R.I.P. Barbara Ehrenreich and other authors 2022

 

I first knew of Barbara Ehrenreich from a mutual acquaintance as another freelance writer struggling to get published and especially to get paid.  This puts additional light on her most cited work, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in which she documented her own experiences working at minimum wage jobs. 

 But she was also well-educated and well-connected, and was published in the best newspapers and periodicals.  Besides her single subject books, like the aforementioned 2001 volume, her periodical pieces were collected. For instance a volume covering the 1980s, which was for her (and many others) a grim and disenchanting decade, as reflected in her title: The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed.  Her 1995 collection is titled The Snarling Citizen. All of these essays exhibit her wit as well as insight. She spotted important destructive trends which unfortunately still pertain. Throughout the decades, she wrote with great acuity about the conditions and injustices women face (and she faced some painful ones herself), and for that and her lively if uncomfortable reporting on both gender and class, she deserves to be read and remembered, learned from and imitated. 

 Greg Bear was a productive and insightful science fiction writer who I met at a Star Trek convention in Seattle, where he was based.  I especially admire his visionary novel Darwin’s Radio. 

Hazel Henderson

I once saw Hazel Henderson essentially take over a World Future Society convention.  As a futurist, environmental activist and economist, she was most dynamic in person, but she reached wider audiences with her books, including Creating Alternative Futures and Building a Win-Win World.

 Suzi Gablik was an artist who wrote about art.  In 1970 she published the first in- depth book on Rene Magritte (and helped make him the highly visible artist he is today), after living with the artist and his wife. In the 1990s she broadened her conception of art to include Indigenous and other worldviews, publishing The Reenchanment of Art. As she became more concerned about self-destructive civilization, she published Conversations before the end of time, a collection of amazing interviews. Both I consider to be landmark books.

 Ted Mooney’s day job was editing Art in America (so he may have edited Suzi Gablik.)  But his contribution to literature is his individual vision in four novels, the first being the best known: Easy Travel To Other Planets in 1981, which an American literary critic placed on his list of the best 100 novels of the twentieth century. 

Roger Angell was best known for his writing on baseball in the quintessential New Yorker style, but he also wrote fiction and other non-fiction (plus the witty annual New Yorker Christmas rhymes), as well as serving as the New Yorker’s fiction editor for many years.  In that capacity he wrote me the most flattering and most heart-breaking (literary) rejection letter of my life, in which he said the New Yorker “could hardly bear not to publish” my story.  History shows they all managed pretty well. Angell was 101.

  Doris Grumbach wrote novels and was known for literary criticism in the New Republic and other periodicals.  Among those she reviewed (approvingly) was novelist Maureen Howard, a writer I also enjoyed.

I admired Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. Hilary Mantel wrote various kinds of novels and stories but is most famous for her historical fiction. Nicholas Evans was a British broadcaster and writer whose best-known book is The Horse Whisperer.

 Larry Woiwode published much-praised fiction, essays, biography and poetry from 1969 to 2022. Besides writing some 18 books, he taught writing and ran university writing programs, so his students got the benefit of somebody who walked the walk.  

Before he was a familiar narrator for historical and nature documentaries, David McCullough was a prize-winning author on mostly historical subjects.  Educated at Yale and a model of aristocratic culture, he was born and raised in Pittsburgh, which may have given him particular perspective on the subject of his first book, the Johnstown Flood.

Mike Davis wrote penetrating books about cities and their future, especially Los Angeles. From 1971 to 2012, Todd Gitlin wrote about mass media and politics. Peace activist Staunton Lynd wrote and edited books on political action and nonviolence. William Rivers Pitt is best known for his reporting and political analysis of the American war in Iraq.  P.J. O’Rourke wrote from the other end of the political spectrum, though he started out as just a funny guy. 

Then there are those who are prominent for reasons other than writing, but also published useful books. The latest name added to this year’s rolls is Barbara Walters, whose death was announced on December 30.  She was 93.  She was a television news pioneer and an expert interviewer, and she was famous.  Though I never met her, I once interviewed her on the phone for a piece on Hugh Downs.  Because of her schedule she had to call me, and I didn’t know when she would.  When she called—evidently in the makeup chair for some television appearance—I was in the shower.  So I in fact interviewed Barbara Walters while naked.

 Others who authored books in addition to their day jobs were former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (whose penultimate book was titled Fascism: A Warning), Mikhail Gorbachev, last leader of the Soviet Union; and for all I know, Pope Benedict and Queen Elizabeth. 

