The Writer's Life: Film & Book Reviews, Observations, and Stories

Interesting that an anti-war film—in fact, a largely un-American film—should be so popular at the box office, though I suppose Avatar is more of a David and Goliath story than anything else. Kind of like the Star Wars saga in which we are directly identified as the evil empire. Odd that Americans love the story but miss the underlying parable. It’s one of the strange things about our culture. We see but never understand. We mouth words but never comprehend them. We talk about God but have no real idea what God is.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh, however.

Which of us (no matter where we live or what our race or religion) does not profess one thing, do the opposite, and is totally blind to it? Ancient wisdom tells us to judge not, criticize not, condemn not, but who is really strong enough to do this? I know I am not.

Of course, language is the curse that condemns us because it is all about making judgments. I suppose that is why some ascetics take a vow of silence. But can anyone succeed in stopping his mind from deciding how things are? I sincerely doubt it. No one escapes being human, no matter how one pretends otherwise.

Robert McChesney and John Nichols were on Democracy Now yesterday. Both are journalists who have recently authored a book entitled The Death and Life of American Journalism.

One of the exchanges between the hosts and guests caught my attention. This is Nichols speaking:

“There’s a new Pew Center study out. They actually studied Baltimore. They looked at where all the original newspapers came from. They looked at all the independent media, all the online, everything. They found that 96 percent, almost 96 percent—there’s a little debate about the precise figure, but well over 90—came from old media, largely from the daily newspaper, The Baltimore Sun. But here’s the scary part, the footnote. The Baltimore Sun is producing 73 percent fewer original news stories today than twenty years ago. So new media is commenting on old media, but it’s not filling the void of news. Old media is giving us a lot less.

“And so, you say, well, OK, come on, Pew Center folks, tell us, where is the news coming from? Who is generating it, if it’s not—well, it’s in there. 86 percent of the stories came in the form of public relations, either from government or from corporations; only 14 percent produced by a reporter who went out and tried to speak truth to power. This is a scary zone we’re entering.”

Let me boil this down for you. Most everything on television and on the Internet (like this blog) is nothing more than repeated news. In other words, both are echo chambers. The only real source of original news comes from traditional media, like newspapers, which are dying. But even here, most of their news comes either from corporate or government sources. That is, we’ve entered a zone in which corporations and the government create 86 percent of the news and the percentage is growing.

Welcome to the brave new world.

In light of the John Terry contretemps, it has finally come to light that Eric Wynalda’s wife Amy had multiple sexual encounters with Eric’s teammate, John Harkes, which prompted then-US coach Steve Sampson to leave Harkes off the 1998 US World Cup team. I’d always wondered why Sampson dumped his best player. Of course, Capello will not take such drastic action. He can’t afford to go to the World Cup without his captain.

But oh my gosh. John, we hardly knew ya. What kind of mate beds his best friend’s girl, panics and has her get an abortion, tries to quash the story in the press, and then goes home to his wife and kids? Uffda. That’s outdoing Harksie by a fair bit.

Oh, but maybe there’s a silver lining. Does this mean we won’t have to listen to John Harkes do color commentary on US broadcasts any longer?

The guy who makes the best pocket sandwiches in town is a Palestinian Christian with dual Israeli-American citizenship. He says it’s the perfect combination. Everyone hates him. He was born shortly after Palestine was occupied by the Jews. His mother was in the process of delivering one of her children and the family couldn’t flee. He’s educated, has a ready smile, and works at his own careful pace. His two sons are doctors and he’s very proud of them. His wife rules, though I don’t often see her in the deli these days. Now and then, he sits in back with a friend drinking tea. He has a loyal clientele, a devoted family, and enough money to live on. What more could a person want?

Yesterday I mentioned I had just seen a film called Cairo Time (featuring the wonderful Patricia Clarkson), and that in one of the scenes a bus headed toward Gaza was stopped by armed Israeli soldiers. I said it was scary even in film. He said his sons and other members of the family had been detained by the police in Israel, even though they were citizens, until the police were certain they were who they say they were. It sometimes took many calls and several hours until they were freed. One policeman suggested that no one could be an Israeli citizen without knowing Hebrew. My friend was sanguine about it. He made no judgments. It was how it was.

