth on Raf, that he is the husband and that is wife is dead, which first crushes him, then infuriates him that the husband could be so cruel, as he knew how much he had loved the woman too. That last fact finally sinks in to the husband; it softens his attitude and by the time of the memorial for the wife he even feels some compassion for the man he once wanted to kill, and both toast what a wonderful woman she was. He goes home with his daughter, his heart calmed and perhaps, even healed.
I liked the dynamic of going from complete rage and jealousy to sympathy and understanding. If only it would happen like that more often.

The new interpretation of the “The Taking of Pelham 123,” is an updated version, with technological add-ons and with villains that look more like the ex-cons and tough guys of today. The hard core of the film remains the same as in the 1974 film: It’s a hostage crisis that’s designed to extort big bucks for 4 criminals and the basic tension in the story is supplied by the lead gangster and the subway dispatcher. In the original story Robert Shaw played the villain and in the new version John Travolta is the brains and chief spokesman for the four hoods. Walter Matthau was a police detective who was the other half of the duet and duel between the two main adversaries. Travolta, besides looking the part, is loudmouthed, vulgar, a serial curser, a psychotic killer, but he also likes the dispatcher, Walter Garber, an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation. Ryder (Travolta) will deal only with Garber. He wants $10 million in one hour or else he will start shooting one hostage every hour thereafter We don’t find out what Ryder’s true motivation is until near the end of the film. He was a high stakes player on Wall Street who stole some money and as a consequence had gone to prison for 9 years and had only recently got out of jail, as did his technical helper Pedro Ramos (Luis Guzman) who used to work for the subway system. They want revenge on the system that sent them up the river. Garber and Ryder engage in a dialog that links them in tension and respect—and in irony, as the ending of the film will show. The four get away with the money, but they don’t get far.
The director of the film was Tony Scott, Ridley’s brother who specializes in urban crime dramas. The last film Scott made with Denzel Washington was “Man on Fire.” In the special features he discusses all the difficulties and handicaps of making a film in New York City. It was a riveting story from start to finish, and the relationship between the two main characters had the right admixture of respect, fondness, and fear.

Too Much Happiness

Before last week I had never read any of the short stories of Canadian writer Alice Munro. With the publication of TOO MUCH HAPPINESS last month that makes 14 books she has written over a long career of writing short stories. I bought TOO MUCH HAPPINESS on the recommendation of a friend. Generally speaking, I am not much of a reader of short stories. I don’t know why; it’s just not my preference as far as fiction is concerned. The last writer of short stories that I got involved with was Raymond Carver. To a certain extent TOO MUCH HAPPINESS made me think of Carver’s work. The kind of people written about by both writers tend to be uneducated, have limited vision and understanding, can be mentally disturbed, very insecure, can be thrice-married, and even homicidal. Some are in dead-end jobs.
“Dimensions” is a good example of what I mean. Doree is twenty three and a cleaning woman, a job she happy with and has no plans to leave for something better. She is an innocent, very naïve, so much so she got swept off her feet while a teenager by a maniac named Lloyd who seduced her into marriage and got her pregnant to tune of three kids before she was twenty. Then one night, when she felt very uncomfortable with Lloyd, she slept at a friend’s house. When she went home the next morning she found all three children murdered by their father, who blamed her for what he did because she had left him last night. After he had been institutionalized for a while he tries to play her like he did when she was a teenager. He does it by telling her the children are appearing to him and they are doing well on the other side and not at all unhappy or mad at their father. Wanting her to come back to him, at least as a regular visitor, he tells her he will keep her apprised of their progress in this other dimension. She was intrigued by his fantasies about the kids, so soon afterwards she is on a bus heading to the hospital for another visit. But on the way there the driver has an accident; the bus hits a young man. When they stop the lad appears to be dead but she starts giving him CPR and lo, he revives and starts breathing on his own. Help is on the way. Her reaction to the emergency revealed something about her she wasn’t aware of before. Her quick reaction made her feel good about herself. When the bus driver said to get back on the bus as he has to get people to their destinations, she tells him to go ahead, she has decided to not go to the hospital and see her ex-husband. She doesn’t have to go anymore. She now knows she is more grounded in reality than Lloyd will ever be. Helping a lad who was in real crisis was more meaningful than traipsing around after the sorry tales of a madman. The kids were gone forever and that was that.
The second story I read was called “Fiction.” In it Munro dealt with a class of people who marry often and never seemed to find the right mate and therefore never find any real depth or comfort in a love relationship. They are like wounded butterflies fluttering from one bed and partner to the next, never quite finding what they think they want or need which is never all that clear to them. Munro cleverly interweaves all these games of musical marital chairs that take place over a matter of time, as they all grow older chasing their own tails. She ends the story with the main character, a woman named Joyce, who encounters the grown daughter of the tattooed woman who stole her first husband from her. The daughter was from a previous relationship but Joyce became her teacher for a short while, teaching her how to play the violin. The daughter is now a writer and she has just published her first work of fiction, a novel, which she buys and finds out is based on her first marriage and its collapse. The daughter has turned what was a heartbreaking experience for Joyce into a piece of fiction that left out a lot of the story. She decides to go to the book store where the girl is autographing copies of her novel; she goes expecting some kind of encounter with the author. However, since so many years have passed the daughter doesn’t recognize Joyce; she signs her book, smiles, and says next please. Joyce leaves feeling let down and crushed that the girl treated her as a complete stranger. As she walks away she thinks that someday she’ll tell somebody about this quasi-encounter, this experience of non-recognition, it’ll make a good story. It’ll be her counter-vision of the fictional truth.
“Some Women” was a story about a contest among a few women acting as caregivers to a dying man. It is a clever gathering together of the crosscurrents of who will control the last phase of a man’s life. The thirteen year old girl in the story, who is never named, is very clear-headed about what is going on in the house. She calls the man “the prize,” even though he is hardly an example wondrous manhood, but instead a balding middle aged man dying of Leukemia.
His name is Bruce Crozier. His stepmother is in the house, Dorothy Crozier, and his wife, Sylvia, who that summer was teaching summer school at a college forty miles away. She hired the thirteen year old girl to help keep an eye on her husband’s needs while she wasn’t available. The stepmother is a cranky old woman who gets outflanked in regard her step-son, so instead she spends her time giving the young girl a lot of lip. The fourth woman in the house is a masseuse named Roxanne Hoy, a local woman with an extraverted personality married to a mechanic. She was hired to relieve poor Bruce of his sore muscles as he never gets out of bed any more. Since she is a take-charge kind of person it is she who gets locked in combat with the wife. Roxanne tries to insinuate her way into the good graces of Bruce who starts playing board games with her to pass the time. But, strangely, her motivation in regard controlling Bruce has little to do with him, having more to do with her sibling rivalry with her older sister who always had the first pick of the boys, while she got the rejects and nerds. Nor does it have anything to do with her husband. This time she felt she had the inside track with the wife gone so much, but where it was all heading, and why, she never stopped to think about. She was just carried on a stream of possible victory. The situation in the Crozier household seemed to develop on its own momentum.
The main event between the wife and Ms. Hoy, the interloper, finally came to a head. It was Mr. Crozier who stepped in to bring closure to the contest. He calls for the teenage girl and tells her to lock his bedroom door and to give the key only to his wife. He had grown tired of Roxanne and her obvious manipulations. That ends it for her; she is ostracized and knows it and so finally leaves for good. The teenager reveals an uncanny understanding of the situation just resolved. This is how she summed it up: “I understood pretty well the winning and losing that had taken place, between Sylvia and Roxanne, but it was strange to think of the almost obliterated prize, Mr. Crozier—and to think that he could have the will to make a decision, even to deprive himself, so late in life. The carnality at death’s door—or true love, for that matter—were things I had to shake off with shivers down my spine.”
Not long after Roxanne left the employ of the Croziers, she and her husband left town. Sylvia rented a cottage by the lake and Mr. Crozier died in peace there before autumn leaves changed color.

