'The Good Lie' : Making A New Life In America - dnoakescharternet's Blog - Blogster

'The Good Lie' : Making A New Life In America - dnoakescharternet's Blog - Blogster

American Sniper: The Toll of War - dnoakescharternet's Blog - Blogster

American Sniper: The Toll of War - dnoakescharternet's Blog - Blogster

Review: "Big Eyes" (2014) - Tim Burton, Amy Adams Movie HD

"Bright Eyes" is an offbeat Tim Burton directed movie, which ,might seem redundant for those familiar with his earlier films. Amy Adams ("Enchanted", "Trouble With the Curve") plays Margaret, a young single mother who flees bad marriage in 1958 and takes her daughter to a bohemian part of San Francisco to make a new life with her young daughter. While looking for a regular job as a commercial artist, she also tries her hand at selling her work free-lance, her specialty being heartfelt but rather obvious portraits of children with large eyes. Her work is given a boost by her new Type-A boyfriend, Walter Keane, played by Christopher Walz ("Django Unchained") who is a dabbler in the arts with a great talent for self-promotion. After they marry, Walter tries to pass off her paintings as his own, under the theory that art produced by a woman cannot be successful as a man's in mid-20th Century America. As the success of the "bright eyes" portraits reaches national and international proportions, Margaret struggles to reclaim her identity.

Burton does a good job stifling his usual penchant for the outlandish and the grotesque you might have seen in his "Alice in Wonderland" or "Batman" films. There is also a refreshing lack of snark about the art in question. Margaret's artwork is shown meeting with criticism and snobbery, but the film gives it her and her followers a proper respect. The style of the movie evokes a bohemian (but pre-hippie) San Francisco of the 60's that feels right, and the story is briskly paced.
Here's the trailer from You Tube. Like too many "coming attractions" it gives away too much of what is good about the film so if you like surprises, please  just view a minute or so of this. 

Pete Seeger--Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and If I Had a Hammer

It just happens sometimes---I found a CD of Mr. Seeger (the album) "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs",  from 1967, and brought it home, setting it aside by my computer to play. Pete Seeger's performance of this song  on the CBS variety show, "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" in 1967 or so that gave prime-time network television a bit of dissent over the rapidly expanding American war in Vietnam. The "cultural wasteland" or genial but shallow situation-comedies, cop shows and and happy singing tune-stylists on other variety shows was invaded by Seeger's own brand of anti-war activism.  And he and so many others were just getting warmed up.

Seeger earned his stripes travelling with the likes of Woody Guthrie and later facing Congressional disapproval during the Red Scare Era of the late 40's and 50's.  One doesn't have to agree  with everything an artist sings or writes or says to admire him or her deeply.  As he got older, his strength as both a performer and an activist who  believed music could change minds and make us all a bit more human to one another has left a marvelous legacy I hope others in his field can continue to follow.  

 
Listening to the album this morning, after hearing of his death last night, I had a sense of how much his presence will be missed as much as his legacy will live on and on.

 As Arlo Guthrie put it this morning, "Of course he passed away, but he's still around".  

RIP Pete Seeger

Book Review: "A Long Way Down" (Nick Hornby, 2005)

“Jess thought for a moment. 'You know those films where people fight up the top of the Empire State Building or up a mountain or whatever? And there's always that bit when the baddie slips off and the hero tries to save him, but, like, the sleeve of this jacket tears off and goes over and you hear him all the way down. Aaaaaaaaagh. That's what I want to do.'

'You want to watch me plunge to my doom.'

'I'd like to know that I've made the effort. I want to show people the torn sleeve.” 
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

Nick Hornby's "A Long Way Down" is my favorite novel of last year, never mind that it was published eight years previously.  We rebellious spirits let a book rest on the shelf a while before headed to the second-hand book shop or the library to take it down.   The novel concerns four disparate characters living in and around contemporary London who happen to meet on the top of a tower block in the metropolis on the same night (New Year's Eve) with separate intentions to jump off the top of the roof and end their lives.

The main characters are Martin Sharp, the former host of a popular British morning talk-show,  who  loses his high-flying career, his marriage and contact with his daughters after the tabloid press  outs him for having a sexual relationship with a 15 year-old girl.  The fact that she was 150 days from sixteen and  just under the legal age of consent, also lands him in prison.   When we meet Martin he feels he is at the end of his rope, reduced to hosting a talk-show on a network (Feet Up TV!) whose  ratings are abysmal.  Martin is the most well-educated and once-successful of the group, but to my mind a character as vulnerable as any of the rest with the added problem of being recognized by many strangers, some of whom are both jealous of  his former success, and verbally reminding him of his fall  from celebrity.  

