Belated

"Every book I read is one that I now can't write," he fumed.

Behind on their Reading

What if Plato et al were to be brought back to life? First off,
they'd have some reading up to do.

story I believe

the story I believe
is like how much land
does a man need
you start out anxious
and greedy to know it
reciting breathless
to persuade others
but it outpaces you
and the sun is setting
on your attempt
it's precious, this story
and it outpaces you
forever beautiful

truth to be told

I'm beginning to think everything, but everything, may be true.

Crying

He cries
That's so sweet
But every night?
I just want the sex
Hold the sauce

dangling cause, dramatic irony, dramatic tension, telegraphing

As I think about these elements, in relation to reading War & Peace,
and how everything was prepared and dramatic tension finally
introduced and ramped up with the mention of Count Bezhukov's will, I
see how in fact simple it can be. I've known all this by instinct,
yet never in such stark terms. But the thing that binds them, and
that is accomplished prior to the dramatic tension is the assignment
of sympathies and antagonisms. This is something I've always bridled
a bit against, as the manipulation can be killing. In the wrong
hands it usually is. Challenge is to get it right, to keep faith
with whatever lives in your motive for getting it down on paper.

Movie: The Queen

(Cobble Hill Cinema ~11/15/06) Was admiring of the simplicity of it,
although maybe it fell short of the greatest insights as a result.
Mesmerized by performance of actor who played Blair. Helen Mirren
worked at something minimal that worked well. The queen's husband's
part was played a bit too over the top and obvious, and smarmy Prince
Charles maybe too. Most effective scene was where she paid her
respects, finally, to Diana and had to confront the horrible notes
about herself, subtly then reversed by the kid giving her flowers.
It the climax of this modest film and didn't fail to move. Oh, I remember what I was going to say--the scene where she's left alone and sees the stag (later killed) somehow missed the mark. Too planted, not present enough. Would be good to figure out why.

A Defense of Art, of sorts...

I'm the reason the world is worth preserving! he snorted.

Adaptability

The thing about our being so adaptable. We could be born into any
world, no matter how fantastic, and would take it for granted. This
might explain the persistence of culture as nurture, the staying
power of so many elaborate beliefs. Born and reared by them we know
no better, yet they become us, they bring us full circle, unless we
happen to witness the certain amount of ruin they may cause, as
happens more and more today on an Earth with fewer and fewer shadows.

In class this AM

She looks around smiling and with excitement at the antics of some of the other kids. There's no envy there, just a selfless shared enthusiasm.

20 yrs

It's been that long. There was love and there was desire to negotiate (ongoing), and family to create (also ongoing). These are of course the things most to live for, and out of which the only good can come. It took me time, but now here I am, ready to engage again. 12/5/06

Raising Kids

Something about raising kids as a blessing because it certainly keeps you insulated from wondering what it's all about (life, that is, and if you haven't quite sewn that question up..) So when the terrors come back to you at least they're novel and so have a kind of beauty about them. You haven't been so cozy with the terrors as to make them agonizingly static; possibility is still engendered by the fear.

Born Adaptors

The thing about our being so adaptable. We could be born into any world, no matter how fantastic, and would take it for granted. This might explain the persistence of culture as nurture, the staying power of so many elaborate beliefs. Born and reared by them we know no better, yet they become us, they bring us full circle, unless we happen to witness the certain amount of ruin they may cause, as happens more and more today on an Earth with fewer and fewer shadows.

Hart and Sevi - Halloween Night '06

Post-trick or treating...

Adks Shots

the answer

4504820103.34569000
I figured as much, she said.

retarded

I'm retarded standing up
Somewhat less so in my lair

Pictures for the Children

We're taking pictures
of things that will no longer exist.
They will resent us
for rubbing it in.
The fresh dew, the leaves, the abundance
Now a leather fruit engineered to withstand
the boiling rain is what they're given
We had it all, the fresh dew, the cares free.
They will resent us for rubbing it in.

Movie: Down in the Valley

A reverent mixture of Taxi Driver & Badlands, with maybe a dash of Shadow of a Doubt (although I never really saw that movie all the way through for some reason). Norton's performance is incandescent and the script holds its own for almost 2/3 of the movie. Unfortunately, aside from the father's (David Morse) great volatile performance, the casting falls down. The girl is bland and her kid brother seems to have been cast for his value as a still. He looks the malnourished alienated representative kid, but in his effort to portray it through his behaviour he's just directionless at best and at worst embarrassingly phoney. To wit, the moment when he discovers the gun and the blood on the bed--it's as if he's a silent film actor being yelled out off screen to do each little thing--caress the gun, look worried, look up, look shocked... Norton just throws off such a captivating performance that it would seem that as foils these nonactors need only respond and revere him, but it just doesn't play out that way--they're so bad they detract, and the end of the film when they strew his ashes in mourning despite the damage he's done them simply doesn't play. The last 3rd of the movie hews just to suspense formula and everything interesting bleeds out of the movie. The moment of Norton's shooting the girl, shot on him, just hearing her wheezing, was very effective, but that kind of marked the end of the movie being worth watching. All in all, the movie betrays its laid on concept, about our ambiguous relationship to illusion as a response to this alienating world we now live in, at the expense of the life of the characters. It loses its speficity and lets itself be quashed by plot, and Hollywood plot at that. It's too afraid to be rough and true as Norton's character would have it be, were he the filmmaker, psychotic as that might seem. But that's what Cassavetes did, and that's what gives life to a film. The film couldn't have done much poorer box office; they should have gone for broke. Casting Bruce Dern shows they were onto it, but lost their nerve.