Journal Notes: On Tiger's Mess

3 Dec. 2009: Journal notes
The chickens have come home to roost. All the stories about Tiger and other women have forced him to fess up, at least within certain parameters. One magazine published a story about some gal who said she had an 18 month relationship with Tiger and some voicemail has surfaced that had Tiger asking a gal to lie for him to cover his ass with his wife. The Huffington Post had a photo of the ‘mistress,’ as well as pictures of two other gals, one current, the other someone he knew before marriage to Elin. Pushed into a corner by what he termed “tabloid scrutiny,” he put out a 350 word statement yesterday, his longest and most revealing so far, that said, yes, he was guilty of some marital “transgressions,” (more than one?) and he had betrayed his values and he was sorry with all his heart. But he gave no names and no details and followed the admissions with another passionate appeal for his right of privacy. He said there should not be a need for “public confessions”; that the parties should be able to solve their problems behind closed doors.
However, once the Media gets a foot in the door it is very difficult to shut it again. They can be relentless when they smell blood, especially with such a high profile sex scandal—a story made in Heaven (or is it hell?) There is an overwhelming momentum to stories like this one, when a billionaire golfer becomes the hottest news item of the week. It is a major figure/celebrity taking a tumble. Given half a chance, the Media can eat him alive and toss the bones in the trash. For example, SPORTS CENTER open last evening with Tiger admits transgressions BUT IS IT ENOUGH? Yes, it should be and some groups have agreed to lie low and give him the time and the privacy he and his family need. But the Media is a hungry beast that is never satisfied until another equally big sucker comes along (like Obama caught with his pants down with Alicia Keys.) Sometimes I think the PGA is in cahoots with the Media to take Tiger down so Jack Nicklaus can remain the all-time king of professional golf, a white man, which is the way it ought to be in America.
A couple of days ago I saw a comment by John Daly. He said Tiger’s was “The Man” in professional golf and it was essential that he be out there playing and winning, and if he wasn’t participating like he used to the PGA Tour would be in trouble. All one has to do is look at what has happened to the LPGA without Annika Sorenstam out there doing her thing. The women pros are down to 23 tournaments next year. Two years ago it was something like 32 events. Of course the economy isn’t helping one bit.
In the latest addition of the Buddhist magazine TRICYCLE there is an article by Joan Duncan Oliver about a show of mandalas at the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC. Oliver calls them “maps of enlightenment” and defines them differently than Jung did. She said the word mandala comes from two Sanskirt words, manda, which means “essence” and la which means “container.” I like that just as well as Jung’s translation of “magic circle.” (The name of the show in NY is “The Perfect Circle.”)
The catalog of the show is 264 pages; in hardcover it cost $80. But it sounds like a gold mine of Manadals The reproductions in the magazine show they can be quite different that we normally see.

Florida Daze and Bacon in Between

Letter to a friend dated 11/2/09
Subject: Florida Daze and Bacon in Between.
Dear Stan,
If the subject sounds a little bewildering let me explain. “Florida Daze” refers generally to our two week vacation along the Eastern Coast of Florida, ranging in the North to St. Augustine, in the South to Sebastian’s Inlet, with the city of Melbourne in the middle. The reference to Bacon is not the kind you eat, but to Francis Bacon, the most well known British painter of the 20th century, whose biography I finished while in Florida.
First, about Florida. The first week was taken up with visiting with Nasima and her family in Melbourne. We spent a lot in time in conversation and even more playing 4 or 5 board games—she and her husband are near fanatical game players—in fact, they own 60 different board games—and eating out frequently, with a Thai restaurant and Galleria Pizzeria serving the most delicious food. I was given an assignment the day after we arrived in town: paint some heraldic figures on a shield of Liam’s for a Halloween Party on the weekend. He had the design for me to follow, but first I had to put two coats of primer on the shield, using acrylic paint. Since I put it on thick I waited till morning to paint the signs and symbols on it, which took me about three hours. I finished just in time for him to go off with it. It came out well and he was quite happy with it. Mission accomplished.
On our first Sunday there Nasima cooked a turkey dinner with all the trimmings. She did it because in the 12 years they have lived in Melbourne we have never had Thanksgiving dinner together. We were a little early on the holiday but no one fussed about that. I’ll take a turkey dinner ant time I can get it.
During our second week there Sue, Nasima, and I went to St. Augustine for two days, our third visit to the oldest settlement in America, a city I have grown quite fond of which exists in an especially beautiful environment, on a Bay where the Indian River meets up with the Atlantic Ocean. The atmosphere of the place is soft and endearing, with lovely blue water and white sand beaches. We visited some Art Galleries, shops, and ate at seafood restaurants; but the most interesting thing we did was the “Eco Tour.” We traveled the Bay from north to south for 90 minutes in a small but fast craft that could carry 5 passengers and the pilot, in this case a young man with an ecological background. We went out at 9 o’clock in the morning when a heavy fog laid over the Bay. The first thing we saw was “Bird Island,” a sand bar where scores of seagulls and pelicans gathered in a dark group in the fog and many of the birds flew off as we approached. I got a good picture of their flight. As we proceeded we saw a sea turtle poke its head out of the water and a small shark swam by. Twice we came across dolphins that were bigger than I imagined they would be. The boat had a mic down in the water so we could hear their dolphin-speak, squeaks and trills of various sort. We saw three Ospreys, a beautiful Hawk that hangs out around water and lives of fish; it is a bird that has made a big comeback after DDT was banned. We saw an eagle’s nest high up in a tree, a nest that has been there for 16 years. Egrets were everywhere but less visible were pink spoonbills, and we saw two on the shore at the south end of the Bay. At times the pilot would run fast through the water, which I found exhilarating. Both Sue and Nasima were so pleased with the trip that they gave the pilot a $40 tip. By the time we got back the fog was gone. It reminded me of my days in the Bay Area, especially around Monterey, California, where likewise the sun would burn off the morning fog.
On our second Sunday in Town, we drove 40 miles south to Sebastian Inlet, where Sue and Liam were able to get within a few feet of a manatee, as two of them had entered the wading area. We walked along the ocean where the Indian River once again meets the Atlantic Ocean at its south end. We checked out the fishing on the jetty and I took about ten pictures while we were there. However, what we will all remember is the attack of sand fleas that took place as we ate our picnic lunch at a table in a grassy area. That night I realized I had hundreds of bites all over my legs and buttocks. Everyone was in the same shape. I am still putting Hydrocortisone on the bites so I can sleep at night.
Now to Bacon. The Biography by Michael Peppiatt has had me in thrall since I started the book a couple of days before we flew to Florida. The author was a member of Bacon’s entourage for 30 years and he was in the habit of writing down much of what the painter said over the years—Bacon’s Boswell, if you will. The book has as a result a very personal quality. It is as modern biographies go very well done and full of cogent insights about a Painter who was surrounded with by cloak of mystery. The book was like a separate world I had one foot in while the other was enjoying the delights of family and Florida.
I knew very little about Bacon, although I knew his work and valued its power to disturb people. I admired his grit and skills as a painter. He had invented a niche that only he could fit in. How he had come by it, I did not know. I knew he was a homosexual but what kind and with what nuances, I did not have a clue. It turns out he was a bit of a wild man, a theatrical, rather swishy gay man who had sado-masochistic tendencies. He was bad luck to his three long-time lovers, men who all died tragically. It all started with his father, a military man, very straight and conventional, who threw Francis out of the house when he found him dressed in his mother’s undies at age 16. They never reconciled after that and Bacon carried that rejection as a terrible burden the rest of his life. He stayed a cross-dresser the rest of his life, indeed, some of his close friends would refer to him as “she’ when they talked about him. As he grew older he could drink any man under the table and he could revel all night and get very little sleep but always seemed fresh as a daisy the next day. He was a well know habitué of sleazy night clubs in London and all its gambling establishments. He liked to visit the shadier spots too, where he could be a male prostitute, someone to be picked up by tough sailors who would beat him up after some sex. But he would always bounce back and be ready for another go at it a few days later. By some miracle of Alchemy he stayed slim his entire life and healthy till he was an old man, although he did suffer from asthma, which kept him out of WW II. When he showed up at a bar or restaurant his personality was instantly the dominate one, like it was a rule of nature. He was charming, a sparkling conversationalist, very clever and witty, the life of the party. He was also very loyal to his friends and doled out big bucks to many of them when he had the cash. For example, when his first gallery owner became seriously ill, he paid for all her medical expenses.
Meanwhile, he kept developing as an artist, drip by drip, step by step, and brush stroke by brush stroke, until about age 35 when he started to show his paintings. His first motif was ‘the scream,’ as that was a major part of his portraits of popes and baboons. One example he liked was Eisenstein’s nurse in the Odessa steps scene in The Battleship Potemkin. I found it curious that Eduard Munch’s painting “The Scream” was not mentioned in the book. He had to have seen it. Perhaps it wasn’t violent or angry enough for Bacon. He wanted the scream to howl a pain new to Modern Man and his tidy vision of what’s real and what’s not. Bacon came of age between the two most destructive wars that mankind had ever seen, and atom bombs were on the ready to go farther into the possibility of total annihilation. While being a through-going pessimist and hard-core atheist, he was a cheerful man and always laughing, full of positive energy, which seemed contradictory but cohabited inside him with no problem or conflict. One of his favorite sayings was this: “We come from nothing and go to nothing, with a brief interval in between, with a chance to learn a few things about ourselves.”
After the scream came those pulverized, oddly shaped and distorted flesh bags with blood spots and loose membranes, puddles of body parts, horrific remnants of humanity after some ultimate melting disaster. They were ghoulish creatures who existed in surreal spaces that seemed like confinement, even cages. Often it was lush life, say, a vivid orange, combined with neutral smudges of organic disintegration and putrefaction. It was one long sustained nightmare by a painter steeped in his own brand of savagery. Yet, he lived with the enthusiasm of a kid, had an endless curiosity within a narrow orbit, and attracted friends from all walks of life because he had such a lively and interesting personality. And there is nothing as unique as an image produced by Francis Bacon. His originality was never questioned.

