Just a note to say The Living Theatre in New York is going to be presenting a staged reading of Empty Bowl on Monday Apr 27.
Not Twice This Play
Empty Bowl is rewritten, rethought and considerably expanded from a one act play I wrote in 1993, inch foot time gem, which for a one act play intended to run an hour had far too many irreducible flaws. Whole scenes intended to capture the enigmatic character of the Zen koan came out obscurantist and befuddling rather; those I excised. In Act III of Empty Bowl I re-used about two pages of Eshun's long speech from the earlier play, though most of Eshun's dialogue's original to this version. None of the other characters already featured--Nobunaga, Nobushige, Hakuin, Peasant in Blue Kimono (renamed Ainu in Empty Bowl)--spoke in their real voices yet, so their dialogue here is totally fresh. (I tell a lie. I did retain two lines from the earlier, much shorter version of the fairground shell game scene:
NOBUNAGA
It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
AINU
I dunno. Six of one, half dozen of the other if you ask me.
Well, would you have cut that?)
The prologue, 'inch foot', and the epilogue, 'not twice this day', considerably reworked, still frame the action of Empty Bowl. Quite a few images I thought effective have been retained, such as Ainu, back from numerous campaigns, a one-eyed double amputee. Narrative threads originally independent of each other have been integrated into one continuous story line.
Wabi, Tamago, Minaki, Taka and various secondary characters are entirely new to this version. inch foot time gem was missing them.
It often takes a long time for the true form of a play to be disclosed, even to its author.
April 17, 2009
April 10, 2009
High End Murder
Impossible to understand the current economic crisis if you take it as a one-off: think of it rather as a high water mark on a crisis wave that crests and ebbs; bearing in mind that the low water mark generates more than enough ruined and outright excised lives to be gong on with. By the same token Bernie Madoff is better read less as an aberration than a very slight extrapolation from everyday commercial practice; the subprime mortgage fiasco scarcely seems less consciously fraudulent, and it appears that until almost the end, knowing his methods grew more questionable and his hopes of recovery more desperate hour upon hour, Madoff still imagined that his superior fiduciiary powers, coupled to one exceptionally luck turn of fortune's wheel would save him yet: which was the fervent prayer of the subprimers and the AIG fiasciators--now enjoying their golden handshakes--as well. (After all he had perhaps the world's largest collection of statuary bulls, nary a bear in the lot; surely that would protect and save him in a market, as everybody knows, governed by phases of the planets overhead and concentrate effusions of sympathetic magic.) And as for the Ford Pinto
--(Google this under "gas tank that explodes" if you want the full background)--
that can't be comprehended at all if regarded as an isolated incident, or even one of a firecracker string of them throughout a century and more of intense commercial history--the Dalkon Shield; Bhopal; the Three Gorges Dam; IBM's collaboration with Nazi Germany on the death camps (you ever wonder why those tattooed numbers on the victims' arms? Each was matched to a stippled card with the same number in a primitive version of computerized filing.) I'll grant you IBM's crime has features that are unique. More indecent even than the collaborations of Krupp and IG Farben (now Bayer); IBM's was as great a crime against humanity, but also an act of high treason. Still, it has features in common with relatively much less extreme commercial crimes.
Nobody writing about this or the Pinto case has ever suggested that either board of directors was composed of anything but typical businessmen. I don't know if a paper trail exists from the late thirties, early forties that would show who at IBM was down with the deal, who if anyone resigned in outraged horror, but memos that came to light in the class action suit over the Pinto make it clear the executive board of Ford Motors, fully aware that they were seeding every highway in North America with car bombs, released the Pinto unmodified because it made more sense on a cost/benefit analysis. A fifty cent piece of equipment they might easily ahve attached to the Pinto's volatile gas tank would have corrected the problem, but they would have had to put up the price about a dollar, or absorb an infinitesimal reduction in profit on each auto sold. Add it all up car by car that's a lot of bucks; two hundred thou per wrongful death suit is what accountants tell them insurance settlements are going for and hey! that works out cheaper. What kind of system so easily and reflexively performs cost/benefit analysis on the merits of murdering random strangers in cold blood? How many? Eight hundred is the lowball estimate.
How many of the most depraved serial killers on death row (in the U.S. states that still maintain it) would you need to assemble in a room until confirmed kills among the lot would total eight hundred? The bloodiest hundred fifty cover that spread? Almost certainly double that number, you'd be down from the eight-ten range to triple, double and onetime murderers long before they added up to such a sum.So why do people who are rabid for the death penalty concentrate so exclusively on such comparative small fry. A CEO and twelve or fourteen presidents and vices round a table conspire to murder eight hundred people and the only sanctions called upon are economic ones. They lost that lawsuit big time, paid out way more than $200,000/wrongful death. That'll teach 'em.
