Politicians as Celebrities

Just this second I noticed "Spell Check" on this window, the composition window before hitting SAVE, and to the right) before I'd written a word I clicked on it: "You have perfect spelling" it replied. Well there you have it: I don't have to type another word, I'm perfect, vote for me before I say something and ruin everything. That's what all politicians, the ones who are successful, strive to do, say nothing so they'll be perfect.

Yesterday I almost posted an appraisal of President Bush's demeanor during his long press conference; I was going to expound on his finally perfecting his 'Good Ol' Boy' media personna, which seems to this old man borrowed from WW2, GI as lovable humorist that perhaps came from his father, and is astonishingly effective, or at least was with the press yesterday. Also yesterday the LA Times Op Ed page carried the scurrilous, destructive essay titled (by someone NOT running for office but who obviously wants to have a big say in who advances their political career, their 'celebrity-hood') "Many Faces of Hillary - None a Winner." The writing is as contentless as the sour rantings of wot's-his-face on American Idol, the most popular one who satisfies our lust that they all be lousy so we out here in Consumerland won't feel so nondescript and unpopular because invisible. What that mean, fat oaf does on American Idol is merely talk not singing technique - he knows zilch about performing - but merely degrees of this manner or that manner of presenting oneself. His message is carried via his attitude, not his knowledge: I promise you he knows nothing of value. That is, not a soul ever did or ever will perform better via following his advice. There is no advice: in sum it's strictly as if his temper is solely derived from how his digestion handled whatever heaping serving he last ate. Shame on America for falling for that sadistic act. America deserves the politicians it ends up with.

When the Prime Minister of Pakistan spoke to the press while sitting with President Bush, on another occasion, I was thunderstruck by how dignified and convincing he was in comparison with our, American, carnival barker con men who work us as politicians in America. I wonder where on earth he got his fine speech, his humility and graciousness? Then I remembered: Pakistan used to be part of India, then finally separated when Muslim Pakistan could never get along with Hindu India, not even under enlightened British rule. The Prime Minister, with his excellent speech, probably went to school and university in England where serving has always been taught as a privilege, not a disgrace. When he thanked us for the money we gave Pakistan to help with relief from earthquake devastation, wow, I felt really, really thanked.

Barry

 

 

 

 

 

My Screenwriter's Cafe Message Board Post - Improved

That damn movie (Brokeback Mountain) is full of dramatic lies, and technical phoniness. I haven't seen such too-obvious rear screen projection since that Garbo movie that had scenes of New York's waterfront, Anna Christie, whatever.

These groundbreaking movie makers expect me to take those would-be "Cowboys" seriously, and with sympathy!? (Actually they herd sheep a fact I'm surprised the trolls haven't gleefully pointed out; but I get it: since they are also gay, the bold lovers get a pass. Prejudice is all, ha ha ha ha.)

When the "Cowboys" kiss in the alley where they can be seen by the shocked-out-of-her-gourd, sweet, loving, faithful wife they totally lost me. I'm expected to find such lying heroes sympathetic?! Gimme a break! Come Oscar time if anyone connected to that movie wins an Oscar I'll lose all hope for Hollywood and take up attacking Hollywood bigtime, pamphleteering. I'll have readers to help with spelling etcetera, ha ha ha!

The hero (is that Spiderman? the actor?) has lesions that quick, coy, cut-away shots reveal, from which we are required to deduce he did not catch (The Virus, HIV) in America, oh no no no, he caught the virus in Mexico where, as everyone knows, not a soul wears a condom.

Then there's those flash cuts of the 'hero' being murdered by a vengeful bunch of real cowboys, ha ha ha ha ha ha. You think I'm making this up!? No no, you just watched the movie through prejudiced eyes. Grow up! Wake up!