The Lost Symbol

The Lost Symbol, like its predecessor, The DaVinci Code, has the same technique of hinged chapters that lead you one chapter to the next with irresistible speed, making the book a compulsive page turner. The reader swings through these series of 133 chapters like Tarzan swinging across the jungle one vine to the next to another in a quick and harmonic order. Robert Langdon is there again, playing the lead role at the center of action and the main resource of knowledge about symbols, puzzles, and “Ancient Mysteries,” as well as being an action figure and a victim. Playing against him is a villain named Mal’akh, a figure of superhero stature and strength, a man covered in tattoos that symbolize his past and future that he covers up with makeup when he has to deal with the normal world. He also wears a blond wig with a tiny camera hidden inside, which gives us the only real peek at a Freemasonry ceremony, which are assiduously kept secret by Masons. The twist at the end of the book is Mal’akh’s real identity, which surprised the hell out of me.
If somebody reading this doesn’t want to know what revelations are made at the end of the day, stop reading now. Earlier in the story we had learned that Zack Solomon had lost his life in a Turkish prison, being killed by Mal’akh who was also prison there. It was an unnecessary death because his father, Peter Solomon, a major figure among Washington DC Masons and long time friend of Robert Langdon, had decided to leave Zach in prison “to teach him a lesson” rather than buy his way out, which he could have done. Mal’akh turns out to be Zach, demented and remade along lines dictated by black magic, so the motive that drives the story is at bottom revenge, which begins with the discovery of his father’s cut off right hand. We aren’t sure what Zach’s plan is aiming at but he does keep saying we must learn how to die wisely. In a bizarre twist we learn he doesn’t want to kill his father, instead he wants Peter to kill him, ritually with an ancient knife used for such killings in the distant past, imagining it as some kind of daemonic apotheosis, an afterlife coronation. What he hoped for, this crazy ascension to daemonic glory, is a token how demented he had become in that Turkish prison and by his hunger for revenge. Not surprisingly, Peter could not sacrifice his son a second time, so he brought the knife down on the altar not into the body like he was suppose to and instead Mal’akh/Zack dies a horrible death as shards of glass from a skylight rain down on him, providing him with an agonizing death, depriving him of his carefully designed elevation to black arts sainthood. I had a curious reaction to finding out the villain was really Zach; It changed the thriller aspect of the story, that is, rather than a determined attack by a Darth Vader type anti-hero trying to bring down the central belief of western civilization, the whole thing was based on an interfamily feud and an exotic revenge plot. He wanted to destroy his father’s moral and ethical center, which in his mind was better—more satisfying-- than killing him outright.
The 12 hours of the story involve, of course, a long chase and several other characters; and reading of all the interactions and twists and turns of the plot make for an entertaining read. This book is more into outright fantasy than his previous two books which were spun around the Vatican and religious notions that have some credence, like Mary Magdalene and Jesus being a married couple and having an heir. Mal’akh is a more far-fetched villain, almost comic book-like in character and appearance. But Langdon remains the same, more or less solidly in the real world. At times you need to have some willing suspension of disbelief, as certain incidents, like our hero’s drowning, are far out and quite a stretch. The explanation Brown offers is Oxygenated perfluorocarbons or breathable liquid. In another section, Katherine Solomon, Peter’s sister, a specialist in the Noetic Sciences, contents you can measure the weight of the soul.
The last several chapters of the book and the epilogue pretty much an add-on, not really necessary to complete the tale. They serve as a patriotic lecture by the author, a tipping of his hat to the history of the Republic and the considerable influence of Freemasonry on the design of the Nation’s capital and on our money. The 18th century was the heyday of Freemasonry and many of our Founding Fathers were Masons. They were also Deists, a spiritual perspective that blended with the Freemasonry with no conflict. They saw to it that the Governmental structures and overall plan of the political precinct had the underpinnings of sound symbolic roots, ideas generated over time starting with the Renaissance. When all was said and done the Big Secret of the Masons was, to put it in a nutshell, Praise God. I have no quarrel with that sentiment, although I might prefer Praise the Universe. Brown’s uses the phrase like he is waving a flag, chiding us all to get our act together. It’s a plea by Brown that we to find unity as a Nation where once there was discord.

Obama the Target

Two noteworthy voices spoke up this week about the character of the animosity toward Barack Obama. First, last Sunday, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote an op-ed column that addressed itself to that animosity, what lies behind all the sound and fury. Today it was former president Jimmy Carter who spoke out about the presence of racism in the current hysteria in town meetings and even congress.
Dowd called her column “Boy, Oh, Boy,” and she deserves credit for calling a spade a spade (pun intended.) I was so impressed with the hard look she took at the implication of Joe Wilson’s shout of “You Lie,” that I sent the piece to several friends to read. I felt it was about time thinking people face the fact that raw racism is once more bubbling up to the surface and we need to examine it and where it might lead. She called her column what she did because she contends that what Wilson was really saying was “You lie, boy!” She then goes on to point out that South Carolina has long been the hotbed of Confederate zeal and pride; the Old South still exist in the minds of many South Carolinians. It has been a state always on the front lines of backward thinking, just look at Strom Thurmond, Senator DeMint, and Joe Wilson, not to mention their misbehaving Governor. DeMint was one of the featured speakers at the rally in Washington last Saturday. Retrograde vision seems endemic in South Carolina. But Joe Wilson has little to worry about in his district which is solidly Republican and white. T-shirts and car tags are selling like hotcakes with “You Lie! “ boldly set forth for all to see. Wilson was very upset when the story broke about Strom Thurmond, the veritable archetype of the Old Segregationist South, confirmed he had a daughter with a black woman in his employ. Wilson thought it brought shame to the state and white people.
The rally last Saturday was billed as a protest over the Administration Health care Bill; but one look at the signs and posters people showed up with indicated the real purpose of the rally was a hate-fest aimed at our first black president. One sign that seemed very popular was “PUT OBAMA IN THE GRAVE WITH KENNEDY.”Other signs linked him with Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Castro. Another favorite was the image of Obama as the comic book image of the Joker, especially in the Heath Ledger interpretation—with the slashed mouth. It was all frothing-at-the-mouth expressionism, the trash thoughts of very angry and unhappy people. It was full of nasty comments and threats of violence. The organizers of the rally—corporate operatives using corporate money, like Freedomworks, which is headed by ex-congressman Dick Armey—tried to sell the gathering as positive, but you’d have to be an idiot to see it that way.
Dowd thinks, and Jimmy Carter agreed with her, that a sizable segment of the South has never accepted the Civil Rights Law and Integration and have been laying in the weeds waiting for an opportunity redress the “wrongs” that have been imposed on the South. They are folks who just can’t accept the idea of a black man in the Oval Office. It just ain’t right, and the fact he is a well-spoken, educated, and uppity black man makes all the worse. There seems to be no reasoning with these folks. Accompanying this racial discontent is silly talk about succession from the Union, first mentioned by the Governor of Texas several months ago.
The important thing about Carter speaking up, is the fact it was Carter, an ex-president from the South, someone who is deeply Southern and knows what he is talking about. He said outright that the animosity toward Obama is clearly based on the fact he is a black man. He said there are some people in the South and elsewhere who believe that a black man can’t have the right stuff to be president of this nation. The right stuff is white stuff—period! Black people, it is said, aren’t equipped to do the job. Since the comments come from Mr. Carter, who is respected around the world, they should carry some weight.
I got an email from my brother yesterday who lives in the Midwest. He’s retired now but part of his job was to go down to Nashville where his company had another factory. While he was there he saw a reenactment of the Battle of Lookout Mountain, a battle of the Civil War that the South lost. However, in the reenactment the outcome was different: this time the South won. This is how they work to redress past wrongs—replace reality with fantasy.