Alas, I'm pretty much an absolute opponent of the death penalty, and besides in this case its woeful inadequacy is plainly to be seen. How many times can you effectively execute any one murderer? Once remains pretty much the upward limit in spite of the dazzling technological advances we've seen in so many areas of our lives. Even if the means existed to spark life back into a corpse so you could execute again, 800 executions would ultimately be not only sickening but way monotonous. Even assigning a value of twenty-forty murders per board member, poking in that many successive lethal needles would surely prove ultimately as tedious as assembly line work. So by the law of an eye for an eye, strict retributive justice must remain a perpetually elusive goal. And I did think the money settlement, humungous as it was by the standard of its day, was rather a timid slap on the wrist. What settlement then might have seen rough justice done and, more importantly, allowed good to win out in glory at last?
What if instead of a huge but inadequate (and for a corporation the size of Ford, fairly easily assimilable) money settlement, or better yet along with it, the defendants had been stripped of their stocks in Ford Motors and the class action plaintiffs, in equal shares, invested with them? appointing a new board of directors from among their own number and taking over management of the company completely.
I'm not sure this wouldn't be a wise thing to attempt everywhere in the corporate world, certainly in every failing or failed institution where people whose corruption, incompetence or both has bred chaos, insolvency and a begging bowl mentality on a global scale. Do you seriously think people randomly plucked off any street corner wouldn't handle things better than these self-inflated, overpriced frauds and financial know-nothings? Me, I seriously wonder if children randomly plucked from a playground could possibly misperform as badly.
How many people died of Madoff's scams? Not just ruined lives, pensioners with their savings wiped out joining the line at job fairs to seek entry level positions at McD's (rain forest assassin) in their golden years, but actual deaths directly traceable to sudden catastrophic plunges in the net worth of charities invested with him whose work literally spelt the difference between life and death in many cases? I don't know if it would be possible to calculate, but in spite of the general hatred of Madoff--loud applause in the courtroom when he was sentenced--it's a question, as far as I know, no-one's thought even to ask. (Given the circumstances, I'm not sure I'd put the charge any higher than negligent homicide in his case. But that much at least, justice should insist on.) With the exception of mob hits and killings associated with large inheritances or insurance payouts, people seem remarkable little inclined even to speak the word when it comes to murder visibly linked to commercial gain. Too brutal a word for most of us perhaps, to associate with gentles of such majestically hoarded wealth. The indisputable common denominator among those on death row in all but a statistically negligible number of cases is not that they've committed a murder--dubious prosecution methods cast doubt on how fairly that issue was decided in too many cases; I'm grateful that in the numerous cases in Canada where we've discovered a wrongful conviction, we've been able to restore justice partiallly by releasing the wrongly convicted, rather than speak useless words of apology to a headstone. No, what they have in common almost universally is that they're poor. Where the rich are convicted of murder they serve out terms in prison, and no-one's ever convicted of murder if it's carried out in the interest of a corporate bottom line.
--(Google this under "gas tank that explodes" if you want the full background)--
that can't be comprehended at all if regarded as an isolated incident, or even one of a firecracker string of them throughout a century and more of intense commercial history--the Dalkon Shield; Bhopal; the Three Gorges Dam; IBM's collaboration with Nazi Germany on the death camps (you ever wonder why those tattooed numbers on the victims' arms? Each was matched to a stippled card with the same number in a primitive version of computerized filing.) I'll grant you IBM's crime has features that are unique. More indecent even than the collaborations of Krupp and IG Farben (now Bayer); IBM's was as great a crime against humanity, but also an act of high treason. Still, it has features in common with relatively much less extreme commercial crimes.
Nobody writing about this or the Pinto case has ever suggested that either board of directors was composed of anything but typical businessmen. I don't know if a paper trail exists from the late thirties, early forties that would show who at IBM was down with the deal, who if anyone resigned in outraged horror, but memos that came to light in the class action suit over the Pinto make it clear the executive board of Ford Motors, fully aware that they were seeding every highway in North America with car bombs, released the Pinto unmodified because it made more sense on a cost/benefit analysis. A fifty cent piece of equipment they might easily ahve attached to the Pinto's volatile gas tank would have corrected the problem, but they would have had to put up the price about a dollar, or absorb an infinitesimal reduction in profit on each auto sold. Add it all up car by car that's a lot of bucks; two hundred thou per wrongful death suit is what accountants tell them insurance settlements are going for and hey! that works out cheaper. What kind of system so easily and reflexively performs cost/benefit analysis on the merits of murdering random strangers in cold blood? How many? Eight hundred is the lowball estimate.
