Untitled Post

Stephen King explores themes of the 1960s, and the effects that decade has had on subsequent years, in his book Hearts In Atlantis. This book is a kind of hybrid work: it is part novel and part short-fiction collection. I use the term “short fiction” loosely; two of the five stories collected here are long enough to be books on their own right, especially the introductory work, “Low Men in Yellow Coats”, which apparently forms the basis for the recent film called Hearts In Atlantis. The five stories are fairly self-contained, each having a different protagonist, but those protagonists all share in common some of the same characters who move through their lives. One effect of this construction is that while we often identify the effects that others in our lives have on our own, we don’t often consider the effects that people we have never met — or even known about — can have on the shape of our lives. So, if the first-person narrator of the second novella (“Hearts In Atlantis”) never meets Bobby Garfield (the protagonist of “Low Men In Yellow Coats”), his life is still affected by things Bobby did as a child. This interconnectedness of all our fates seems to be a theme of King’s in the entire work.

The stories here are not typical King horror; in fact, only three of them deal directly with any kind of supernatural event. “Low Men In Yellow Coats” is one of those stories where the young kid, whose life could be tilted in any of several directions, is profoundly shaped by the arrival of a somewhat mysterious stranger. Young Bobby Garfield lives alone with his mother, a woman who for one reason or another isn’t totally capable of real emotion (his father has passed away as the book begins). He desperately wants a new bike for his birthday, but his mother instead gives him an adult library card — which he uses under the increasing tutelage of his new upstairs neighbor, Ted Brautigan, one of those older figures who knows many things and is also haunted…both figuratively and literally. I enjoyed this story, even though it is basically The Man Without A Face with a supernatural element; but I must note that the supernatural element is a bit disappointing. The book appears to be a tangential part of King’s ongoing Dark Tower series, none of which I’ve read, so the bits that deal with that part of his story lost a great deal of their significance to me. Better, though, is the fact that Mr. Brautigan’s effect on Bobby is not totally positive. In many stories like this, the young kid goes on to be a fine, upstanding young man after the itinerant teacher leaves his life. That’s not the case here. The dark forces that King employs so often are not done with Bobby, not at all.

The second novella, “Hearts In Atlantis”, has no supernatural element at all. It’s the story of a group of college students and their bizarre obsession with the card game “Hearts”. These young men want to do nothing but play the game, which takes over their lives even as the events of the 60s — the Vietnam War, peace protests, et cetera — spin around them. This story has the kind of feel that King achieved in “The Body” and “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”, and it is quite successful.

Less successful are the remaining stories in the book, although they are not without their charms. “Blind Willie” is the story of a Vietnam veteran who may — or may not, it seems — have figured out a scam by which to earn a lot of money, although his reasons for carrying out the scam are not, it turns out, based on selfishness. “Why We’re In Vietnam” is a strange kind of ghost story — I’m not sure I understood it, but I enjoyed its tone and surprising ending. The book ends with “Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling”, in which two characters are reunited after many years. Not, as it happens, the characters that I wanted to see reunited; but it’s an interesting reunion nonetheless.

Hearts In Atlantis is not a perfect book; its very structure makes it feel uneven, with the three brief tales feeling somewhat insubstantial, following as they do two longer, more “complete” stories. But it is an interesting analysis of the time of the 1960s and the feelings that decade still evokes on those who lived through them. (I missed the 1960s by two years, it turns out.) King writes at one point: “Although we’ve forgotten the language we spoke in those years…sometimes a word or two comes back….And sometimes, in my dreams and memories…, I smell the place where I spoke that language with such easy authority: a whiff of oranges, a scent of oranges, and the fading smell of flowers.”

Share This Post

Untitled Post

(WARNING: Blatant defiance of my “no politics here” pledge coming up.)

So, for the second time in my life, a President named George Bush is going to take my country to war against Iraq.

I am no expert on such matters, but I see little reason to expect America vs. Saddam, Release 2.0 to be much different than the first. I expect our military to pretty much clobber the Iraqi forces. A worst-case scenario would involve a lot of close-quarter combat within the streets of Baghdad and Iraq’s other cities, with the Iraqi military actually deploying the chemical and biological weapons already in inventory against our troops. A best-case scenario would involve the Iraqis themselves, whom some maintain are not as enamored of their dictator President as he would have us believe, rising up to provide our forces with some kind of assist, if not a full-out coup or revolt. In either case, I expect fairly swift victory for US forces — being secured in less than three months, say — with the main difference between the best and worst case scenarios being the number of dead Americans and Iraqis.

