The Time Machine (The Ice Is Breaking Up)

In 1926, the Russian film maker, Vsevolod Pudovkin, created one of film's most famous metaphors by cutting back and forth between images of the ice in a frozen river breaking up and workers storming a prison. The montage starts with the ice-clogged river, cuts to marching workers, back to the river, beginning to flow, marching workers reflected in the water, the water and broken ice cascading down river.

I wonder what a modern day Pudovkin would juxtapose with the river thawing and slowly turning into a torrent of water to create a metaphor for the financial system thawing out. Start with the Spring thaw maybe. Water dripping from the trees. I got a phone call from the bank that holds the mortgage on my house the other day, offering me a line of credit. Cut to a rivulet of water flowing downhill into a stream. Today, the bank offered to refinance my mortgage for free and give me a half-point discount if I open an account and let them deduct my monthly payments automatically. Cut to mail going into mail boxes, people calling the bank, kids trying on new shoes.

I can't wait for the part where the ACDs at the banks start to light up and we get to film those flashing lights on the computer consoles and data flying across the CRTs, images that took the place of tapes spinning back and forth to show those big computers working.  Money piling up in corporate accounts.

The hyenas have started buying "distressed" properties in Detroit, Florida and New Jersey. Cut to those jagged black cracks streaking across the ice.  Millions of people drowning in the cold water.  Bodies swept out to sea.

Power Failure

The power went out in our neighborhood late this afternoon. Still light enough with the shades up to search for candles and the kerosene lamp that was our main source of light during hurricanes when I was growing up. I don't know how I ended up with the lamp. I think I dug it out of my mother's attic when I got back from Germany and moved into the upstairs of an old house in Galveston's historical district with a friend from Seattle. We had some statues and some big scheffleras that looked good in the lamplight. A grey kitten that attacked our feet when we were sleeping. Bach on a reel to reel tape deck I blew my first paycheck from ANICO on. And a big staircase down to the front porch that had a way of ending halfway down, like something had pushed it in against the wall, so I couldn't get out of the house. I slept in a room off that staircase, and later, after I was married and my son was born and we had spent some time in Arkansas making films, when we moved back to Galveston, we rented that same upstairs apartment and my son slept in that room. The ceiling of his closet fell in one night.

This afternoon, I found the lamp oil right off, but it was almost dark by the time I found the lamp and the glass chimney, and some of the time I was looking with a flashlight, its narrow beam highlighting the TV, some books, the top shelf of a closet, and, finally, the kerosene lamp. I showed my daughter how to fill it, trim the wick, light it and adjust the flame, then how to put the chimney on. The lamp oil burns with a whiter flame than the kerosene did, and it has a different smell, but the light is still soft.

When my wife got home, we went out to dinner. For some reason, during dinner and on the way home tonight, the three of us were exceptionally gay.

Unity

Sitting in my wife's car in the garage tonight, lights on, windshield wipers going, it's easy to see how people get depressed. I'm just back from the store, and had to maneuver past my old 4-Runner to get into the one-car garage. I left the truck's lights on when we came back from the PTO pancake breakfast this morning. Thai soup for lunch. I made the soup last night because I went down to the faculty practice at Northwestern by myself Wednesday, and my wife and daughter missed out on lunch at a good Thai restaurant. I had a glass of champagne at lunch today. An ounce of cognac in the champagne. The same grape. And I fell asleep reading Nial Ferguson's The Ascent Of Money. When I woke up, I knew I'd left the lights on and I knew the battery would be dead when I went outside and tried to start the truck.

This is the first winter we've had a one-car garage. We park my wife's VW in the garage and leave the Toyota in the driveway, close to the furnace exhaust where it's a little warmer. The battery is probably finished. I'll jump it in the morning and drive the truck tomorrow, but I'm not hopeful the battery will hold its charge. Getting my daughter to school Monday may be a hassle, I'm thinking, sitting in the warm car, staring at the odds and ends stacked on the shelf at the end of the garage, above the bicycles and the snow-blower. A yellow sprayer I used to spray nematodes on the grubs infesting my yard back in Wisconsin in a futile attempt to avoid chemicals. The "for sale" sign from the lot we bought down by the beach here in Michigan last summer with the address and the outline of the lot on it. When we bought the lot, down near the water where a Jack Nicklaus golf course is under construction, I distinctly remember saying "how can we lose?"