How many of the most depraved serial killers on death row (in the U.S. states that still maintain it) would you need to assemble in a room until confirmed kills among the lot would total eight hundred? The bloodiest hundred fifty cover that spread? Almost certainly double that number, you'd be down from the eight-ten range to triple, double and onetime murderers long before they added up to such a sum.So why do people who are rabid for the death penalty concentrate so exclusively on such comparative small fry. A CEO and twelve or fourteen presidents and vices round a table conspire to murder eight hundred people and the only sanctions called upon are economic ones. They lost that lawsuit big time, paid out way more than $200,000/wrongful death. That'll teach 'em.
Alas, I'm pretty much an absolute opponent of the death penalty, and besides in this case its woeful inadequacy is plainly to be seen. How many times can you effectively execute any one murderer? Once remains pretty much the upward limit in spite of the dazzling technological advances we've seen in so many areas of our lives. Even if the means existed to spark life back into a corpse so you could execute again, 800 executions would ultimately be not only sickening but way monotonous. Even assigning a value of twenty-forty murders per board member, poking in that many successive lethal needles would surely prove ultimately as tedious as assembly line work. So by the law of an eye for an eye, strict retributive justice must remain a perpetually elusive goal. And I did think the money settlement, humungous as it was by the standard of its day, was rather a timid slap on the wrist. What settlement then might have seen rough justice done and, more importantly, allowed good to win out in glory at last?
What if instead of a huge but inadequate (and for a corporation the size of Ford, fairly easily assimilable) money settlement, or better yet along with it, the defendants had been stripped of their stocks in Ford Motors and the class action plaintiffs, in equal shares, invested with them? appointing a new board of directors from among their own number and taking over management of the company completely.
I'm not sure this wouldn't be a wise thing to attempt everywhere in the corporate world, certainly in every failing or failed institution where people whose corruption, incompetence or both has bred chaos, insolvency and a begging bowl mentality on a global scale. Do you seriously think people randomly plucked off any street corner wouldn't handle things better than these self-inflated, overpriced frauds and financial know-nothings? Me, I seriously wonder if children randomly plucked from a playground could possibly misperform as badly.
How many people died of Madoff's scams? Not just ruined lives, pensioners with their savings wiped out joining the line at job fairs to seek entry level positions at McD's (rain forest assassin) in their golden years, but actual deaths directly traceable to sudden catastrophic plunges in the net worth of charities invested with him whose work literally spelt the difference between life and death in many cases? I don't know if it would be possible to calculate, but in spite of the general hatred of Madoff--loud applause in the courtroom when he was sentenced--it's a question, as far as I know, no-one's thought even to ask. (Given the circumstances, I'm not sure I'd put the charge any higher than negligent homicide in his case. But that much at least, justice should insist on.) With the exception of mob hits and killings associated with large inheritances or insurance payouts, people seem remarkable little inclined even to speak the word when it comes to murder visibly linked to commercial gain. Too brutal a word for most of us perhaps, to associate with gentles of such majestically hoarded wealth. The indisputable common denominator among those on death row in all but a statistically negligible number of cases is not that they've committed a murder--dubious prosecution methods cast doubt on how fairly that issue was decided in too many cases; I'm grateful that in the numerous cases in Canada where we've discovered a wrongful conviction, we've been able to restore justice partiallly by releasing the wrongly convicted, rather than speak useless words of apology to a headstone. No, what they have in common almost universally is that they're poor. Where the rich are convicted of murder they serve out terms in prison, and no-one's ever convicted of murder if it's carried out in the interest of a corporate bottom line.
March 3, 2009
Politics and the English Language
Orwell: All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays
In a column on the most famous essay included in this new volume, 'Politics and the English Language' (1946) Robert Fulford drops the rather original suggestion that Orwell's failure to notice Churchill's splendid wartime speeches--in an essay eplicitly devoted to rigorous analysis of double talk and obfuscation in the political rhetoric of his day--was a proof of Orwell's reverse snobbery. Que?