The Pleasures of Difficulty

I think we may be failing to teach Sevi how effort can be identified
with pleasure. This isn't surprising, since it's a lesson we
ourselves could learn better, or I could certainly. There's a
negative reinforcing going on, probably here at home, and I'm
guessing it carries over into school. She feels inadequate to a
challenge, so she evades it or laughs it off, clowning it off with an
edgy nonchalance. The fear of more failure leads to disengagement
and increased concern about what other people think of her, which
begins to take over focus and leave her even less mental attention
for concentration for doing well at the matter at hand. I continue
to want to see her engage in some activity that she really takes to,
to see how with effort she can do well at something, even
exceptionally well. This lesson can then naturally color her
approach to other things, opportunities to rise to a challenge that
can be ultimately pleasurable.

Of course a part of me does have a distaste for the aggressive drive
to "excellence" because I feel that imagination can be the first
casualty. But maybe there is no dichotomy here. Imagination is an
appeal to something larger and unknown, a receptivity to it, and
wouldn't that also flourish with a more confident attitude?

the digital age

is all the rage
running through rackety hallways
hollering mad
slamming doors
shrieking get me there
scraping
bumping awkward
smarts
shame
all alone
don't stop for a second
you're sore
lost
get with it
or out

Dissection of Anger

It has two parts, always:
1. Injury
2. Desire for retribution.

Janus Collection - 50 yrs DVDs

• ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938), Sergei Eisenstein • ASHES AND DIAMONDS (1958), Andrzej Wajda • L'AVVENTURA (1960), Michelangelo Antonioni • BALLAD OF A SOLDIER (1959), Grigori Chukhrai • BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946), Jean Cocteau • BLACK ORPHEUS (1959), Marcel Camus • BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945), David Lean • THE FALLEN IDOL (1948), Carol Reed • FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959), Kon Ichikawa • FISTS IN THE POCKET (1965), Marco Bellocchio • FLOATING WEEDS (1959), Yasujiro Ozu • FORBIDDEN GAMES (1952), René Clement • THE 400 BLOWS (1959), François Truffaut • GRAND ILLUSION (1937), Jean Renoir • HÄXAN (1922), Benjamin Christensen • IKIRU (1952), Akira Kurosawa • THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (1952), Anthony Asquith • IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART II (1958), Sergei Eisenstein • LE JOUR SE LÈVE (1939), Marcel Carné • JULES AND JIM (1962), François Truffaut • KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (1949), Robert Hamer • KNIFE IN THE WATER (1962), Roman Polanski • THE LADY VANISHES (1938), Alfred Hitchcock • THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (1943), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • LOVES OF A BLONDE (1965), Milos Forman • M (1931), Fritz Lang • M. HULOT'S HOLIDAY (1953), Jacques Tati • MISS JULIE (1951), Alf Sjöberg • PANDORA'S BOX (1929), G.W. Pabst • PÉPÉ LE MOKO (1937), Jean Duvivier • IL POSTO (1961), Ermanno Olmi • PYGMALION (1938), Anthony Asquith • RASHOMON (1950), Akira Kurosawa • RICHARD III (1955), Laurence Olivier • THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), Jean Renoir • SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), Akira Kurosawa • THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957), Ingmar Bergman • THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (1973), Víctor Erice • LA STRADA (1954), Federico Fellini • SUMMERTIME (1955), David Lean • THE THIRD MAN (1949), Carol Reed • THE 39 STEPS (1935), Alfred Hitchcock • UGETSU (1953), Kenji Mizoguchi • UMBERTO D. (1952), Vittorio De Sica • THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960), Ingmar Bergman • VIRIDIANA (1961), Luis Buñuel • THE WAGES OF FEAR (1953), Henri-Georges Clouzot • THE WHITE SHEIK (1952), Federico Fellini • WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957), Ingmar Bergman • THREE DOCUMENTARIES: THE GREAT CHASE (1962), THE LOVE GODDESSES (1965), and PAUL ROBESON: TRIBUTE TO AN ARTIST (1979), Saul J. Turell

Scot-free

The dead body
Sloughed off like a costume
Grins unaccountably
All he convinced you of
Written there, but silly, dangling...
You're the one holding the bag.

Movie: Little Children

Good performances, great unfold of the plot, shots and cutting all
their own and effective. Only toward the end did I start to feel the
contrivance. The first I felt it was in one particular shot, a
medium shot with the belligerent friend and his megaphone at night in
the front yard with the addled mother of the pariah alleged sex
offender right as she collapses--it started to seem a bit
unintendedly silly there. Also the way expectations were played
with, in the thriller genre at the climax, seemed unworthy of the
film, although perhaps hardwired into the book. Perhaps my distaste
for it has to do a certain allegiance I feel to misfits and their
validation, where the whole point of this film from the title on down
was revealed at the end to really characterize the affair as an
illusory feat of immaturity. Then it was that I saw that the film
really does take this stance toward its characters, a sort of moral
high ground that only gives lip service to an actuality. And then
there are the huge lacunae that exist to make that case. For
instance the absolute irredeemability of Kate Winslet's idiot husband
and his panty-sniffing internet obsession is just a pastiche, and yet
it's this that somehow constrains her to this "kept" unhappiness
likened to Madame Bovary's? In the book club scene Winslet argues
heroically (against the pastiche of a suburban automaton) for the
validity of Madame Bovary's hunger for life, yet the film ultimately
doesn't embrace this position wholeheartedly. Its idea of maturity
seems to be to resign oneself to mistakes made in marriage rather
than confront or transcend them. What, after all, of promise is
there to be found in the huge gap between the failed lawyer's living
in the past and his narcissistic wife and her distrusting eclipsing
mother. Are we to imagine some kind of reconciliation? The more I
think about it, the more this film is a simulacrum of the message it
purports, briefly, to believe in. It signals things constantly about
the characters, such as Jennifer Connolly gazing adoringly into the
narcissist's mirror of their sleeping child, calling him "perfect"
over and over again. The framed professional bedside portrait we see
later of she and her husband, with her nearly blocking him out and
absorbing twice the light while he peers at camera over her
shoulder. These things are all signalled so that, as Roberta once
observed, we get them intellectually, but do we really feel them?
Has what's being put over in the film really got into the ring and
engaged us on that level, in the raw way that say a Cassavetes film
would? This film would not dare to stick its neck out, to be made a
fool of, to leave conclusions dangling. In a film like "In the
Bedroom" there was something much tighter going on with the story
that made it almost archetypal or mythic, and ironically the actors
within that (also owing to the tragic tone) could find something that
was less in danger of this kind of falsety. Here, while I really do
admire the film, I find the predisposition of it ultimately a little
confining. It came so close to the real, yet its shortfall was that
much more evident. I heard an interview with Todd Field by Elvis
Mitchell on "The Treament" (KCRW) and a remark by Field that struck
me was his view of characters as defined by the many different
situations they find themselves in and other characters they play
opposite. As in life, we are strikingly different people in
different situations. I saw this at work in the film, and it was
delightful to see. Yet, like a stereopticon, which gives you an
illusion of 3D, it differs here from the fullest reality which I
think is achievable even within a story, by being a series of flat
planes arranged in three dimensions, with all the control and insight
required to achieve that, but lacking, ultimately, the courage to
punch those planes out into the true 3 dimensions that they occupy.
I think maybe that the courage to take that on was a little more
childish, possibly ruinously foolish, than the filmmaker or the
writer would allow themselves without violating the theme of this work.