Letter to a Friend

Parts of a letter to a friend….
Otherwise I am enjoying one of my drawing streaks. I have never been one to work on some regular, punch-the-time clock sort of schedule; it’s more periodic outbursts with me, an eruption of ideas and energy that can go on for three or four months and then lay dormant for 6 months, while I get into other things of interest to me. For the first time in ages I am working on a horizontal format, me, a strictly vertical guy for decades. I don’t know what got into me. On a sudden impulse I turned my paper because I had an idea to do a three panel triptych, like Max Beckmann was fond of doing. I am also in a more formal frame of mind, which is odd for me, as I am usually focused on subject matter and content. This time I am more concerned about pattern, the black-white-and-gray patterns I am getting by mixing pen and ink tones and shadings with pencil. When I sit back and contemplate what I have done, I am looking at how all the bits and pieces are hanging together; I am asking myself, do they all harmonize? I am getting an overall grey look with white and black accents in the grey field. There is a softness and subtlety to the imagery that I really like.
What is the nature of the imagery? Well, let’s see, how about an explosion in a cartoon factory, or perhaps a kind of intoxicated surrealism, or like the theater of the absurd. One thing is for sure: it is horror vacui taken to an extreme. One drawing I have titled “Merry Mayhem,” and another “Four-square Evolution.” The sizes of the images are small, 12” X 8,” like Paul Klee’s work, diminutive but complex and lively. However, I have not abandoned the figurative/symbolic imagery I am noted for. No indeed. I saw this German film two weeks ago, “Eight Miles High,” starring this incredibly sexy young actress. She inspired me to do two ‘hieroglyphs’ featuring her as a Betty Page retread strutting her stuff on my typical floating stage with symbolic bric-a-brac surrounding her like broken and random pieces of memory, all tokens of my experience more than what belongs to her. I have done 5 things like that which are larger than the other group. All this work is as good as anything I have done in the past. So at 73 I am not slipping or losing any of my power. The one problem that I do have that is connected to old age is the “yips.” Golfers and pool players are familiar with the yips. They are those sudden uncontrollable twitches and jerks, the result of old and tires nerves. They can ruin a putt or make you miscue at the worse time—or make you draw a line you didn’t want there. Such ‘accidents’ can screw up am image.
Interestingly, I sent a bunch of my drawigs to RC, that old friend from college, who I have been communicating with a lot last six weeks. He said he would, unlike Fred Spratt, comment on them. He knows the story how Fred would not comment on them because they were so far removed from what he does; he just couldn’t relate to them. Well, it has been three weeks since I sent those things to RC and so far nothing has been forthcoming. It really doesn’t matter because he has already rendered me a service that I deeply appreciate. Both he and I have had a long time interest in what is commonly called “Outsider Art.” After some back and forth about some Outsider artists, he told me that is how he is seeing me. I am an outsider despite my education, because I have pretty much thrown the baby out with the bath water, which is true. In Primus Rota I characterize this by saying my education “was cargo I no longer needed so I threw it overboard.” RC has given me much to think about. The label does fit with my eccentric and highly subjective imagery, which have been inscrutable puzzles to so many people and, frankly, to me too, although I do speculate about them for the hell of it, to be playful. It fits with my character and what I have experienced in extreme moments of vision and illumination, which removed me from the club of professors at UNLV. My work has been so personal since 1968, that fateful year for so many people my age and younger, and for a long time I have ignored the trends and fashions of the moment and gone my own way, no matter what the consequences. The guy who took my place at UNLV was once a colleague of RC’s. He painted stripes, what Celine liked to call “necktie art.” He is still there, Head of the Art Department now, and probably still paints stripes. God bless him. Some belong there, I didn’t. I work on the basis of inner impulse not external dictates and I have been following that star for four decades, and so I say fuck the art world, its money, games, and galleries, and all the rest of it. Right? Right…
The following is a response to the above from SD, my friend up in Canada.
“Your comments about “outsider artists” don’t surprise me at all except that you think that is a revelation. That’s how I have always thought of you. Beyond the art, it speaks for your integrity. I think of you as one of the few people I know who has stayed with your values all the way through.”

"When Europe Slept"

Dear Lon,
Since I have read 4 of the essays in those two FIRST THINGS you sent me a while back, I’d be happy to read more if you care to send them. Also, a while back I mentioned Phillip Jenkins to you, the scholar from Penn State who has become the chief spokesman for the demographics of the Christian Church—where the Faith is leaving from and where it is going to and what is likely to take its place in Europe. I went on to buy two of Jenkins books, The Next Generation: the Coming of Global Christianity and The Lost History of Christianity, or how the thousand year reign of the religion in the Middle East came to an end. That is the topic in another great book that I read 2 years ago, From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple, which, some time or other you ought to read, for it tracks where Christianity was so strong at first, and so dominant, only to be gradually pushed out of the region by Islam, although it still hangs on here and there, but the great majority of the Christians have gone elsewhere.
Clearly, the glory days of the Faith in that region, the region of its birth, is over with, just as the same eclipsing of the Faith is likely to happen in Europe by mid-century as Muslim immigrants are reproducing at a rate that will overwhelm the ‘native’ population of white Europeans. Muslim workers went there after WW II to help build a new Europe so devastated by the war. The Natives thought they would go back home after a while, but they stayed and that phenomena is going to have unexpected consequences. R.J. Neuhaus himself mentions Muslim immigration in his essay on “Secularizations,” stating that some observers already “depict Europe as a dying continent; dying culturally, spiritually, and, perhaps most decisively, demographically.” Like many others I am familiar with, he thinks Europeans may have reached the ‘point of no return,” and that their numbers will stay well below the Muslim’s “replacement level.” Islamic demographic dominance is like a boulder rolling down hill. It is not a question of IF, but of WHEN. Ponder what that might mean for the civilization of Old Europe, the famous buildings, great Art, churches, and other unique things and places created through the Christian centuries, not to mention the Greek and Roman civilization that went before Christian Culture. But by mid-century the Vatican will have been moved from Rome to some place in Africa, where the church, both Fundamentalist Protestant and Catholic, are flourishing and growing at a fast pace. The new home base for Christianity will be in the Southern Hemisphere; because that is the direction the faith is traveling right now. Europe is a secular state but that won’t last much longer.
Another essay that I responded to was “While Europe Slept,” by some professor from the University of Chicago. It covered things I have thought about too, over the years, especially after I left the church. Two questions hang in the air considering a post-Christian world. First, I was certain I could but I wondered about others being able to live peacefully and constructively sans an institutional support system and its moral and ethical guidelines. Is multiculturalism a substitute principle for guidance? The professor doesn’t think so and neither do I. He also argues that without the Church and what it provides, anarchy and nihilism would be the results—because then all things would be permitted. . I am not persuaded by this argument, but then, I am no measure against the ordinary citizen. They may need to have all the rules and regulations spelled out very clearly. Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Camus, and others, all felt we were headed toward nihilism if God was dead, as Nietzsche had written, or if his church dissolved under secular and material pressures. Personally I think we have innate equilibrium that would serve us well if people could tap into it, but that would take a certain amount of inner work and modern man would rather take and pill and watch American Idol.
Secondly, if we are no longer rooted in Christian Culture does that mean we have no access to transcendence? Again, I can answer in the affirmative; it is possible because it is built into out make-up, our psyche. But at the same time I realize modern individualism may not be able to sustain a purely secular world with a total absence of a religious principle and a spiritual aspiration. Left to his own devices the professor says the will to power will override everything else. The universe of human interactions would tend to be self-serving, wolfish, and selfish, where might makes right, and the extreme form of that is indeed nihilism.
So what do you think Lon?
Saturday morning. I got a call from Brodek this morning, a bad connection so I probably missed if he called you too or not. But he fell out of his golf cart playing at Meadowbrook and broke his shoulder and as a consequence he’ll be out of commission probably till next year sometime. They don’t plan to operate.