I’ve been reading a lot about the coming war, in the Blogosphere on both sides and in newspapers and magazines. I listened a bit (though not much) to the Senate’s debate on the war resolution. It’s not inaccurate to say that on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I have been pro-war, while I’ve been anti-war on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. (Sundays, I’m a Bills fan.) The anti-war arguments have struck me as being fairly ineffective — clinging to an unrealistic view of the world and America’s role in it; more derivative of anger at President Bush the Second than anything else; curiously bankrupt in terms of offering options other than outright war. Being anti-war seems to have become something of a reflex for some. (And I’d be dishonest if I didn’t admit to sharing that reflex, at least in part.)

The problem I’m having is that if the anti-war arguments are striking me as hollow, the pro-war arguments are not proving convincing, either. It seems to me that the burden of proof should always reside with the people who would send American soldiers into battle, and yet the burden of proof has not been met, not by a longshot. The Administration insists that Saddam is very close to nuclear capability, and yet no real proof is offered — instead we’re shown pictures of places that we think could possibly resemble nuclear bomb-making facilities, or we are given cloak-and-daggerish type arguments (like the inspectors who saw Iraqi soldiers removing boxes of something from the facilities….). The pro-war side constantly invokes 11 September 2001 as a justification, and yet no concrete link of Iraq to Al Qaeda is ever forthcoming, so instead the entire rationale for sending Americans into war is changed: no longer do we require a smoking gun to go to war; instead, it is now sufficient that we suspect the existence of a gun in the first place. The implications for such a paradigm shift regarding war are better examined by persons better versed in such things than I; suffice it to say that I don’t find “We have to go to war to stop what we think could conceivably happen at some point in the future” particularly convincing, because there is still no guarantee at all that even if we go to war, what we think could conceivably happen if we didn’t now won’t happen. We are told that we must go to war because it is the only way we can keep, say, Philadelphia from being obliterated by a terrorist nuke. But what if we go to war, defeat Saddam, destroy every weapon of mass destruction that we find, and then a year or two later Al Qaeda strikes us all the same? Our war with Iraq will have turned out to be useless — and we will be faced with another war, somewhere, somehow. And I am forced to wonder if we are really, truly prepared to go to war against any country that has any dealings at all with Al Qaeda or some other terrorist state.

So, I am unconvinced that war with Iraq will in any way prevent future September 11’s. I am unconvinced that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction are as numerous or as present a threat as the Administration is claiming. And I tire of the Administration’s cagey insistence that they have the information, and that we have to take their word for it. “Trust us, we know what we’re talking about” is simply not reassuring when we’re considering war; and when we ask for the information that would convince us, we shouldn’t be satisfied with “We could tell you, but then we’d have to kill you.” The burden of proof must lie on those who want to go to war, and it doesn’t help when the CIA itself is releasing reports that call into question just how big a threat Saddam really is.

It also does not help when President Bush the Second publicly says things like, “This is the guy who tried to kill my dad.” And it doesn’t help when Ari Fleischer, the President’s spokesperson, publicly states that the whole thing could be avoided if some Iraqi would only assassinate Saddam Hussein. Statements like that make me question our Administration’s motives: is this really a war to “make the world safe for democracy” (so to speak), or is this just a bit of unfinished personal business on the part of the Bushes? If our goal is to remove from the scene a possible source of weapons of mass destruction, why would an Administration official publically say things that imply that the real goal is simply the death of Saddam Hussein?

And for that matter, I’ve seen precious little discussion of what our post-war strategy would entail. I would like to see some assurance that the void in Iraq left by Saddam’s death would be filled by something safer…but then, even that wouldn’t be entirely convincing, considering how Saddam is a product of the United States in the first place. It certainly wouldn’t be convincing given the conflicting signals coming from Washington as to just how big a threat Saddam is in the first place. And given our relative lack of concern with Afghanistan once the Taliban was removed from power a year ago, I wonder how well-equipped we are to run things in Iraq once we create a power-vacuum there.