Revkin's comment back

Kevin, to my mind, has hit the nail on the head. Faced with a trajectory toward risks on a global scale, but without hard evidence, is it possible for humans to adjust current behaviors and investments to protect generations yet unborn? Not clear at all yet that this is possible. In fact, that’s the question I plan to explore in depth next year in The Times and subsequently in my next book.

As for what the world may be like, some modelers have looked out into the 22nd century, where the picture of possible futures actually in some ways is clearer than in the short term because the levels of greenhouse gases are potentially so very high.

I did a story precisely one year ago that is accompanied by an animation loop showing temperature trends in one scenario.

posted on October 31st, 2006 at 5:48 am 

Keepin' Busy

All of these who grandstand
About world peace
In the event of world peace
Might be doing less laudatory things
True
But that's not an advertisement for war
Nor to impugn the employment

The Preocuppied Piper

Vita

Vita breva
Ars bubble
Whilst Earth
Wobbles
Throwing off
Vita

Earth Smother

The old kind were wonderers
But we who make the seas sweat
The soils crumble
Can no longer wonder
With impunity

My comment to NYT's Andrew Revkin

Since new generations are being born into the inheritance of this
problem, is it not likely that a certain acceptance will occur and an
erosion of the idea that climate stability is a birthright? We have
already heard from this administration, in press conference with Dick
Cheney about 2 years ago, that we may have to give up our affection
for “Rocky Mountain meadows”. It seems to me that one of the most
ineffectual elements in the ability to persuade people of the dangers
of climate change is the failure to forecast in hard terms what life
might be like on an ever-warming Earth. Is there a reason why no
prognosticators I’ve read seem to be able to see beyond the year
2100? Why not 2200? At what point do much of our inland continents
come to resemble Mars? Only James Lovelock, that I know of, seems to
be looking that far ahead–correctly or incorrectly.

I’m wondering why the issue cannot be framed as simply as follows: We
cannot allow carbon currently sequestered in the earth to be released
into the atmosphere for a net gain in atmospheric CO2 any longer.
Anyone not working against this outcome, let alone working to
exacerbate it, is ultimately committing a crime against humanity.
What are the barriers to deeply cultivating this understanding in the
human psyche? Are we incapable of reacting “before the fact” (because
after the fact, as it turns out will be too late) due to some fact of
our evolution? Is there no precedent for our ability to respond
proactively?

Ethanol and Silicon Valley Venture Capital

Venture capitalists are investing on a technology proven to save consumers money at the pump, but for a lack of availability. These entrepreneurs and investors are taking this task on.

read more | digg story

Wide Iris Podcasts:

www.wideiris.net/video/demoreel4.mp4

cudless blue

bloodless coup

Yellow Teeth

A few nights ago, while getting her teeth brushed, Sevi informed me
that mine were yellow. "The better to threaten you with if you don't
brush!"

Spoon Runner

Hart had a spoon-running operation going while I did dishes and mama
and Sevi read "On the Banks of Plum Creek" in her bedroom. Hart
would take a spoon from the dishwasher (after I vetoed forks and
knives) toddle down the hallway with it, offer it to Sugi and Sevi,
then bring it back and put it in the dishwasher, clap, leave the room
for a second, then come back and repeat, sometimes taking more than one.

Day in the Park

Fun time with Gia and Alexander on his 6th bday at Wagner (?) Park on
the water by West St. near the Battery. 2nd year in a row, and Tom
Chapin was there this time, as well as the Klezmatics, and then
Beausoleil.

Casino copy

you find yourself saying "my horseshit is much better than their
horseshit"
....reminder: it's all horseshit.

p.s. - 14 Wedges to Fight Global Warming

Kolbert also good at communicating the concept of the various 14
wedges that must work in concert to make any kind of meaningful dent
in carbon emissions.

Book: Field Notes from a Catastrophe

Compelling, though takes a different tack than Boiling Point. Less
constructive on solutions. Writing is serviceable but a bit gray--I
don't know how many times Kolbert introduces a character with a
summary description of merely his/her eye and hair color. Probably
the most useful, and which Gelbspan didn't really characterize so
succinctly, was the idea of what it means to upset the climate
equilibrium that our civilization has enjoyed since its birth.
Kolbert adduces the beginnings of evidence that, yes, the earth will
always find climate equilibrium according to the laws of physics, but
that we shouldn't confuse that with the equilibrium that happens to
work for us. An expert metaphor she applied to this was that off
rocking the boat. You rock it one way, then another, it always sort
of settles back, but eventually the rocking will cause it to tip, and
the new state is equilibrium is the boat overturned. No one really
knows what overturning the boat will mean for us, but plenty of
evidence points to the fact that rocking has begun.