I grew old reading John Updike's books. I read Rabbit, Run the first time in a reading room at the Student Union of the University of Texas in 1960. I think I puzzled over the punctuation of the title for an hour before I started reading the book. Updike is a little older than me, but close enough in age for us to have seen and done some of the same things at the same time. It was Updike's genius to take his time with Harry Angstrom, to let him live, taking him up every ten years or so when the world had changed enough for new things to be important. Updike saw the end of Detroit coming. And he knew it would not be the foreign cars that undid us, but the easy money, the fast deals and cooked books. If I never quite believed Rabbit was real, I always understood him. I could relate to him as he got older and richer, then poorer and, finally, died.

The jump start worked. The battery held its charge. Fat Boy, my 1993 Toyota 4-Runner, is parked in my driveway, charged up and ready to go, icicles hanging from his shiny grill like frozen snot.

The Wolf Of Winter

A long time ago, I told my son, I think he was in the first grade then, that Kenneth Patchen's The Wolf Of Winter was about the winter cold killing poor people. I doubt we got into nice distinctions between body and spirit or into the idea that there is a pessimism born of winter that afflicts boys who grow up in the South. A winter depression that settles into your bones and makes it hard to move.

Economic hard times are bound to hit people in the North, in the big frozen cities, harder than they hit people in the South. Finding a way to stay warm, a place to sleep, has to be tough. In Seattle, they open up the public buildings at night and the homeless sleep in the halls. For the poor, winter is hard. During a depression, it's going to be deadly.

The first panhandler of the winter turned up on our street yesterday. It was recycling day, and, in retrospect, I imagine she was working the snow-covered sidewalk for bottles and saw me dragging my little green tub of bottles and cans to the curb.

Her story was one I'd heard before. Just moved into the neighborhood. Family in trouble somewhere. Gas money to get to them. Pay me back in a couple of days. God bless me. Can she give me a hug? We settle for shaking hands.

I've never turned a panhandler down. It's a deep superstition of some kind. The way I buy off the bad luck that stalks me, just out of sight. Like a wolf.

Only A Couple Of Thousand To Go

Scientists have figured out those big lizards called  Komodo Dragons are poisonous. When they tear into their prey, the snake-like venom in their bite sends their victims into shock and stops their blood from clotting.

I saw one of those reptiles kill a deer in a film on television once. Some kind of nature show about predators and their prey. It disgusted me. The idea of a reptile killing a mammal makes my blood boil. Probably a hatred that goes back to the garden.



The sight of a killer whale crashing onto the beach to grab a seal is exhilarating. Watching a few lions pull down a water buffalo or a baby elephant is awesome, almost sexual. But watching a 150-pound lizard grab Bambi's mama by her hind leg and tear it off is shocking.

The good news is this revolting reptile is near extinction. Maybe we should create a demand for Komodo skin boots and belts. Speed them on their way. I would not hesitate for one second before knocking a baby Komodo in the head with a club.

I Was Born Too Soon



A new female condom is coming on the market.

The FC2 Female Condom is made with a soft material for quieter use. Its original version failed to gain a foothold in the U.S. marketplace because it was too noisy to use, as well as too expensive.

Too noisy? Hell, why not make them even noiser, but with better sounds?

How about the Flight Of The Valkyries? Or something wet and squishy, like rubber boots slogging through the mud of a rice paddy?

Collaboration

Are dialogue, collaboration and appropriation "the lifeblood of all great art” and "the very quintessence of culture itself” as has been suggested recently?  I'd say that's true of some segments of popular culture.  Certainly, collaboration is the name of the game in Hollywood, and appropriation is definitely the lifeblood of Madison Avenue. I suppose you could argue too, in a Hegelian sort of way, that a dialogue between two artists might, if the dialogue were an argument, lead to a synthesis that advanced art, or, that if the dialogue were jazz-like, the conversation itself might be artistic.  But I wonder if appropriation can, under any circumstances, be called the lifeblood of art.  Even collaborations and dialogues are problematic.