Then there's the all-too-anticipatable hatred of women. The lovely, expressive, seductive, to-die-for woman in the bar, marries the gay man and becomes this tight-lipped, censorious bitch of an accountant for her rich father who screws up Thanksgiving dinner. She's been made up and directed to look and behave disgustingly. Where's continuity of character? As character development it's completely unbelievable.

What's this, an advertisement for male gayness?The movie sucks! My wife said it was the worst movie she'd ever seen. After the ready-to-orgy male lovers are seen kissing in the alley, early in the movie, I was ready-to-leave, hissing the whole way out of the theater. Attendance was mighty sparse by-the-way; by Oscar voting time this movie will be dead in the water by boxoffice measures, unless, that is, Glendale CA is simply too Christian (and therefore not overly 'forgiving') to be real.

Munich, by contrast, is for grownups.   Barry

Packin' 'em In

On Friday the American Government gave my wife a USA flag at the Montebello country club. There were 899 other recipients of a small, cute flag. There were three such ceremonies that day, totaling about 2,700 new USA citizens on that one day.  A short film of GW was shown. Not a soul hissed. The top five groups of new citizens were announced: #5 was El Salvador, #2 was Philippines (including my wife) and #1 was Mexico, which was no surprise. The rest I don't remember. Standing in line as 'family' the couple next to us was Korean. I chatted briefly to help kill time while waiting hours in the sun, even showing off my one and only Korean sentence: 'Un young hee choo moo shush um nika?' Instantly the USA citizen 'Korean' lady repeated what I'd said, but in English: "Did you get a good rest last night?" They didn't thank me for saving them from the North Koreans. Well, that's alright. It was a holiday really, for me, as a 'scrub nurse' at the 25th Station Hospital near Taegu.

The flag is stuck up high now at home, high enough to discourage the little monster citizens from shredding it and breaking the stick it came on.

Barry

Comment On Bea's Comment

> "I've heard the phrase that "writing is fantasy" but I have not heard that language is anti-phobic. Could you elucidate?

 >TIA."

>From: Beaone12

You're welcome, Bea.

I'm quoting from The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, by London
University Professor of Linguistics (Actually English and Drama,
at a college within London University) Jacqueline Rose. The book
was published first by Harvard University press in 1991,
in paperback, because Plath's husband, England's Poet
Laureate Ted Hughes, a morbid bully, threatened to kill her if
the book was published in England, a fact stated by Rose in
her book.

The book has over 300 footnotes, and five pages of fine print
bibliography, almost none of which have I read. Yet, the book itself
is fairly easy reading. (Although the implications of her writing
not so easy.)

Here's a list of quotes, taken at random, from scattered pages
in her book:

1. Language is anti-phobic
2. All writing is fantasy
3. All language is metaphor
4. Writing is violence
5. ALL WRITING IS UNSTABLE AS TO MEANING
6. Writing is aggression.

This whole list runs counter to popular wisdom.
For that reason alone it would be foolish for me
to attempt to explain what Rose means. Those quotes
are NOT lined up by Rose as rules for reading and writing;
they were taken out of context by me for my own
private use; in reality they are embedded in complex
discourse on difficulties of reading and writing.

When I was ten I wrote letters to my country cousins
virtually begging to be invited up to their sheep station
(in Australia) for the holidays. To ingratiate myself
with them I wrote whopping great lies about my violence and
aggression toward other boys, gang members. My writing then
was totally naive, so virtually innocent I had zero sense of
telling lies. Rose, with great precision, explained it to me
via her book decades, many decades, later. My letters were
saved by my cousins' mother, a strict Catholic, and a great
mother of eleven children, who knew from her native intelligence
that I was NOT a violent boy. I was a showoff, and bright.
After she died, long after, her son Michael mailed photocopies to me
for which I will be eternally grateful.

