It's A New World

I woke up this morning in a new world.

Last night, I learned Michigan used to be on the equator. It was completely covered by warm, salt water just 350 million years ago. My attitude toward the Great Lakes and the little town I live in changed overnight.

I live where a great ocean used to be.

Noir

I woke up early and went down to the Corner Bakery for a cup of coffee. I sat at the window, next to a table of Russians. I couldn't understand a word they were saying.

I was watching the raindrops race each other down the window, the big ones gobbling up the little ones that got in their way, and thinking about Raymond Chandler and The Long Goodbye, a Chandler book I'd been reading the night before, when it hit me that The Long Goodbye is Chandler's most personal and autobiographical novel.

They say Chandler's agent was disappointed by The Long Goodbye. He thought the Phillip Marlowe character had gone soft. Personally, I think Marlowe comes across as more bitter and cynical than he is in Chandler's earlier work, and more political, more angry at the rich people who shaped the West Coast.

Some people say: When you dream, everything in the dream is you. I've never looked at novels and films that way, but maybe I should.

Chandler died in 1959. He developed pneumonia after a binge.

The chronology that accompanies The Library of America's Chandler (Stories and Early Novels), ends with: "1959 ... Returns alone to La Jolla where he intended to live. Drinks heavily, develops pneumonia, and is hospitalized on March 23. Dies in Scripps Clinic at 3:50 P.M. on March 26. Buried on March 30 at Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego."

Robert Altman made a film version of The Long Goodbye in 1973. In a send-up of the detective genre, Altman cast Elliot Gould as a mumbling, bumbling Marlowe who talks to his cat.

The thing about noir in books and films is there is never enough rain for me.

Unit D

My daughter was home today, complaining about having to get out of bed because the maid was coming. The maid's a woman from Brazil. Her husband's a divinity student at the Adventist college in a little town down the road. He helps her clean the house now and then, making her a maid service or cleaning service I guess, which is what we called our maid in Brooklyn, even though she was just a woman from Guatemala who brought her daughter with her sometimes and showed her maid tricks like storing the garbage bags in the bottom of the garbage can. The word maid was a problem in Brooklyn because my wife was ashamed that a woman was cleaning our house. There were programs on NPR about that in those days. Ways to get by without a maid. We lived with the guilt. Now I don't feel guilty about having a maid, just uneasy about being able to afford a maid when so many people are out of work sometimes, but never when I'm picking up the house before she comes, because I know that without the Friday pick up and the maid we'd slowly sink beneath a rising sea of kipple. When the house is picked up enough for her to start cleaning it, I get out of her way.

This morning I took the kid to Big Boy for breakfast. On the way, she told me if she had been born in the old days we would still be in New York where her name was written in the book. People couldn't move around back then she said, couldn't leave New York the way we did right after 9/11, a move we'd planned to make to the Midwest, made easier by the dust in the air and the smell like a burned out motor or lamp and the scorched pieces of paper that floated into the courtyard of our co-op the day after the towers fell down. That was the day I got back to Brooklyn, drove all night in a rented car, came in across Staten Island with the heavy trucks, ambulances, and military vehicles of all kinds, everything but tanks. The tanks were just in my mind. But I heard the helicopters when the rental threw a rod a couple of blocks from my apartment and I parked it in front of a corner grocery and walked the rest of the way home.

If it had been the old days, we'd have stayed in New York instead of laying in a supply of Cipro and Amoxicillin and flying out to the Midwest, and I never would have put that guy's eye out at the dump. It was about the time Saddam's sons, Uday and the other one, were killed, gunned down or blown up, and right after I took the wood from the kitchen cabinets we tore out to make room for the new refrigerator down to the dump. Right before that, the night before or maybe the night before that I dreamed I was trapped in the basement and the house was on fire, and I was yelling at my wife to throw the .357 magnum through the narrow basement window so I could blow my fucking brains out to keep from burning alive, the kind of dream that stays with you all day. And right after that dream I took the wood to the dump. Long pieces of wood with nails sticking out that I tried to hammer down, but they kept bending and sliding under the hammer and I couldn't get them all out or bent down flat, and I had to be careful not to jam one into my hand when I was loading the wood into the back of my truck. When I got to the dump, the attendant helped me pull the wood out of the back of the truck and throw it over the side of the walk-in dumpster. And when we were almost finished a guy came out of the dumpster, holding his head and saying what the fuck were we doing, and the attendant told him he wasn't supposed to be going inside the dumpster like that. You're lucky you didn't get killed the attendant told him. I could see the guy had a cut next to his eye, and he was sticking his finger through a hole in his baseball cap and saying you ruined my fucking cap. Then he went over and got in his car and his wife was looking at his eye, and I backed out and drove off, thinking they were probably writing down my license plate number, or maybe they would come back to the dump every Saturday and try to find me. But I was thinking maybe he wouldn't have much of a case, even if he lost that eye, because he probably shouldn't have been in the dumpster. But just to make sure, I called a lawyer so he could set my mind at ease. They say when you leave a place you get a unique perspective on it, see things the people who stay behind don't see. All I get is homesick now and then.