A long time ago I had the opportunity to collaborate on a project with a relatively well-known and successful painter who was, at the time, interested in making the remnants of ancient signs more visible in the modern world.  He asked me to produce some handmade "paper" for a series he was doing for the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston.  I was working out of Galveston, Texas, at the time.  The pieces of paper he had in mind were large photographs of a performance piece he was planning to put on at the Imperial Sugar Company warehouse on the wharf in Galveston.  I filmed some of the performance and made some black-and-white photo murals that were quite large for that time: single sheets of paper, some as large as 4' x 5', processed in huge, open tanks of chemicals in a commercial darkroom in an old Galveston building.  It took my crew of 4 people several days to produce the prints.  I ended up with some kind of chemical pneumonia from making the murals and doing the studies for the big prints in a small, poorly-ventilated darkroom in Austin, Texas.

The artist "transformed" my photo murals into art by covering them with hair, blood and semen, pins and needles, dirt and other materials.  They were first shown at the CAM and, later, some of them made a nationwide tour before ending up in the Menil collection in Houston.

For forty years, I've thought of what the artist did to my prints as "enhancing" them in some way -- as if by laying his art-world-acknowledged hands on my photos he was turning essentially worthless paper into real art. Amusing, but a little sad.

Recently, I learned that an old LA Times review of one of the artist's retrospectives had mentioned my photographs.

"A group of photographs that might be overlooked amid this sensual overload is conceptually the most interesting piece in the show. Not the usual documentary report of a performance, these black-and-white photos are more like remnants of 'Sugar Sacrifice,' a private, filmed event held in 1974 at a sugar warehouse in Galveston, Tex.

"Setting up a painted 'rug' and 'altar' in the shadow of a 20,000-pound mountain of sugar, Tracy 'sacrificed' what he regarded as his best painting. Symbolically, he meant to sacrifice art to food as a gesture of serving the greater good in a world where he believes hungry people outnumber the well-fed.

"Politically motivated art can rarely be more than a conscience-raiser. This grandiose but hermetic ritual only exists on film and photographs, but the pictures suggest a visually powerful extravaganza in which the sugar resembles an Egyptian pyramid and a warehouse is transformed into a mystically charged landscape."

Over the years, I've become more and more convinced that the best "collaborations" and "dialogues" are the ones that take place inside the same skull.

Bertolt Brecht

When I was browsing through some HUAC testimony recently, I ran across this video of Bertolt Brecht.



He cooperated with HUAC so that they would let him go home to Germany. East Germany, it turns out.

I still quote lines from "To Posterity" now and then, particularly the first verse as translated by R.H. Hays. (After listening to Brecht testify, I'm almost afraid to put an English translation of one of his poems up, but what the hell. Here it is.)

Indeed I live in the dark ages!
A guileless word is an absurdity. 

A smooth forehead betokens
A hard heart. He who laughs
Has not yet heard
The terrible tidings.

Reading Brecht's complete testimony, I was struck by an exchange between Brecht and HUAC's chief investigator, Robert E. Stripling, about a song Brecht wrote with Hanns Eisler.

Stripling - Did you collaborate with Hanns Eisler in song uh In Praise of Learning?

Brecht - Yeah, uh collaborate, I wrote that song, he only wrote the music.

Ouch.  I wonder what Kurt Weill thought of that testimony. 

Billy Glad - Did you collaborate with Kurt Weill on The Threepenny Opera?

Brecht - Yeah, uh collaborate, I wrote that opera, he only wrote the music.



Siri Vik, Die Ballade von Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife)

I went to a hole-in-the-wall cabaret in Berlin a few years ago.  The trans singers were impressed to learn I'd met Elvis.

They're Back!

Remember these guys?  They're the science ants who have been shooting particles down a tunnel that would be the envy of any hive in the world.

They're the physicists of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and they just sent some sub-atomic neutrinos, emanating from their particle accelerator outside Geneva, to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy — a distance of 454 miles — at a speed about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam to travel the same distance. That amounts to a speed greater than light by about 25 parts in a million.

Not much of a difference, but if the speed holds up, it will confine Einstein's theory of relativity to a world without neutrinos.

I've been expecting something like that to happen.

I went to a Catholic high school run by the Christian Brothers, and thought I was getting a good education, until I competed to get into Rice University with kids who'd had a real education in math.  There were questions on the exam I couldn't even read, let alone answer.  Probably the only person in the world with as low an opinion of Catholic education as mine is Pierce Brosnan, who also went to a Christian Brothers school.

When I started college, I was still struggling with math.  I took Calculus three times.  First time I made a B, so I took it over and made a C.  I gave my daughter a copy of that college transcript last year so she'll never have to worry about what I think about her math grades.