Scientist James Lovelock saw Earth as a living system, developing (with others) the Gaia Theory, and warned of the dire consequences to the planet of the climate crisis in a series of popular books.  He had 102 years of a remarkable life. Environmentalist and writer David Foreman founded Earth First!

 Revered Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh reached millions with his lectures, audio meditations and his many books. Stage director Peter Brook wrote several important books about theatre.  Before he made films, Jean-Luc Godard wrote about them, and continued to talk about filmmaking at book length.

 Print and television journalists who published books (and some who didn’t) but passed in 2022 include: film critic Sheila Benson, Mark Shields, Bernard Shaw, Bill Plante, Jim Angle, Michael Gerson, John DiStasio, Francis X. Clines, John Hughes, Ann Garrels, Richard Lopez, Shelby Scott (who I remember from WBZ in Boston), and Robert Herman.

 

Chronicled in books and other media, the legendary work of World War II and fashion photography Tony Vaccaro, and of the photos of Tim Page in Vietnam and afterwards.

 Some subjects of journalistic and other writing that should be mentioned but haven’t fit into previous categories include General Charles McGee, last of the Tuskegee airmen of World War II, and Holocaust survivor Edward Mosberg; American Indian activist Clyde Bellecourt, artists Claus Oldenberg and Margaret Keane (those big-eyed figures popular in the 60s); sportscaster Vin Scully, men’s basketball great Bill Russell and women’s basketball great Lusia Harris; legal scholar Lani Guinier, co-founder of the Environmental Defense Fund Art Cooley.

 In general, writers don’t get a lot of respect in America, though they may be celebrated locally or within a profession.  So whatever degree of success or failure, fame or obscurity these following writers had in their lifetimes, as long as they have a book or a periodical piece in a library somewhere, or something buried in the depths of cyberspace, there’s a chance some stranger may read it, and their words will live again.

 Also passing away in 2022 were: Andre Leon Talley, Anne Harris, Barbara Love, Geoffrey Asche, Terry Garrity (The Sensuous Woman), Carleton Carpenter, Bruce Duffy, Valerie Boyd, Leonard Kessler, Paul Cantor, Shirley Hughes, Sally Watson, Bethany Campbell, Thomas F. Staley, Sydney Shoemaker, Francois Bott, Tom Maddox, Julia Powell, Sharon Presley, JFK conspiracy theorist David Lifton, Stuart Woods, Joanna Clark, Raymond Briggs, Andrew Hubner, Helen Potrebenko, Terrance Green, Mark Girouard, Michael Malone, Antonin Bajaja, Sue Hardesty, Luis Agular, Jean Franco.

 Poets Gerald Stern, Peter Landborn Wilson, Simon Perchik, Dennis Wilson, Noah Eli Gordon. Editor and publisher Jason Epstein, and literary agent Sterling Lord (I was once represented by his esteemed agency.) Let this list also honor the writers whose deaths were unnoticed.  May they all rest in peace.  Their work lives on.

R.I.P.Christine McVie and other musicians 2022

 What strikes me now about the Fleetwood Mac records of the mid 1970s is how clean the sound was.  The instruments had distinct separation and pop, the lead voices and backup harmonies balanced and flowed, there was no excess or noise. There was no rush or frenzy. Yet somehow this produced an irresistible  momentum over a tasty beat, and unleashed the emotional force of the music and lyrics.  This music rang like a bell.  It was cleansing, but at the same time, it startled you and grabbed your attention and emotion.  In the context of the mid-1970s, it was also hopeful.

 I noticed this at the time—after all, I had been paid to make that kind of observation for years leading up to this moment—but the emotion and physical energy generated by the songs were primary.  I just felt it.

 It was a magic lineup musically: Mick Fleetwood’s drums, John McVie’s bass, Lindsay Buckingham’s unique guitar and Christine McVie’s keyboards.  Buckingham was a vocalist and songwriter, but the voices unique in pop music at that time belonged to Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie—very different from each other but both distinctive.      

 As is well known now, their lives were messy in many ways (I once stayed in a Santa Monica apartment where a few weeks before, Stevie Nicks conducted a secret tryst with—I believe it was—a Beach Boy) but their music was precise.  You could listen to it with admiration and awe, if you could keep yourself from moving.  Their uplifting brilliance was all the greater for being so widely shared.  These records sold millions and there was always at least one of their songs on the radio. 