And so it goes. Around and round. Contention and struggle are facts of life. Nothing is ever settled. Nothing can be. Life is a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers. Only the strong (those who are most vocal and armed) survive.

But like my friend, I have eschewed all of that. I am too old to care.

It’s hard to know exactly what’s wrong with my new computer, but the odds are that you guys did not test your ST2010 Dell monitor driver with Windows 7. (I’m fairly confident of this because both the physical monitor and graphics driver have been replaced.) This is a major annoyance because when Windows comes up, it assumes I have a generic monitor. My screen, which is set for the ST2010, assumes surrealistic proportions. Like something from a Odalisque landscape. I’ve had several guys from the Philippines poking around inside and several other guys from the support center in India giving me polite but useless responses by email. It seems “engineering” is working on it. In other words, I can wait until the man or woman who’s responsible for the monitor driver (you!) gets around to fixing it. The only saving grace is that if I’m patient, wait for half an hour, and then force Windows to detect the monitor, it eventually does, and the stuff on my screen assumes normal proportions.

My advice to the rest of you: System 7 is great but there is still a lot of catching up to do on the part of the vendors. Perhaps it would be wise to wait to make the switch from XP. Switching from Vista is probably a no-brainer, however.

Oh, and don’t buy a Dell XPS with an ST2010 until I give you the high sign!

On the slimmest chance
A wren might land on the bough
I wait like a cat.

It was interesting to see the well-traveled Robbie Keane (six clubs in almost as many years) join Celtic on loan yesterday during the last few hours of the transfer window. Keane had gone from being undervalued to overvalued to underused and undervalued again. I suppose this is natural if you don’t produce as a striker. With big money comes big expectations. You’re expected to score under any and all conditions, regardless of the supporting cast or the pattern of play laid down by the manager. It’s too bad, really. Keane had such a wonderful record with Berbatov at Spurs. Unfortunately, neither have done particularly well without the other.

It just goes to show that a large part of success is being in the right spot at the right time. Of course, the opposite is true, as well.

Take one of our local principals who had the temerity to defend a program for Hispanics to a board member who opposed it. The board member accused the principal, who is one of the best in the city, of racism and then got the school board to spend an entire year trying to find something they could use to destroy him—an inappropriate hug, potential racist comments of friends, making mistakes with his budget—but could find nothing. He was clean. Perfect. As pristine as any human could be. The principal now says he’s learned his lesson. Keep your mouth shut and do whatever authority tells you.

Is it really okay to harass one of your best principals because he insists on ethnic diversity and then label him a racist?

The thing that ties this guy to Robbie Keane is that they are both (were in the case of this principal) passionate about their jobs. Keane received a rousing welcome at midnight in Glasgow. It was the same for the principal. Most of the parents stood behind him as the school board attempted to destroy him. There were even public rallies in which hundreds attended. In the end it made no difference. The nail was driven down until it was level with the others.

Score important goals, Robbie. We need to keep the faith right now. (No pun intended!)

Heaven is listening to J. S. Bach’s motets on a cold, sunny winter day. Why are they so emotionally moving?

Did you know that the Bach’s copy of his two volume Bible commentary by Lutheran theologian Abraham Calov was discovered in the 50s in a barn in Minnesota? In it he marked the texts for his cantatas. Of course, now it’s impossible to see them, because they’re kept in innermost archives of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.

Luckily, this isn’t a problem with Bach’s music, which is accessible even to the most tone deaf of humanity. Who can listen to Bach and not think of God?

Cabinet, a Brooklyn-based periodical which bills itself as a quarterly of art and culture, is filled with wonderful photographs and illustrations and strange, off-the-wall articles. Kind of like Wired for the arts. It’s very much like something Jorge Luis Borges might have edited. For me, it helps pass the time pleasantly while I take a dump and has the distinction of being the mustiest smelling publication in existence because of its use of soy inks. I suppose if I really tried I might learn something from it, but these days my attention span has shrunk to mere phrases. I’m hoping one day to morph into a mensch, though I wish god would hurry up with it. Time is running short.

The cat slinks away,
Her anger is not assuaged,
The sky turns stone gray.