Tales from the Old New Land - Tale 4 - A Bit More

And having a playback memory, Carmen remembered something he said about copying down everything he said that sounded vaguely like a reference to Isaiah 8:1, and recorded every word of what he said for fear that he'd demand of her why she did not comply with the order he gave mid-binge/tirade to record these pearls of wisdom. In fact, she did it immediately after he let her go from the ledge. She kept a copy of it on her person every day of her life, in case the Producer ever returned and demanded to see it.

The Producer and Carmen slugged on after that night for another sixteen months. When Carmen finally became Steve's, she was more radiantly beautiful than ever before for two whole decades, and considering the dangers she'd passed, one could argue that she was still more beautiful inside than out. Nevertheless, her ribs had the consistency of crushed ice, her joints bent in manners no human being should, the simple act of arising from her bed was pain itself. Among those who'd experienced repetitive trauma, it is not uncommon to deal with the constant rebreaking of bones, degenerative disc disease and an eventual lumbar spinal fusion; bone spurs, torn ligaments, degenerative arthritis, staff infections from corrective surgeries. And that's only from the effects from before he started to hit her face.

This is mercifully not a book in which to discuss the particulars of tyrannical behavior which cause such internal horror. This narrator has neither the patience nor nothing like the fortitude to speak in any more than generalities about the abominations perpetrated upon Carmen and he asks your forgiveness for his need to speak any further of these depravities. But if this fictional rendering of a single Hollywood player getting off on the scent of blood has anything like the ring of veracity to you, then he asks you to at least consider how many thousands there may have been over the past century of powerful Hollywood men who've acted precisely like this.

This particular apparition of a Producer knew on the night of this "window dressing" (his charming term for what transpired that dawn) that his days as a respected Hollywood player could be counted with two digits. Don't mind us the circumstances of his ignominy, there were any number of risible cinematic bombs in the late 70's and early 80's which wiped out Hollywood producers, production companies, and whole studios:

There was At Long Last Love, Peter Bogdanovich's trivial homage to 30's movie-musicals, Cole Porter songs, and Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedies - because nothing oozes Golden Age Hollywood class quite like Burt Reynolds, who became a superstar a few years previously when Deliverance allowed us to watch him kill a Georgia hillbilly with a crossbow while the hillbilly sodomized a 300 pound Ned Beatty.  There was The Exorcist II: The Heretic, a shameless money grab of a sequel starring a miserable looking Richard Burton during a period when he looked like he was taking parts in horrible movies just so he could pay his astronomical bar tab. There was The Swarm, a horror movie about killer bees that starred Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Olivia de Havilland - because what everybody wanted to see in the late 70's was the biggest stars of 1945 in a horror movie with a plot too absurd for Roger Corman to film. There was I Spit On Your Grave - a film that couldn't even find distribution for two years because of its quarter-hour depictions (notice the plural) of gang rape. There was X-rated Caligula, a movie made through the combined talents of literary lion Gore Vidal and Bob Guccione - publisher of Penthouse Magazine, who simply wanted to record a literal rendering of the depraved events within the Roman Emperor Caligula's palace in Tacitus's Annals. Every imaginable degradation seemed to find its way into the script; raping a bride on her wedding day - and her groom, sex shows involving children and the deformed (if you don't believe me, watch it), gladiatorial public execution, and a confusing scene for which poor Helen Mirren has to use what is hopefully a prosthetic vaginal cavity to depict herself giving birth as part of a (literally) execrable performance within all these execrable performances. After seeing the original cut, Guccione decided that audiences weren't getting their money's worth, and insisted on inserting a forty-five minute bisexual orgy near the end which the Roman Senators and their wives are coerced into having.

There was, of course, Heaven's Gate, which lost 30 million dollars, ran to nearly four hours in original cut, deliberately killed a horse with explosives, was yanked from movie theaters after less than a week, and bankrupted United Artists - the greatest of all movie studios - forever. Some swear it's a misunderstood masterpiece, this narrator doesn't want to find out... Of course, it has a ten minute rape scene...

There was Inchon, the B-Movie hagiography for America's Five-Star General in Asia, and for a moment in 1952 America's would-be dictator, Douglas MacArthur. Financed with no expense spared by a combination of the United States Military and world's most infamous cult leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, with MacArthur played by the world's greatest actor - the ailing Lord Lawrence Olivier - for a cool million bucks, and directed by Terrance Young, who made the first few James Bond movies. MacArthur's closest confidante was played by Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft. Who'd have conceived that a movie of such disparate parts would come unglued?

There was Tarzan, the Ape Man - in which a mythical White Ape turns out to be a white man raised by apes and therefore must be brought back to civilisation in England where he can be taught proper discourse. Nevertheless, he retains the animal sexual magnetism of Africa, which overwhelms poor proper and prim Jane. Tarzan's character was found offensive by some in the 1910's when he first appeared, imagine the reception by 1981. Yet somehow, there've since been another six Tarzan movies.

And who can, or should, forget George Lucas's Howard the Duck? A PG live-action movie in which a loveable alien duck gets transported through a wormhole to our world. In the course of the movie, he gets dumped by a club bouncer into a hot tub where a couple is having sex, a human that turns out to be an alien who has a tongue seems to extend like an erection in the presence of Lea Thompson, Howard's duckbill attempts to bite the ass of a sixty-something black woman whose onion-like posterior he finds quite stimulating, he excitedly opens Playduck Magazine in which we see a photo of a duck with curves and hair and feathered white nipples (later in the movie we see duck boobies with pink human nipples), the Cleveland Police Department sexually assaults Howard the Duck, and actor Jeffrey Jones (himself now a convicted sex offender) walks in on Lea Thompson seducing Howard the Duck.

And, of course, Ishtar. The only of these risible and bank-busting movies directed by a woman, and the only one whose director never directed a movie again. Perhaps Ishtar was, truly, the last movie of the Old-New Hollywood - directed by Mike Nichols's old comic partner Elaine May, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty starring, Vittorio Storaro (Coppola and Bertolucci's cinematographer of choice) doing the photography, co-starring New Hollywood luminaries like Tess Harper (Tender Mercies) Charles Grodin (from an Orthodox family), Jack Weston (Weinstein), Carol Kane (Woody's first wife in Annie Hall and an Oscar nominee for a part in Hester Street that she acted in Yiddish), Aharon Ipale (Israeli), Fred Melamed (Sy Ableman in A Serious Man), David Margulies (Hollywood's character actor of choice when you needed a Jew). Is it any wonder that a film bombed that had so many Jews involved whose scenario was in an Arab country?

Something rotted in that air of freedom which made the New Hollywood Golden Age possible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It was inevitable that the freedom which allowed for realistic depictions of ordinary people with their ugliness intact, with sex, and violence, and emotional turmoil unshielded by a production code, would curdle into freedom's betrayal by making its depictions into something sickeningly exploitative - sometimes freedom's very liberators betrayed it. In the case of Hollywood, what appeared to be a glorious liberation turned out to be merely another swing of the pendulum that landed on equilibrium for a moment before swinging into decadence. Today's Hollywood has a new production code, a code that allows for rivers of blood so long as the violence is confined to an unrealistic genre and its human consequences softpedaled, a code that allows for the naive innocence of children to continue unabated into adulthood with bro comedies about manchildren, a code in which romantic comedies in which love's ugly moments are airbrushed out of existence, a code dominated by action movies in which the stars are the special effects. Just as in the old production code, today's Hollywood movies can still be damn good, but in the opinion of this clearly not humble enough narrator, almost none of them show us ourselves. There are ways around the problem - movies like The Social Network and Her and WALL-E and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which only show us a complex image of the human spirit by showing us how technology may have completely reshaped it; or movies like Boyhood or the Before movies or (believe it or not) Borat, in all of which the experimental gimmick that makes them possible is so radically extreme that they can only be done once and never be copied. There are some very fine and human directors working in Hollywood's orbit if not actually 'in' Hollywood: there are at least two American treasures: Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater, both of whom manage in every movie to say something new and elusive about America. Among the 'tribe', there's Jason Reitman, or at least was, who made three of the great American movies at the beginning of his career with Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and Up In The Air, all three of which manage to say something new and elusive about America, and there's John Sayles, whom nobody remembers anymore, but twenty years ago was the God of Independent American Film. There's Ang Lee, who isn't even American, but easily beats Americans at their own game. Errol Morris, the documentarian who makes movies so utterly different from everyone else's that you shouldn't even call them movies by the accepted definition. 