Truth is you could make a pretty good case for Orwell as both a snob and a reverse snob on the basis of any number of things he actually wrote. (Perhaps he was simply being narrowly self-consistent--his upbringing was shabby-genteel, either lower-upper or upper-lower class depending your pov--which afforded ample room to despise the true lower and true upper classes both.) But to argue he was expressing contempt for Churchill by not winkling him into an essay he couldn't have fit into logically--what possibly is the point? He wrote enough words actually about Churchill--admiring and critical both--if that's your litmus test for his response to the upper classes. What would he have accomplished by heaping praise on Churchill as a master political rhetorician in an essay otherwise completely taken up with negative examples? taken it down a blind alley for a paragraph or two before it to its proper course? And how could he possibly have praised Chruchill fulsomely enough to satisfy Rob, 63 years later?
'Most important, the English language had just given the greatest political performance in its history, turning away from England's shores the most formidable of all military machines, Germany's.
' In the hands [sic] of Winston Churchill, language ralllied the British, sustained them through desperate years and led them to victory. It was the supreme political accomplishment of Britain in modern times.
'How could Orwell, writing at precisely that moment, have ignored this central fact of England's existence?'
--Robert Fulford, NatPost Mar 3, 2009
If this hyperbolic gush acknowledges Churchill's role in defeating Hitler, it's hard to imagine what Orwell or anyone, writing at the time with nothing but facts to go on, could have written that wouldn't have struck Fulford as grossly inadequate recognition? Did Churchill's speeches galvanize? yes. Was it the sole force that did? no, though it was a key focal one. At the base level what galvanized the British was simple recognition that Nazism was anti-human and a danger to life and alll human liberty. Was British resistance to Hitler crucial? yes. Was it sufficient? no, anymore than Churchill's language was sufficient in itself to defeat Germany's war machine. Troops moving over air, sea and land were also required, and support troops supplying them in a thousand areas. And they were galvanized, not hypnotically and zombifically driven, by Churchill's powerful rhetoric, and obliged to make complex decisions day by day, hour by hour, that Churchill's speeches could give them no specific guidance on. Some of the credit for their actions--my mother's and father's among the rest--belongs to them as free agents; they weren't simply windup dolls driven forward by a master rhetorician's impulsion. Churchill would have been repulsed by that suggestion, and so should every free citizen.
In one of his essays or columns during the war Orwell spoke of a most-probably-apocryphal story going round about one of Churchill's most famous speeches: ". . . we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!” It was widely rumoured that when he went off mike he added, "We'll throw bottles at the bastards, we've got nothing else." Orwell thought, rightly I'd say, that for such a story to circulate was a strong indication the depth and breadth of affection there was for Churchill, across all class lines. Even more interesting is how stark a topper it is, and what ferocity of resistance it utters. Churchill felt that impulse and fed it, but he didn't originate it: it came from a wider place than any individual, great or small, could occupy alone.
In a column on the most famous essay included in this new volume, 'Politics and the English Language' (1946) Robert Fulford drops the rather original suggestion that Orwell's failure to notice Churchill's splendid wartime speeches--in an essay eplicitly devoted to rigorous analysis of double talk and obfuscation in the political rhetoric of his day--was a proof of Orwell's reverse snobbery. Que?
Truth is you could make a pretty good case for Orwell as both a snob and a reverse snob on the basis of any number of things he actually wrote. (Perhaps he was simply being narrowly self-consistent--his upbringing was shabby-genteel, either lower-upper or upper-lower class depending your pov--which afforded ample room to despise the true lower and true upper classes both.) But to argue he was expressing contempt for Churchill by not winkling him into an essay he couldn't have fit into logically--what possibly is the point? He wrote enough words actually about Churchill--admiring and critical both--if that's your litmus test for his response to the upper classes. What would he have accomplished by heaping praise on Churchill as a master political rhetorician in an essay otherwise completely taken up with negative examples? taken it down a blind alley for a paragraph or two before it to its proper course? And how could he possibly have praised Chruchill fulsomely enough to satisfy Rob, 63 years later?
'Most important, the English language had just given the greatest political performance in its history, turning away from England's shores the most formidable of all military machines, Germany's.
' In the hands [sic] of Winston Churchill, language ralllied the British, sustained them through desperate years and led them to victory. It was the supreme political accomplishment of Britain in modern times.
'How could Orwell, writing at precisely that moment, have ignored this central fact of England's existence?'