There is also Jess, the rebellious teen-aged daughter of a junior Cabinet Minister. She has issues with authority figures, says what is exactly on her mind at all times (in contrast to the circumspect  father she dislikes) and has recently been dumped by her boyfriend.  It is the quest to find Jess's loutish ex-boyfriend
at a party that (and for her to confront him face-to-face with some direct questions and vulgar insults) that  gets the four would-be suicides the initial quest which binds them together.

“A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.”
― "Martin Sharp" , A Long Way Down

J.J. is the one ex-pat in the group, an American and the former member of a rock band, The Yellow,  which never  quite made it and has now broken up, although  one of the former members has now gone onto success as a solo performer.  He is also shy one former lover, a girlfriend who be believes left him because he who longer fronted a touring band.     Deprived of working in a recording studio and convinced that he has no chance to "be someone", JJ decides to end it all by diverting from his evening rounds, delivering pizzas from a London restaurant.

The fourth protagonist is a fifty-something single lady, Maureen ,who has given up her job to look after her severely disabled teen-aged son, a task that has given her no little private time whatsoever, and no hope that her son will ever progress beyond an almost catatonic and child-like state.  (She checks the young man, Matty, into a clinic on her way to end it all and then, after a change of mind, she goes back to caring for him in her small flat.)  She is the only religious character in the book, and never swears, the latter trait being much to the amazement of the others.

“How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies.” --J.J.

 In the hands of a more overly-sentimental  writer, this might be a film that would take the easy route and show the reader that each of these character's sufferings  could be alleviated  by mutual support  and good fellowship. But Mr. Hornby will not let us all the hook with such a well-trodden path.   The sting of self-destruction and the hard-business of people putting their oft-desperate and damaged lives back together makes for a four -person journey that is both unique for each of the main characters and where their  support for one another often backfires and brings them to get one one another's nerves as much as soothe their fears and compensate for their lonely or unfulfilled lives.

The  book is quite funny at times and has its share of penetrating, common- sense insights into the human condition.  Hornby has a matter-of-fact writing style that leaves no room for easy answers. But he also gives his characters in "A Long Way Down" an affirming sense that while suicide is a route taken by some, it is neither an inevitable destination for all who seriously consider it, nor are people as alone and unique in their distress as they might feel. Even in a dark rooftop at the top of a building in a lonely but crowded city, one distressed person or four might just  find odd reasons (and odd people) to argue, laugh, frustrate and make happier for a time of a life  with.

There will soon be a film version coming out in March of "A Long Way Down" with Pierce Brosnan as Sharp,  Toni Colette as Maureen, and Rosamund Pike as Jess.  One hopes it will be faithful to the original story.

 

Issac Stern Plays Erik Satie: Happy Holidays To All from Ashland Oregon!

One of the most beautiful version of this famous piece by Erik Satie (Gymnopedis # 3.) I'm sending it out to those who are getting through the long winter nights in the Northern Hemisphere, and anyone else who might stop by from the Antipodes. (My thanks to Sheryl Lynn Bence for putting this video together.)
Here a bit of the Snows of  Ashland Oregon we had last week.  Most of the US and Canada has had a unseasonably cold late Fall and, oddly enough, it's been a too-too dry December--these pictures were taken during a snow fall that hung around and turned to icy conditions with little of the follow-up rain we get to really fill the mountain passes for the Spring runoff. .  Most of the heavy rain we get in this part of the West is concentrated in the last weeks of the old and first weeks of the New Year.

 Here is hoping you have the Christmas/Solstice weather of your dreams wherever you are!

Song for a Saturday: Aretha Franklin's "Say A Little Prayer" (1968)

If you asked me in my twenties to name my three favorite superstar lady singers I would have said, Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield and this lady:

Dionne Warwick is usually associated with ""I Say a Little Prayer" because of her long association with Burt Bacharach and Hal David.   But the First Lady of Soul did quite a job with this song herself. Interestingly it was not originally seen as a potential hit tune.

Here's some of the back-story on this great tune, courtesy of Wikipedia:  "Intended by lyricist Hal David to convey a woman's concern for her beau who's serving in Vietnam, "I Say a Little Prayer" was recorded by Dionne Warwick in a 9 April 1966 session. Although Bacharach's recordings with Warwick typically took no more than three takes (often only taking one), Bacharach did ten takes on "I Say a Little Prayer" and still disliked the completed track feeling it rushed. The track went unreleased until September 1967 when it was introduced on the album The Windows of the World which largely consisted of older material; it was Scepter Records owner Florence Greenberg rather than Bacharach who wanted "I Say a Little Prayer" added to that album." 

Aretha's version came out a year later. It also hit the top ten on the US Rhythm and  Blues charts. This is a terrific video that does justice to her beauty and talents.  Which version is better? I'd just as soon listen and not judge.  