Other than them, there are, as Woody once called them, the Academy of the Overrated: Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, PT Anderson, Wes Anderson (whom in all fairness seems to be improving), Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufmann, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh (who at least tries to be more ambitious), Sofia Coppola, Peter Jackson, Ken Burns (it takes a rare talent to make the subjects of his documentaries boring), David O Russell, the Wachowskis, Gus Van Sant, Tim Burton, James Cameron... 

These are directors so enamored of movies that they jam pack their movies with references to other movies and forget to put references to life in them. Perhaps that statement is unfair, there are exceptions in every one of their outputs, but the exceptions are very few compared to the misfires. There is a kind of ersatz profundity to their movies - movies like The Matrix and Inception and Avatar and I <3 -="" a="" able="" about="" and="" anderson="" are="" arrested="" brothers="" burton="" challenge="" charlie="" coen="" contain="" cookie.="" cynical="" darkness="" david="" development="" fincher="" fit="" font="" for="" fortune="" gravity="" huckabees="" i="" incomprehensibility="" kaufmann="" last="" like="" love="" lynch="" meaning="" messages="" mistake="" movies="" nbsp="" of="" other="" philosophical="" pt="" s="" tarantino="" tedium="" that="" the="" tim="" to="" used="" wes="" which="" whimsy="" within="">therefore perhaps movies against movies. Most alarmingly, and prevalent to nearly all of them, movies that mistake technology for humanity. Even among the directors unaddicted to CGI, there are more breathtaking shots in today's American movies than ever before, but to what end? Today's auteurs have utterly mastered the technical end of filmmaking, and perhaps because we've mastered technique, we've forgotten what the technique is for.  

Meanwhile, people who've devoted their whole lives to film tell us that the world is experiencing a cinematic Golden Age of which the United States is the only first world country who remains excluded. As with so many things about Contemporary America - soccer, news, public transit, languages, condoms, history, black humor, cheap health care, gun laws, and vegetables - we have in America have only the dimmest awareness of the feast that often seems to happen in every corner of the globe but ours because we're too busy playing with our toys.

Special effects are the new stars of Hollywood. The highest grossing movies are no longer character based movies like The Godfather or Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy or Easy Rider or American Graffiti or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or MASH or Fiddler on the Roof or Patton. There were plenty of smaller, character driven films during these years that did well, but it was between 1975 and 1990 that technology become the undisputed box office king, and after that came the systematic gutting of movies that portrayed Americans in their natural state in anywhere but independent film and the Miramax ghetto. Just over the other side of 1975 lay the Star Wars Trilogy and Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Indiana Jones and ET and Back to the Future and Roger Rabbit - and how human and full of personality do those early Spielberg and Lucas and Zemeckis movies seem next to the high-grossing movies of our time! Would it surprise anyone that Tom Cruise or Chris Hemsworth or Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson were actually computer programs or robots that only exist on a screen? There was even an Al Pacino movie about that exact notion fifteen years ago called Simone. Maybe Jennifer Lawrence is just an updated Simone, an indication that these computer avatars have improved to the point that seem so like us humans that perhaps humans are indistinguishable now from robots!

This New New Hollywood came into existence because the knowledge that movies like Caligula and I Spit On Your Grave and Heaven's Gate and Howard the Duck gave us of what we were capable of was too terrible. The freedom to create greater and more uplifting spectacles can also give us things too vile and revolting for contemplation. All it took was less than a dozen movies in which the human animal was presented to us undeniably in all its stinking shit, and the movie world's been running away from its truth ever since.

Our dearly beloved Producer could have been working on any of these movies, it doesn't matter which, but by the same time the next year, The Producer hadn't worked on a movie for nine months; nine months during which his fists literally performed an abortion on Carmen. Perhaps it became his sole source of satisfaction and relief, because for six months, no glamorous friend returned a call, relieving him not only of his own glamor but the sycophants who glommed onto it. Friendship is fleeting, love mere folly, but how much more true would that be when living in a place known as the 'Dream Factory?' But five minutes after every time he went off, he begged her not to leave, just you wait, he'll make you happy again, Hollywood can be something better than its ever been, and you'll be its leading lady!

Then there was the time the Producer bruised her father up after her father asked about Carmen's bruises. Two minutes later, he gave her Dad a $10,000 wad of cash, then drove him to the emergency room personally in his 1977 Lamborghini Countach. The moment he got through the door, he took out more wads of cash for the doctor and nurses and the other patients - they saw nothing. And while they were in the ER, Carmen's sister practically kidnapped her to a courthouse to make her get a restraining order. Carmen was unwilling, worried she was about to get killed. If not by her producer, then by the guys he'd pay to keep her quiet. The judge listened very patiently and carefully and evinced great compassion for her suffering, he then excused himself to his chamber for five minutes, came back and refused the restraining order. Twelve minutes later, the Producer was at the courthouse, gave Carmen a huge hug and kiss as she sobbed her tears upon him, took her home and told her over and over again how much he loved her.

Who could turn down the life he promised? This was a man who knew how to turn curvature of the Earth to the precise angle he wanted. He was the best actor in Hollywood. For more than a decade, he dealt with creative geniuses every day of his life, but he was a genius of life itself. Every event, the most glamorous, the most spiritual, the most transcendent, the most intangible, could be picked apart and reduced to a transaction. Nothing in life was a mystery to him, and all he demanded in return was that she be no more complicated to understand than the concierge in Oviedo.

Tales From the Old New Land: Tale 4 - Rough Beginning

And having a playback memory, Carmen remembered something he said about copying down everything he said that sounded vaguely like a reference to Isaiah 8:1, and recorded every word of what he said for fear that he'd demand of her why she did not comply with the order he gave mid-binge/tirade to record these pearls of wisdom. In fact, she did it immediately after he let her go from the ledge. She kept a copy of it on her person every day of her life, in case the Producer ever returned and demanded to see it.

The Producer and Carmen slugged on after that night for another sixteen months. When Carmen finally became Steve's, she was more radiantly beautiful than ever before for two whole decades, and considering the dangers she'd passed, one could argue that she was still more beautiful inside than out. Nevertheless, her ribs had the consistency of crushed ice, her joints bent in manners no human being should, the simple act of arising from her bed was pain itself. Among those who'd experienced repetitive trauma, it is not uncommon to deal with the constant rebreaking of bones, degenerative disc disease and an eventual lumbar spinal fusion; bone spurs, torn ligaments, degenerative arthritis, staff infections from corrective surgeries. And that's only from the effects from before he started to hit her face.

This is mercifully not a book in which to discuss the particulars of tyrannical behavior which cause such internal horror. This narrator has neither the patience nor nothing like the fortitude to speak in any more than generalities about the abominations perpetrated upon Carmen and he asks your forgiveness for his need to speak any further of these depravities. But if this fictional rendering of a single Hollywood player getting off on the scent of blood has anything like the ring of veracity to you, then he asks you to at least consider how many thousands there may have been over the past century of powerful Hollywood men who've acted precisely like this.