Finally, I want to know who’s next. Who is our next target in the war on terror? Where do we go from Iraq? Iran? North Korea? Saudi Arabia? And what do we do if and when Al Qaeda strikes again, as nearly everyone I’ve read is convinced will happen?

These are not arguments I am advancing against war in Iraq or anyplace else. My country was brutally attacked on 11 September 2001, by agents of a stateless terrorist group. I don’t believe, not for one second, that we should adopt a pacifist stance in hopes that this will mollify the terrorists. But I am also not convinced that war in Iraq will have anything to do with a larger war on terrorism, despite the description of Iraq by many as the next logical phase of “this war”. We are told that there will be more attacks on American soil and more Americans will die, but that war in Iraq is necessary to prevent these attacks. We appear to be damned if we do and damned if we don’t. I don’t think I’m asking for much here: I just want to be shown that the lives of Americans will be safer for having gone to war in Iraq. Not “might be”, not “trust us”, not “he’s evil and we should do it anyway”. Especially not that last, if it later turns out that we’re still willing, as we’ve been all too willing in the past, to ignore evil when its existence is in such a place that does not particularly engage our sense of urgency. I don’t object, on principle, to the United States being the world’s policeman. I do object to the United States being a bad policeman.

What it comes down to, I suppose, is that I fear that in the case of the coming war against Iraq (and I cannot in good conscience consider the war against Iraq to be another theater in the war against terrorism….yet) just might be an instance of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, because next time it will be all the easier to fall victim to the same reasons. I am not against the war on a priori grounds, as most of the anti-war folks seem to be. And I am most definitely not for the war on a priori grounds, either…and neither side has made a strong a posteriori case.

One of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, in exhorting the United States to fight the Spanish-American War in 1898, used the headline: “War? Sure!” The feeling I’m getting now is, “War? I guess so….” Somehow that just doesn’t seem like enough.

Share This Post

Untitled Post

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Detail from the “Gypsy Girl” Mosaic, possibly originally meant to be a likeness of the goddess Gaea.

This mosaic is one of a large number of masterpiece mosaics discovered during an excavation of the ancient city of Zeugma, on the banks of the Euphrates River in present-day Turkey. Tragically, much of the city’s ruins have been lost, unexplored by archaeologists, due to the creation of a reservoir after the Euphrates was dammed for hydroelectric power. A large portion of the site is now underwater. Part of the site’s excavation was covered on an episode of NOVA on PBS (click image for link).

Zeugma is not the only site to have either been lost or threatened with inundation by damming projects. An overview of some other such “hotspots” can be found on the PBS site.

Share This Post

Untitled Post

Oh, how I would love to have been alive in New York City during the forties, fifties and sixties, when the American musical theater was at its peak. I would love to have been able to see all those wonderful stage productions. I would love to have been able to see Show Boat, for instance, and Oklahoma!. In the home of my childhood, my parents were always playing records of Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter — performed by the likes of William Warfield, Julie Andrews, Maurice Chevalier, Rex Harrison, Richard Burton…if I could transport myself back to any time and place in American history, I might well choose the Broadway of the middle twentieth century. To attend a production on opening night; to await the rising of the curtain on a new production with an audience that has never seen it; to drink martinis at Sardi’s with the cast afterward, tensely awaiting those first notices in the morning edition newspapers…how wonderful that must have been! All those wonderful songs, with their glorious lyrics, composed by those magnificent composer-lyricist collaborators for whom urbane sophistication and wit were the coin of the realm, and to whom our own age of ironic detachment would be as alien an environment as Broadway itself would be to a Peruvian alpaca farmer…how amazing a time, indeed. I wish I could have seen it, in all its glory, as opposed to catching glimpses through film versions of those plays (some of which are magnificent in themselves) and compact discs of those original cast albums, which were recorded on the plays’ opening weekend.