Julia

Aug. 26, 2009 (Journal Notes)
Sue and I watched a gripping, nerve-wracking drama last night about a crazy, off-the-wall alcoholic woman who drank every night and slept with any man who’ll buy her drinks. The name of the movie is “Julia,” and stars Tilda Swinton who won an Academy Award a couple of years ago for her performance in “Michael Clayton.” Julia meets a Mexican American woman at an AA meeting who tries to persuade her to help her kidnap her 8 year old son who has been living with his rich grandfather who happens to be a gangster. She dismisses the idea as absurd, sheer foolishness dreamt up by a desperate woman anxious to get her son back. The woman offers her half of the ransom money they could obtain from the rich old man. But as Julia thinks about what the money could do for her, she begins to reconsider; it could help her get off this merry-go-round to nowhere. So she decides to do it, but to do it without the mother. She tries to talk an old lover into going in with her, but he refuses, seeing it as a crazy idea. But she goes ahead on her own; she kidnaps the boy, kills his caretaker by running over his body with her car, the first of two murders she commits in pursuit of the ransom money. But the next hour or so of the movie is so full of ups and downs you get dizzy watching her flail her away through one crisis after another.
A sub-plot to the kidnapping caper is her relationship with the boy. At first he is just an object she needs to manipulate with little thought about his comfort or feelings; it is also perfectly obvious she knows absolutely nothing about kids. But gradually she realizes he is a human being and so she begins to soften up toward him, as he does toward her, as he realizes she is the only ally he has in the mess they are both in. Eventually, they become quite close, even cuddly and affectionate. This development is handled quite nicely; what happens between the two of them is the only real positive in a story otherwise full of negatives. In effect, she becomes his mother, at least until they unite with his real mother in Mexico.
The worse crisis that occurs toward the end of the film is the boy is kidnapped by a couple of young Mexican lads in Tijuana. She kills a Taxi Driver acting as their messenger. She meant to only scare the guy but the gun went off as she was waving it at him. She finally wrestles the cash from the grandfather, a cool $2,000,000. She plans to keep half of it, but she runs into a snag. The boys want all of it, otherwise no boy. So it becomes her Sophie’s Choice: What’s more important, the money or the safety of the boy? She opts for the boy. The Mexican lad with the money drives off beside himself with joy, with $2,000,000 in the back seat. Somehow, given the cutthroat world he lives in, one doubts it will be in his possession very long. In any event, free at last the boy gives Julia a big hug; he is so happy to be reunited with her. A last moment of regret flashes across her face, but then she looks down at the boy and says, “Let’s go find a mother.”
I like “Julia,” not only because Tilda Swinton is an accomplished and nuanced actress, but also because I liked the process she went through to let the money go in order to save the boy and therefore save her own soul; it was a byproduct of the choice, its truth and consequence. That decision, to love the boy rather than sell him as piece of meat in the black market, allowed her to also love herself, which upped her self-esteem. She had none of at the beginning of the story.

More Funny Games

8/19/09 (Journal Notes)
After I did my 30 laps in the pool at LA Fitness I walked across the street to Blockbuster’s to pick up “Sunshine Cleaning” only to find it’s not available to next week. So instead I picked up four films more or less at random, at least two of them straight-to-video type films. The one I decided to see first was something called “Surveillance,” a film directed by David Lynch’s daughter, Jennifer, starring Bill Pullman and the lovely Julia Ormand. David Lynch was also listed as Executive Producer. Right from the opening sequence, of a grisly murder, you could see the influence of father on daughter. The scene was dark, obscure, and unexplained. Altogether it was a strange and violent film: If I counted correctly there were 14 murders. Those are Tarantino totals. Bloody mayhem. It was extreme, ghoulish, and bizarre, like the director wanted to rub your face in it, with there also being an underlying absurdity to the killings, almost as if they were recreational, like in the recent film, “Funny Games,” directed by Michael Haneke. There are references made to two black-clothed killers wearing bag masks in the opening sequence and in a few flashbacks but we don’t find out who they are till the last quarter of the picture. Their Identity is something of a surprising twist.
The story starts out with two FBI agents, Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormand) arriving at a police station in the middle of god-forsaken country out West somewhere. There is the usual conflict between the local police, who are atypical and sometimes outside the law themselves, and the FBI, who want to interrogate everyone, including some officers, about the death of one cop and several other people on a nearby highway. The agents act with decorum and take over, with Elizabeth grilling with sensitivity an 8 year old girl, one of two survivors of the highway killings. But the agents knew what happened because they were there; it turns out they are the psychotic killers in disguise. The only person who figured that out early was the little girl, who whispers in Hallaway’s ear, “I know who you are.” That kicks off the bloody last section of the film. Elizabeth goes off with two officers to investigate the murders we saw at the beginning of the film, the killing of the real agents, but one of the cops finds some photographs in the back seat that show erotic scenes between Sam and Liz, which forces her hand and she kills them both. Meanwhile back at the station Sam has revealed his true identity and starts killing cops, leaving only the other survivor, a pretty blond cokehead. Lynch is saving her for the finale. When Liz comes back to the station their passion for each other is revealed; they are literally MAD for each other. Liz takes off her belt, gives it to her lover, climbs on the blonde’s lap, and starts to kiss and fondle her, while Sam puts the belt around her neck and slowly tightens it, killing the blond woman while Liz continues to passionately kiss her. That really gets the couple off, and shortly afterward they drive off, their dirty work completed. They see the little girl off in a field. Sam says to his mate, “Because she guessed who we were, I am going to let her live.” Liz smiles and says, “That is so romantic.”
I once saw on film one of David Lynch’s paintings, which had rotten meat on it that was filled with maggots crawling around the surface of the painting. Looking at this movie was comparable to looking at that painting. If there is a category below low-life, the characters in this movie inhabit that category, and that includes the scummy cops.
The erotized murder of the blonde was the next shocking and uncomfortable killing on screen that I have ever seen. Number one in my estimation remains the opening sequence in Sam Peckinpaugh’s “Osterman Weekend,” where another blond woman is assailed by two bad men moments after making love to John Hurt who had just jumped out of bed into the shower. Suddenly these two men break in, hold her down while one of them takes a long hypodermic needle and injects something lethal into her brain by going up her nose with a long needle. She’s dead in seconds. That scene still rattles my cage and disturbs my sleep. It’s not only the method of killing but the abruptness of the scene and how it was accomplished in less than a minute that is so creepy and disconcerning.

The Outrage

Aug. 23, 2009 (Journal Notes)
I saw “The Outrage” last night, Martin Ritt’s take on Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon.” I had seen it before but it had been many years since I last saw it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, I thought it was a great script, and I thought Edward G. Robinson did a marvelous job as the cynical con-man. Before writing about it I thought I’d look it up to get some basic info, but to my surprise I couldn’t find a thing about it in Martin & Porter for 2007, none of Pauline Kael’s books mention it, and neither does David Thomson in his listing of a thousand films. I wondered why it was ignored; skipped over when it is obviously a solid film, even more if you ask me. It was listed with the 500 best Westerns.
The story is set up so well, with the three men in the train station, which is decrepit, while a heavy rain pours down, creating a gloomy ambience for the three men who have gathered there. There is the delusion preacher (William Shatner), the absolutist who believes truth should be one and unassailable; the old prospector (Howard de Silva), who hides his version of “the truth” to the last; and the con-man (Edgar G. Robinson) who is there to prick the balloons of idealism floated by the other two. While sitting in foul weather the con-man persuades them to tell the story of the trial held the day before, which is still fast on their minds—actually, more like an acid eating into their guts. At first it’s just away to past the time till the train arrives, but as the tale unfolds it becomes the perfect foil for the con-man to deliver his merciless and insightful attack on this foolish, dishonest, and pathetic humanity who wouldn’t recognize truth if they sat on it.
The story is told in flashback from four perspectives. The prospector had found a dead man with a knife buried in his chest and reported it to the sheriff who arrests Jose Carrasco (Paul Newman) who was found asleep under a tree near the sight of the murder. Carrasco is a notorious bandit well-known in the Arizona territory, and the locals would love to pin the killing on him just to rid the territory of him. We hear Carrasco’s story first at his trial for the murder of the gentleman; and it’s full of his egotism and bravado, as he touts his own mastery of fighting, having killed the man in a duel of honor, and his power over women as the genteel lady he snares, along with her husband, falls for his sexual charisma. He had stopped them on the trail and then kidnapped the pair; the man, a Southern gentleman (Lawrence Harvey), he ties to a tree and rapes the woman, who to some extent enjoys the experience. When she tells her story there’s no question she enjoyed the encounter with Carrasco and her husband treats her with contempt, as he was witness to their embraces and love-making, later accusing her of inviting the rape. Angered by his view and snobbery she kills him with his knife. The husband has a story too, which he told to an old Indian who found him still alive but dying. He claimed he had killed himself over the humiliation by accidently falling on his knife while fighting with Carrasco. As each of these different versions are unraveled the con-man delivers biting discourses on the folly of human nature, and Robinson gives these speeches with plenty of brio and black humor, taking no guff from the other two who are too tender-minded as far as he is concerned.
But there is a 4th version and that belongs to the prospector who claims to have witnessed the whole charade. His telling is broad and comical, a kind of absurdist summing up of the event. It leaves everyone involved without much dignity and looking quite foolish, with the gentleman this time killing himself quite deliberately. We also learn why the fancy murder knife wasn’t found. Some old reviews treat the 4th version as definitive but it’s hardly that; it just one more telling by someone with a stake in the telling.
One thing I didn’t like was the finding of the baby in a room at the train station; it is no more that foil to encourage the prospector and especially the preacher back to rejoin the society they had temporarily been disillusioned with due to this rape and murder. It was an improbable event at best.
The movie cleverly argues truth is subjective and shaped by the storyteller’s investment in a situation; they will always color things in their own favor. Carrasco make himself out to be commanding in the situation with the Southern pair; in her version her sexuality made him jump through some her hoops. He also said the gentleman was a good fighter but he was better. But the prospector said the so-called duel between them was a farce, as both were scared to death and acted cowardly.
Newman was enjoyable as a Mexican bandit, although a bit too broad and too comical throughout, although that did not bother me very much, as clearly he and Robinson had the job of being comic relief to the tale of murder and rape. To see the movie these days, it would have to be through Netflix.