Hart's questions

For the last month or so, Hart points ALOT and says "ISH?" "IZ?"
"IZ DAT?" a lot, as well as his old standby "DI-POO"

Hart walks for real

Hart started walking, cautiously, but definitively, while we were up
at Camp about 2 weeks ago. The rugged variety of terrains up there
were so challenging that I think they gave him a lot to work with.
Upon returning to Brooklyn he's toddling around on two feet probably
more than crawling and grabbing onto things less and less to support
himself. He's basically got it now.

Brain Rental

poem or something about the fact that you're given a body and a brain
for only a little amount of time before it all degrades. about being
tasked with something to do with them. how do you know what's best?
the indeterminacy of Wm. James....

p.s. on Monk

wife is not nor ever has been Judith, but Nena--no idea where that
wrong info came from...

The Monk in the Guideboat

Saturday September 2, 2006, 11:15am. Was sitting by the boathouse at
the Lower Lake somehow feeling uncharacteristically at ease with the
world and hopeful, and then the bus rolled in and onto the porch
stepped Robert Thurman. I recognized him inside of about 5 seconds.
We exhanged hellos. It got me fairly buzzing with excitement, though
too shy to acknowlege that I knew who he was and had followed his
thoughts some time ago. Too many of my own thoughts elbowing in all
at once, and not wanting to spoil the candor. Heard him ask if the
club boat they were shoving into the water was a guideboat. Then he
and his wife (Judith I'm guessing, the writer, straight grey hair,
spoke with an accent I couldn't identify) made their way out in the
water. He was pretty hapless with the oars at first, but as they
pulled out in the distance I saw him adopt some coordinated strokes,
both oars at once. Two sons (I think) followed them out in another
boat. Something very momentous about the whole thing for me. It
really brought back in a huge rush all the things I'd been thinking
about when I was reading Thurman, watching his lectures on DVD etc
about 5 or so years ago (or longer?)--like a spore leaping to growth
with the right conditions. Made me want to think here was a real
boddhisatva... Not a day or so earlier I'd been wondering to myself
on the trail whether so and so was a "hungry ghost", or whether I had
become one...

some Rilke I'd forgot

I remember reading the Duino Elegies in the chill of October around Wichita TX just off the set of the documentary we were shooting. Trying to steal away and focus and let this be a part of me, as it turned out it was, really without my trying, throughout my 20s..I was then 26. Every encounter held that promise and drive, yet clear as I saw it, and as much a part of my thoughts, so many obstacles...something miserly and fierce resisting...

"For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation." -- Rainer Maria Rilke

Hart moos in no uncertain terms!

At the table on Sunday August 6, 2006 (I believe it was)--Hart made
mooing sounds when we referred to the cow on his Sigg Bottle,
repeatedly. Got a kick out of it too.

Hart walks, a little

On Saturday August 5 2006 I was playing with Hart at the Outdoors
Festival at Lincoln Center, and he walked a few baby steps toward me
by himself. Then he repeated the game over and over. Just baby
shuffling steps, then launching into my arms. Such a cutie.

Our weakness as species

We're good at fixing things
Except for the things we've broken.

Book: The Metaphysical Club

This is one of the best books I've read--ever. For sheer substance,
for bringing alive the complexity and interrelations in the history
of ideas, for making sense of some underpinnings of American thought
that are needed now, as they say, more than ever. It also debunked
many givens for me, as it detailed toward the end, the uses and
misuses of the "due process" clause of the 14th amendment. I'd known
that it was misappropriated to protect business enterprises,
conferring on them the same intrinsic rights as individual persons,
but I hadn't known of Oliver Wendell Holmes dissenting opinion of
that misuse as the enshrining of an economic ideology that it should
have been anathema to the Constitution to protect. And his later
dissent in the Abrams case, over the jailing of socialist
pamphleteers during World War I, and how that opinion, albeit a
dissent, helped pave the way for strong protections of free speech as
later interpreted by Brandeis from the 14th amendment in 1925. The
birth and evolution of thoughts of the "pragmatists" are traced as
relating very specifically to lessons learned from the Civil War,
particularly in Holmes' case (who was wounded, once nearly mortally,
in 3 different battles). It's a prizing of democratic process, not
on the basis of intrinsic human rights, but because a plurality of
voices will assure that the ideas in the best interest of society are
adopted. Pragmatism is pervaded by a distrust of ideology, of ideas
abstracted from context, because they inevitably lead to violent
conflict. The thought of Dewey, particularly as it was impacted by
his coming into contact with Jane Addams at the time of the Pullman
strike outside Chicago (1893?) moves in parallel. The idea that
antagonisms are simply failures to understand common cause,
misinterpretations. And Dewey's extrapolations bearing on education,
the following of instincts, the etiology of mental development
understood in a new way. In these, in particular, the book leaves me
with a great hunger to learn more. The evolution of these ideas
really make visceral sense as well by being grounded in their
reaction against certain fundamentalisms of their forefathers
represented in analogue by Darwin's challenge to Agassiz' and other
then-current theocratic theories of life's history and origins; how
William James came to value indeterminacy and a certain self-making
in philosophy, the overlooked contributions of Charles Peirce and
Chauncy Wright (which are as fascinating as they are for me still
hard to retain!) In fact the book is so exciting, so packed, so
alive with anecdote and relevance that it, probably alone among all
the books I've ever read, makes me wonder about the missed joys of
academic life. Menand is so brilliant he's apparently both an
academic and trader in ideas outside the gates, writer for New
Yorker, this book etc. This work has no must on it; it is no stale
recitation as some have been, such as Richardson's "Emerson: The Mind
on Fire", a book that was certainly very damp for its subject. It
lives, it wants to be read more than once, it's an invitation to
taking stock in a powerful grounded way of the place we find
ourselves today. Unqualified triumph I say. I'll read whatever
Menand puts out.