At Big Boy, we ended up in a booth next to some kind of old timers' breakfast club, four guys from the local VFW, talking about draft dodgers in the Seventies and a local doctor who did a tour on a medevac plane, flying critically hurt GIs from Iraq to Germany, the kind of old men and the kind of conversation makes you want to say if I get that way please put a bullet in my brain pan. But just to show you how confusing free association can get, I sat there thinking all at once about four or five things, all jumbled up, that I have to put down in some linear way here, because the narrative won't let me tell it all at once. The VFW has to let you use their big, portable barbeque pits if you're a veteran. You just reserve the pit. Tow it home with your truck. Leon told me that at Leon's World Famous Barbeque in Galveston while I waited for my take-out ribs, reading the menu on the wall, reading cold yard bird, a phrase my wife picked off the menu and put in a poem, you cold yard birds, I know the names of poets in high places, while Carmen, whose craziness landed me in the Army, waited for her order, standing alongside me at the counter, wondering who I was. I made the mistake of going to see her at Unit D, you don't even have to explain to anybody what a place called Unit D is about, after she slashed her wrists, and the cops, doing me a favor, figuring me, an officer of a local bank, for a respectable guy who happened, unwittingly, to be mixed up with the criminally insane, took me down to the station and showed me her rap sheet. How were they to know that inside that thick file was where I longed to be?

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?

The Hunger Games (2012)

Having read The Hunger Games, I knew that coming to grips with the film was going to be a challenge, so I took along my resident expert in Greek and Roman myths and the life and times of teenage girls -- and my personal symbol of rebellion -- when I went to the movie last night.

BG:  So what did you think of the movie?

KG:  It didn't seem like the same story.  The book didn't translate to the movie very well.

BG:  I think it's hard to get from a first-person novel to a third-person film.  That may explain why the producers ended up with a second-rate director.  The good directors shied away from the script.  If anybody deserves a poison berry for the The Hunger Games (2012), it's Gary Ross.  He just never found the right mix of action and contemplation to make his film work.  And he never got close to the horror in the book, of Cato's death for instance.  Ross never caught the power of nature, violence and unreason as a sustaining force.  

KG:  Yeah.  Maybe it would have been a better movie if they weren't trying to make "The Hunger Games."  The book is so iconic now and so many people share it that if you try to be true to the characters and plot the way all these people imagined it and trying to please everyone, you can't make a good enough movie.

BG:  Maybe it's about selection.  Picking the right things about characters and the right scenes from the novel to make a good film.

KG:  They didn't do a very good job of that.  The scenes at the cornucopia were important and they fell short.  It's such an important part of the arena, and the things that happen by it and around it set the mood for everything in the arena.  The actors they chose were wrong.  Except for Peeta and Primrose.  Josh Hutcherson was right for Peeta.  Willow Shields was perfect as Primrose.  Jennifer Lawrence was too old to play Katniss.  And she didn't look hungry.  And they dyed her hair!  Donald Sutherland was a terrible choice for President Snow.  The people in the capitol are supposed to age gracefully.  They're supposed to be thin.  And they missed a really good chance to contrast the people from the capitol with the people from the districts at the beginning when Effie Trinket comes to District 12.  She should have been way over the top.

Jennifer Lawrence, The Hunger Games, Lionsgate, 2012

BG:  Aging gracefully means staying thin?  Got it.  The producers are going to be up against it, trying to cram in two more movies before Lawrence turns 25. And yet, Lawrence is about all that The Hunger Games (2012) has going for it. She is someone people can care about. Her face is large enough and smooth enough for the camera to linger on, to turn into the kind of landscape we're missing for most of the movie.  What do you make of the fact that Collins gave the kids from District 12 nature names, like Katniss, Primrose, Gail (like a strong wind), and even Peeta (like the bread)?

KG:  They don't have much.  All they've got is nature.  Nature helps them survive.  They'd be dead without it.

BG:  Did you miss knowing what Katniss was thinking?

KG:  Oh, yes.  Definitely.  What she was thinking is over half the book, and when you take it away there's like this enormous weight on the dialogue and the body language to communicate the depth of what she was thinking.

BG:  It's hard to find good external signs of inner dialogue and change.  Katniss goes from girl to woman, from huntress to warrior, and, at the end, back to girl.  If Ross had pulled that off, he would have had a great movie.  All of that teenage energy and drama, dropped into the middle of gladiatorial training and combat.  OMG.  The screenwriters, who included Susan Collins, and the director missed so many chances.  Katniss' thoughts at the end of the film could have been externalized by having her say them out loud to Peeta, for example.  I thought the most effective scene in the film was Katniss' hallucination in the arena.  It works because you finally get into Katniss' point of view.