Bill Clinton to the Rescue

Bill Clinton to the Rescue
Like many other Americans, I watched the joyous homecoming of Laura Ling and Euna Lee and the discreet behavior of President Bill Clinton who finally got used wisely. Clinton stayed in the background and never uttered a public word at the scene at the Burbank airport. I choked up when little Hana, Lee’s four year old daughter, leaped into her mother’s arms and hung on her as if she intended to never let go again. It was a gotcha moment for me. A few tears dripped from my eyes.
Obviously, the only way to get those women back was with the appropriate bait, with Bill Clinton, who is widely admired throughout the world, including in Kim Jong-il’s court. Kim has coveted getting Bill Clinton to his country ever since he was president. There was good reason for a meeting to happen on both sides. But first many things, official matters, had to worked out; American officials had to get all their ducks in a row, a private plane had to be secured for the flight, and the deal had to be done before the plane took off. That took a while, probably a few weeks. A wealthy benefactor, Stephen Bing, a friend of Bill Clinton’s, offered his plane and even went so far as to pay the $200,000 it would take to go back and forth to Asia, and for incidentals, like the catering for the folks who went with Clinton, like John Podesta. Friends like that can grease just about any wheel.
The posed pictures of the two men look similar to Edger Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, but stiffer, with frozen non-smiles on their faces. Clinton looked like a healthy giant next to the frail-looking diminutive dictator, who supposedly has been in ill-health. But the informal shots of Kim were quite different; he appeared more animated and in one photograph his eyes were bright with admiration for the man sitting across the table from him. There was no doubt in his mind that he could deal with Bill Clinton where he could not with the Bush crowd. This president had been sensitive enough to send Kim a letter of condolence when his father died. Small things like that can add up to something later on. It added to the aura and appeal of the American statesman.
Afterwards I read the column of Mo Dowd in the TIMES. Her rendition of the freeing of the two journalists was annoying as hell, having little to do with them. She treated them as small fry. She brushed aside the human aspect of their story and focused on it as a contest between Bill and Hillary. It was a chance for Bill to outshine Hillary who had left the same day for a lousy ten day trip to Africa, nothing of any prestige. Score one for Billy Boy in his endless combat with his ambitious, competitive wife who boxes in the same ring. What kind of crap is that? Dowd also contended that the experience of Bill was part of a “revenge plot” by Kim. He was upset over Hillary’s comment about the North Koreans acting like “misbehaving children.” Dowd called it “giving the limelight to Daddy punishing Mommy.” Why should Hillary be put off by her husband doing a good thing on Humanitarian grounds? Why must motives always have to be sinister, half-unconscious subplots? This was a simple case of Bill Clinton being the right man for the job and he did it, with a minimum of egotism. End of story.
The tactic of mob disruption at Democratic town meetings on the Health Care Bill is not new; it goes back to that Shout-Down ordered by James Baker at the recount in Florida in 2000, which stopped a recount, which had time pressures, from proceeding with 10,000 votes. The other night on Rachel Maddow’s show she identified the nine members leading the charge that day, a so-called grass root uprising. Not quite. All nine were identified by name and all were political operatives, and she detailed who they worked for in the G.O.P. In addition, after Bush was declared the winner, all found lucrative positions in the Republican Administration for being good soldiers. Then as now, the Republicans would have us believe that these current ‘Mob Rules” events that are silencing debate and democracy are “just folks letting Obama know” his plan for “socialized medicine” is not going to pass muster. Of course the older “folks” don’t want Medicare touched. Once again it is political pros that are being paid by Health Industry corporations or the Republican Party to disrupt the proceedings. It is organized money doing dirty tricks. Rachel also describes several of the groups behind these disruptive tactics. They transport people to sites of meetings and hand out “talking points.” They manufacture protest, while insisting they aren’t that at all. I don’t think they will get away with this time. However, if it intensifies violence could break out.

Muslim Immigration in Europe

A fellow I went to college with 50 years ago recently reconnected with me via Facebook.com and ever since (since July 1) we have been engaged in a month long email and phone exchange covering the lost decades between us in incredible detail. We have also spent some time speculating about the future, hardly one more pessimistic than the other. For example, I am reading Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West by Chris Caldwell, a right-of-center journalist who has marshaled an impressive array of facts and statistics that strongly suggest that Islam will ultimately be dominant in Europe without firing a shot or using a suicide bomber. At the same time my old grad school chum saw a video on youtube.com that dealt with the same material. He sent it to me and I was as impressed, as the facts presented were hard, if not impossible, to refute. It concerns the coming demise of Europe as we and History have known it.
In brief, the Muslims will take over Europe by the sheer force of the many more babies they are having compared with the ‘native’ population. The last two generations of Europeans have paid heed to the idea of overpopulation; it was seen as virtuous to have fewer children than before World War ll. The Muslims, however, ignored the warnings about the population explosion, reproducing at a much higher rate (8.6 per family) than people in the West (in Europe most countries are at 1.9 down to 1.3 per family.) Demographers argue that a culture in order to sustain itself must reproduce at a rate of 2.11 kids per family. In 1945 1000,000 immigrants came to Europe to help the rebuilding of a devastated land. The thought was the workers would return to their homeland after a while, but instead a large portion of them decided to stay as the wages, opportunities, and the social welfare system was so much better than Morocco and the Middle East. This step by step ‘invasion’ of Europe is described in considerable detail by Caldwell in his well-researched book. The name of the video is Muslim Demographics. I recommend both to anyone interested in the possible consequences of thoughtless immigration. They constitute 90% of the immigrants now. By 2050 it is estimated that there will be 102,000,000 Muslims in Europe. They are gaining a foothold and they don’t assimilate, being an entity outside the EU, living in self-sustaining enclaves, preserving their culture, religion, morality, and ethnicity. German statisticians say it is too late to reverse the birth rate in Germany, and France isn’t far behind. Europe will be overwhelmed in a few decades.
These thoughts and fact-laden predictions have led me to entertain a few fantasies about the future in Europe. Just consider these possibilities: the Eiffel Tower will become where the faithful are called to prayer; Paris will be shorn of alcohol, jazz clubs, and French movies; Oktoberfest will be nothing but a memory; the Vatican will have been moved to Timbuktu and the Pope will be black and hail from Africa; Chartres,, Wells Cathedral, and St. Peter’s will be retrofitted as mosques, just like St. Sophia’s was in the 16th Century; images of the Christian trinity, Jesus, and other leading figures will be desecrated, painted over, or buried in the basements of museums; and one hesitates to guess how many great works of Western Art will bite the dust, like those Giant Buddhist sculptures did in Afghanistan several years ago that were pulverized by dynamite by the Taliban who took no regard to preserve the icons of another culture and religion. Caldwell mentions that the city of Amsterdam represents a storehouse of the art and culture of the Netherlands. Then he quotes Ayann Hirsi Ali who became a Dutch citizen and Member of Parliament. “If the citizens of Amsterdam, 60% of whom will soon be of non-Western origins, are not part of that, all of this will decay and be destroyed. When the municipality has to vote on whether funds go to preserving art or build a mosque, they may ask, ‘Why should I pay for a stupid painting.’” One trembles with fear and loathing at these possibilities.
A similar phenomenon is happening south of the equator; if it is a countervailing development I can’t say, but it could be under the right circumstances. And that is the migration of Christianity to the southern hemisphere, as it has run out of juice and clout in Northern climes. It has been dying on the vine since the close of Second World War, with eroding attendance at Sunday Mass being the main indicator of a fading religion. It has virtually disappeared from the land of its origins. It is very strong in Africa already, and growing by leaps and bounds, both the Catholic Church and Protestant sects. It is spreading in Asia too. For details of this development read the books of scholar Philip Jenkins. These new Christians could rival the Muslims in Europe in reproductive fury and numbers and they might even entertain ideas of a “crusade” to reclaim Rome and the rest of captive Europe. But problems loom: many Africans and Asians live in Shanty towns and vast slums; there is not the wealth and wherewithal that would be necessary to take back what has been lost. As in its origin, the faith of Jesus is designed for the poor.
There is no point in bemoaning these epochal transformations that are in process. It is like trying to hold back a giant boulder that is rolling down hill. And yet we must think about it. But those of us who won’t be around can merely shrug our shoulders and take our meds. And I realize Islam is a complex subject and issue, a religion with many faces and sects, and that I have simplified it to profile some facts. Plus who knows what unknown forces might change the thrust of events and change the path of the crashing rock of destiny. Or as my old college mate put it, “Perhaps Gawd will intervene.”