This particular apparition of a Producer knew on the night of this "window dressing" (his charming term for what transpired that dawn) that his days as a respected Hollywood player could be counted with two digits. Don't mind us the circumstances of his ignominy, there were any number of risible cinematic bombs in the late 70's and early 80's which wiped out Hollywood producers, production companies, and whole studios:

There was At Long Last Love, Peter Bogdanovich's trivial homage to 30's movie-musicals, Cole Porter songs, and Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedies - because nothing oozes Golden Age Hollywood class quite like Burt Reynolds, who became a superstar a few years previously when Deliverance allowed us to watch him kill a Georgia hillbilly with a crossbow while the hillbilly sodomized a 300 pound Ned Beatty.  There was The Exorcist II: The Heretic, a shameless money grab of a sequel starring a miserable looking Richard Burton during a period when he looked like he was taking parts in horrible movies just so he could pay his astronomical bar tab. There was The Swarm, a horror movie about killer bees that starred Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Olivia de Havilland - because what everybody wanted to see in the late 70's was the biggest stars of 1945 in a horror movie with a plot too absurd for Roger Corman to film. There was I Spit On Your Grave - a film that couldn't even find distribution for two years because of its quarter-hour depictions (notice the plural) of gang rape. There was X-rated Caligula, a movie made through the combined talents of literary lion Gore Vidal and Bob Guccione - publisher of Penthouse Magazine, who simply wanted to record a literal rendering of the depraved events within the Roman Emperor Caligula's palace in Tacitus's Annals. Every imaginable degradation seemed to find its way into the script; raping a bride on her wedding day - and her groom, sex shows involving children and the deformed (if you don't believe me, watch it), gladiatorial public execution, and a confusing scene for which poor Helen Mirren has to use what is hopefully a prosthetic vaginal cavity to depict herself giving birth as part of a (literally) execrable performance within all these execrable performances. After seeing the original cut, Guccione decided that audiences weren't getting their money's worth, and insisted on inserting a forty-five minute bisexual orgy near the end which the Roman Senators and their wives are coerced into having.

There was, of course, Heaven's Gate, which lost 30 million dollars, ran to nearly four hours in original cut, deliberately killed a horse with explosives, was yanked from movie theaters after less than a week, and bankrupted United Artists - the greatest of all movie studios - forever. Some swear it's a misunderstood masterpiece, this narrator doesn't want to find out... Of course, it has a ten minute rape scene...

There was Inchon, the B-Movie hagiography for America's Five-Star General in Asia, and for a moment in 1952 America's would-be dictator, Douglas MacArthur. Financed with no expense spared by a combination of the United States Military and world's most infamous cult leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, with MacArthur played by the world's greatest actor - the ailing Lord Lawrence Olivier - for a cool million bucks, and directed by Terrance Young, who made the first few James Bond movies. MacArthur's closest confidante was played by Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft. Who'd have conceived that a movie of such disparate parts would come unglued?

There was Tarzan, the Ape Man - in which a mythical White Ape turns out to be a white man raised by apes and therefore must be brought back to civilisation in England where he can be taught proper discourse. Nevertheless, he retains the animal sexual magnetism of Africa, which overwhelms poor proper and prim Jane. Tarzan's character was found offensive by some in the 1910's when he first appeared, imagine the reception by 1981. Yet somehow, there've since been another six Tarzan movies.

And who can, or should, forget George Lucas's Howard the Duck? A PG live-action movie in which a loveable alien duck gets transported through a wormhole to our world. In the course of the movie, he gets dumped by a club bouncer into a hot tub where a couple is having sex, a human that turns out to be an alien who has a tongue seems to extend like an erection in the presence of Lea Thompson, Howard's duckbill attempts to bite the ass of a sixty-something black woman whose onion-like posterior he finds quite stimulating, he excitedly opens Playduck Magazine in which we see a photo of a duck with curves and hair and feathered white nipples (later in the movie we see duck boobies with pink human nipples), the Cleveland Police Department sexually assaults Howard the Duck, and actor Jeffrey Jones (himself a convicted sex offender) walks in on Lea Thompson seducing Howard the Duck.

And, of course, Ishtar. The only of these risible and bank-busting movies directed by a woman, and the only one whose director never directed a movie again. Perhaps Ishtar was, truly, the last movie of the Old-New Hollywood - directed by Mike Nichols's old comic partner Elaine May, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty starring, Vittorio Storaro (Coppola and Bertolucci's cinematographer of choice) doing the photography, co-starring New Hollywood luminaries like Tess Harper (Tender Mercies) Charles Grodin (from an Orthodox family), Jack Weston (Weinstein), Carol Kane (Woody's first wife in Annie Hall and an Oscar nominee for a part in Hester Street that she acted in Yiddish), Aharon Ipale (Israeli), Fred Melamed (Sy Ableman in A Serious Man), David Margulies (Hollywood's character actor of choice when you needed a Jew). Is it any wonder that a film bombed that had so many Jews involved whose scenario was in an Arab country?

Something rotted in that air of freedom which made the New Hollywood Golden Age possible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It was inevitable that the freedom which allowed for realistic depictions of ordinary people with their ugliness intact, with sex, and violence, and emotional turmoil unshielded by a production code, would curdle into freedom's betrayal by making its depictions into something sickeningly exploitative - sometimes freedom's very liberators betrayed it. In the case of Hollywood, what appeared to be a glorious liberation turned out to be merely another swing of the pendulum that landed on equilibrium for a moment before swinging into decadence. Today's Hollywood has a new production code, a code that allows for rivers of blood so long as the violence is confined to an unrealistic genre and its human consequences softpedaled, a code that allows for the naive innocence of children to continue unabated into adulthood with bro comedies about manchildren, a code in which romantic comedies in which love's ugly moments are airbrushed out of existence, a code dominated by action movies in which the stars are the special effects. Just as in the old production code, today's Hollywood movies can still be damn good, but they can't show us ourselves. The closest Hollywood's come in the 21st century, in the opinion of this obviously not humble enough narrator, is in movies like The Social Network and Her and WALL-E and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which only show us a complex image of the human spirit by showing us how technology may have completely reshaped it; or in movies like Boyhood or (believe it or not) Borat, in both cases of which the experimental gimmick that makes it possible is so radically extreme that in both cases it can only be done once. Meanwhile, people who've devoted their whole lives to film tell us that the world is experiencing a cinematic Golden Age of which the United States is the only country who remains unaware of it. As with so many things about Contemporary America - like soccer, factual reporting, public transit, languages,  condoms, history, black humor, cheap health care, gun laws, and vegetables - we have in America have only the dimmest awareness of the feast that often seems to happen in every corner of the globe but ours because we're too busy playing with our toys.

Special effects are the new stars of Hollywood. The highest grossing movies are no longer character based movies like The Godfather or Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy or Easy Rider or American Graffiti or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or MASH or Fiddler on the Roof or Patton. . There were plenty of smaller, character driven films during these years that did well, but it was between 1975 and 1990 that technology become the undisputed box office king, and after that came the systematic gutting of movies that portrayed Americans in their natural state in anywhere but independent film and the Miramax ghetto. Just over the other side of 1975 lay the Star Wars Trilogy and Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Indiana Jones and ET and Back to the Future and Roger Rabbit - and how human and full of personality do those early Spielberg and Lucas and Zemeckis movies seem next to the high-grossing movies of our time! Would it surprise anyone that Tom Cruise or Chris Hemsworth or Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson were actually computer programs or robots that don't exist on a screen? There was even an Al Pacino movie about that exact notion fifteen years ago called Simone. Maybe Jennifer Lawrence is just an updated Simone, an indication that these computer avatars have improved to the point that seem so like us humans that perhaps humans are indistinguishable now from robots!

This New New Hollywood came into existence because the knowledge that movies like Caligula and I Spit On Your Grave and Heaven's Gate and Howard the Duck gave us of what we were capable of was too terrible. The freedom to create greater and more uplifting spectacles can also give us things too vile and revolting for contemplation. All it took was less than a dozen movies in which the human animal was presented to us undeniably in all its stinking shit, and we've been running away from its truth ever since.

Our dearly beloved producer could have been working on any of these movies, it doesn't matter which, but by the same time the next year, The Producer hadn't worked on a movie for nine months, nine months during which his fists literally performed an abortion on Carmen. Perhaps it became his sole source of satisfaction and relief, because for six months, no glamorous friend returned a call, relieving him not only of his own glamor but the sycophants who glommed onto his glamor. Friendship is fleeting, love mere folly, but how much more true would that be when living in a place known as the 'Dream Factory?'