Bill O'Reilly Fails Basic Logic and Economics

The amazing Bill O'Reilly a man who is both an  elitist and a claimant  for the status of tribune of "the folks out there" has his admirers despite the fact that he rarely gives any critics on his show a chance to finish any sentences.  His annual pretense of a "War on Christmas" every December is becoming a regular part o f the holiday festivities at Fox News, just the way some other networks do an annual presentation of movies like "It's A Wonderful Life" (1946) or "White Christmas" (1954).   There is no arguing with Bill on his own show without his "Irish" getting up, so it's best for opponents to  take his "talking points" and respond to them one by one so they can finish their thoughts, the way Bill-O does for himself but fails to do for others.

Here we see a classic logical fallacy:  begging the question. Bill can "beg the question" (assume a premise is true without presenting verification of same)  with the best of them. Some governments in Europe have a more developed social welfare state, ergo, it must be true that all economic problems  are caused by domestic spending on health services,education and pensions. Richard Wolfe goes a way in setting that straight by pointing out that very solvent nations have the same benefits and are doing quite well.  Even Ireland (one of Bill's  dreaded "nanny states") is recently out of major debt problems, and although it had to pare down its public sector,  it did stop abandon services.


  O'Reilly  is listed as having graduated from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard but I doubt he would have made it past my Logic or Economics professors at community college  with his "begging the question" tactics or for promoting a single-cause explanation for major events (the reasons various nations in Europe fell on hard times in 2008-9.)

If O'Reilly  thinks the US economy is just Greece or Portugal writ large, he should check out how well the stock market and corporate profits have been doing lately, and also note how much of the gains have gone to the small dividend-grabbing  crowd at the top at the expense of those average taxpayer guys and ladies of the middle and working class who paid off the debts of the major investment banks like AIG and Goldman Sachs or  have been downsized into near or total poverty and are still waiting for all the good things  to trickle down to Main Street. (It's better for Main Street than a year ago, granted, but not by much--such is the legacy of the worst economy since the Great Depression.)

The truth of the matter is that multinational financial capital run amok played as big if not as big a role in the disasters of the USA and Europe, disasters fueled in part by toxic Wall Street securities tied to the housing bubble in the USA.  To ignore that equation is to forget there is more than one elephant in the room and it takes many a pachyderm to make a stampede.

Thoughts on John Kennedy and the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination

"We were never innocent.

"That word is invariably used to describe what changed in America 50 years ago today when a dashing young president was murdered in Dallas. But the word has never been quite right.

"Anyone who was 40 years old the day John Kennedy died had already lived through global economic collapse, factories silenced, smokestacks stilled, bankers selling apples on street corners. She had seen the agricultural heartland dry up and blow away in towering black clouds of dust, the former tenants dispossessed and forced to flee. She had seen war on a scale that beggars the imagination, mass murder in numbers that blaspheme God and a nuclear sunrise over Japan. Just the year before, she had seen the world teeter on the brink of another nuclear catastrophe.

"We were not innocent.

"And yet, something did change when Kennedy’s motorcade executed that hairpin turn onto Elm Street and Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger of that mail order carbine. After that moment, something was different, something was lost — and it has haunted America ever since."--Leonard Pitts, Jr., columnist Miami Herald. 

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/19/3765118/jfk-assassination-what-we-lost.html

A lot has been written about John Kennedy lately.  He is a man more memorialized in death than almost any other contemporary figure in the United States.  He has been both made larger than life and cut down to size by details about his personal life and decisions he made in the 994 days of his Presidency.  I have no personal recollection of what was once called "The New Frontier" but I grew up in the shadow of the  events in Dallas fifty years ago, with my parents and many of my friends feeling that something was lost that could not be replaced.

  JFK had a mix of  charisma, intellect and courage.  He was not universally liked by a long shot, but he seems in retrospect to have been growing towards becoming an important if not a great president who might have done more to bring the world further away from the threats pf nuclear destruction and started on the path to becoming the first President of the United States since Lincoln to use the "bully pulpit" of the White House to achieve a real new era in Civil Rights.

Too many questions remain unanswered about this man to say with certainty what the 1960's and the decades beyond would have been like had Kennedy lived longer.  We just will never know.  What we do know is that war abroad and riots and a loss of faith in government and all public figures came after his death. How would the personality and polices of John Kennedy have mitigated this loss of faith and national sense of optimism?   We can only speculate and watch television and read articles and books and wonder.  We who did or would support this man in office are left with a gnawing  unknowable anticipation that, in the end, will never be fulfilled.  


    Even the events of his death provoke sharp debate and this I feel is not the day or the place for me to add to that. I mourn his loss for my parents who admired President Kennedy and for those friends who do remember the events of that terrible day fifty years ago.  And I mourn for what might have been for my generation, a mourning without dewy-eyed sentiment but with a sense of something lost from a random and treacherous action. This president's cruel murder had nothing to do with courage or working for peace and equality and national security--things Kennedy I believe  would have continued to strive toward,  no matter what his poll numbers or his flaws would have revealed about him had he lived another thousand days or more. 