Bride-gear General

The bride sat like a general issuing orders. "Don't drag my train while you're at it" etc.

how much violence is ok?

I keep asking, when they talk about mistreatment of detainees. isn't
humane treatment of prisoners gilding the turd. support our troops?
you mean because we find it necessary to kill? why not, "support our
alcoholics" because we find it necessary to drink?

EKE

Documentary called "Eke" in which people who are comfortably
millionaires detail how they earned or came by the money. Eked out
their existence...

The Engaged Couple in the Photograph

together, looking out at you as from the hold of a spaceship, trying
and transparently failing not to betray the judgment they are placing
on the airless hostile environment around them. Because this is how
he read the photograph of the couple, the real airlessness, the trap,
seemed to be where they were, sealed off from commerce with the world
of ideas and affections.

Jane Addams' "A Modern Lear" - 1896

and the idea of "affectionate interpretation". Her refusal to
recognize the reality of antagonisms between capital (or a
paternalistic benefactor like George Pullman) and labor. Her
reflections on the Pullman strike, resulting from residents in
Pullman's model town of Pullman Illinois striking when their wages
were cut due to a cyclical depression yet Pullman resisted cutting
their rents accordingly. Goes to the core of the transformation in
Addams' thinking about the harm that can be inflicted by
philanthropy, to the extent that it privileges the benefactor and
puts him/her out of touch with the spirit of the time, the moral
ethic unique to the current generation, the "consent" of one's fellow
men. On the other side she chided the laborers for having no piety
with which to balance and negotiate their claim. The new order must
always acknowledge its debt to the old. The analogy is with the
family and the breakdown of affection and family claim in King Lear.
Good food for thought. Was apparently a big impetus in the
intellectual life of John Dewey.

graciousness

the forbearance and real charity of the superior athlete or intellect
toward those of lesser abilties. In reciprocation, their respectful
admiration and joy at the guidance and the example of phenomenal
performance. A respectful taking on of the mantle and in return a
kind of piety, an assigning of importance. That's the ideal anyway.
Falling short of that is disdain of the superior intellect and mighty
and envy, schadenfreude all around. Money, power, recognition all
offer their escapes from the execrable nature of this fallout in the
natural order.

Crash vs. Lantana

would be useful to compare these two similar films. Crash has it
moments, but is deeply flawed and phoney. Lantana, if I remember
right, never loses its hold on truth.

arguments

effective debate must try to corral the opponent in uttering a
statement that you have already identified as being indefensible.
sophistry? debate teams? what lawyers do? all of the above.

No one happy first...

Each maintained that the others' foul mood brought him down. Yet no one was prepared to be happy first.

Man so jittery

eating a chocolate bar in the subway so jerkily it was like a strobe
light was hitting him.

Man so thin

his shirt hung from shoulders as from a hanger. Something called
forth the feeling of falling. Everthing about him was stomach in
mouth, freefall.

Ann Coulter

has a face about as subtle and inviting as an elbow.

Environmental Devastation

Uniquely painful to our generation? Which is both acutely aware of it and tasked with responsibility for it. We may be the last generation to remember (insular though our outlook may have been, but mainstream was insular) an environment seemingly not under threat, as a refuge of the eternal and regenerative. As in, the mtns could cure you, make you see the thing of beauty and strength in yourself. Now the mtns are ailing, as with everything else, and the prevailing public mind (in this country) is not to care, to be "real". While to me the real is fast disappearing.

Movie: Flight 93

Was moved by it, found it good, though also sui generis. A film
about a time we experienced that brought back waves of dread. Was
curious to know what exactly happened and admired the fidelity to
facts, the restraint. A bit bothered by the silly jiggling camera
particularly in all the suburban settings with people and kids. I
was spurred to see this by Martin Amis' positive review, but now I
see he was referring to Greenglass' "United 93" that just came out.
Will see that when it's on DVD. Would be interesting to compare the
films, say in a film school setting. Goes back to that exercise I
always envisioned of tasking a class to break up into groups and
shoot the same script on the same set with the same actors--the point
being that all versions would be different anyway.

wm. paul cont'd

And you speak of "the agent" as someone with sensibility, someone who really KNOWS something. The agent is the default person, the bottom feeder who cares for nothing, the made-up man

Aging

"The years have been kind to you."
"Maybe. But I feel as though they've been talking behind my back."

manipulating people

I can't still give myself a satisfactory answer to the idea of
manipulating an audience, and you ask why I've made no progress...

wm. paul

everything about him was mirth and a perfect understanding of how
contingent he was. I wished I could be so laid back. I had a debt to
seriousness, and still do. A certain flailing exposure to
everything, to apprehending (maybe controlling) it all. whereas he
has seen this as a job o' work. not much troubled if screenplays
never get made or get mangled, or unphased, rather. smart, sane
grounded way to live, has closure, makes sense. my way is a
bloodletting of sorts, and a huge turgid floe of stasis to show for
it. if I ventured into that land of mirth I would decry it as the
worst cynicism. I can barely refrain from judging him, but awareness
of envy gives the lie to that...

Rehearsals

Film about people gearing up for various events of different kinds.
Maybe a la ronde, connecting each one. actor, business mtg, break-up
etc.

Beggars

film about how philanthropy has been built into our system as the
only way to mollify or correct wrongs. The best and brightest become
beggars.

Hart fed me

cereal at the SPAM party at Meghan Boody's tonight. He was very
insistent on putting the puffed kamut and corn flakes right in my
mouth. First kind of interaction like this. He was also having a ball.