At the center of it all was Christine McVie.  Her keyboards anchored the music, and her songwriting defined the group.  Nicks and Buckingham were flashier, but she wrote and sang more of the hits.  She had an elegant blues-based sense of playing and writing (as Christine Perfect—her real unmarried name—she’d been the mainstay of the 1960s blues band Chicken Shack—and of course Fleetwood Mac had started as a blues band) and a genius for musical hooks.  Her singing style was simple and subtle, never strained, yet it carried these songs to the heights.

 The band predictably imploded by the 80s, though it made several near-perfect albums in the 70s.  It reformed when unexpectedly, the Bill Clinton/Al Gore campaign chose McVie’s song “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” as their theme/fight song for the 1992 election, and the band came back together for an Inaugural concert. They were again a great band in the late 90s. Eventually McVie left the band again and stopped making music, but then she rejoined and the songs kept coming.  They were and are irresistible.

  It’s probably clear from the first entries in this series, but I’m primarily honoring artists and others who touched my life.  The time limits to that are most obvious with music.  The music that moved me and may well still move me was first generated in the 20^th century and before.  I stopped listening to much that was new as the hip hop and rap era took hold, and I still hear almost no contemporary pop music (the best of which tends to suggest to me a watered-down variation on artists that came before. I’m probably wrong, but there you are.) 

 Musicians associated with the 1950s:

Jerry Lee Lewis, one of the original rock and rollers, a weird guy and crazed performer it was impossible not to watch. Ronnie Spector (the Ronettes), Fred Parris (the Five Satins), Bobby Hendricks (the Drifters), bandleader and novelty musician Gloria Parker.

 Songwriters Paul Vance (Perry Como’s hit “Catch A Falling Star”), Sonny West (Buddy Holly’s “Oh Boy!”) and country songwriter Dallas Frazier.

 

 Bobby Rydell was the best singer among the Philadelphia Italians crooners promoted by Dick Clark in the late 50s/pre-Beatles 60s. He had a string of hits, and a big screen role in Bye, Bye Birdie.  I bought his 45s and saw him live at the Allegheny County Fair, partly because some girls in school thought I looked like him, an impression I encouraged with my pompadour, until I went full JFK.

 Musicians who broke through in the 1960s:

Loretta Lynn

Country great Loretta Lynn, singer (Ian and Sylvia) and songwriter (Four Strong Winds) Ian Tyson, rocker Ronnie Hawkins, Dino Danelli (The Rascals), Kim Simmonds (Savoy Brown), Don Wilson (the Ventures), Rosa Hawkins (the Dixie Cups), Gary Brooker (Procol Harum), folksinger Judy Henske and Broadway singer Robert Morris.

 Jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis had a 60s hit with “The In Crowd.”

 Bob Neuwirth hung out with Dylan (in the film Don’t Look Back he tells him that Donovan is a better guitarist) and co-wrote Janis Joplin’s Mercedes Benz song with Janis and poet Michael McClure.

Judith Durham

 Composer Tom Springfield (“Another You” and “Georgy Girl”) and the lead singer of the Seekers that turned these songs into hits, Judith Durham.

 Composers Montey Norman (the Bond Theme), Lamont Dozier (“You Can’t Hurry Love”), Lenny Lipton (“Puff the Magic Dragon”), and Ivy Jo Hunter (“Dancin in the Street.”)

 Impressarios of two major 60s events: James Rado (co-creator of Hair!) and Michael Lang (co-creator of the Woodstock festival.)

 From the 1970s:

Pop singer Olivia Newton-John, Meat Loaf, folksingers Paul Siebel and Mary McCaslin, country and western singer Mickey Gilley.

 Klaus Schulze (Tangerine Dream), Warren Bernhardt (Steely Dan), Calvin Simon (Parliament-Funkadelic), Dick Halligan (Blood, Sweat and Tears), Nathaniel Ian Wynters (the Wailers.)  Songwriter Jon Lind.

 

From the 1980s and 90s:

 Irene Cara (“Fame”), Naomi Judd (the Judds), and Andy Fletcher (Depeche Mode).

Composers Vangelis, Angelo Badalmenti, Lucy Simon and Shirley Elkhard.

 

Pharoah Sanders

Also passing in 2022 were jazz and R&B artists Pharoah Sanders, Taylor Hawkins, James Mtume, Bobbie Long ‘Beegie’ Adair, Michael Henderson, Jessica Williams, Barbara Morrison, Jessie Powell, Janet Thurlow, Joyce Sims, Geraldine Hunt, Barbara Thompson, salsa singer and songwriter Hector Tricoche, samba singer Elza Soares, calypso singer Kenny J.  May they all rest in peace.  The music lingers on.