Colin Woodward's Eleven "States" of The Americas

For those who wonder why politics is so fractious in the United States, here is a map that does go some way to explaining how hard it is for a President and Congress to agree to a consensus on the role of government in health care law, or  issues such as immigration, abortion, gay rights, taxes for large corporations, income inequality, et al.   Indeed  the very nature of government itself is a controversial topic in the USA more so than I think you'll will find in most post-industrial nations. To understand an event like a mass shooting in one part of America, one needs to reflect on how the majority of citizens in each region view the role of guns and regulations on them. It is rooted in a past that may or may not be resentful of what is viewed as outside agitation or overbearing authority.

“To understand violence or practically any other divisive issue, you need to understand historical settlement patterns and the lasting cultural fissures they established.”--Colin Woodward

Here's link to an article in Market Watch which provides more information to Colin Woodward recent book,  and a follow-up  article in a Tufts University (Massachusetts) magazine. It gives a sketch of the 11 "nations" and how he believes they got that way.  
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/themargin/2013/11/15/understanding-the-u-s-s-most-divisive-issues-by-dividing-the-u-s-into-11-nations/


The first thing you have to do is throw out the  state borders.  As a resident of the state Oregon who has lived  in both the Far West and Left Coast areas I can say there is a definite shift in political and even cultural hegemony when you cross over the Cascade Mountains that cut across the state from North to South. The Left Coast has its share of conservatism, but the Portland-Eugene-Salem metro areas are more in tune with the voters in "Yankeedom",  the liberal-to-moderate New England/East Coast,  3,000 miles apart.  Whereas if you are visiting places such as Klamath Falls and Bend Oregon on the "Far West" part of the same state you may feel you are closer to the more rural and conservative (and clannish) areas of the Rocky Mountain and Upper Midwest states.       Folks in San Francisco and Los Angeles are more alike than some citizens who live closer in a geographical proximity to the respective cities in the Sacramento-Stockton part of the Central Valley, but there are differences (i.e.,  more of a Hispanic cultural force to the South, from the proximity to Mexico.)

Indeed the whole issue of international boundaries is less of a help  on both North and South  Borders. One living in Portland or Seattle and the liberal arts college and university towns to the south may well feel more akin to the politics of Vancouver, British Columbia, than to the eastern areas of the same state in the same nation. And surely many residents states like Idaho and Montana feel closer to the mining and ranching reaches of the Canadian  Rocky Mountain provinces like Alberta than to the "Left Coast".

The American way of life will likely become more fractured if present trends in population diversity and income inequality spread. Our politicians will continue to try and "ride two horses" (or maybe three) at once in the great "Circus Maximus" that is the national arena.  And more lucky pols some will just have to make one of these regions happy, and others (like the Obama Administration or any President afterward) will have to try to make the most of what little commonality there is on economic and social issues across the continent.

  The institutions that thrive in this environment are not political, I would say, but rather  the large international banking giants and the resource industries (oil, natural gas, shale, tar sands )  and those who make military hardware. The upper tiers of business  likely have long accepted that the lines on a political map of North America are often just that----lines, and, allowing for some exceptions within these regions, more indicative of the nation than any official boundaries.  

In and Around (Random Photos of the Sites of Ashland Oregon)

A squirrel from just beyond the  fence line near the backyard. I think he headed for greener pastures  for better acorns near the park, or to find a mate.

Much the same angle from the backyard, just near sunset last month as Summer ebbed.

 Lithia Creek in Lithia Park (Ashland Oregon)

A tree turning fall colors on our street at  mid-October

The base of a redwood tree, planted in Lithia Park in 1922.  

The view from the bottom of the twin redwoods. Majestic towers indeed!  

" Whatever you're thinking of doing, don't!"    

The Lithia Bandshell, where the Ashland City Band performs on Summer nights, and  July 4th festivities. It also is where students from the local university, Southern Oregon, hold their graduations.  

The Park  again, this time near the Japanese Gardens. 

Here's one not like the others: A fuzzy shot of  me at the City Lights Bookstore,  on Broadway in San Francisco, circa 1992. 

A rather large mushroom (or toadstool),  the most impressive fungus in the neighborhood. 

The Elizabethan Stage at The Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  Last year the eleven plays shown over eight months at the three festival stages averaged an 89% attendance rate.  I saw  "Taming of the Shrew here and there are also plays this year by Tennessee Williams and a variety of modern writers.    This set was for "Cymbeline" I believe. 

The plaza at the  Elizabethan  Theatre. Just to the right is the indoor "Bowmer Theatre", named for the festival  founder, Angus Bowmer. The "Green Show" is an open-air presentation of various cultural music and dance productions on a rotating basis, available for free during the summer months. 