I dropped out of college my senior year, bummed around until I got drafted, and spent some time in and out of the Army in Germany.  Along the way, I met one of the most important people in my life, a guy named Joe Farina, who went through advanced training with me in San Antonio.  Farina was working for Lockheed at NASA and doing a six-month hitch in the Reserves.  At the end of our training, he went back to Houston and I shipped out for Germany.  We corresponded while I was in the Army, and, when I returned to Galveston from Europe, we spent the summer hanging out at the beach and the Galvez Hotel pool.  That summer, he taught me the fundamental concepts of math I should have learned when I was a kid.

Farina worked with a guy named George who had a theory about Einstein's equations I found fascinating.  According to George, the reason those electrons couldn't go faster than the speed of light wasn't that they got denser the way Einstein said.  It was because they started to wobble.

So I was thinking about George yesterday when I heard about those super-fast neutrinos.  Thinking maybe those neutrinos fly straight.  But mainly I was thinking about Joe Farina and about how in just a couple of months one guy could undo 4 years of harm caused by a bunch of incompetent educators.  I owe him more than he will ever know.

Why Mars Matters

America is not America without a frontier. We're the kind of people who need to be constantly pushing the outside of the envelope, creating a frontier, settling it, getting restless and moving on. It's in our nature to move West. And the only West left is out in space. That-a-way. Out yonder. Back East is a museum. It's getting as bad as Europe. But out West, you can stretch out and breathe. Tim Leary knew. He toured America, playing electronic music he claimed would prepare the human mind for a voyage into deep space. The Department of Justice put him on tour to recant, to take it all back. And he did. He told us the government was firmly in the hands of men and women who only a few years before had been stealing hub caps at Atlanta rock concerts. He said he was about to play some tapes to rearrange the molecules of our brains, to prepare us for deep space, for the long voyage ahead. Anybody who didn't want to go had better leave. I trusted Tim, and I wasn't ready for space, so I left. I never heard the Leary tapes. I doubt I'm fit to travel into space. But some folks are.

FLIR

Forward Looking Infrared has been around a long time. I first saw it in use over 30 years ago, cruising along the Rio Grande in an INS helicopter. FLIR has given U.S. troops the ability to see at night without being seen. It has completely altered the nature of modern warfare. It's incredible stuff. It reduces the human beings at the receiving end of a weapon to mere targets on a screen. If it's true, as I was told growing up in Texas, that distant is polite, FLIR makes killing about as polite as it gets.

I read recently that some researches believe playing kill-or-be-killed war games improves cognition. According to Daphne Bavelier, an assistant professor in the department of brain and cognitive science at the University of Rochester, people who play fast-paced games "have better vision, better attention and better cognition." Bavelier was a presenter at a symposium on the educational uses of video and computer games.

I'm constantly running into reports that suggest video game players make the best surgeons, pilots and CAD monkeys.

I guess that depends on the individual. My first video game was Doom, and after playing it for a month or so, I developed tunnel vision that lasted for weeks after I stopped playing the game. It was like walking around, looking at the world through a tube about the size of a coffee can.

Last year, Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker that some of the CIA agents who fly the lethal drones over Afghanistan wear flight suits at work. Mayer's October 2009 article, The Predator War, explores the risks of using predator drones as our weapon of choice in the war on terror.



The New Yorker, October 26, 2009

I don't doubt that video games are educational and have real potential for making work more fun.

One of the best games I've heard about was used by currency traders. The traders sat in the cockpit of a virtual fighter jet and gunned down stacks of foreign currency with bullets denominated in dollars to exchange dollars for Euros, Francs or Marks. To buy dollars, they loaded up with a foreign currency and gunned down piles of dollars.

You could develop a Madoff version of that game that helped investment advisors gun down their clients fortunes, and, in the advanced version, gun down their clients themselves, saving them the trouble of jumping out of windows.

Professor Bavelier had some good ideas about ways to "harness the positive effects" of first-person shooter games without violence.

"As you know," she said, "most of us females just hate those action video games. You don't have to use shooting. You can use, for example, a princess who has a magic wand and whenever she touches something, it turns into a butterfly and sparkles."

Put that into the targeting system of an Apache helicopter and you might have something.

Personally, I'm looking forward to smart weapons that know when to shoot and when not to.