Chapter 3: The Ending Speech in Still More Final Form (And Still More Massive Trigger Warnings)

But need we that you read the price at which said high life is procured? Need we state the details of utter imbalance that puts Carmen in the company of the world's cultural elite, but unable to say a word unless spoken to; play hostess to the world's most famous people every night, but held responsible by this declining Hollywood player for everything his servants do wrong and subject to endless berating for their mistakes in preparation and hers in conversation after the guests leave - and therefore to say little as well about the imbalance between a declining producer and the coddled Hollywood stars upon whom this producer's very sense of self is dependent? Need we enflesh how this Hollywood player had a Vertigo-like obsession with the details of Carmen's appearance - her hair, her dress, her eyes, her nails; the appointments every day with stylists, designers, tailors, plastic surgeons? Need we detail how the Producer emerged unannounced from some corner of USC to accuse her of talking to some USC film brat for too long? Need we detail the many private scenes that seem cribbed from a Golden Age Bette Davis melodrama? Need we elucidate the occasional death threat, the many blows to the stomach so as not to damage her face - in front of the servants no less, the many times she heard female voices in the background of phonecalls, the times he told her how much more beautiful and less snobby were the hundreds and hundreds of other women he had - before her of course.., the all too many times she was ignored when pleading with him to stop and do something else to her? Need we elaborate upon the many small and futile attempts Carmen made to take revenges upon her Producer that, in the parlance of our own era, could perhaps be called microaggressions, certainly not microagressions in their intent or ferocity, but microaggression in proportion to the degree of perpetration upon her, and incontrovertibly micro in their degree of effectiveness; aggressions that endowed her with satisfaction for only split-seconds before the anxiety and/or the terror returns to full force; the knife she once pulled on him, the heavy objects thrown, the screaming until she was horse, the loving stares at his gun collection, the worst imaginable pains she could inflict during sex - which, relief followed by endless aggravation and a little horror amidst the validation - he seemed to enjoy more than ever.

Who knows if Carmen was actually in love? Did it matter? The Producer was not so much something to be treasured or hated by Carmen as something that happened to her. All the good, all the bad, all that she learned or didn't, all the coke and cock was not of her doing. She was a passenger in a Mercedes that a drunk driver locks from the outside while getting loaded and then returns for the simple pleasure of banging up something beautiful.  

Instead of detailing all this, your ever reliable narrator will tell but one simple story of the night her Producer became a finished producer. It was dinner at the house with Janet and Marty Sheen (Ramon to friends), Nolte, a couple lawyers and their wives who brought 50 year old scotch and choice cut coke, Marcheline and Jon Voight, The Producer and Carmen, on an unseasonably frigid February night. Ramon was back from the set of Apocalypse Now, having wrapped up the shooting, or maybe he'd quit for something like the third time, or maybe it was while recouping from his on-set heart attack, and this was to be a welcome home dinner that spared no expense for a movie star who'd need a perfect comeback role after starring in a film that everybody in Hollywood knew would be a disaster. 

It was relatively early in the relationship, and in retrospect, the one time at which the Producer truly seemed pleased with Carmen's hosting abilities. Neither the cook nor the pastry chef did a single thing wrong, for which he held Carmen as responsible as he did when they didn't. The Galician wines bought to impress Ramon were perfect, conversation flowed freely, Carmen turned down Nolte's blatant passes at the table with magnificently self-effacing assurance, the then ex-Catholic and Marxist Voight promised to be on his best behavior with the extremely Catholic Ramon when it came to questions about the new anticommunist Pope, and mostly fulfilled his pledge. Little did anyone know how vehemently they would switch political sides in twenty years.

Around 11, the Producer got a call that he took in his office. He emerged and didn't say anything for the rest of the night except a cursory goodbye to Ramon and Janet at 2 in the morning when they left early to get some sleep before their flight tomorrow to Bermuda. From the glances that darted around the room, everybody knew something was wrong, but only Nolte, a man who looks for danger like a hammer for a nail, was brave or stupid enough to broach it. For Nolte's 'troubles' and 'concern', the Producer threw the entire fucking room out of his house. 

That was around 3:30. The Producer and Carmen sat on a sofa downstairs with a small hill of cocaine on the coffeetable. The Producer would not tell her what it was about, but changed the subject by complemented her hosting abilities profusely. After an hour and a half of using every roundabout way of trying to get it out of him, she shrugged her shoulders and went upstairs to find her Xanax for bed. 

It was somewhere in the area of five-thirty to six that the Producer came upstairs, the sun was already coming up and Southern California glowed with morning light. With a subtly mischievous grin, he told Carmen that she was ready to know the secret of making good movies. Did she want to know?

Of course she did. And because she did, the Producer dangled her by her feet from their fourth floor bedroom window. 

It is something approaching inconceivability that Carmen could remember every word of something so incoherent while lying upside down in winter air more suited for Latvia than Los Angeles. But as we've already seen, Carmen's ability to retain information at this point in her life something approaching miraculousness, unfortunately for her, a memory both photographic and phonographic in its ability to recall detail, regardless of how harrowing. 

"Here's the fucking secret you freeloading cunt. The secret is right in front of your motherfucking Quasimodo face. Look out at that secret you filth, touch it, kiss it, suck it, take it all fucking in, because the fucking secret is danger. You're gonna fucking love danger. Do you love danger?

(of course she said yes)