The walkway up to the Bowmer Theater. The official name of the theater area was "Chautauqua Park". In the late 19th/Early 20th Century this area was set up for presentation of the  annual Chautauqua adult lecture and musical entertainment circuit.  The movement, which featured social, scientific and political leaders and experts expounding on topic of the day,  and band and opera music.  provided cultural diversions for people outside the major cities in the America Middle and Far West.  The term was coined from where the movement started in the 1880s in  Chautauqua, New York state.  Here's some more information, courtesy of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chautauqua

One of the older Victorian houses just south of downtown. 

Lee Marvin: The Wanderin' Star

Film actor Lee Marvin (1924-1987) came across on screen as a quiet, intelligent  but perhaps dangerous man who knew the darker side of life .    He was not a stereotypical actor, his Oscar for a duel role in the film "Cat Ballou" (1965) came from his ability to play both comedy and menace with equal apparent ease.


Until his major success  in films (after a stint as a supporting player and the lead of a early 60's Cop show called  "M Squad") Marvin played a great variety of characters, from heroic parts in movies like "The Dirty Dozen" (1967), to the American black market fur-dealer in Michael Apted's Moscow -based crime drama "Gorky Park" (1982) to the anti-hero Walker in director John Boorman's "Point Blank", made in 1967.   Marvin could hold his own on screen with all major actors he played opposite--including John Wayne, who probably wished he could had  Lee Marvin real life biography.    

  The first clip is part of his unforgettable portrayal of a predatory frontier outlaw  in  John Ford's  1962 classic film, "The  Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" with John Wayne and James Stewart.  Neglected when it was first released, this I believe is in important film in understanding the tension between American cultural passions for "freedom" and the dangers of a society where lawlessness leads to terror and  violence  when some, through greed or brutality,  abuse the vacuum of law and order in a civilized place.


Marvin knew a lot  about terror and brutality.  As a young  man, he was a combat Marine in the Pacific Theater, and received a Purple Heart medal valor in the Battle of Saipan in 1944.   The effects of the war left him, according to a recent biographer,  with what would today be called post-traumatic stress disorder. He led a hell-raising, heavy-drinking lifestyle in the early post-war years--trying to erase the incredible terrors he saw on the faces of his comrades..   Returning to his hometown of Woodstock, New York, he worked as a plumber with his father and, as legend has it,  found his way into a local theater company when he showed up to fix a leaky sink and the director saw the coiled potential for violence and raw energy he needed for the part of a tough guy in play set in a  saloon.    Whatever the truth of this, that streak of violence and rawness mixed with a quiet and believable authority worked.    Twenty year later, Marvin, an international star, would return to Woodstock to care care of his ailing father and, after two failed marriages and several affairs with his leading ladies, reconnected with his high school sweetheart and married her.  He turned his back on the Hollywood scene apart from his film roles and lived the rest of his life in New York state and a comfortable suburb of Phoenix, Arizona.

In this next clip Marvin waxes melancholy singing an off-key version of "I Was Born Under a Wanderin' Star" from the California Gold Rush musical "Paint Your Wagon".  The film is uneven and too long, but it has its moments and Marvin "sells"  this ballad of  wanderlust with a great mix of sadness and gusto.  Few actors other than Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney could have brought  such conviction to this scene.  

Marvin's quintessential role for my money is as "Walker" in John Boorman's film noir classic "Point Blank".  The material is from a Donald Westlake novel. Walker is a determined man, a career criminal who has been double-crossed by his friends in a heist job.  He comes out of prison looking to get his share of the  money he is owed and extract a calculated revenge.  Marvin's character is a  man who only wants what is due to him.  It turns out that the crime group he once worked for has gone corporate and crime is now in the hands of white collar operators who can't understand why a man would want butt his hard head against this new Corporate Crime Establishment?   Why won't Walker change, and accept his place as part of The System? He is a man out of place in the new order of American White-Collar Crime.  It is that unwillingness to do so that makes him an American Rebel, AKA, a figure to root for despite his violent nature.

  Walker is a haunted man--an old-time robber lost in a world of the late 1960's Los Angeles psychadelica, with the criminals now faux hipsters toting wallets full of credit cards and living in penthouses, sheltered from their crimes by pay-offs to the law made with money managed by fat, sharp -eyed accountants who have  twenty-year mortgages on a house in the valley, nice offices with corner views in the city and pretty secretaries.  The world has moved on and his kind of "eye for an eye" restitution befuddles these suburban crooks and bagmen who just want a quiet life.   Walker moves  too fast, is too single-minded and unreasonable, and won't stop.  He   wants $93,000, what he feels is his due, and nothing more.

Marvin went on to other major parts and made a lasting mark in American cinema and with critics all over the world.      There may be a few "Lee Marvin" types around today , but only one was the genuine article.