Sotomayor Hearings and the Politics of Fast Destruction

I have been watching the Sotomayor Hearings with interest and frustration. It impresses me as two shows with few contact points. One is the judge and the huge throng of family and supporters sitting behind her, a group beaming with pride that one of their own is up for this high honor of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Show number two is the Republicans playing their usual ‘loyal opposition “ role, as they noisily and blatantly play to their base, not caring a damn about the judge’s seventeen year record, instead focusing much of their attention on one sentence from a speech she made several years ago, and the New Haven Ricci case. That sentence was the “wise Latina” comment. That sentence and the Ricci case are the only red meat issues the Republicans can, or think they can, score heavy points on. They know they can’t win, but that doesn’t seem to be their main aim, which is twofold. One, they are appealing to their base, two, they are laying the ground work for the next appointee to the High Court who they assume will be a dye-in-the-wool liberal. They want to establish the idea that a judge should measure up to a conservative yardstick and that a Liberal can’t be considered mainstream.
Sotomayor is holding up pretty well, as she appears to have been well coached; she is hanging in there, holding her nose when she has to, and waiting for the attacking clique of angry white males to run out of gas. The bottom line on the Hearing is it is about race. The Republicans are arguing that only white males have the stuff to be “impartial and objective,” whereas a “wise Latina” will vote her bias and prejudices; plus she’s likely to be gender-proud and rely on “feelings “too much, as, typically, women are prone to do. We’ve been around this block before. Her record doesn’t indicate any such thing. She’s a by the book—precedent is the guiding rule—judge, very far from a radical judge that Sessions has tried to describe.
Of course by downgrading her status as a capable judge, the Republicans are continuing their self-destructive saga. In the process they are alienating the Hispanics of this nation, a voting group that will be of increasing importance in the upcoming elections of 2010 and 2012. Why they ignore this factor is beyond me. Republicans are cutting their own throats by pretending it is the 1950s and White Males still rule the roost. Adding to the self-destructive tendency of Sessions, Kyle, and Lindsey Graham, we can add the likes of John Ensign, Mark Stanford, Sarah Palin, Cantor and Boehner in Congress, and Dick Cheney, who we are now learning (as if we didn’t know before) was calling the shots on National Security issues, not George W. Bush, who should have been the point man. Ensign, the great spokesman for family values and one of the chorus of voices calling for Bill Clinton’s resignation in 1998, won’t resign, where if anyone should, it would be him. Why isn’t what’s good for the goose is good for the gander? In fact, he announced yesterday that he will be up for reelection in 2012. Sanford trips over his tongue every time he opens his mouth, and he, like Ensign, carried on his affair for several months. As for Palin, she keeps shouting “I am no Quitter!” when she quit in mid-term. Her mind is scrambled eggs and toast.
The sane and sound Peggy Noonan, a sage Republican, wrote a column the other day that the Party needs to forget the base and instead find the best and the brightest within its ranks and rebuild from there. That is good advice but no one seems to be heeding it.

Mankell and the Beasts

The other night I stopped reading The White Lioness by the Swedish author Henning Mankell, who I got into after seeing the first installment of “Wallander,” on Masterpiece Theater. Wallander is the name of his detective, Kurt Wallander, age 44, master sleuth and passionate advocate of full commitment to a case. He’s my kind of guy: He doesn’t work out; he drinks too much, and lives in a haphazard, slovenly manner. But when it comes to a case he is a Gila Monster: once he takes hold, you can’t shake him off. Anyway, I kept the last chapter of the novel till tomorrow, which I’ll read while my wife is up in Phoenix. I also wanted to fit in a movie later.
I am very impressed by Mankell’s writing; it has the same driving narrative force that, for example, Michael Connelly has as a storyteller. The White Lioness opens with the inexplicable killing of a woman, a real estate agent, who had stopped at a house to ask direction as she was lost looking for a house. She was shot in the forehead by some unknown assailant, a man who threw her body down a well. Wallander was utterly at a loss for a motive; the case became even more puzzling because the house was blown up as well and after the blast investigators found a black index finger on the ground, and inside the house they stumbled upon pieces of a pistol made only in South Africa. The reader finds out before Wallander that the person who shot the woman was a an ex-KGB agent working for some fascist network in South Africa who are plotting the assassination of Nelson Mandela who will soon become the President of South Africa in 1994. They want to kill him, which would cause chaos and violence, providing them an opportunity to take over the government and to declare that Apartheid will stay in force and the white minority will continue to rule the country. Eventually Wallander will be able to connect the dots but will take over 450 pages to do that as the plots twists and turns. The KGB agent proves to be formidable opponent, and he feels the same about Wallander who he originally scoffed at as a provincial policeman. All things considered, the novel was an exciting and entertaining read.
The movie I chose to see the night I put the book down was another of those obscure titles that I am fond of taking a chance on. This one was a fantasy type film called The Outlander, with Jim Caviezel, John Hurt, and Ron Pearlman, who is one of my favorite character actors. I had never heard of the film but the cast was appealing so I gave it a look-see. It was the ultimate derivative movie and a bizarre curiosity as such. For example, it combined elements of a medieval fantasy and extraterrestrial life forms, and a terrifying monster that was part Grendal from Beowulf and the scary creature in the Alien series; there was also an idea from King Kong, and other snippets from other movies, like the Banquet Hall drinking scene in the recent Beowulf movie and a magic sword comparable to Excalibur.
In the year 709 A.D. a space ship splashes to earth in a lake somewhere in Scandinavia and a lone survivor named Kanan (Caviezel) has to make his way on a strange planet although he looks like a normal human being. He is obviously from a distant and advanced civilization and speaks a foreign tongue. He is in touch with his home base and he has with him a gadget that instills in him (through one eye) the language and culture of the world he has landed in, which is pretty nifty and very convenient. He has also a powerful weapon, a ray gun of a sort, but he loses it when he is captured by the tribe of Vikings who live in the area. They don’t know what to make of this stranger (is he friend or foe?) but when a mysterious and ghoulish beast shows up that the locals don’t have the wherewithal to handle, Kanan comes in handy, for he not only knows about the beast, he brought it to earth. He had been on a mission to exterminate the beast and its kind on a planet his people wanted to control. In order to save itself the creature, like the lizard-like beast in Alien, snuck into the space craft ; it also managed to survive the crash. This particular ogre is more radioactive than the Alien, as he heats up when aroused to action and lights up like a Christmas tree fed by LSD. This was when Kanan came up with the King Kong idea: Let’s dig a huge, deep ditch, trap the creature, fill it with flammable material and light the fire and see what happens. Well, the plan succeeds, the beast falls into the pit, there is fireball created, but the beast arises from the flames more irritated than damaged in any way. Fire seems to be the element he dominates; it is coeval with his nature. Going back to the drawing board, Kanan comes up with another idea; he dives down to space craft at the bottom of the lake and brings to the surface some of the metal the craft is made out of, an extraterrestrial alloy, much stronger than what was then available to the Vikings. With that metal he fashions the sword, a truly magic weapon like that famous mythic sword, Excalibur. With it he slays the fire-breathing dragon that he had accidentally brought to earth. Unfortunately the king was killed during the earlier battles with the beast. But the tribe turns to Kanan as their new King and he wins the hand of the King’s daughter too, so all turns out well for the ‘Man Who Fell to Earth’ from ‘Father Sky.’
I couldn’t help but wonder what he did with that machine he used to adjust to his new environment? He could also still be in touch with his Homeland. But we never heard of this possibility again.
After the Orlando’s surprise win over Cleveland and LeBron James, I watched Valkyrie with Tom Cruise and a cast of old worthies. As far as I know, it did not do well at the box office and now I understand why; it is a listless costume drama with an ending familiar to every schoolboy which takes the punch out of film’s martyrdom at the end of the film.. Other than the opening sequence in the African desert, where Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise) suffers his injuries, the loss of his right hand, left eye, and two fingers off his surviving hand, the film is by and large a bunch of talking heads working on a conspiracy that somehow did not add up to suspense or high drama. The director also underworked the Colonel’s relation with his family; it would have helped to know them longer or better. They were just pawns to establish he had a family. The whole thing just fell flat and the public sniffed it out. There should have been a better way to tell the story that would have had more emotional weigh and impact. All the conspirators were summarily shot as soon as it was understood Hitler was still alive. Nine months later Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. I didn’t know this but there were 15 attempts to assassinate Hitler. It was a shame too, as a lot of people died during those nine months. But that all seems part of the nihilism that made up Hitler’s life and death.
By the way, Wallander and his associates foil the plot to kill Mandela, but just barely. Wallander outduels the Russian and two South African security agents seize the shooter just as he got off a bad shot.