I SAID DO YOU LOVE DANGER! You're gonna look for danger everywhere you fucking go. You're gonna be a goddess who plays with danger for your lying whore sport. You're gonna be the shiksa goddess of death who plays with the sands of the fucking kingdom and the fucking foundation and the fucking splendor and the fucking eternity and the fucking beauty and the fucking severity and the fucking kindness and the fucking understanding and the fucking wisdom and the fucking crown. You're gonna be unmerciful before they sin and you're gonna be unmerciful after they sin and then you're gonna be unmerciful over the people you rule and then you're gonna be unmerciful for the people who are tempted and then you're gonna be unmerciful to the people who don't deserve mercy and then you're gonna be unmerciful to the people who deserve mercy and then you're gonna be unmerciful to the people and you're gonna be quick to anger and small in kindness and never tell the truth and be unforgiving of the evil and be unforgiving of the good and end all the generations with us. YOU AND ME. I am the alpha and you are the omega! Together we're the reason that everything's happened until right fucking now when you stare down to the ground and scream with your whore mouth and get rid of the thousand fucking years of sorrow. Cuz you're gonna be alone with death and eat a meal with death and meet death's family and and wear his ripped fucking clothes and go to death's parties and say prayers for death and remember death once a fucking year after you die because not in here with the shadowy dank hall but out there where you are in the endless light where you're staring down and up and left and right into the shape without form and the shade without color and the paralyzed force and the gesture without motion so those who have crossed with direct eyes to death's other kingdom can remember us not as violent souls but as hollow men cuz you can see the light clearly and shape it and bless it like the fucking clay of earth and plan time and light like infinite fucking vistas of the light within your mind and you listen to it and you listen to the listening. And then you're gonna take their heads when all about you are losing theirs and you're gonna wear them both together like linen and fucking wool cuz everybody is hollow and false and the world's a darker place with them in it! Every human is Haman and the winds are blowing and they're all standing around with their arms folded while the towns burn to the fucking ground and everybody in it is a heap of ashes and bones licked by the tongues of fire! And now the lifeless skulls add up to into millions and you wander through the fucking ghetto and you find no peace cuz everybody you love is fucking gone and you're a beggar at everybody's doorway begging for just a little bit of happiness and every day is the day of fucking woe! You always longed for home even if you hated your homeland because the flowers are burning because it's Springtime for motherfucking Hitler in Germany and you won't fucking forget until past your dying fucking day! So it's fucking impossible to describe what's necessary to those who don't know what horror is cuz horror has a fucking face and you must make a friend of horror cuz horror and terror are your fucking friends cuz if they're not then they're enemies you fear. So you're gonna take yourself a roll of the fucking book and write upon it all the fucking words that I have spoken unto you about me, Israel, and ye, Babylon, and get rid of the thousand year old sorrow put on us by all the whores of Babylon from the day I spoke unto ye even unto this day when there's no trace left of Yankl and red red red royt red red red I'm gonna see something that explodes in YOUR head and I leave a heap of dirty ashes where YOUR cocksucking self once fell from this motherfucking window cuz no good angel is coming to save you, the motherfucking flames'll just burn more brightly and higher and death will blossom like a sapling! No one will dream you! No one will remember you! No one will deny you! No one will yearn for you! Or maybe I'll keep you alive because a live, fresh cut nerve is infinitely more sensitive, I'll just drill into the healthy tooth until I reach the pulp and singe their hair from off your face and you howl and bay and start to scream! Cuz you know you know who I am, I'm fucking Szell! I'm the White Fucking Angel of the Camp and no matter how many times I pretend to be a Jew selling diamonds on 47th street, I'm the fucking Nazi and you're never gonna stop me! I will ordain the conquering of the fucking world and the mothers will mourn their living sons! Yea though you walk through the fucking valley of the shadow of death you will fear evil because the person you're with is me and my word is a lamp for your fucking feet and light on your fucking path and I'm the only fucking light and salvation you're ever gonna have. I'm gonna strike you down and become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. If I bring you back inside I'm going to break you with a rod of iron into pieces like a potter's vessel. Because I chose you honey from all the women in the fucking world to be mother to my only living son in 1979, the year thirteen, cuz God is dead and Satan reigns and you're gonna remember that when imps on broomsticks in a ring dance around you. It'll smart when you breathe after I cut your nose cuz the fish should be served with the head and they don't accept people of the Jewish persuasion here. You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me you don't. You're gonna be the mother and the daughter and then get shot in the eye while driving while you're bringing LA to the daughterfucking water and make them an offer they can't refuse as I leave the gun and take the cannoli. We're gonna have the naive Presidents and Senators killed with their brains and their signatures on the contract after you tell them you're innocent. You'll let them suffer as much as you suffer cuz I don't ask with respect, I don't offer friendship and you're gonna fear to be in my debt and this scum that ruins you will not suffer this day or any other cuz you're never gonna throw it all away just to make me look ridiculous. I made my bones and I took sides against the family and I dishonored it and took the freedom and you're not gonna be able to weep because of the pain. I spend my whole fucking life trying not to be careless, and I'm telling you right now, YOU WILL NEVER BE BEAUTIFUL AGAIN AND I'M GOING TO MAKE YOUR CHILD AN ORPHAN BEFORE HE'S FUCKING BORN! And you're gonna wander through the fucking ghetto from lane to useless fucking lane and find no solace because there are no little kids left to learn that stupid alphabet and get that fucking useless flag with the Hebrew letters. You're gonna never want to forget, like you were shot with the diamond bullet through your head, your perfect, genuine, complete, crystaline, pure head. Cuz it's stronger than you, and I'm stronger than you, I'll never strengthen you and always hurt you with my righteous right hand as you grow older and you understand how many tears lie in the light between the fucking letters until you make the friend of the fucking horror and become the tears yourself. Keep your friends close but your enemies closer, cuz I'll break your fucking heart with an abortion and I'll take the captain of the command with me and wipe everybody out from the beginning to the end because if history's taught us anything, it's taught us that you can kill anybody - men of vision and guts and there's no plaque to any of'em cuz we stepped over their bodies and even if they were alive I'd kill them all cuz I despised their masquerade and the dishonest way they posed themselves and their whole fucking families. They're not brothers, they're not friends, I don't want to see them at hotels, I don't want them near my house. Don't they know I would use all my power to prevent something like that from happening? All my strength? The strength, the strength, the strength to do it! My strength! I'll make lights in the heaven to divide the firmament to give light upon the earth v'limshawl bayom oo'vo'layloh oo'lehovdil beyn ha'or oo'veyn khoyshekh ve'ha'aretz hayesaw sohu va'vohu v'khoshekh awl-p'ney sawhom v'rooach elokim m'rakhephes awl-p'ney hawmahyim. Cuz I determine the numbers of stars and give all of them their names ve'oyseh eysh k'seel ve'kheemaw and utilize my instincts to kill without feeling passion and without judgement because it's judgement that fucking defeats you. I'm unrighteous because the righteous perish and no man lays it to heart and no one understands that the righteous perish to be taken away from evil. I'm gonna go off the reservation of light and make my own reservation on the infinite light where they worship me as the god of death and burn them all as you cry without tears and make the fuckin' wind the messenger and the fuckin' fire the minister awsaw yare'ach l'moawdim hawmabit lawawretz v'tir'awd yiga bey'hawrim v'ye'eysawnoo and not be judged and disappear out into the light of the jungle with my people and feel comfortable with my people cuz what would my people back home do if they ever learned just how far I've really gone but they have no right to call me a murderer and I have a right to kill you and make wars unto the ends of the earth and break the bow and cut the spear and burn the chariots in fire with adoyshem es eeyov min ha'sawraw mee zeh makhshikh eytzaw v'milinn bli daw'as? Cuz life is not a sinister fucking night anymore and nothing's closed anymore and every door is open and I'M THE ONE WHO DOES THE FUCKING PERSECUTING! The morning stars will never sing together and all the sons of God will never shout for joy before the sun and the light because the moon and the stars are darkened and clouds return after the rain and the watchmen of the house will tremble and the mighty men stoop and the grinding ones stand idle because they're few and those who look through windows grow dim."

And as his obedient partner in life, when he let her go from the ledge, she wrote it all down. 

ET Almanac: Greatest Letter Ever

To Meirs Fisher, Esquire:

I must address you, in this manner, although you do not deserve it. Unaccustomed as you are to receive any mark of respect from the public, it will be expected that I should make an apology for introducing a character, fetid and infamous, like yours, to general notice and attention. Your conspicuous Toryism and disaffection long since buried you in the silent grave of popular oblivion and contempt; and your extraordinary conduct and deportment, in several other respects, has brought and reduced you to that dreary dungeon of insignificance, to that gulf of defeated spirits, from whch even the powers of hope "that comes to all" cannot relieve or better you.

In this most miserable of all situations, principally arising from an obstinate, inflexible perseverance in your political heresy and schism (so detestable in itself, so ruinous and destructive to our country, and obnoxious to all around us), you are now left quite destitute and forlorn! Unhappy and disappointed man! Once exiled and excommunicated by the state, as a sly, insiduous enemy; severed and detached from the generous bosom of patriotism and public virtue; severed and detached from the generous bosom of patriotism and public virtue; shunned and deserted by faithful friends, in whom you once so safely trusted; since, debarred and prevented from your practice by rule of court as an attorney at the bar; and excluded from your practice by rule of court as an attorney at the bar, and excluded from every other essential and dignified privilege of which the rest of citizens can boast--with the wretched remains of a wrecked reputation--you exhibit so complete a spectacle of distress and wretchedness, as rather excites one's tenderness than vengeance, and would soten and melt down dispositions more relentless and unforgiving than mine!

But whatever claims of mercy you may demand, on these accounts; whatever I should think, were I to judge of you as your personal enemy in private respects; yet the forward and unexampled advances and steps you have lately taken in the concert of public affairs; the high-cockaded air of fancied importance you now assume; the petulant, discontented humor you have manifested for establishing a new bank; your longings and pantings to approach our political vineyard, and blast the fruits of those labors for which you neither toiled nor spun; and more particularly, the indecent, unjust, inhumane aspersions, you cast so indiscriminately on the Jews of this city at large, in your arguments of Wednesday week, before the honorable legislature of the commonwealth--these circumstances, if my apprehensions are right, preclude you from any lenity or favor, and present you a fair victim and offering to the sacred altar of public justice.

You are not therefore to expect any indulgence, because you merit none. I daresay you experience it not in your own feelings; nor have you any right whatever to hope for the least tenderness from me. You shall not have it, and if you are cut and smarted with the whip and lashes of my reproach and resentments, if I lay my talons and point out the ingrate, if my tongue is clamorous of you and your odiouos confederates, and I should pain the tenderest veins of their breasts--remember, you first gave birth to all yourself that it arose entirely from you; and in tracing of events hereafter to the source you will, perhaps, find to your sorrow and cost that you are only blamable for whatever consequences have or may arise on the occasion.

