The Republicans in Congress are trying to cut the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities out of the federal budget, essentially eliminating all federal support for the arts, including support for documentary films. That's just one more way to stifle independent voices.
At a time when protests -- both non-violent and violent -- are sweeping the Middle East and Africa, and American unions -- supported by college students -- are struggling to fight off Republican attacks on the remnants of the labor movement, let's recall the kind of documentaries public money has helped produce.
Even the Heavens Weep: The West Virginia Mine Wars (1985), directed and edited by Danny L. McGuire, was produced by WPBY-TV and the West Virginia Educational Broadcasting Authority with money from The Humanities Foundation of West Virginia and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It's a simple documentary -- narration, still photos and interviews -- that recreates the beginning of the labor movement in America, and the battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia. It packs a surprising wallop.
In 1921, 10,000 armed coal miners -- many of them WWI vets -- marched up Blair Mountain to get at the coal mines and company towns on the other side of the mountain, triggering the bloodiest fight between labor and capital in America's history. The mine owners defended their mines and shanty towns with 3,000 hired thugs -- armed with rifles, machine guns and a small cannon -- dug in at the top of Blair Mountain, and hired private planes to bomb the miners with explosives and tear gas. Finally, Warren G. Harding sent federal troops to Blair Mountain to disarm both sides. Until the documentary was made in 1985, Blair Mountain had dropped out of American history.
Even the Heavens Weep, WV Educational Broadcasting Authority
Even the Heavens Weep is an important historical document, pulled together from archival photos and news clippings, framed by a good script. The photographs of the working conditions in coal mines before the unions and of the living conditions in the "company towns" at the West Virginia mines are, at the same time, a grim reminder of the past, and a horrifying glimpse into what the future of workers might look like in America, Inc.
Even the Heavens Weep is available from West Virginia Public Broadcasting in Charleston, West Virginia. For anyone interested in the labor movement and in understanding what that movement was originally about -- whether or not you know who John L. Lewis and Mother Jones are or where the name "redneck" came from -- it's more than worth the effort to get it.
It’s hard not to see similarities between the mine owners’ determination to smother the nascent union movement early in the 20th Century and corporate government’s determination to finish off the vestiges of the union movement now.
But it’s even harder not to see the differences. The early unions had the energy of youth and the excitement of their discovery of solidarity and brotherhood on their side, and the course of history was in their favor, even if it took ten more years, the Great Depression and the New Deal to establish the unions. (By the time Roosevelt threw the weight of the federal government behind the unions, every working man and woman in American would be hurting from the economic collapse that followed the drastic consolidation of wealth into hands of a few, privileged Americans that touched off the Great Depression.)
Nowadays, the union movement is on the wane. Fighting to protect public employee unions feels almost like fighting to protect an endangered species. Many Americans are hurting, and, in fact, will never work again. But there are too many Americans who are not hurting this time. The country and the economy is too big for 10,000 marchers to make a difference, even if they were armed — is that even conceivable anymore — and could find somebody to march against. It feels like the only thing left to document is the end of the labor movement in America. And maybe we won’t even bother to do that.
Films like Even the Heavens Weep don't cost a lot of money to make, but they do take time and dedication. And it takes backing to get the kind of interviews with historians McGuire uses to pull the archival footage and photos together. Without the mantle of the CPB, the NEA or the NEH, particularly for young film makers, getting access to credible sources can be extremely difficult --almost impossible -- to do.
Friday, May 1, 2015
Thursday, March 28, 2013
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.
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.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
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.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
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?
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?
Thursday, March 14, 2013
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.
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.
Friday, March 8, 2013
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 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.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
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?
Saturday, March 24, 2012
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.
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?
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?
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
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.
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
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.
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