This bit of nostalgic reverie on my part is brought on by my reading of the book The Street Where I Live, by Alan Jay Lerner. Lerner was the lyricist to composer Frederick Loewe in my favorite of those great theatrical collaborations, Lerner and Loewe. These men were the geniuses behind Gigi, Camelot, Brigadoon, and for me the greatest musical of all time, My Fair Lady. (As far as I am concerned, the film version of My Fair Lady eclipses all other musical films — with the sole exception of Singin’ In The Rain.) This book is not a comprehensive memoir of Lerner’s life, or even of his work in the theater. It is, instead, an account of Lerner and Loewe’s last three collaborations (My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot), which are also contemporaneous with the end of what Lerner calls the “belle epoque” of the American musical theater which ended in the early 1960s. Lerner’s first sentence sets the tone for the book, and a wonderful sentence it is:

This is the story of climaxes and endings and the sundown of a decade that blazed with joy, excitement, and triumph: so much, in fact, that as I look back I am haunted by the fear that perhaps I drank the wine too fast to taste it and instead of slowing down to look at the scenery, kept my foot on the accelerator and my eyes on the road ahead, gazing only occasionally from side to side and waiting far too long to glance at the rear-view mirror.

After a brief prologue (which Lerner, not unexpectedly, calls the “Overture”) in which Lerner describes his own biographical background including a very touching portrait of his father, the book launches into the whirlwind that must have been Lerner’s life as his last three projects with Fritz Loewe took shape. For me, the best chapter is the first, because that is the chapter dealing with My Fair Lady. The challenges Lerner and Loewe faced in converting George Bernard Shaw’s classic stage play Pygmalion to a stage musical are fascinatingly chronicled — where to put the songs, what dialogue of Shaw’s to retain and which to exclude, how to bridge the scenes in a more convincing manner for the musical theater. The problem with the original play’s resolution — in which Shaw pointedly insists that Professor Higgins remained a bachelor, while Eliza married Freddy — is dispensed with. A lot of this matieral actually flashes by, as Lerner is more interested in detailing the actual creation of the production itself once the show’s writing has been mostly accomplished. Now the book becomes more engrossing, as a series of “supporting characters” move onto Lerner’s stage. There is Moss Hart, the accomplished director who is apparently one of the most diplomatic men of all time; there is Julie Andrews, the talented young singer tapped to play Eliza Doolittle even though she has never starred in a major production; there is Rex Harrison, the accomplished stage actor who has also never done a musical and who is prone to hilarious and brief outbursts of temper:

On another occasion, much more recently, Rex was visiting my wife, then Sandra Payne (she is still Sandra Payne, but no longer my wife) and me in the country, and sitting around the fire one evening he was discussing, most sympathetically, how difficult it was for his wife, then Elizabeth (still Elizabeth, but) to put up with his past which, time after time, kept cropping up either in the press, social conversation, or in the shape of children. I said, also sympathetically, that I could understand that. Sandy said, also sympathetically, that she could, too. That is all. She could, too. “God damn you, women,” screamed Rex. “What about Alan and me? It’s bloody difficult for us, too, but none of you ever thinks of that.” Looks of bewilderment. Change of topic. Scene around the fire continues pleasantly.

Also hilarious is Harrison’s self-appointment as the guardian of the spirit of Shaw’s original play, to the point of keeping an edition of the play on the set at all times and the mistake Lerner makes when Harrison asks about the source of some material not in the original play:

There is a speech just before “The Rain In Spain”….when Rex got to that scene he said to me: “That’s a damn fine speech. Where in Shaw did you find it?” Like a fool I told the truth and said: “I wrote it.” From then on he lost respect for it and seldom got it right. But it taught me a lesson. Ever after, if he came to a line I had written and inquired: “Is that yours?”, I would always reply that I had found it in one of Shaw’s letters or in a preface or an essay. That seemed to satisfy him and we had no more difficulties. I must have been so persuasive that in an interview with the London Times two weeks before the English opening, he said that in the entire play there were only six lines not written by Bernard Shaw.

Lerner does not do a lot of editorializing in this book, but a theme that does bubble to the surface now and again is his feeling that (at his writing) an age is ending. If the Age of Irony has not actually dawned at the time that Lerner is writing (1978), he does seem to feel it coming. We see this when he describes the recording of the My Fair Lady cast album, because that album’s producer — a man named Goddard Lieberson — had been a beloved friend of Lerner and Loewe, and he had died just before Lerner wrote the book. “With his passing,” Lerner writes, “went another drain on the world’s fast-diminishing supply of charm….pleasure without joy is as hollow as passion without tenderness, and the pleasure of Goddard’s company was the joy he brought to others. We call it charm and I weep for a world without it.”