--Robert Fulford, NatPost Mar 3, 2009
If this hyperbolic gush acknowledges Churchill's role in defeating Hitler, it's hard to imagine what Orwell or anyone, writing at the time with nothing but facts to go on, could have written that wouldn't have struck Fulford as grossly inadequate recognition? Did Churchill's speeches galvanize? yes. Was it the sole force that did? no, though it was a key focal one. At the base level what galvanized the British was simple recognition that Nazism was anti-human and a danger to life and alll human liberty. Was British resistance to Hitler crucial? yes. Was it sufficient? no, anymore than Churchill's language was sufficient in itself to defeat Germany's war machine. Troops moving over air, sea and land were also required, and support troops supplying them in a thousand areas. And they were galvanized, not hypnotically and zombifically driven, by Churchill's powerful rhetoric, and obliged to make complex decisions day by day, hour by hour, that Churchill's speeches could give them no specific guidance on. Some of the credit for their actions--my mother's and father's among the rest--belongs to them as free agents; they weren't simply windup dolls driven forward by a master rhetorician's impulsion. Churchill would have been repulsed by that suggestion, and so should every free citizen.
In one of his essays or columns during the war Orwell spoke of a most-probably-apocryphal story going round about one of Churchill's most famous speeches: ". . . we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!” It was widely rumoured that when he went off mike he added, "We'll throw bottles at the bastards, we've got nothing else." Orwell thought, rightly I'd say, that for such a story to circulate was a strong indication the depth and breadth of affection there was for Churchill, across all class lines. Even more interesting is how stark a topper it is, and what ferocity of resistance it utters. Churchill felt that impulse and fed it, but he didn't originate it: it came from a wider place than any individual, great or small, could occupy alone.
February 27, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire
I don't often feel huge enthusiasm for the film that wins best picture at the Oscars. They seem to me mostly such timid and compromised choices. I'm rarely quite so pissed at them as I was in 1972, when I thought it scandolous that The Ruling Class didn't swep every major category. Best adapted screenplay? There certainly wasn't one that year--few any year--so brilliant and incisive as Peter Barnes' adaptation of his own stage play--just as there've been few plays in English that come close to the wit intelligence emotional-philosophical range of The Ruling Class--and five at least of those that did were written by Peter Barnes. (A couple were even written by Shakespeare.) Best lead actress? Coral Browne, hands down. Lead actor? Peter O'Toole. Supporting actress? Carolyn Seymour. Supporting actor--Alastair Sim and Arthur Lowe would have to duke that one out. Direction? Editing? Soundtrack? Cinematrography? Set design, costume design? Nothing else that year came anywhere near The Ruling Class in any of these categories and I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. But I was angry at a larger injustice than an Academy snub: the loss to a wide popular audience of a genuinely great popular classic.
The Ruling Class had been too weak a draw at the box office to drum up much Academy buzz, and why is a puzzler. Indifferent promotion's the culprit I suspect, by movie executives who had no clue the film's merits--made it at O'Toole's insistence in exchange for his agreement to play the lead in Man of La Mancha. You tell me: was A Clockwork Orange a huge hit? Was Life of Brian? why shouldn't The Ruling Class have been, since it fuses the virtues of both?
Slumdog Millionaire didn't evade the same fate by much. It was slated to go straight to video when a People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (my home town, yay!) got the money boys thinking they might have a viable property on their hands after all. Good that this time around a truly splendid popular entertainment has its chance, a film whose intelligence is not whittled away by compromises aimed at mass acceptance, but amplified by its wide-ranging appeal. Big pictures like Dark Knight or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button almost never have that kind of potency.
Then again some of the people I've been chatting with virtually think Slumdog Millionaire is a big picture masquerading as a small one. The helicopter scene is cited. Here it might come down to your definition of big and small. Through most of the history of movies, $15,000,000 would have been a very big budget indeed, and as recently as fifteen years ago I think it would still have been a mid-sized one. And of course it's still possible to make a film for much less if all involved tighten their belts, defer their salaries and bring their own lunches along. Maybe The Wrestler was made for less, but every other best picture nominee cost more, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button cost ten times as much. (Way more money for sure than ever got out through FEMA for relief of Katrina victims.) And there's this: the entire cast and crew of Slumdog Millionaire attended the Oscars. I think they took up roughly a single row of seats. What secondary hall would you have hired to seat everybody else if the entire Benjamin Button cast and crew had turned up? Slumdog aims at epic proportions, which necessitates a certain bigness of frame and scope; but it's always resolutely on a human scale.
Somebody else communicating cross-continentally said he had no interst in seeing "feel good shit" like Slumdog Millionaire. I won't presume to guess what he'll think of the film if he ever does get round to seeing it, but if he still dislikes it he'll have to modify his reasons. "Feelgood shit" has as near as it can come to no emotional range, that would be too unsettling; it doesn't take you on a propulsive roller coaster ride, and it certainly never ends with a disturbing fusion of tragedy and triumph. (The best fairy tales, on the other hand, often do, which is why I have no quarrel with people who call Slumdog Millionaire a fairy tale, unless they mean it derisively. "Just a fairy tale"--why do people say things as silly as that? They never say a story is "just a tragedy," "just an epic" or "just a magic-realist fable". And what, pray tell, is a magic-realist fable when it's at home? a fairy tale. What's the difference between a flutist and a flautist? $50,000 a year.)