"Big Sur" (2013) : Jack Kerouac's Retreat: Love, Fame, Pain and The Whole Damn Thing!

A film version of the Jack Kerouac novel "Big Sur" was previewed at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and is scheduled to go into at least limited release in North America next month.  Being a fan of Kerouac's writings, I am looking to this one.  Written in 1961, it follows an autobiographical path: Jack Kerouac (the Sal Paradise of his most famous novel, 1957's "On the Road").  The French-Canadian/American writer from Lowell Massachusetts finds his "instant  success"  overwhelmed him.  To many young people, he is the new prophet, but to the establishment he is part of the "beat-nik" world conformists associate with sexual and countercultural excess.    Robbed  of the privacy he needs to work by the demands of fans and media hawks looking for a quick story and a quicker buck he needs a respite to continue his multi-volume Proust-like novels--known collectively as "The Legend of Duluoz". He flees from his public and takes a cabin in the woods near the famous California Coastal community to continue his writings, of which "Big Sur" stands as one of his most important, along with "Dharma Bums" and "The Subterraneans".  

A still from the film, set partly in early 1960's San Francisco,  featuring actors John Marc-Barr and John Lucas as  Kerouac and Cassady, along with an insert of the real men.



The novel deals with a period a dozen years after the events of  "On the Road"--the early post World War II America, where Jack Kerouac had finished his studies at Columbia and the New School for Social Research in New York City, ended  one marriage, written a novel, "The Town and the City" (1950), that was not   widely received and not in his true "voice" as a writer. He had met a group of literary friends (including the "beat" poet  Alan Ginsburg and the eccentric, iconoclastic writer,  William Burroughs)  that would form the core of his peer friendships. He had also been heavily influenced by the vibrant outlaw, hobo, womanizing  free spirit and hard-as-nails railroad worker, Neal Cassady, known as Dean Moriarty in "On the Road" and as "Pomeroy" in "Big Sur" . Below, an interview with the actor John Marc-Barr:

 It was this relationship more than with any author or professor that fueled Kerouac's liberation from copying the style of Hemingway or Thomas Wolfe and toward a more revolutionary writing known as "spontaneous prose".  America itself of course was an influence as well, the people Kerouac met as he hitchhiked and drove across the USA back and forth--tramps, cops, drug addicts, barkeeps, cotton pickrs, spiritual seekers,  roving reprobates, hustlers, jazz cats and women looking for a man to both love for his exuberance and energy and tame for herself.  He opens himself to experiences only he could translate into words with as much verve. There is a sense of desperate grasping for all "the mad ones" still plying the concrete and steel trails of the giant frontier nation before it sinks under the weight of its  own material success.  Further dimensions were fueled by his explorations into Buddhism and those then-unique "Bebop" jazz--he and other white hipsters hooked into.  The African/American jazz clubs with sometimes anonymous sax and trumpet players exploring intimate recesses that their brethren in New Orleans decades earlier had pointed towards--it was all coming to a new experience in music from San Francisco to Chicago and New York and all points between. .    


I haven't had a chance to see this film but from the reviews and the smart people who seem to be in and behind the camera I have some hope that this will be a film that may do justice to one of America's most influential authors.    

Doug's Site Special Report: "Fears and Phantoms Work Well for Demagogues...For a Time

"Good evening Mr and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea, let's go to press",as the powerful and (for many) scary mid-20thcentury New York columnist , Walter Winchell, used to say on his national news and gossip radio show..

First a bit about old Walter, courtesy of the invaluable Wikipedia:

"His newspaper column was syndicated in over 2,000 newspapers worldwide, and he was read by 50 million people a day from the 1920s until the early 1960s. His Sunday-night radio broadcast was heard by another 20 million people from 1930 to the late 1950s. (One example of his profile at his professional peak was being mentioned in Richard Rodgersand Lorenz Hart's 1937 song "The Lady Is a Tramp": "I follow Winchell, and read every line.")

"Winchell, who was Jewish, was one of the first commentators in America to attack Adolf Hitler and American pro-fascist and pro-Nazi organizations such as the German-American Bund. He was a staunch supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal throughout the Depression era, and frequently served as the Roosevelt Administration's mouthpiece in favor of interventionism as the European war crisis loomed in the late 1930s. Early on he denounced American isolationists as favoring appeasement of Hitler...Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Winchell was also an outspoken supporter of civil rights for African Americans, and frequently attacked the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups as supporting un-American, pro-Nazi goals. After World War II, Winchell began to denounce Communism as the main threat facing America.