This theme of Lerner’s, the passing of the musical theater’s hey-day and the passing of charm, becomes more evident in the chapters on Gigi and Camelot. Whereas many musicals start as stage productions and are filmed later, in the case of Gigi the process is reversed, because of some contractual obligation Lerner owed to MGM. As he recounts his work with the legendary musical producer Arthur Freed (who also made Singin’ In The Rain), he notes the passing of the great studio system.

For so many years the most derogatory critical epithet that could be hurled at a film was to call it “Hollywood”. It still happens, but to do so today is like joining a protest march against Pompeii. I entered the Hollywood scene shortly before its demise, but I saw enough to make me wish it were still there.

This sense of a passing time is more evident in the last chapter, about Camelot, which was Lerner and Loewe’s last production together, as well as their most problematic. (Loewe retired after Camelot, while Lerner went on to do work with such composers as Andre Previn.) Camelot is, of course, the King Arthur musical, based on T. H. White’s novel The Once and Future King. Lerner recounts the heavy reworking the play received as its troubled production moved from Toronto to Boston and finally to Broadway, with a new song at one point being written the night before the play’s New York opening. He describes the play’s not-disastrous, but not-overly-enthusiastic reception, and the way it did not become a hit until its songs were featured on an episode of Ed Sullivan’s variety show. (I should note that while I love the songs and music in Camelot, and have never seen the stage production, the film version is nearly unwatchable.) Of course, no chapter on Camelot would be complete without a mention of how the play became something of a metaphor for the presidency of John F. Kennedy after 22 November 1963. Even that, to Lerner, signifies a sea-change in the arts: “The death of the president opened the door to the chamber of horror called the 1960s. As the national compass began to go mad and the nation began to lose its sense of direction, no less did the performing arts.” And Lerner reserves his most damning condemnation for the aimless drift he sees at work in the arts, and the way the youth in whose hands the arts now reside lurch from one fad to the next: “Youth has many glories, but judgment is not one of them, and no amount of electronic amplification can turn a belch into an aria.”

Lerner’s condemndation of rock-and-roll rankles a bit, although it’s not hard to understand his point of view, writing as he does from his perspective as probably the last living exponent of the great tradition of the American musical theater. If he was not in a position to appreciate the works that were to come later on (particularly, the “British invasion” of Broadway of the 80s and 90s), he should still be noted for his defense of beauty and joy — and charm — that really do seem to have dropped off our cultural radar screen. The Street Where I Live is magnificent.

Share This Post

Untitled Post

I’m both excited and scared right now: in the novel-in-progress, I have reached the chapter where the climax begins. Like any good epic fantasy, the thing ends in a pretty large battle that actually takes place in two different locales, with the two locales becoming one in the end; and while that battle is taking place, my main character is alone someplace else, achieving her unique mission. (When I describe it like that, the thing sounds disturbingly similar to The Lord of the Rings. Maybe I shouldn’t have my heroine having a change of heart on the brink of a volcano….)

The problems that have me worried are pacing and sequence of events. With the denouement transpiring in this way, I have to make sure that I don’t intercut from one bit of the action to another at inappropriate moments and that the sequence remains clear. I think I have most of that problem figured out already, as one portion of the battle really isn’t initially as important, from the standpoint of the novel’s main story, as the other, so that part of the battle can remain in the background, so to speak, until the other battle and the heroine’s solitary mission are done. Then the other battle can move to the forefront.

My other concern is to avoid having the whole thing become a morass of dull-to-read carnage. I plan to dip into the battle scenes in Malory, Tolkien, Kay and others as I write this material. If I’m going to steal, I might as well steal from the best, n’est-ce pas?

Share This Post

Untitled Post

Via ESPN, a nifty article by Jayson Stark compiling some nifty statistics about this year’s MLB playoffs thus far. My favorite nifty stat is this bit about the Yankees’ pitchers in the series against Anaheim: in games two and three of that series, Yankees pitchers worked the count to 0-2 against sixteen different Anaheim batters — and surrendered hits to eight of those batters, versus securing only four strikeouts. Ouch.