SYA 25th

Very moved by this reunion, though in the days following this took
the form of a deep sadness. These people were the repository of so
many memories that I can't share with anyone else, and so little
effort was made, or felt it seemed, on the part of others, to
recapture them. This probably has mostly to do with the fact that
most people have moved on, are preoccupied with their present, and
I'm a little exposed at present (as usual) out of the lack of updraft
to my current life, as I hope for more projects and muscle my way
back in a script I left nearly 2 years ago. It was also, I guess,
that few among them were my close friends, so I guess their need to
talk to me was that much less. Woody also came across not so much as
the principled, if a bit stiff, poetic icon that I remembered him to
be, and more of a fundraiser, which is after all the biggest reason
he would have been attending, the value of memories notwithstanding.
It's weird, but this general sadness I felt toward the group is
probably some ingenious displacement of the sadness I actually feel
toward myself for not having achieved. It's true that I haven't
compromised a lot and have been stubbornly staking my own way, but
that way isn't so far doing much for the world and in fact is largely
hypocritical as I struggle to scrape out a living off the good works
of others. I don't enjoy the esteem of anyone, have no recognition
for having done anything in particular, and in no way enjoy the
pyramidal profits of advancement in a chosen career. What I have
done at least is found love and started a family, without which I
know none of the rest would matter. Still I wish so much to have
connected more. I am aware that this big swoon of nostalgia rests on
something very sentimentalized--my view of the year has enormous
lacunae, the whole crisis of possible paternity (so ridiculous now in
retrospect) that worried me almost to paralysis for a good several
months has no real place in it. Or perhaps it's that second release
of independence that followed that alarm being passed that makes it
even more poignant. For the record, it was at Chuck's home.
Attending were Suzie, Eric, Barry, Giles, Chip & Kristin (now
married), Chris, Nat & Woody.

Book: To the Finland Station

I was captivated by this book as, I guess, an antidote for the sorry
state of the world. So much of the history of the idealism behind
revolutionary movements has been conveniently overlooked in light of
the ghastly history of the Soviet Empire. The equally ghastly
conditions spawned by capitalistic empires run amok have been
eclipsed by it. It may be that the urge to revolution is just a
component of the human spirit, maybe even an infantile one (in the
sense that it is not all providential and no less morally ruthless in
practice than the order it challenges), yet it was undeniably also a
response to unchecked power and the history of suffering that it
caused. The fervor, the ascetism, the sense of mission all of course
bring to mind the profile of the terrorist in today's world, and this
is perhaps why the goal of governments has been to rob terrorist
groups of even their claim to ideologies (the war is against
terrorism, not even something remotely salvageable, like "the
communist menace" of 50 years ago.) Any opposition is "terrorist",
the raison d'etre of such groups being death, chaos and ruination.
There is some mention made of radical Islam of course behind much of
it, but a pointed avoidance underlies it of ever trying to enter into
the mindset of the terrorist. This is a book about such a mindset,
only it provides a good look at the conditions of 19th century
capitalism that gave rise revolutionaries like Babeuf, Saint-Simon,
LaSalle, Marx & Engels, Bakunin and utopians like Owen and Fourier--
and the way rebellious thought converged into disciplined thought,
and that into the course of action eventually adopted by Lenin and
Trotsky. Written in 1938, and prefaced with something of an apology
by Wilson in light of the Stalinist nightmare, it nonetheless does
credit to the hopes and dreams of those who would not allow their
lives to bear passive witness to the decadence of a world order that
was destroying human dignity. Is there a similar way out of the
predicament today? It brings to mind the success too of early
Christianity in the late Roman Empire; as it offered a pure and
ascetic moral alternative to the abuses reigning over the human
population, co-opted though it was to be by those very forces.

Movie: Crash

TV for the big screen. Some great performances, a few gems of
scenes, but all shrink-wrapped to phoney formula. You feel the
buttons being pushed and feel that the scenes themselves thrill to no
consequence--it's a hit and run by the filmmakers. Nothing
breakthrough, nothing true. Pretty forgettable, Oscar
notwithstanding. A Christmas Carol meets LA.

candle thoughts

I can't hold a candle to you. It'd burn your hair.

A woman reading "US" magazine in the subway. Poring over pictures of
downy pears beading with condensation, she a melting candle.

Movie: Six Shooter

So this short film, which won the Oscar, is the best the world can
do? A good actor pitted against a bad actor in a script that...what
can I say, is just hollywood writ small. No life, no relevance, no
mystery, humor that misses, a few gags. Just some phoney crap by a
for some reason "celebrated" playwright cutting his teeth in the
typical slighting way on the movies. the best the world can do...
well that leaves some room for improvement at least.

Reptile Brain

I'm convinced that without awareness and applied effort to counter
it, the typical human consciousness devolves throughout life AWAY
from empathy and compassion and toward dogged self-centered survival
instinct. Nearly everything that makes life valuable gets lost in
that process, pruned away as inessential. You might cite the same
thing in sex, where at first one is overwhelmed by the presence of
the other and knows love, only to abstract from the experience some
habit of using the other toward the end of recapturing bliss. It
bears repeating. A human being is an end in his or herself. "A
person's a person no matter how small..." - Dr. Seuss

Sevi & Hart

Sevi running to school this morning accidentally kicks her butt with her upflying foot. Immediately tickled to death by this and keeps repeating it intentionally.

the doomsayers

doc that thoroughly explorers the assumed ulterior motives and
pathologies of those concerned with doomsaying issues, environmental
and otherwise. The point would be to compare these with the motives
of those who would ignore any warnings of threats to human health and
environment and see how they stack up.

film called "Wherewithal"

Most important lesson to impart

and to live:
A person is an end in his or herself.
If that were the only wisdom I could pass on, it would be enough.

Doc about guys employed to make sure things break

the obsolescence engineers that must exist

the word "bedevil"

always makes me think "boll weevil"

Ossification of the Architect

Maybe one reason for the ossification of the architect, his taking
refuge in the mantle of the stoic visionary and "great man" with his
eye on immortal concerns, is his inability to be self-critical, at
least in public. How could an architect say of some of his earlier
work, "I was faking it," or "Boy I really got that wrong!" when
people are still living in it? This would be like a famous surgeon
saying, "Those operations I did in the 70s? Boy was I an amateur
just poking around in people's organs. I hadn't a clue!"