"During World War II, he attacked the National Maritime Union, the labor organization for the civilian United States Merchant Marine, which he said was run by Communists.^[6] In 1948 and 1949 he and the influential leftist columnist Drew Pearson "inaccurately and maliciously assaulted Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in columns and radio broadcasts."^[7] Winchell also labeled African-American-French entertainer Josephine Baker as a communist after she took him to task for not questioning the racial-discriminatory policies of the Stork Club in New York. His relentless campaign against Baker prevented her from getting her visa to enter the US renewed.^{[citation needed]}

"During the 1950s Winchell favored Senator Joseph McCarthy, but he became unpopular as the public turned against McCarthy. He also had a weekly radio broadcast which was simulcast on ABC television until he ended that employment because of a dispute with ABC executives in 1955.

"A dispute with Jack Paar effectively ended Winchell's career, signaling a shift in power from print to television.^[9]

"During this time, NBC had given him the opportunity to host a variety show, which lasted only thirteen weeks. His readership gradually dropped, and when his home paper, the New York Daily Mirror, where he had worked for thirty-four years, closed in 1963, he faded from the public eye.

"The most controversial part of Winchell's career were his attempts, especially after World War II, to destroy the careers of personal or political enemies. A favorite tactic was to accuse them of being communists or of sexual impropriety.^[10] Winchell was not above childish name-calling: An example is his feud with New York radio host Barry Gray, whom he described as "Borey Pink" and a "disk jerk". ^[11] When Winchell heard that Marlen Edwin Pew of the trade journal Editor & Publisher had criticized him as a bad influence on the American press, he thereafter referred to him as "Marlen Pee-you".^[5]

"For most of his career his contract with his newspaper and radio employers required them to reimburse him for any damages he had to pay, should he be sued for slander or libel.^[12] Whenever friends reproached him for betraying confidences, he responded, "I know — I'm just a son of a bitch."^[5] By the mid-1950s he was widely believed to be arrogant, cruel, and ruthless.^[13]"

Ron Paul--son of Rand,  and father of the Tea Party Fear Faction and Dissemblers, Ltd.

In other words, as he got older, Winchell more and more overplayed his hand and became narrow-minded and petty and cruel. He enjoyed being a maker and breaker of reputations in show business and politics for many years, until at last the public had enough of his bullying tactics and he fell out of favor.

Proving that justice does occasionally flow down like a mighty stream as Martin Luther King pointed out, Walter spent time in a  Las Vegas lounge act, reliving his former glories as a mover-and -shaker in the Nevada desert, witnessed by  an audience of bleary-eyed drunks, low-rent gamblers and curious types looking for a laugh at the once-mighty. Later the self-described Son of a Bitch  was saved from late-career obscurity by being hired to narrate  a popular ABC cops-and-crime show set in the 1920s called, ironically, "The Untouchables".  

As long as people are scared, men like Winchell and Cruz gain in popularity. But there comes a time when the timidity of the crowd leads to skepticism and a return to fair play and process building.  It might take a few years but the demagogues lost their appeal and we go forward as a nation, making up for the lost time we had when fear of "reds" or "socialized health care" fades away and people see things as they are, not what the angry and the grasping wish they were.

Bachmann of Minnesota, failed Presidential Candidate and one who predicts "mass killing of women and children" if Obamacare  is implemented.

There are more than a couple modern-day Walter Winchells around today, and not all in the media.  The most successful of which are currently Ted Cruz of Texas and all those who follow in his wake, as well as about two dozen Congresspeople of the tea party loony town including Ms. Michelle Bachman of Minnesota,  Louis Gomert  of Texas  and, of course,  Senator Rand (as in Ayn) Paul of Kentucky.   They do not care about the reputations of their colleagues or  about laws passed in other sessions or even vital government services for veterans and seniors and kids; these birds  want power and to play to the worst fears of the public about the public sector.  There is a market for such fear-mongering. The Winchells of today  have found their target (The Affordable Care Act) and are keen to use their microphones to spread lies faster than any reasoned argument can rebut.

Cruz of Texas---Next stop the White House? Or Federal Psychiatric Ward?



The US government shut down yesterday for the first time since 1995. This was the end result of a struggle between Republicans in the minority tea party faction to delay and essentially repeal the Affordable Care Act of 2010, which is now a law. There have been some 40 attempts to repeal this law, and none of them have been successful.  The problem is that whatever reservations the public has about such a major piece of legislation, which changes an industry that accounts for between 15-17 percent of the GDP of the country, most people find some elements of the program acceptable and approve it by the defacto  reelection of President Obama and VP Joe Biden in 2012.   The Senate is in Democratic hands by a handful of votes, the direct result I would argue of the tea party wind of the GOP endorsing too many far-right candidates (like Richard Murdock of Missouri, who suggested that a woman being raped was just God's Plan for bringing more  children into the world and other inanities.)  Far-rightists who won primaries in states such as  Indiana, Delaware (Christine O' Donnell in 2010)  and Missouri  proved unacceptable in a general election, allowing weakened Democratic incumbents to keep their seats.  Had the GOP chosen more moderate tribunes to carry the party forward, the Senate might look  different.  But such is the course of the Republican Party these days it is hard to moderate a viewpoint without being called out as a craven coward by billionaires and Fox News-enraged voters.