Also interesting is the fact that since the Braves began their postseason run in 1991, they have played every National League team at one point or another in the postseason, save only two — and those are the only two National League teams that never made the postseason in that span. Read the article to see which teams.

Share This Post

Untitled Post

IT’S ALL IN THE DETAILS, part two.

(A sporadic series of appreciations or deprecations of those little details in movies that either enhance the story or evict the viewer from it. Read Part One.)

GOOD: In the Line Of Fire. This underrated thriller stars Clint Eastwood as an aging Secret Service agent who becomes personally involved when a brilliant assassin announces his intention to kill the President of the United States. He has a love interest in another Secret Service agent played by Rene Russo. In one scene where they seduce each other, the camera tracks the movement of their feet across the hotel room carpet as they undress each other — but as they move, one by one all of those gadgets Secret Service agents carry thud to the floor. Handcuffs, their guns, their holsters, their radios, those little ear-buds that come up the back of the neck, all of it. That’s a good touch in itself, but it actually is the set-up for a joke. Eastwood and Russo have barely begun when the phone rings. It’s their boss, of course, telling them that there’s been a change in plans and they’re to report immediately. Russo jumps up and starts getting dressed, leaving Eastwood alone in bed for a second, at which point he groans, “Now I gotta put all that shit back on.”

GOOD: Die Hard. This film is actually full of good details, but two favorites of mine occur during the scene where the police are about to attempt to raid the Nakatomi Building, ignoring the protests of John McClane (Bruce Willis). As the policemen make their way through the building’s surrounding landscaping, one of them catches his hand on a bush’s thorns, and yelps, “Ouch!” Meanwhile, the bad guys prepare to receive the cops in the building’s lobby, with one of them taking his position behind a candy counter. As this guy waits for the shooting to start, he reaches into the counter and swipes a candy bar.

BAD: Die Hard 2. I love all of the Die Hard movies, but Die Hard 2 has its share of goof-ups and errors. Two of them are most notable. Early in the film, Detective McClane is in Dulles International Airport, which is in Washington, DC. He uses a payphone to call his wife on her plane (she is flying in, and he is there to pick her up). The problem with the scene is that the payphone he uses is clearly marked, “Pacific Bell”. The other bad detail in the film comes when the terrorists intentionally cause the crash of a jetliner. This is a very horrific scene, complete with a shot of the passenger cabin before the crash just so we know that this is a fully-loaded jet whose passengers are all going to die. When the plane crashes, it goes up in an immense fireball. The problem with this is that we’ve already been told that this particular plane has almost no fuel left. It simply would not make that big of an explosion upon crashing.

BAD: Air Force One. Speaking of airplanes, there’s this film which may be the most disappointing film I have ever seen, when I compare my expectations based on a description of the plot versus the finished product. Harrison Ford plays the President of the United States who must fight armed terrorists when they hijack Air Force One — how could a movie with that story go wrong? Well, I won’t list the ways in which it goes wrong here, except to note one glaring detail. Air Force One contains the single worst visual effect I have ever seen in a big-budget Hollywood movie: the final crash of Air Force One into the ocean. This effect looks every bit like the lousy piece of computer animation that it is. I am astounded that the filmmakers looked at this effect and said, “Yep, that’s good enough”.

GOOD: Pinnocchio. You have to admire a Disney film with as cheerful a dark side as this one has. The scene where the pool-shooting ruffian Lampwick metamorphosizes into a donkey is a perfect bit of horrific film-making.

BAD: The X-Files. Just how did Mulder and Scully manage to get back from the South Pole, anyway?

Share This Post

Untitled Post

Perhaps it’s a result of conditioning by reading Tolkien at an early age, but it bugs me when I encounter an imaginary-world epic fantasy with no map of its world. Such was the case with Sean Russell’s The One Kingdom, a book which I set aside the other day after it failed to really grab my attention after 90 pages or so. I’ll try it again another time; I’ve had the experience many times of bouncing off a novel only to return to it some time later — years later, even — and come to love it immensely. But the lack of a map seriously rankles, especially in a book where geographical features play an apparently important role (in this case, a river).

Share This Post