You not only endeavored to injure me by your unwarrantable expressions, but every other person of the same religious persuasion I hold, and which the laws of the country, and the glorious toleration and liberty of conscience, have allowed me to indulge and adopt. The injury is highly crimsoned and aggravated, as there was no proper reason or ground for your invectives. The attack on the Jews seemed wanton, and could only have been premeditated by such a base and degenerate mind as yours. It was not owing to the sudden sallies of passion, or to the warmth of disconcerted and hasty imagination. I cannot, therefore, place it to the account of mere human frailties, in which your will and understanding had no concern, and for which I am always disposed to make every compassionate allowance. And though an individual is not obliged to avenge the inuries of particular societies and sectaries of men, he is nevertheless called upon, by every dear and serious consideration, to speak his mind freely and independently of public transactions and general events, to assert his own share in the public consequence and to act his part fairly on the social theater.

Permit me, then, with this view of things, to take notice of these terms of reproach and invective which, considering you as a friend to good manners and decorum, you have heaped upon our nation and prefession with so liberal and unsparing a hand. I am a Jew; it is my own nation and profession. I also subscribe myself a broker, and a broker, too, whose opportunities and knowledge, along with other brokers of his intimate acquaintance, in a great course of business, has made him very familiar and privy to every minute design and artifice of your wily colleagues and associates.

I exult and glory in reflecting that we have the honor to reside in a free country where, as a people, we have met with the most generous contenance and protection; and I do not at all despair, not withstanding former obstacles, that we shall obtain every other privilege that we aspire to enjoy along with our fellow-citizens. It also affords me unspeakable satisfaction, and is indeed one of the most pleasing employments of my thoughtful moments, to contemplate that we have in general been early uniform, decisive Whigs, and were second to none in our patriotism and attachment to our country!

What but Erinnys itself could have thus tempted you to wander from the common path of things, and go a stray among throns and briars? What were your motives and inducements for introducing the Jews so disrespectfully into your unhallowed and polluted lips? Who are you, or what are you (a mere tenant at sufferance, of your liberty) that in a free country you dar to trample on any sectary whatever of people? Did you expect to serve yourself, or your friends and confederates--these serpents in our bosom, whose poisonous stings have been darted into every patriot character among us?

In any other place, in managing another cause, you might have had patience to attend to the consequence of such unpardonable rashness and temerity. But here you thought yourself safe, and at full leave to take the most unlicensed liberties with characters, in regard of whom you can in no respect pretend to vie! You shall yet repent, even in sackcloth and ashes, for the foul language in which you have expressed yourself. And neither the interposition of some well meant though mistaken Whigs who, I am sorry to think, have joined you, "or even the sacred shield of cowardice shall protect you," for your transgressions. Who knows but the beams of that very denomination whom you have traduced may, on one day, perhaps not very remote, warm you into the most abject servility, and make you penitentially solemnize what you have done?

An error is easily remedied, and there may be some compensation for actual injuries. But a downright insult can neither be forgiven or forgot, and seldom admits of atonement or reparation. It is our happiness to live in times of enlightened liberty, when the human mind, liberated from the restraints nad fetters of superstition and authority, hath been taught to conceive just sentiments of its own; and when mankind, in matters of religion, are quite charitable and benevolent in their opinions of each other.

Individuals may act improperly, and sometimes deserve centure; but it is no less unjust than ungenerous to condemn all for the faults of a few, and reflect generally on a whole community for the indiscretion of some particular persons. There is no body of people but have some exceptionable characters with them; and even your own religious sectary, whom you have compelled me to dissect int he course of this address, are not destitute of very proper subjects of criticism and animadversion.

Good citizens who nauseate, and public who contemn, have heard your invectives against the Jews. Unhappily for you, a long series of enormities have proved you more your own enemy than I am. To you, then, my worthy friends and fellow-citizens (characters teeming with strict candor and disinterestedness), do I turn myself with pleasure from that sterile field, from that Grampian desert, which hath hitherto employed me.

It is your candor I seek; it is your disinterestedness I solicit. The opinions of Fisher and his adherents, whether wileful in their malignity, or sincere in their ignorance, are no longer worthy of my notice. His observations are low; his intentions are too discernible. His whole endeavors center in one point, namely, to create a new bank.

To effect this end, he has spared neither pains or labors. He has said everything that artifice could dictate, or malice invent. He has betrayed himself in a thousand inconsistencies, and adopted absurdities which, supposing him a man of sense and observation, would have disgraced the lips of an idiot.

And for whom is the new bank meant and intended? For the benefit of men like himself, who have been in general averse and opposed to the war and common cause: for the insurgents against our liberty and independence; for mercenary and artful citizens, where selfish views are totally incompatible with the happiness of the people; for bifronted political Januses, the mere weathercocks of every breeze and gale that blows.

Who traded with the enemy? Who first depreciated the public currency? Who lent our enemies money to carry on the war? Who were spies and pilots to the British? Who prolonged the war? Who was the cause of so many valuable men losing their lives in the field and prison ships? Who did not pay any taxes? Who has now the public securities in hand? Who would not receive our Continentlal money? Who has purchased Burgoyne's convention bills? Who depreciated the French bills? Who depreciated the bills of the United States on Paris? Who slandered the institution of the Bank of North America? Who refused taking banknotes when the first issued? Who discouraged the people from lodging money in the bank? And are these the people who want a charter from our legislature? Shall such a bastard progeny of freedom, such jests and phantoms of patriotism and the social virtues be indulged in their wishes? For shame! For shame! Surrender the puerile, the fruitless pretensions! Public honor and public gratitude cry aloud against you, and says, or seems to say, as earnest as your endeavors have been, you shall not have your charter.

From such a medley and group of characters (an impure nest of vipers, the very bloodhounds of our lives and liberties) we have every thing to hazard, and nothing to expect. Suspicion shakes her wary head against them, and experience suggests that the sly, insinuating intrigues and combinations of these persons are to be watched and guarded against as much as possible. Though the proposals are generous and captivating, their practices, I will venture to affirm, cannot correspond, and however fascinating they may be in appearance, they may exercise the hand, the hairy hand of Esau!

I shall not inquire whether two banks in a commercial country would not clash with each other, and prove exceeding detrimental and injurious to the community. Having only ventured to give an account of the leading characters who compose the new bank, allow me in conclusion to rectify an error of Mr. Fisher's, who publicly declared, "the Jews were the authors of high and unusual interest." No! The Jews can acquit themselves of this artful imputation, and turn your own batteries on yourself. It was neither the Jews or Christians that founded the practice, but Quakers--and Quakers worse than heathens, pagans, or idolators; men, though not Jews in faith, are yet Jews in traffic; men abounding with avarice, who neither fear God, nor regard man.

Those very persons who are now flattering themselves with the idea of a new bank, first invented the practice of discounting notes at five percent. I have retained an alphabetical list of names, as well as the other brokers, and can specify persons, if necessary. In the language of Naphtali to David, I have it in my power to point at the very would-be directors, and say; venture money in trade during the war, who first declined letting out money in the best mortgage and bond security.

Were they now gratified in their expectations, would they not display the same undue spirit and degrade the dignity of a bank with practices unbecoming a common broker? Is it not in their power to finesse at the bank, and refuse discounting notes on purpose to gripe the necessitous part of the people, and extort improper premiums out of doors? And have we not reason to expect that would not be the case?

A Jew Broker

1784

(Perhaps I should change the title to "Most Jewish Letter Ever.")

When Facebook Becomes Blogging - Szell Conducts Beethoven's 9th

Joshua Bornfield asked me to do my part to get rid of negative news on facebook by sharing some music that starts with "G". As one of facebook's prime bearers of bad news, I'm going to try to redeem myself and cheat somewhat so I can share what I've been listening to today. It's of course cliche, but...