Doodling

The thing of my constant doodling on pads as a kid. Hit the point of
a very interesting pattern or drawing, but still with pen in hand,
needing to doodle on, pushing it pas the point of balance and into
something overwrought, noisy, thick and tangled. This is how I feel
about what can go wrong in the approach to film editing where,
because it is so easy to do, the point of perfection is glibly passed
over, the sense of beauty is missed and before long the faculty
dulled so that the idea of their even being a restraint, a kind of
balance, is no longer recognized or appreciated. Which is why I had
an early distinctive distrust dislike disgust with music videos.
They were an oxymoron. The real music was in the story. Editing was
the process of finding and completing a symphony of meaning. While I
see now that the whole culture has gone the way of worshipping this
newer understanding of editing, few filmmakers coming through its
discipline have been able to hew it to ends that I can admire. Most
produce eye candy and think that's enough.

modesty

some discover it early
others have it beat into them
some ram it home for good measure
in obsequies

The Architect

Long a believer in space kept by stone
Now wanting to come unstuck
be lambent as the image-makers
who shimmer with no bearing
who've never been jealously
guarded by some final belief
He wants to shake it off and
Be Change.

Defense

I'm not going to say what you egg me on to say in defense of art, my
art, whatever. No targets will be given in the utterance to dissolve
into froth. I'll jealousy horde my bone.
'

Movie: Grizzly Man

Herzog still has it. In fact, has it more. His attachment to this
guy is one of pure paternal affection, of the kind that he had for
Bruno S. Only here the guy is this weird Hollywood-inflected loner/
outcast, and the amazing thing is, it's not at all difficult to see
him having become a Woody Harrelson (to whom he apparently lost out
in casting for "Cheers"). Onto his story Herzog is able to graft
very organically his vision of the diabolical chaotic world the
romantic finds himself struggling for meaning in. But it's just a
perfect find for Herzog--it's like found art. This guy is in fact
pushing something like a death wish in his drive to become one with
the bears, and you sense the meaning of his salvation from alcoholism
in these charged moments of rapture after his close encounters. As
in Stroszek and some others, the overlay is very much in the vein
that Errol Morris taps, juxtaposing him against uncomprehending
others, Americans passing judgment in their middle-American scripted
ways, or casting him as something of the idol of misfits, but the
difference is that I don't think Herzog really ever has contempt for
these people, I think his compassion is true, while Morris is
savagely bitter (though often uproarious too). Herzog seems not to
have that sense of irony. In keeping with his characterization of
America as "the most exotic place on earth."

A rule of thumb in film editing

Think of the woman in France who got her face rebuilt. She looks like
a monster. It does little good to say "But think of what she looked
like before"
Because no one, seeing her for the first time. Ever appreciates
that. Likewise, never pride yourself on what you've cut out from a
prior version no one will ever see. Look at what's there, always,
for the first time.

Cardinal Rule of Film Editing

Think of the woman in France who got her face rebuilt. She looks like
a monster. It does little good to say "But think of what she looked
like before"
Because no one, seeing her for the first time. Ever appreciates
that. Likewise, never pride yourself on what you've cut out from a
prior version no one will ever see. Look at what's there, always,
for the first time.

Revelation in Coop

after running into Deb M. and her husband Jason in AM. Something
about people vacillating between considering others as ends in
themselves and others as means to ends.

Sugi's 42nd Bday

Sevi and I made "Rebecca & the Wolf" DVD
Chocolates from Bierkraft
Bottle of St. Peter's Cream Stout
For Dinner, Made:
Balsamic-Roasted Seitan with Cipollini Onions (Shallots used as
substitute)
Buckwheat Vegetable Pancakes with Spicy Yoghurt Sauce (hold the spice)
Maple Chestnut Mousse w/ Whipped Cream and Chocolate Shavings
--all recipes compliments of Peter Berley's "Fresh Food Fast"

Sugi's 42nd Birthday

Sevi and I made "Rebecca & the Wolf" DVD
Chocolates from Bierkraft
Bottle of St. Peter's Cream Stout
For Dinner, Made:
Balsamic-Roasted Seitan with Cipollini Onions (Shallots used as
substitute)
Buckwheat Vegetable Pancakes with Spicy Yoghurt Sauce (hold the spice)
Maple Chestnut Mousse w/ Whipped Cream and Chocolate Shavings
--all recipes compliments of Peter Berley's "Fresh Food Fast"

Oo the shots, the shots!

Talk of the gorgeous cinematography is exactly analogous to picking
up a novel and saying, "what wonderful use of the word 'asseverate'
or 'badinage' or 'quondam'." What smart sexy words and look how well
used! Or picking apart Mozart and saying, "lovely use of the 'A
note' or the "arpeggio". Certainly this kind of thing is done, but
in these cases it becomes that much more obvious that the admirer is
missing the point, which is the flow, the story, the totality and its
implications for our existence, our apprehension of beauty IN the
cosmos, not abstracted from it.

Book: Axel's Castle - p 2

You read reviews of books of fiction on websites, and much it comes
down to "The author took me away to another time and place." Is this
all that's required? The consumer criterion ne plus ultra? It seems
that the frame of interest is simply in titillating the consumer in
this way of escape. Is this the legacy of Symbolism/Modernism?
Because for the last century we seem merely to have elaborated on it.

WSJ vs. NYT

Mark Voelpel's theory that businessmen want to know the truth.
"What's really happening in Iraq, or anywhere?" makes the Wall Street
Journal politically neutral and objective in a way that the New York
Times definitely is not. He feels the NYT is in the business of
cultivating public opinion primarily to be pro-Israel, and that's why
it has found uncritical common cause with the so-called War on Terror.

He's very big on this book "Don't Think of an Elephant" which is
about the history of Republicans assiduously working to shape
rhetoric in the US.