I admit to being of two minds about the film's title. I like the classic purity of Q & A, the title of the novel it's based on; but would enough people have lined up to see a film called Q & A for it to win a Peoples Choice Award at TIFF? And the in-your-face quality of the title the filmmakers settled on has its appeal: we're dogs, we're scum, we're from the slum, but you who'd sell your nearest and dearest for some additional cash, we can out-think you any day of the week.
No theme's more richly explored in the movie than the global economy and its frenzies; its easy cohabitation with the gangster element; the uneasy points of comparison between gangsters and the respectably wealthy (Maman who captures stray orphans to set loose in the city as beggars, blinding the sweetest singing ones so they'll fetch more from sentimental passersby, is the psychological twin of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? host Prem Kumar, which is why Jamal with his experience of Maman knows Kumar's offer of help on the ten million rupee question can't be trusted); the empty towering shells it erects and sheathes for quicky mass housing. But the main critique of a money obsessed ethic in Slumdog Millionaire is the lead character Jamal, the film's calm intelligent centre, who apart from what's necessary for survival has zero interest in money. He's known for months if not years how to become a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but only uses that knowledge as a last ditch measure to reach, in the battlement tower where she's imprisoned, his lost love.
I don't often feel like climbing on the bandwagon for an Oscar pick, but it's the rare rule that isn't sometimes best observed by breaking it.
The Ruling Class had been too weak a draw at the box office to drum up much Academy buzz, and why is a puzzler. Indifferent promotion's the culprit I suspect, by movie executives who had no clue the film's merits--made it at O'Toole's insistence in exchange for his agreement to play the lead in Man of La Mancha. You tell me: was A Clockwork Orange a huge hit? Was Life of Brian? why shouldn't The Ruling Class have been, since it fuses the virtues of both?
Slumdog Millionaire didn't evade the same fate by much. It was slated to go straight to video when a People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (my home town, yay!) got the money boys thinking they might have a viable property on their hands after all. Good that this time around a truly splendid popular entertainment has its chance, a film whose intelligence is not whittled away by compromises aimed at mass acceptance, but amplified by its wide-ranging appeal. Big pictures like Dark Knight or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button almost never have that kind of potency.
Then again some of the people I've been chatting with virtually think Slumdog Millionaire is a big picture masquerading as a small one. The helicopter scene is cited. Here it might come down to your definition of big and small. Through most of the history of movies, $15,000,000 would have been a very big budget indeed, and as recently as fifteen years ago I think it would still have been a mid-sized one. And of course it's still possible to make a film for much less if all involved tighten their belts, defer their salaries and bring their own lunches along. Maybe The Wrestler was made for less, but every other best picture nominee cost more, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button cost ten times as much. (Way more money for sure than ever got out through FEMA for relief of Katrina victims.) And there's this: the entire cast and crew of Slumdog Millionaire attended the Oscars. I think they took up roughly a single row of seats. What secondary hall would you have hired to seat everybody else if the entire Benjamin Button cast and crew had turned up? Slumdog aims at epic proportions, which necessitates a certain bigness of frame and scope; but it's always resolutely on a human scale.
Somebody else communicating cross-continentally said he had no interst in seeing "feel good shit" like Slumdog Millionaire. I won't presume to guess what he'll think of the film if he ever does get round to seeing it, but if he still dislikes it he'll have to modify his reasons. "Feelgood shit" has as near as it can come to no emotional range, that would be too unsettling; it doesn't take you on a propulsive roller coaster ride, and it certainly never ends with a disturbing fusion of tragedy and triumph. (The best fairy tales, on the other hand, often do, which is why I have no quarrel with people who call Slumdog Millionaire a fairy tale, unless they mean it derisively. "Just a fairy tale"--why do people say things as silly as that? They never say a story is "just a tragedy," "just an epic" or "just a magic-realist fable". And what, pray tell, is a magic-realist fable when it's at home? a fairy tale. What's the difference between a flutist and a flautist? $50,000 a year.)
I admit to being of two minds about the film's title. I like the classic purity of Q & A, the title of the novel it's based on; but would enough people have lined up to see a film called Q & A for it to win a Peoples Choice Award at TIFF? And the in-your-face quality of the title the filmmakers settled on has its appeal: we're dogs, we're scum, we're from the slum, but you who'd sell your nearest and dearest for some additional cash, we can out-think you any day of the week.