Between playing it, hearing it live, CD's, LP's, cassettes, napster, spotify, and youtube, I've probably listened to a few hundred interpretations of Beethoven's 9th Symphony over the years (beat me up later). There are even times when I've gotten sick of this piece which I think Debussy called the "universal hangover." But Beethoven 9 is more than that, it is the piece that does what music does best - it is a piece that is literally about bringing us all together. Pacifying our suffering, finding our voice, and adding it to the voices of others so that we can feel connected to something bigger than ourselves.

In all those performances I've heard, this is the one I turn to most often. It is, detail for detail, pound for pound, the closest to ideal it gets in what's generally regarded as the definitive piece of music. From Mengelberg you get high drama and fire, from Furtwangler you get epic breath and harmonic tension, from Toscanini you get rhythmic punch and a singing line, from Klemperer you get iron control and every detail, and from later conductors like Gunter Wand and Herbert Blomstedt and and Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein and Klaus Tennstedt and Kurt Masur and Rafael Kubelik and Sergiu Celibidache you get many other wonderful qualities, but from George Szell (G), you get all of those qualities held in a virtually perfect balance.

Szell was a Hungarian-Jewish conductor who led the Cleveland Orchestra for twenty-five years after World War II. 45 years after he died, there's still no orchestra in America that plays better - if silver has an aural quality, then the Cleveland Orchestra sounds like a silver plate facing toward the sun. Szell was as much a drill sergeant as conductor - a musical martinet with a hair trigger temper who rehearsed orchestras so exhaustively that it was said that he 'even rehearsed the inspiration.' Some of his Cleveland performances feel like technical exercises, but when he wasn't overly fussy, his explosive temperament poured through the music like volcanic lava. This performance, from London in 1968, a year much like our own, is Szell at his best, when he was better than virtually anybody. Szell's Beethoven in Cleveland was extraordinary, but not more extraordinary than any other great conductor. But when Szell played Beethoven with other orchestras and whipped them up with the kind of broken baton and tossed down music stand frenzies that Beethoven himself made in his personal life, he created Beethoven that seemed absolutely perfect. Exploding with apocalyptic intensity at virtually every moment, yet with not a single detail out of place.

Beethoven used to mean more to us than it does today. If you go to classical concerts, you probably know that Mahler occupies the central place in the orchestral world that Beethoven used to. In our neurotic, exhausted age, we need a composer who understands what it's like to be from a culture that has little hope for the future. Granted, anyone in their right mind would rather live now than fifty years ago, but the postwar era was different in that it had hope for us in a way that we often can't find our hope for our children. In classical music, that hope seemed to find expression in Beethoven. The whole world knew what it meant to feel grief, suffering, hope, and redemption in a way that most of us never will. Today, performance of Beethoven is a question of style, not substance. The question of historically informed performance (using the instruments and style of the musicians of the composer's era) has done wonderful things for many composers, but it's made the way we listen to Beethoven go from pondering life's mysteries to pondering questions of fashion. Older performances of Beethoven may not be what Beethoven wanted, but they are the Beethoven we need.

Beethoven's Ninth is regarded as perhaps the ultimate piece of music, and I suppose this is the closest I find to its ultimate performance. So if you're new to classical music, I guess you won't get a better introduction to what classical music is than this. Play it on your earphones at maximum volume.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Here followeth a rant, please ignore if you like.

When I write about politics, I'm usually trying to needle radicals. Ideas matter, and the Internet is their providence for anyone whose ideas nobody will listen to. I don't go after conservatives with as much passion because what's wrong with them is so obvious to virtually everyone in the virtual world, and I don't feel like preaching to a choir.

But that doesn't mean I find their moral irresponsibility any less disgusting. You cannot shout to the wind that liberals smugly write off everyone who disagrees with them as evil, and then say a moment later that everybody who disagrees with you is a piece of filth who should burn in hell for betraying your religion or people of origin. And if you then start writing off the people to whom you're talking who might have a twinge of sympathy with these dissenters as insane or idiots, or even just their friends, then you have relegated everyone in that position whom you claim to care about to a second class citizen.

From Richard Nixon down to the least informed Rush Limbaugh viewer, the modern conservative pathology has always been to fulminate against those who disagree as an abstract monolith of smug evil, and then be shocked when specific dissenters respond with irritation because they know that they're obviously being implicated. The shock of which, of course, feeds their pathology and make them double down on their obsessions. They become defined by their hatred, because their hatreds are the only way which they know what they stand for.

The conservative worldview divides the world into a secure fortress of complacency and the barbarians at the gates. Those in the fortress are the blessed, accepted for who they are without exception or earning it, nevertheless, those who diverge from the worldview will always be viewed with suspicion, inevitably a second class citizen of the fortress who have to endure abstract beratings of unchecked aggression that, passive aggressively, are clearly aimed at them specifically. They transform in a matter of seconds from angels to demons - relishing the chance to catch a fly in their net and force it at its weakest moment to battle on terms not its own for its self-respect, solely provoked for the angry pleasure of the spider proving itself right yet again, not so much as food for survival as a drug from which they can never wean themselves, because ultimately, the need to constantly prove oneself right gives you little satisfaction or peace.

I know that this description sounds all too familiar... I am, in no small way, what I was formed to be, and maybe a particularly virulent exemplar of this combative temperament. But I don't fool myself as to what I am: if I've being provocative, I know that my intention is to be provocative. At this point, I wonder if I know how to be much else, much as I wonder if my formative influences ever did any better.

The Internet is not a place to give a direct self-history, so instead I'll say, very simply: my provocation, my taking potshots, my obviously interrogative personality, was based on an isolation that for many years was nearly complete. I was the ultimate outcast, an ex-prodigy reminded of his spectacular failure to reach the potential everyone told him was his from all too early an age with all the humiliations that accompany it, the leaning disabled brilliant kid who went from the smartest person everyone ever met to the dumbest in a matter of months, the punchline of Pikesville. Deprived for decades of friends who understood anything about how this came to happen, and often family too, and would rather never make the effort.

I rejected the world because the world rejected me. I learned virtually everything I've learned by myself, without teaching, without guidance, without support. The groupthink of most of those who've read as widely as I or more is sickening, they never purchased their knowledge at any worth, with any more anxiety to accompany it than when they have to hand in their term papers with plenty of colleagues who can assuage their worst fears. No wonder so few of them have any original insights.

Meanwhile, the smartest people who go out into the real world often embrace a false self-aggrandizement and individuality, and pretend that they've accomplished things that are barely even accomplishments. Many of these pseudo-successes develop conservative and libertarian ideas, which glorify their achievements when it's obvious to everybody else that what got them there was a mixture of functional institutions and luck, institutions which their beliefs dictate they must do everything within their power to corrode from the inside. It enrages me that these luftmenschen can think that their innate goodness got them to where they are when they are probably doing what they can to destroy every advantage that made them so successful before anyone else can reach for the same success.

The peers I grew up with are all, as nearly all upper middle class Jews are, great successes in the world. I alone was left behind to be the idiot son in a business for which everyone knows an organizational garbage fire like me has no aptitude, and without the organizational know how to extricate myself, or anyone with the patience to help me find the way, and therefore with little left to do but contemplate that which almost was and might have been in different circumstances, with nothing left to do with this organizational train wreck in which I've always lived and must always live but to stew in the rage of entitlement which few people as privileged as I ever have to face that they feel just as much as I obviously still do.

I know that humiliation is an extremely relative concept. I've had as difficult a life as only a privileged guy can have. I demand not to be pitied, please put that to people far more deserving than I, but as a privileged guy, I reserve the right to speak my mind unreservedly, consequences be dammed - how bad could they be? I come with a sword because it was placed in my hand every time I tried to drop it.

Nervous breakdown over. Nothing to see here folks.

ET: Almanac

We cannot very well set about to contrive opponents who will do us the service of forcing us to become more intelligent, who will require us to keep our ideas from becoming stale, habitual, and inert. This we will have to do for ourselves.