Book: Axel's Castle

This book sat on my shelf for 18 years before I finally read it.
(Had been a roommate's I think.) Coming to it now, I was voracious
for it. It's made me realize how scattershot my knowledge of
developments in literature really has been, despite the much vaunted
English major at Yale. Granted, this study is really comparative lit,
yet I'd never HEARD of the school of Symbolism, for instance and its
real role as the handmaiden of Modernism (the latter term Wilson
never uses; don't know whether Joyce, Proust, Stein etc were even
being called modernist in 1930, when it was written). In any case,
fascinating on Eliot, Yeats, Proust and Joyce. Each essay made me
want to pick up the originals again and delve. I think it has me
fired up to re-read Swann's Way in a new translation and likely go
beyond it.

Interesting structure in the way that Wilson sort of limns Symbolism
and its exponents at the beginning, but really much more effectively
defines at the end of the book after having adduced these examples of
its heirs. Just as Romanticism was a reaction against Classicism,
and Naturalism a reaction against Romanticism, Symbolism sort of
subsumed Naturalism and Romanticism both. He talks about Joyce's
excruciating attention to the details of human behaviour and cultural
life, a Naturalist obsession, yet with the kind of lambent,
suggestive and highly idiosyncratic method of telling, a kind of
multi-valent perspective relentlessly at work. With Proust he
focuses among other things on his unconcern with naturalistic
exigencies on the one hand, the kind of dream logic plan of the
work. The symbolist thing that Wilson emphasizes in conclusion seems
to be universally escapist. On the one hand a way out of the
objective mechanistic shortcomings of say, Zola or even Flaubert, to
waken us to the possibilities of consciousness; on the other hand--
and here a marked departure from Romanticism--an absolute refusal to
engage the actual world, to affect it, but rather to construct an
alternative to it, so rigorously constructed and rich as to be an
alternative world. The title comes to Villiers D'Adams' "Axel" whose
castle really represents this rarefied alternative to having to
live. A tendency which filtered down or was echoed in Mallarme,
Valery etc, whose concerns were the periphery of consciousness as
access to the quick of things, or in the latter a renunciation of
content for process--kind zen-like it seems or Buddhistic in its need
to empty. The other option, that of Rimbaud, was literally escapist,
and in his case from literature itself, and escape into the real
world, from which he cultivated nonetheless some hermetic resistance
all the same. Gertrude Stein whittling down language to a
distillation of something overlooked or unexplored, which seems to
have nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of language, which is
communication, something like private totem or sensation freed from
history and meaning. These are just gluey ramblings to help me
remember, rattled off quickly with Sevi begging to type, so wrapping
it up

Tolstoyevsky

my favorite author

the viper couple

vying with eachother for a shot a things to bite and poison

Movie: The Human Stain

Good book, but felt sorry for all involved in this movie, even before
I saw it. Was very faithful indeed, but could not succeed on that
basis. Robert Benton, Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, all cornered
in an enterprise of phoney-ness.

The Personal Fallacy

To believe that high art and inspiration lives with any person is a
profound mistake. Some catch it through serependipity for a while.
Some struggle and never find it. The rare few continually pursue it
and get it, sometimes, again and again.

Chipmunk Boy

In Grandma's basement at the Brooklyn Children's Museum
A chipmunk boy
A Disney character without words
Smiling and nodding with degrees of vehemence
Pointing out things to Hart, who was fascinated
And I naming each thing
And this affable kid nodding
Fuzzy headed cheer
Bounding about
Perfect little time.

thrown from the throne

At the Y

Grey ponytailed plodding man/woman scowled down at us lined up against the wall in the gym at the Y. Kids were on the mat. The woman (as it turned out) was telling us about the gym and swim class. ..."Then we sometimes have them onto those colored mats over there and sing "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands. If you're not, get the hell outta my gym."

"Have them leave by that door. The next class is coming in by the other door. If they try and leave by the same door we might lose one. I get 200 kids a day here, and losing maybe one isn't so bad, only about .5% unaccounted for, not bad, but the parents do get upset about it."

Taimse 'Im Chodladh
Tráthnóinín déanach i gcéin cois leasa dom
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé
Sea dhearcas lem' thaobh an spéirbhean mhaisiúil
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé
Ba bhachallach péarlach dréimreach barrachas
A carnfholt craobhach ag titim léi ar bhaillechrith
'S í ag caitheamh na saighead trím thaobh do chealg mé
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé


Is mó buachaillín óg a thógadh go ceannasach
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé
Do cuireadh le foirmeart anonn thar farraige
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé
Go bheicfeadh an lá a mbeidh ár ar Shasanaigh
Ughaim ar a ndroim is iad ag treabhadh is ag branar dúinn
Gan mise a bheith ann mura dteannam an maide leo
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé


Ba bhachallach péarlach dréimreach barrachas
A carnfholt craobhach ag titim léi ar bhaillechrith
'S í ag caitheamh na saighead trím thaobh do chealg mé
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé

(is ba mhaith liom "reputation point" le h-aghaidh sin!)

Delete It

at my funeral

please have someone play

taimse im chodlah

Father and Son Sushi

Kid rubbing noses with his warm Mediterranean papa at the sushi bar
in Cobble Hill. Dad was broad-shouldered dark and smiley with a
woolen sweater and pants with vertical black and white stripes. 6 yr
old kid and he kept rubbing noses lovingly.

Movie: Kiss of Death

Seeing Mike Leigh's "Kiss of Death" was a great surprise--one I'd
long ago missed and didn't know existed, but with all the elements
and the feel of 70s haplessness. The caricatures that nonetheless
aren't hiding nothing. Resolved in a more shaggy way but with much
the same placidity as the last scene in "Life is Sweet".

Roberta at 80

Apt strewn so I could note each trip she'd made over the past weeks
by the discarded piles.

Corporate character

with the sunny phoney uncomprehending ruthless disposition of a
corporation.