Barry

Fact and Fiction

Have you heard all the malarky about Oprah and Frey the writer? No, I'm not hinting they are an item, I'm referring to A Million Little Pieces which was first pedaled as a novel, then finally published as a memoir. All of that can be sent down the chute by really believing, as I do, that "All writing is fantasy." That quote is from my all-time favorite non-fiction book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath by Jacqueline Rose. My copy has been read, by me, so many times it is held together with tape. I'd take the time to type, one finger at a time, hunting, my other five fav. quotes from that book but I've done that so many times with so little appreciation or feedback I'll play take-away and cuddle with the truth all by myself. So there.

Barry

 

Bringing Up Baby

One of us, someone with a blog, made an entry recently about the difficulty of raising children. I made a mental note to reply - it's a subject I'm immersed in, having three young children - but now I can't find the entry. So, I'll reply simply in total agreement.

Of my three children from my present marriage the most volatile (I'll avoid the word 'problematic') is the three year old almost four. He's a treat, and a trick. He has almost indestructable toys, such as a bicycle with training wheels, but most of the others he dismantles; he took apart two 99 cent flashlights PDQ (pretty damn quick) I bought him today before the sun set. I'll do what I usually do, get the same 99 cent packet of two tomorrow and use the first packet for parts. I did the same thing with a 99 cent helicopter that actually flies. China spoils us. The helicopter takes off when you pull the string rotating the three blades. But upon crashing something or other nearly always breaks, and if it doesn't he flies it into a brick wall on purpose. So I buy a lot of Krazy glue and use the irreparably broken one for parts.

I'm ashamed to admit he picks up and uses all the foul language, and directs it toward his mother, who is always blameless of his charges, language that he has learned from, you guessed it, his foul-mouthed father. If I punish him, even if I threaten to punish him, he gets back at me by piteously pleading soon after, with "Can I have some food?" He pulls a face quivering so wind-struck a lake of tears seem about to fall. It's blackmail pure and simple. The boy is a genius and doubtless will rule a kingdom somewhere rich. Believe me he is thoroughly fed food food food, all day long if he demands it. His mother spoon feeds him to make absolutely certain he is fed fed fed. But seeing how important it is to us that he be well fed, he tortures us by putting on his 'When are you gonna feed me?' act. This boy will rule in hell. Nah, God's in his pocket.

Barry

 

Short Story Writing

Page 64, The New Yorker for January 16, '06 begins a short story titled Three Days, by Samantha Hunt (a nom de plume?).

What three days?

What does the horse, dead or alive, represent? Is the weed-smoking of the brother merely local, Midwest color, or does that work to drive the story?

Do you happen to know that writer under another name? Jane Hamilton for example? The setting of urban sprawl impinging on Midwest farm land hints at such, and so does the name of the horse, 'Humbletonian' a play on a breed of horse.  Hamilton echo, also.

Does ice represent death? (In the story)

Does the heroine want to die too? Or is she merely mourning. I've almost forgotten what mourning really is, or supposed to be. (Is anger mourning?)

Ever wanted to remember the dead through writing about them?

Barry

Politics Etc.

It's lunch time during the Alito hearings. Looks as if the Princeton alumni publication just might sink Alito. Teddy, Harvard, where there's academic freedom, vs Alito, Princeton, which apparently is still mired in F. Scott Fitgerald (Princeton) snobbery and ghastly social advantage, and curbed academic freedom. 

Princeton has one of the deepest competition swimming pools in the nation. Reason? Deep pools theoretically make swimming faster possible. Seconds, or hundredths of a second faster: Similarly, Princeton imagined that  excluding women and minorities would give good old boy 'Scott Fitgeralds' continued dominance in the job market.

In short, I hope Alito is booted. By the way, a major reason women were admitted to Harvard and Princeton, finally, was to combat rampant homosexuality. It was bone crushingly ironic, therefore, that once women were admitted to Harvard there occurred a two-women murder suicide on campus at Dunster House. (Where in olden times there was a sports-jock male majority, and minimal homosexuality.)  After the murder, the other woman hung herself in the shower.  Don't tell me gossip doesn't contain useful germs of truth, at least sometimes. 