 

R.I.P. David Warner and other actors 2022

When Alan Rickman died in 2016, stories emphasized his movie roles as villains, despite the actual range of the characters he played in dramas and comedies.  Yet the images and clips accompanying the stories often were from his only romantic lead (however offbeat a romance, in that his character is dead) in the wonderful film Truly, Madly, Deeply.

 Something similar happened when David Warner died in July 2022: stories focused on his villains, though he played more honorable characters, but the images were usually from his only film as an offbeat romantic lead, the 1966 Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, known in the US also as simply Morgan! 

That movie, stylistically a quintessential 60s film directed in England by Karl Reisz, made a big impression on me when it came out.  Caught between working class communism he grew up with, and the self-satisfied world of the rich he married into, partly because he became a commercially viable artist, Morgan is a kind-hearted man who identifies his rebellion with the natural instincts of apes as well as the symbols of revolution.  He longs for his ex-wife, played by Vanessa Redgrave in her first film role, who is also torn between her accustomed comforts and Morgan’s rough charm.  The gap between his idealistic fantasies and reduced reality, as dramatized by his futile gesture of breaking up her wedding reception while dressed in an ape costume, gets him committed to a bucolic asylum.  

Warner’s character and performance in this film suggest what his 1965 performance as Hamlet might have been like: highly physical and mercurial, alternating catatonic brooding with sudden frenzies of speech and action.  When David Tennant was slated to perform as Hamlet in 2008, he made a short TV film in which he interviewed other actors who had played the role.  Most acknowledged that the greatest Hamlet of their lifetime was David Warner.

 Warner did play a lot of film villains, and eventually tired of it, but he also played Bob Cratchit in the 1984  George C. Scott version of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, and the Klingon Chancellor modeled on Gorbachev (who also died in 2022) in the last Star Trek original cast feature film.  He played historical characters from Jack the Ripper to the young William Wordsworth.  He performed in at least two filmed roles in Chekhov plays: in the 1968 Sidney Lumet feature version of The Seagull, and a 1991 BBC production of Uncle Vanya.  He returned to the stage in the early 21^st century, playing King Lear in 2005, the traditional capstone to a career that includes a Hamlet.

 Warner’s voice was always a stage asset, and became the source of his many roles in animated and audio stories that included playing Doctor Who.  Because of Morgan (and the fact that I identified with both the character and the actor), I followed David Warner’s career with affection as well as appreciation and admiration. 

It would take a book to begin to describe the importance of Sidney Poitier’s movie performances in the 1960s, just as the Civil Rights movement was moving into unavoidable prominence.  No history of the racial attitudes and official changes in those years would be complete without referring to A Raisin in the Sun, Lillies of the Field (for which Poitier became the first black recipient of the Best Actor Oscar), Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, To Sir With Love and In the Heat of the Night.

 His career began in the 1950s, though he was a Blacklist victim for part of that decade.  In addition to more popular movies like The Defiant Ones, he was in some lesser known films I saw on television and loved: Go, Man, Go (a low budget look at the origins of the Harlem Globetrotters) and Paris Blues ( Blacklisted director Martin Ritt’s look at American jazz musicians in Paris, with comment on race issues, costarring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward as well as Diahann Carroll and Louis Armstrong.) 

After the mid-1960s when he was the biggest box office draw in Hollywood, he turned to directing, producing and playing occasional lead and supporting roles, as well as political activism.  The only comparison I can come up with concerning his onscreen charisma and distinctive line-readings and physicality is Marlon Brando.   In 2009, his list of honors—and his work for racial justice—were capped by receiving the US Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.  He died in January 2022 at the age of 94.

 There aren’t too many actors left from the classic Hollywood period before 1950, so I take special interest in the ones whose names get one more mention as their deaths are announced. 

Angela Lansbury is the most prominent among them, for her career started in the 40s with two best supporting actress nominations, but it extended well into the 21^st century on stage as well as television, where she was best known for her 1980s series Murder She Wrote.

Marsha Hunt

 Beginning at age 17, Marsha Hunt appeared in Hollywood films of the late 1930s through the 1940s (including the Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson version of Pride and Prejudice, and the 1944 film None Shall Escape, regarded as the first film about the Holocaust), and was Blacklisted for most of the 1950s.  She did theatre and played a few movie and TV parts in the 1960s and afterwards, and in the 1990s appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  She remained a political activist and humanitarian.  She was 104.