Michael Gerson of The Washington Post put it this way in part of his September 29th 2013 column:

 the development of an alternative establishment — including talk-radio personalities, a few vocal congressional leaders and organizations such as Freedom Works and Heritage Action— that creates a self-reinforcing impression of its power to reshape politics (while lacking much real connection to the views of the broader electorate)..

In other words, the big donors of the GOP  are afraid things will improve too much for too many.

Cruz  is apparently the de facto leader of the GOP right now, as the nominal leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, finds himself too afraid of the far-right base in the Bluegrass State to take him on.  Among other things, Cruz has already called a former Vietnam War veteran, former Senator of Republican Nebraska, Chuck Hagel, a possible agent of the North Koreans and urges GOP members of the House to avoid any compromise with the White House that would leave the Affordable Care Act standing, despite it being approved and passed by a previous Congresss, signed into law and found Constitutional by the Supreme Court.

  He is not in Washington to write or amend laws, but to serve his personal agenda which is to intimidate and insult his colleagues for the benefit of the tea-party crowd back home.

  To their credit, this has not stopped Senators John  McCain of Arizona and  Bob Corker of Tennessee from criticizing Canada-born Edward Cruz  for his his blustery and bullying tactics. Nor did it prevent New York GOP Congressmen Peter King (hardly a liberal) from referring to Cruz as a nut.

No one would suggest the Affordable Care Act (Or "Obamacare") is a perfect law. No law that effects such  a large number of people and had to pass muster with a sizable portion of the health insurance, hospital, doctor and pharmaceutical lobbying powers that ring  Capitol Hill and all of Washington could ever be anything more than a series of compromises between corporate profits and consumer affordability. But it will allow millions to get some health care (along with their children) and thus promote the general welfare of a nation that has lagged behind other comparable nations in reaching out to those who have suffered for want of care for too long.  A 2010 study by the Harvard Medical School revealed that upwards of 40,000 people, young and old, died due the lack of a better health system, many because they had to put off health care for too long and only went to the Emergency Room of a local public hospital as a last resort. Once there, they had to be sick enough to justify getting the care they needed, and many of which had developed advanced cases that could have been better addressed had they been able to access a primary care doctor weeks or months before.  So the ACA is not a law in search of a problem, as the voting restrictions in Florida and North Carolina are.  It is a case I would argue of the United States catching up with the rest of the developed world in treating health and the "right to life"  itself not as a privilege, or something only concerning the unborn, but as a human right.            


 It will still leave many Americans without insurance and it no doubt has flaws which will need to be amended as goes forward, which I can say has been true of EVERY major law that has passed in Washington in the last few decades,  no matter which party controlled the Senate or the White House.   But this tea party crusade is not about amending anything--it is about tearing a law apart even though the votes to do it do not exist in either part of the current Congress

Also factor in the problem the Republicans are having with engaging Latinos, women,  and independent voters of all races and genders and you have a party of purists who can hold seats in gerrymandered House districts in Texas and North Carolina and in ruby-red states in the "empty quarter" states like Wyoming and Idaho and Utah but who don't play as well in Florida, California, Illinois and New York.   The demographic changes in the nation do not bode well for the Grand Old Party which might go a long to explain why they have tried to make voting laws more restricted in many states, despite little evidence that voter fraud is as wide spread as the draconian changes that are being  put in place. .        



 The last time there was a federal shutdown it was in 1995, with a dispiriting  battle royal between Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his personal bete noire, President Bill Clinton. At that time Speaker Gingrich was laboring under the notion that he had created a special new office for himself--Prime Minister of the United States.  The success of the 1994 Congressional Elections for his party and the main-steam media focus had made him feel as if it was his inevitable role to lead the nation until such time as he could replace Clinton with himself or some hand-picked successor in the White House.

This did not come to pass.  Gingrich essentially took whatever success he had and plowed it into the ground by being constitutionally unwilling to see that the government had a role in the economy.  The shutdown lasted 28 days.  In the end Gingrich did not survive his own tactics. Now the stakes are higher than so long ago because there.are fewer moderate Republicans about to temper the hawks and the need to raise the ceiling on federal spending (funds already spent) will appear soon and with it the threat of a market downgrade by the real powers in the economy, the banking titans, which would slow the economy.  That many  members of the GOP seem unconcerned about this dark development only illustrates the desire to the "let-me-have-it-all, or nobody-gets-anything" mentality of the extremists among us.          

Jon Stewart  put this all rather well in a recent segment of his "Daily Show" on Comedy Central. The link is here below.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/539756