Barry

 

Movies, Acting, and Reviews

"Critics? The only thing that would satify me with respect to critics would be revenge,"   expostulated gently, as was his wont, Lee Strasberg to his acting class. (For anyone who might be too young, or indifferent to theater, to recognize the name, Lee Strasberg was the actor who played the Jewish gangster in Coppola's GODFATHER II; he was the character in that story, a character from real life New York gangster history, who was shot dead by rival gangsters at the airport. Oh, and Strasberg, also, was co-founder of the Actors Studio. When he wasn't getting Academy Award Nominations for acting, he was teaching his private acting classes, which I attended over a 13 year period, with gaps, as well as attending sessions at the Studio as an 'Observer.'

Critics, you see, don't have eyes for acting: nearly all of their attention is on movie stories, what happens, and almost never on how what happens is performed. For example, reviews in the LA Times, and in The New Yorker, dwell on the politics of the story in the movie MUNICH, directed by Steven Spielberg, particularly on the real life character's notions about what they thought they were doing in assassinating the Palistinians who murdered the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games.

If the critics sound luke warm about MUNICH I believe the cause might be politics, not art. We are all quite capable, I believe, in figuring out our own politics without help from movie critics. Therefor, please, see MUNICH as 'theater' not politics, and have a splendid experience at the movies because of the terrific writing and excellent acting. I never thought I'd say this about a Spielberg movie, but there it is on the screen, top flight acting and screenplay writing. PLEASE SEE THIS MOVIE. If you've hesitated, and now go see the movie I strongly believe you will thank me. (Don't, of course, take children. We took the children to KING KONG. The atrocious acting in that film, excluding that by the fine actress playing the damsel in distress, resulted probably from rotten direction by P. Jackson, the silly fat man who made a mess of  the fantasy movie the name of which I've deliberately forgotten forever.)

The house was almost full at MUNICH, and half empty at KING KONG. I pray  for a miracle and Best Picture for MUNICH.   

Barry

 

 

Oldies 'N Goodies

Listening in privacy and relative quiet while driving on the freeway I've been flabbergasted at the excellence of some oldtime popular music. I stumbled across it on radio stations 1260 am and 540 am (amplitude modulation - had to slip that in: I used to be a Ham Operator-Station owner - which is different from FM, aka frequency modulation) in Los Angeles and no doubt heard quite a distance away, unlike most FM.

Have you ever heard of Jackie de Shannon? My spelling could be way off, which won't help, but I don't even know where to look for her name, not being into research or googling not one little bit.*** Wow could she sing! She sang like a soprano opera singer but with every word clearly enunciated. Even better, she created a character. The very young Barbara Streisand could create a character, but if the character was supposed to be alone, Streisand couldn't or wouldn't create that: she never sounded private. She sure could sing 'Send In The Clowns,' partly because she wasn't supposed to be alone. If Jackie de Shannon were to have sung that same song the last line would have melted every heart, even those made of stone. (It's something like, 'Don't bother....they're here.') 

The young Frank Sinatra was a marvellous showoff with his voice alterations. Astounding. Older, he was a better actor while singing, but he'd lost his young technical sliding around with his voice. The radio stations don't waste much time indentifying the artists so most of what I've listened to I cannot name.

I'm very glad and happy that old movies and older popular music is still available somewhere, somehow. Thanks Ted Turner for TCM (to say nothing of CNN). And thanks for whoever owns 1260 and 540 AM Radio in Los Angeles. Bravo/Brava!!!

Barry 

***

Hey Barry, I found something about Jackie De Shannon, I hope you find in there something that you like or heard.
Here is the link.
Jackie DeShannon Appreciation Society
 
If you want I can google some more for you.
BEA

(Please note she dates from the 1960s - Barry)

I simply couldn't resist asking Bea for permission to add this to my journal entry. Reason? most of the time I feel like a music ignornamous, and recognizing excellence so immediately made me feel good. Thanks again, Bea!

Barry