No theme's more richly explored in the movie than the global economy and its frenzies; its easy cohabitation with the gangster element; the uneasy points of comparison between gangsters and the respectably wealthy (Maman who captures stray orphans to set loose in the city as beggars, blinding the sweetest singing ones so they'll fetch more from sentimental passersby, is the psychological twin of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? host Prem Kumar, which is why Jamal with his experience of Maman knows Kumar's offer of help on the ten million rupee question can't be trusted); the empty towering shells it erects and sheathes for quicky mass housing. But the main critique of a money obsessed ethic in Slumdog Millionaire is the lead character Jamal, the film's calm intelligent centre, who apart from what's necessary for survival has zero interest in money. He's known for months if not years how to become a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but only uses that knowledge as a last ditch measure to reach, in the battlement tower where she's imprisoned, his lost love.
I don't often feel like climbing on the bandwagon for an Oscar pick, but it's the rare rule that isn't sometimes best observed by breaking it.
February 8, 2009
25 Random Things
1. I have no intention of telling you 25 random things about myself. On the other hand. . .
2. Approached as a compositional idea, it has a certain temptation. . . which is a major revelation about how I approach the creative act of writing.
3. I try not to repeat myself too much because I'm easily bored.
4. Also I find that if you repeat something for emphasis or to make a point, it often has the opposite effect: either each repetition diminishes the impact, or the point being made is obscured by the reader's attempt to look for a hidden meaning.
5. If I remember, I roll my socks in pairs when they come out of the dryer. If I don't, which is often the case, in the morning I'm trying to find two matching black socks in the dark, not wanting to wake Marysia an hour earlier than she has to get up.
6. I get up an hour earlier than I strictly need to because it's a good time to catch up with work on the computer.
7. I wake up in the middle of the night with story ideas, perhaps direct from my dreams to me. Sometimes I go back to sleep, sometimes I get up and write out at least a beginning.
8. I'm a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Still can't understand, except as an index of his pretentiousness, a maven of the National Post. lamenting the triumph of trash culture, whose crescendo argument at the end was that scholars write studies of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They write studies of The Brothers Karamazov too, what's your point?
9. I like both shaggy dogs and shaggy dog stories.
10. If I had any brains I'd be an idiot, they seem to get all the best jobs.
11. I've thought for years the fundamental unit of meaning in language is not the word but the rhythm, or more precisely the breath. Same in all the other arts really. If a research facility offered me a huge sum to study this for a year or two I'd produce some interesting results.
12. The fundamental unit of all artistic expression really.
13. Of all expression in life, even conversation.
14. I've been known to worry at the thread of an argument an inordinate length of time.
15. At least I don't have any red socks in my drawer. Two black socks, people have to examine the patterns pretty close to know they don't match, and even in the dark I can tell which of my socks are white.
16. I wonder how entropy really
17. I sometimes wish I'd been born in a different galaxy. The trick would be discovering just the right one, with a site available for live births.
18. Is a question ever a random fact?
19. I know how to count but putting the numbers right there on the side helps keep track for sure. Very few people could keep count while speaking 19 consecutive sentences, and I'm certainly not one of them.
20. I like to play slightly subversive games with formal literary exercises.
21. Even informal ones.
22. If I'd been editing Frida Kahlo's diary, I'd have put the translations of the extensive text on facing pages instead of at the back of the book. As it is you have to flip back and forth too much, unless your Spanish is tip top, and the whole point of these illustrated pages overgrown with jungle thickets of text is that you should be reacting to the images and the words simultaneously. Somebody else would have to do the translaation.
23. I have my suspicions about the Universe. I think it may be a collective noun to which no collective unity can be ascribed.
24. I'm listening to Fats Waller right now. The Dadaists could have learned a thing or two from him.
25. So could just about everybody else.
2. Approached as a compositional idea, it has a certain temptation. . . which is a major revelation about how I approach the creative act of writing.
3. I try not to repeat myself too much because I'm easily bored.
4. Also I find that if you repeat something for emphasis or to make a point, it often has the opposite effect: either each repetition diminishes the impact, or the point being made is obscured by the reader's attempt to look for a hidden meaning.
5. If I remember, I roll my socks in pairs when they come out of the dryer. If I don't, which is often the case, in the morning I'm trying to find two matching black socks in the dark, not wanting to wake Marysia an hour earlier than she has to get up.