KG:  At the end of the fighting, when Cato makes his big political speech, he could have been talking for Katniss. 

BG:  Anything else?

KG:  Yes, there are two main things that they changed in the movie that they should have left the same. The first one is the mockingjay pin. It's the symbol of the whole book and when they had her getting it at the hob they demolished the connection between Madge ( the mayor's daughter ) and Katniss.  The problem there is now in later movies they will need to think up a new way for her to meet Madge or leave that part out completly, butchering the story even more.  The other thing that left a lot to be desired was the dogs.  Sure they were in the movie, but they looked like pit bulls on steroids, not the terrible mutations that would later haunt Katniss and give her even more depth as a character.

BG:  Okay.  I want to leave you with a couple of thoughts.  There is a way to get The Hunger Games back. Go re-read the book.  And this.  It's from a poem by Yeats.

What master made the lash.
Whence had they come,
The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?

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.

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.

YouTube

Web 2.0 has witnessed the rise of citizen journalism and a brand of publishing that reminds me of the wild, wild West. Compared to the staid publications of the East Coast with their European sensibilities and, as Norman Mailer put it, their "bloodless, gutless restraint," the World Wide Web is raw, ideological and combative. 

Julian Assange, publisher of WikiLeaks, is one of the most combative and ideological publishers on the web and Assange and the leaked documents and videos he has published are now at the red hot center of the battle to control the flow of information across the web. Although Assange is not the first publisher to make government documents available to the public, his publication of gun camera videos and U.S. Department of State cables is massive, both in terms of its sheer volume and in terms of its buzz. And it is the only leak around right now. In my view, there is nothing on WikiLeaks as sensational as the Abu Ghraib photos, and, in fact, nothing as shocking as some of the videos that have been up on YouTube since the start of the Iraq occupation, but Assange has made the leaks personal and part of a private war with the U.S. government. He has given the publication of leaks a human face. He has become the center of attention. That's too bad. Because it may be too hot at the center for Assange.

When I first saw the gun camera video Assange published, I was struck by the fact that the gunship was adhering to General Petraeus' regrettable rules of engagement for Baghdad. The rules should have been stricter, but at least they prevented the gunships from finishing off the wounded the way the gunship in this suppressed video did.



This kind of video, depicting the actual murder of a wounded insurgent, was available on YouTube for years, along with countless home videos put up there -- self-published, if you will -- by American soldiers and Marines, and also by insurgents. Most of the insurgent videos seem to have been removed quietly over the years on the grounds that they violate YouTube's terms of service. I say "quietly" because YouTube, a publisher whose significance dwarfs the personal soap opera of Assange and WikiLeaks, has never identified itself as a publisher with an ax to grind. In fact, YouTube doesn't pretend to be a publisher at all. Putatively, they are simply providing a forum for the free exchange of information. Therein, it seems to me, lies YouTube's safety, if not legally -- and I don't pretend to understand the legal issues around the free flow of information -- at least morally. For YouTube does not notice us -- unless we draw attention to one another. They have adopted at least the appearance of ignorance and neutrality. Assange has not.

Assange has, in fact, made quite a big deal out of knowing exactly what he's publishing. He has probably been led down that path by the establishment press who are very high on "responsibility" and insist on things like verifying sources, redacting classified information, and making a determination about whether the public's right to know outweighs the danger of exposing operators and operations. Having consented to work with the establishment in making those judgments, Assange has exposed himself to the moral, if not the legal, responsibility to get it right.

I suspect that is something Julian Assange is poorly equipped to do.

(Update. 3/24/2019. YouTube removed the video of an American gunship murdering a wounded insurgent.)

Is Julian Assange A Journalist?

Both sides of the WikiLeaks debate seem determined to misrepresent the issues in the Assange drama by hotly arguing over whether Assange is a journalist or not. Of course he isn’t. Assange is a publisher, and he’s entitled to the same protections — no more and no less – as any other publisher.

File this under topics for further research.

Do journalists have better or worse protections under the U.S. Constitution than publishers have? Are they held to different standards? Do people respect journalists more than they respect publishers? Who raised the issue of whether Assange is a journalist in the first place? Does being perceived as a journalist help or hurt Assange?

And what, if anything, do the charges a Swedish prosecutor — a woman who has a long history of prosecuting sex abuse and child abuse — wants to question Assange about have to do with WikiLeaks? For the record, I don’t think the charges have much to with the WikiLeaks drama at all. Sex shouldn’t be a death-defying act. If Assange did what the two women have accused him of doing — if he exposed them to the risk of AIDS by forcing them to have unprotected sex – he committed a crime under Swedish law. That doesn’t mean he’s not entitled to protection as a publisher when he publishes government tapes and documents.