- Lionel Trilling - The Liberal Imagination

ET: Almanac

...Commercial realism has cornered the market, has become the most powerful brand in fiction. We must expect that his brand will be economically reproduced, over and over again. That is why the complaint that realism is no more than a grammar or set of rules that obscures life is generally a better description of le Carre or P. D. James than it is of Flaubert or George Eliot or Isherwood: when a style decomposes, flattens itself down into a genre, then indeed it does become a set of mannerisms and often pretty lifeless techniques. The efficiency of the thriller genre takes just what it needs from the much less efficient Flaubert or Isherwood, and throws away what made those writers truly alive. And of course, the most economically privileged genre of this kind of largely lifeless "realism" is commerical cinema, through which most people nowadays receive their idea of what constitutes a "realistic" narrative.

Decomposition like this happens to any long-lived or successful style, surely; so the writer's--or the critic's, or reader's--task is then to search for the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced.

But rather than do that, Barthes and Moody and Giles and William Gass and many other opponents of fictive convention confuse two quite different complaints. Here is Barthes in 1966: "The function of narrative is not to 'represent,' it is to constitute a spectacle still very enigmatic for us but in any case not of a mimetic order . . . 'What takes place' in the narrative is, from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; 'what happens' is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming" Now, to charge fiction with conventionality is one thing; to move from this charge to the very skeptical conclusion that fictive convention can therefore never convey anything real, that narrative represents "literally nothing," is incoherent. First, all fiction is conventional in one way or another, and if you reject a certain kind of realism for being conventional, you will also have to reject for the same reason surrealism, science fiction, self-reflexive postmodernism, novels with four different endings, and so on. Convention is everywhere, and triumphs like old age: once you have reached a certain seniority, you either die of it, or with it. One of the nice comedies of Cyril Connolly's essay is that by blacklisting every conceivable convention he effectively bans the writing of any fiction at all--"anybody over six feet, or with any distinction whatever." Second, just because artifice and convention are involved in a literary style does not mean that realism (or any other narrative style) is so artificial and conventional that it is incapable of referring to reality. Narrative can be conventional without being a purely arbitrary, nonreferential technique like the form of a sonnet or the sentence with which Snoopy always begins his stories ("It was a dark and stormy night . . .")

Paul Valery was hostilein a Barthes-like way to the claims of fictional narrative, and his example of an entirely arbitrary fictional premise was a sentence like: "The Marquise went out at five o'clock." Valery felt, as William Gass did when discussing James's Mr. Cashmore, that this sentence is exchangeable with an infinite number of other possible sentences, and that this kind of provisionality robs narrative fiction of its necessity and its claim to probability. But as soon as I place a second sentence on the page--"That letter, received in the morning, had irritated the Marquise, and she was going to do something about it," say--the first sentence no longer looks quite as arbitrary or peremptory or merely formal. A system of relations and affiliations is beginning to quicken. And as Julien Gracq points out, "Marquise" and "five o'clock" are not arbitrary at all, but full of limit and suggestion: a marquise is not an ordinary, interchangeable citizen, and five o'clock is still late afternoon while six is drinks time. So what is the Marquise going out for?

The point to make about convention is not that it is untruthful per se, but that it has a way of becoming, by repetition, steadily more and more conventional. Love becomes routine (and indeed Barthes once claimed that "I love you" is the most cliched thing anyone can say), but falling in love is not nullified by this fact. Metaphors become dead through overuse, but it would be insane to charge metaphor itself with deadness. When the first caveman, shivering, said that he was as cold as ice, his interlocutor probably exclaimed: "That is pure genius!" (And after all, ice is cold.) Likewise, if someone were now to paint in the style of Rembrandt, he would be a third-rate copyist, not an original genius. These are the simplest arguments, and one should not have to make them, were it not for a persistent tendency among those hostile to verisimilitude to confuse convention with an inability to refer to anything truthful at all

Brigid Lowe argues that the question of fiction's referentiality--does fiction make true statements about the world?--is the wrong one, because fiction does not ask us to believe things (in a philosophical sense) but to imagine them (in an artistic sense): "Imagining the heat of the sun on your back is about as different an activity as can be from believing that tomorrow it will be sunny. One experience is all but sensual, the other wholly abstract. When we tell a story, although we may hope to teach a lesson, our primary objective is to produce an imaginative experience." She proposes that we restore the Greek hetorical term "hypotyposis," which means to put something before our eyes, to bring it alive for us. (Somehow I don't think that "hypotyposis" will displace "realism" as the preferred term any time soon.)

If we reexamine Aristotle's original formulation of mimesis, in the Poetics, we find that his definition is not about reference. History shows us, says Aristotle, "what Alcibaides did"; poetry--i.e., fictional narrative--shows us "the kind of thing that would happen" to Alcibaides. Hypothetical plausibility--probability--is the important and neglected idea here: probability involves the defense of the credible imagination against the incredible. This is surely why Aristotle writes that a convincing impossibility in mimesis is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The burden is instantly placed not on simple verisimilitude or reference (since Aristotle concedes that an artist may represent something that is physically impossible), but on mimetic persuasion: it is the artist's task to convince us that this could have happened. Internal consistency and plausibility then become more important than referential rectitude. And this task will of course involve much fictive artifice and not mere reportage.

So let us replace the always problematic word "realism" with the much more problematic word "truth" . . . Once we throw the term "realism" overboard, we can account for the ways in which, say, Kafka's Metamorphosis and Hamsun's Hunger and Beckett's Endgame are not representations of likely or typical human activity but are nevertheless harrowingly truthful texts. This, we say to ourselves, is what it owuld feel like to be an outcast from one's family, like an insect (Kafka), or a young madman (Hamsun), or an aged parent kept in a bin and fed pap (Beckett). There is still nothing as terrifying in contemporary fiction, not even in the blood-bin of Cormac McCarthy or the sadistic eros of Dennis Cooper, as the moment when Knut Hamsun's narrator in Hunger, a starving intellectual, puts his finger in his mouth and starts eating himself. None of us, I hope, has done this, or will ever want to. But Hamsun has made us share it, has made us feel it. Dr. Johnson, in his "Preface to Shakespeare," reminds us, "limitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind."

Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying. So the artist is always trying to outwit it. But in outwitting it, the artist is always establishing another dying convention. It is this paradox that explains the further, well-known literary-historical paradox, namely that poets and novelists repeatedly attack one kind of realism only to argue for their own kind of realism.

James Wood - How Fiction Works

Weekend Playlist: Some Songs That Would Probably Sound Good To Arrange A Capella

Asterisk Indicates REALLY Good:

Ain't That A Shame (Fats Domino) *

Alexander's Ragtime Band (Irving Berlin) *

All or Nothing at All (Frank Sinatra)

Always Late With Your Kisses (Lefty Frizzell)

Always on My Mind (Willie Nelson)

Angel from Montgomery (Bonnie Raitt) *

As Time Goes By (Dooley Wilson)

Back in the Saddle Again (Gene Autry) *

Be My Baby (The Ronettes) *

Big Yellow Taxi (Joni Mitchell)

Blue Moon of Kentucky (Bill Monroe)

Blues in the Night (Ella Fitzgerald)

Bouquet of Roses (Eddy Arnold)

Call It Stormy Monday (T-Bone Walker) *

Change is Gonna Come (Sam Cooke) *

The Christmas Song (Mel Torme) *

Coal Miner's Daughter (Loretta Lynn)

Coat of Many Colors (Dolly Parton) *

Come Sunday (Duke Ellington/Mahalia Jackson) *

Coo Coo Bird (Tom Ashley)

Crazy (Patsy Cline) *

Crazy Arms (Ray Price)

Crazy Blues (Mamie Smith)

Dark Star (Grateful Dead - possibly with vocal improv...)

Der Fuhrer's Face (Johnny Bond) *

Doo-Wop (That Thing) (Lauryn Hill)

Down on the Corner (Creedence Clearwater Revival)

Dream A Little Dream (Kate Smith) *

El Watusi (Ray Barretto)

Everyday People (Sly & the Family Stone) *

Fire and Rain (James Taylor) *

Flash Light (Parliament)

Good Vibrations (Beach Boys) *

(Good Old) Mountain Dew  (Bascom Lamar Lunsford)

Good Times (Chic)

Lullaby of Broadway (42nd Street) *


Thunder Road (Bruce Springsteen) *