 Mildred Kornman was one of the last surviving cast members of the Our Gang comedies in the 1920s and 30s, though she had a non-speaking role.  She was a bit player in 20^th Century Fox films of the 1940s, and a magazine model. She was 97. As a child actor, Mickey Kuhn was the last surviving cast member of the 1939 blockbuster Gone With the Wind.  He appeared in other major films in the 1940s and early 1950s. He was 90.  Faye Marlow played a few leads and supporting roles in 1940s movies and early 1950s TV before becoming an author.  She was 96.  Nehemiah Persoff was a sometimes familiar face (when not disguised) if not a familiar name in supporting roles in more than 200 television shows as well as movie roles, including a few in the late 1940s. He was 102.  

Irene Papas in Zorba the Greek

Memorable performers from 1950s television passed away in 2022, among them: Tony Dow (Wally on Leave It To Beaver), Dwayne Hickman (Dobie Gillis), Tim Considine (Disney’s The Hardy Boys and various Disney movies), June Blair (Ozzie and Harriet—she played and was David Nelson’s wife), and comedian Pat Carroll (Sid Caesar, Danny Thomas shows.)  Actors in 1950s movies include Akira Takarada (Gojira), Hardy Kruger, Linda Lawson, Georgia Holt, Andra Martin and Greek actress Irene Papas, who went on to a film and stage career of more than 50 years.  Bernard Cribbins began his movie and TV career in this decade and it never stopped until he did—he’d become a beloved icon in the UK.

Yvette Mimieux

 Actors who helped characterize the 1960s include Nichelle Nichols, Yvette Mimieux , Henry Silva, James Olson, Mitchell Ryan and Ann Flood as well as European actor Monica Vitti (Antonioni films.)

Sally Kellerman & J. Caan

Actors first associated with the 1970s include James Caan (The Godfather), Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Sally Kellerman (M*A*S*H), Howard Hesseman, Dani (Truffaut films), Bo Hopkins, Ruth Madoc, Stuart Margolin (The Rockford Files), David Birney (Bridget Loves Bernie); Emilio Delgado and Bob McGrath (both Sesame Street perennials), Bob Elkins, Susan Tolsky, Jo Kendall and Mary Alice, who began her long film, TV and stage career in this decade. 

William Hurt

Known best for their work in the 1980s and 90s are William Hurt, Fred Ward, Paul Sorvino, Ray Liotta, Anne Heche, Tadeusz Bradecki (Schindler’s List), Kirstie Alley (Cheers), Robert E. Mosley (Magnum P.I.); Al Strobel, Kenneth Welsh and Gary Bullock (Twin Peaks), Mary Mara (Nash Bridges), John Aniston (Days of Our Lives), Estelle Harris and Kathyrn Kates (Seinfeld), Jack Kehler and comedians Judy Tenuta and Bob Saget.  In the 2000s: Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid), Helen Slayton-Hughes, Leslie Jordan, Gary Friedkin; Tom Sirico and Bruce MacVittle (Sopranos.)

 Finally, actors who mostly graced the stage include Joan Copeland (sister to Arthur Miller), Robert LuPone, Rae Allen and Doreen Brownstone.  May they all rest in peace.  Their work lives on. 

R.I.P. 2022: Jean-Luc Godard and other filmmakers 2022

I probably saw my first Godard film at a Cinema Club screening as a student at Knox College, and doubtless I didn’t know what the hell was going on.  It took awhile for me to absorb especially the narrative language of foreign films.  But Jean Luc Godard was a rising star in the late 60s and early 1970s, so I made sure to see as many of his films as I could during a Godard festival in 1970 at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, MA.  As I recently described elsewhere, I recall sitting mesmerized in the back of a nearly empty theatre late at night, drinking coffee and smoking Gauloises as I watched.

 Eventually I saw all of his films released in America by 1970 at the Welles, and a few that came to America later.  At their best, scenes in his films were strikingly audacious and expressed a culture that was partly familiar, and partly foreign but magnetically attractive. For example, I loved the simple café scenes in Masculin/Feminin.  They were deliberately imperfect in ways that, for example, the films of his French New Wave contemporary Francois Truffaut were not. Both made offbeat films about the future, but Godard’s Alphaville was more mythic and strange.