6. I get up an hour earlier than I strictly need to because it's a good time to catch up with work on the computer.
7. I wake up in the middle of the night with story ideas, perhaps direct from my dreams to me. Sometimes I go back to sleep, sometimes I get up and write out at least a beginning.
8. I'm a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Still can't understand, except as an index of his pretentiousness, a maven of the National Post. lamenting the triumph of trash culture, whose crescendo argument at the end was that scholars write studies of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They write studies of The Brothers Karamazov too, what's your point?
9. I like both shaggy dogs and shaggy dog stories.
10. If I had any brains I'd be an idiot, they seem to get all the best jobs.
11. I've thought for years the fundamental unit of meaning in language is not the word but the rhythm, or more precisely the breath. Same in all the other arts really. If a research facility offered me a huge sum to study this for a year or two I'd produce some interesting results.
12. The fundamental unit of all artistic expression really.
13. Of all expression in life, even conversation.
14. I've been known to worry at the thread of an argument an inordinate length of time.
15. At least I don't have any red socks in my drawer. Two black socks, people have to examine the patterns pretty close to know they don't match, and even in the dark I can tell which of my socks are white.
16. I wonder how entropy really
17. I sometimes wish I'd been born in a different galaxy. The trick would be discovering just the right one, with a site available for live births.
18. Is a question ever a random fact?
19. I know how to count but putting the numbers right there on the side helps keep track for sure. Very few people could keep count while speaking 19 consecutive sentences, and I'm certainly not one of them.
20. I like to play slightly subversive games with formal literary exercises.
21. Even informal ones.
22. If I'd been editing Frida Kahlo's diary, I'd have put the translations of the extensive text on facing pages instead of at the back of the book. As it is you have to flip back and forth too much, unless your Spanish is tip top, and the whole point of these illustrated pages overgrown with jungle thickets of text is that you should be reacting to the images and the words simultaneously. Somebody else would have to do the translaation.
23. I have my suspicions about the Universe. I think it may be a collective noun to which no collective unity can be ascribed.
24. I'm listening to Fats Waller right now. The Dadaists could have learned a thing or two from him.
25. So could just about everybody else.
February 2, 2009
Tradition Busting at the House of Lords
So there's a plan afoot to reform the British House of Lords by ousting members convicted of felonies:
"A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice said: 'In the House of Commons, if you break the criminal law or, for example, it's found that although you haven't broken the criminal law you've been doing something completely improper then the House of Commons can, in extremis, expell you. We're saying that most apply, too, to the House of Lords also."
--Julia Belluz, London Feb 2 '09
(Special to the Globe and Mail)
Dangerous, precedent-shattering idea! Pretty much violates every tradition on which the House of Lords is founded. Those Nobles who don't owe their titles and estates to appropriations from the looting and sacking of monasteries in Henry VIII's time owe it to the pillage and plunder of an entire nation by William the Waster (Alasdair Gray's more apt name for the king usually styled William the Conqueror); or to some lesser episode in the gleefully kleptomanic history of the nobly armed and wealthy. True, there are titled families that have kept their noses clean since, sometimes for as much as a century at a time, and they're to be commended for the fresh spirit of innovation they embody. The trouble is these titles are hereditary. Strip a fourteenth, seventeenth or nineteenth century Lord of title for crimes against humanity, you've pretty much stripped the current Lord of the same title. What to do with a House of Parliament suddenly bereft of Members? Make a jazzy site for a commercial mall. Dibs on the Starbucks site eh?
"A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice said: 'In the House of Commons, if you break the criminal law or, for example, it's found that although you haven't broken the criminal law you've been doing something completely improper then the House of Commons can, in extremis, expell you. We're saying that most apply, too, to the House of Lords also."
--Julia Belluz, London Feb 2 '09
(Special to the Globe and Mail)
Dangerous, precedent-shattering idea! Pretty much violates every tradition on which the House of Lords is founded. Those Nobles who don't owe their titles and estates to appropriations from the looting and sacking of monasteries in Henry VIII's time owe it to the pillage and plunder of an entire nation by William the Waster (Alasdair Gray's more apt name for the king usually styled William the Conqueror); or to some lesser episode in the gleefully kleptomanic history of the nobly armed and wealthy. True, there are titled families that have kept their noses clean since, sometimes for as much as a century at a time, and they're to be commended for the fresh spirit of innovation they embody. The trouble is these titles are hereditary. Strip a fourteenth, seventeenth or nineteenth century Lord of title for crimes against humanity, you've pretty much stripped the current Lord of the same title. What to do with a House of Parliament suddenly bereft of Members? Make a jazzy site for a commercial mall. Dibs on the Starbucks site eh?
January 31, 2009
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