Profies of Three Movies

Finally saw “The Wrestler.” Pretty damn good. The film deserved the praise it has received. The match between the story and the actor was, so to speak, made in heaven. A has-been actor, Mickey Rourke, plays a has-been wrestler, Randy “The Ram” Robinson, with long blond tresses, a scarred body, and a heart problem, in every sense of the term.
It’s a downbeat story about the tail end of a pathetic career in the ring, a tale not meant for a large audience because it is too peculiar, set as it is in a small obscure world of no charm or sweep, with subject matter that smells of sweat and blood, and with self-annihilation for a conclusion—not the kind of thing that would appeal to the vast majority of today’s moviegoers. The film balances the dehumanization of the profession and the character’s emotional sensitivity. Once he blew it with his young daughter and the stripper he had taken a fancy to rejects him, and knowing he was lost without his performance in the ring, despite its pathos and ridiculousness, and that there were no other doors open to him to start another life for someone like himself and despite a doctor’s warning about his heart, he went back to a trade that will kill him. But since the wrestling ring was the be-all and end-all of his meager emotional existence, so it might as well be the vehicle and area of his death.
The other surprise about the movie was the director, Darren Aronofsky, whose previous movies, “Pi,” “Requiem for a Dream,” and “The Fountain,” were all in a different genre, to say the least, much more like arty films that depended on great camera work and rich images. Not so in “The Wrestler.” He obviously wanted to show Hollywood he could make a more ordinary looking movie. And the film will certainly revive Mickey Rourke’s career.
Like “The Wrestler” “Frost/Nixon” was worth the price of admission because of the acting. I remember Frank Langella way back when as Dracula. He’s come a long way, baby! The movie deals exclusively with the 4-part interview that David Frost, a talk show host, had with ex-President Richard Nixon in 1977, with the final interview being the memorable one because it dealt with Watergate. It was revealing to see the real interviews in Special Features because you could see the difference of tone and emotion in the two takes on Nixon. The spoken lines were the same but they were as different as night and day when it came to the expression of personality. The real Nixon remained a cool customer no matter what he was saying; his facial expression never really changed, remaining a bland mask, like it was frozen in place, not really reeling under his devastating admissions—for example, when he said, “When the President does it, it is not a crime.” The whole weight of the movie rests on that line, and Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld banked on Nixon’s lead, and that attitude worked for them until recently, when the whole superstructure of their lies, secrecy, and policy of torture has came crashing down, like the flimsy House of Cards it always was. In contrast to the real Nixon, Langella’s face literally rippled with emotion and the weight of what he was saying--how he had screwed up royally and disappointed the American people. His face expressed the regret, sadness, and guilt, and his eyes were like pools of discovery, showing how he felt below the surface. Therefore I’d have to say Langella’s Nixon is an interpretation, an attempt to portray the ex-President as if he was capable of feeling deeper emotions through the of claiming of the lawlessness of his actions during Watergate.
There was another telling scene that I assume was speculation, a phone encounter between Nixon and Frost the night before the final interview. In that conversation, which is largely one-sided, Nixon carries on with considerable resentment about the rich snobs from Wall Street, the “well born” and the Country Club set who never accepted his humble origins and banal education. I suspect Ron Howard threw that in to spice up the next day’s confrontation.
The secondary characters around the two principles played well too, keeping Frost aggressive, telling him he could not let Nixon off the hook, but he had to nail him, which he finally did. In a sense, they ganged up on Nixon. It was a game of pin the tail on the donkey.
The Screenwriter/Director of “Nothing but the Truth,” Rod Lurie, used the subtext of the Valerie Plame revelations and her husband Joe Wilson’s articles that were critical of the Bush Administration in shaping his story which diverged widely from the case, being in the end more fiction than fact. But it certainly was the inspiration for the movie and the case certainly haunts the movie as a very pregnant undercurrent.
All things considered, “Nothing but the Truth” was gripping drama and a compelling story of the price that sometimes has to be paid for integrity and a journalist protection of sources; and there is considerable irony when we finally find out who the source was. The reporter in real life was Judith Miller of New York Times and she did serve time for not revealing her source, because it was a National Security issue, but it was much shorter than the woman in the film who ends up a year in jail and two in prison. More than that, she lost her job with the Times. But she was fired less for the Plame story, which was actually broke by Bob Novak, another Beltway journalist, but for her defending of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld policy in Iraq, which she continually supported uncritically. The movie makes it clear it is a tricky proposition to play the spy game; one can easily end up dead. Once you are outed you become suspect to your own colleagues at CIA, and your life can be in danger. Kate Beckinsale plays the reporter in the movie and she goes through hell, not only incarceration for three years, but her marriage dissolved under pressure, she was alienated from her son, and was severely beaten by another inmate. Hard times came as a result of taking a principled stand. It took a resolute soul to do what she did.
Incidentally, in case anyone is curious, Judith Miller now works for the FOX NEWS Network.

23 April 2009: Journal Notes

23 April 2009: Journal Notes.
Things are heating up in regard the torture issue. It appears that Obama is backing away from his attitude of not prosecuting those responsible for the torture inflicted on detainees; and he is doing it by saying it is up to Justice to decide what to do about what most Democrats agree is unquestionably abuse that rose to the level of torture. The rub here is the bulk of congressional Republicans don’t agree with the Armed Services Committee report just released and signed by Committee Chairman Car Levin of Michigan, a Democrat. The Republicans won’t buy it because it is a partisan document, so-called, simply because the Democrats wrote it, which means it can’t be objective. The only truth they recognize is their version of it. They don’t want the Democrats to get an investigation going because it will ultimately involved Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Tenet, McLaughlin, and the lawyers, including Yoo, Addington, and Bybee, who wrote the torture memos. The word is that Rice was opposed to the idea of harsh enhanced interrogation techniques, but lost out as she often did to Cheney and Rumsfeld, who ruled the roost in Bush’s first term. She eventually went along with the program. A Pentagon lawyer by the name of Philip D. Zelikow was on Rachel Maddow’s show on Tuesday night. It appeared that he could be a pivotal figure in this case; Rice appointed him her agent in regard the torture issue. When he took a look at the torture memos he was appalled by their poor logic and inadequate defense of harsh interrogations. They were a pathetic exercise as far as he was concerned. The memos flew in the face of logic and the law about torture. But he recognized the lawyers had their perspective and they understood what was expected of them—a legal smoke screen to hide the fact of torture. But they went a step farther: they tried to round up all existing copies of Zelikow rebuttal argument so they could destroy the copies; but they did not succeed, and hopefully the memo will surface in the near future. The fact they wanted to destroy the memo indicates there was validity to his argument and criticism.
Progressives like Rachel and Keith Olbermann are hot to trot on the torture issue, and so is my wife; they are so outraged by the abuses perpetuated by the Bush Administration they want them punished for their crimes, no matter what. I see things somewhat differently. To pursue the torture thing would be to invite a scandal as huge and dramatic as the impeachment of Bill Clinton. It would swallow up energy and time like the impeachment did, which allowed exactly nothing to get done in Clinton’s second term. That’s what I am afraid of, a snarling of purpose, a huge distraction, and a delaying of essential concerns. Congress would wallow in another legal drama and things that needed to get done would languish on the sidelines. I’m sure that’s what Obama was thinking of with his reluctance to go ahead with prosecutions. They would have to drag Bush, Cheney and the rest of them to court kicking and screaming; they would never willingly cooperate.
There is also a report that the Taliban have taken over another province, one just south of the Swat province, which put them 60 miles from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. They have already imposed Islamic law in the province just south of Swat, which means men must grow beards, women must give up jobs and school, and Islamic Law must be followed by one and all. They brook no other way. One of their religious leaders said their great purpose was to convert the rest of the world to their Faith and Law. They apparently are seriously considering invading Islamabad and trying to establish Taliban rule over the central government. Hillary Clinton addressed the situation yesterday, saying it WOULD ENDANGER US AND THE ENTIRE REGION because Pakistan is a Nuclear State. She said the Pakistani government was basically abdicating to the Taliban and other extremists.