 My favorite was always Pierrot LeFou, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karinia.  The road sequences (largely improvised) and the tragic-comic ending are memorable, but I was devoted to the early scenes of Belmondo as the married man Ferdinand, before he runs off with the babysitter.  He reads a book on art in his bathtub (literature, art and bathtubs all recur frequently in Godard), reading aloud a passage about the painter Velasquez as the artist of the spaces between people and objects, “the painter of the evening, of the plains, of the silence…”

 The world he lives in disgusts Ferdinand, shown as a surreal party in which upper middle class young professional couples converse literally in the language of advertisements.  He meets the American director Samuel Fuller who tells him that the cinema is all about emotion.  All of this describes Godard’s aesthetic at the time, resonating with our attitudes about the conventional adult world we were expected to join.

 Godard was an early exponent of the French New Wave, which he helped to define.  With a film vocabulary steeped in his encyclopedic knowledge of movies—especially American movies—he took his camera into the streets, and working from outlines and ideas, quotations and some dialogue, he enacted cinema of the moment.  “But that’s cinema,” he says in an interview published with the Pierrot script.  “Life arranges itself.”

 For awhile, Godard exemplified and symbolized a new creative role for cinema, available to anyone.  He inspired countless young filmmakers, and film schools, as well as moviegoers. He more than any other of these directors changed the culture.

  After this New Wave period he alienated many with political messages, but continued to make gorgeous images.  Personally I didn’t share his fascination with American gangster films and violence, but even his most lurid images are indelible.  He also alienated friends with his mercurial behavior and confused others with his churning intellectual obsessions, but he remained committed to film as art, and will be remembered for this.      

 2022 also saw the death of actor Jean-Louis Trintigant, prominent in several French New Wave films, and two French filmmakers not especially associated with the New Wave but who made two of my all-time favorite movies, each exemplifying cinematic and narrative style found only in European films: Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva) and Alain Tanner (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000.) 

   

Peter Bogdanovich was an American director, and a writer and raconteur on Hollywood movies.  After early success as a director with The Last Picture Show and his following two films, he married his fortunes to the Picture Show’s star, Cybill Shepherd.   He cast her as the lead in Daisy Miller, based on the Henry James novel.  He wasn’t wrong about her embodying qualities of the James heroine, but the movie did badly with critics and at the box office.  They made a couple of subsequent failures before he stopped directing for several years, and the relationship ended.  I met them after a screening of Daisy Miller at the Orson Welles in 1974.  They were both nearsighted, and seemed very vulnerable within the circle of frenzied attention that followed them. That was not the last of his ill-fated romances.  But along the way he helped to revive the reputation of Orson Welles himself, also in the 1970s.  

  

Other filmmakers and movie professionals who died in 2022 (excluding actors) include: American directors Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces) and Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters), British director Mike Hodges (Get Carter), Japanese film director Akira Inoue, Czech director and screenwriter Dusan Klein, film editor David Brenner, film designer Tony Walton, British cinematographer Sir Sydney Samuelson, production designer Albert Brenner.  May they all rest in peace.  Their work lives on.

Fails

 On the coldest Christmas Eve in Washington DC history, several buses of migrants, not clothed for the weather because they started out from Texas, were deposited on the street.  All signs point to Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas as the person who sent them.  He notified no one that they were coming.  He did not order the buses to stop at an agency equipped to shelter some 150 destitute strangers.  Instead he ordered the buses to throw these people off on an empty street in the dead of night, near the official residence of the Vice President.

It was, as White House spokesperson Abdullah Hasan said, "a cruel, dangerous, and shameful stunt." And the media by and large fell for it.  Stories about this incident appeared, often including the response of churches and volunteers who were tipped off by someone in an NGO in Texas.  But the story needed a photo or image, and what did many media outlets select?  Photos and images of Vice President Kamala Harris.

What did Harris have to do with sending these helpless people onto the cold streets of Washington?  Absolutely nothing.  Is she even responsible for federal policy on migrants?  No.  It's not even clear she was at the residence.  But lazy editors did what Abbott baited them to do anyway, and linked the story to her with a photo.  

Maybe not running a photo of Abbott instead was justifiable if journalists couldn't get confirmation or a quote that he'd sent them.  But a photo of someone who had nothing to do with it, except that Abbott wanted her photo associated with the story--that's just a total lazy fail.

And where were the questions?  The journey took two days, and they did not know their destination.  Were they even fed along the way?  The dehumanization of these people that began in their own countries was compounded in this country, abetted by at least some of the media.

Another recent journalistic fail is more complicated.   George Santos, newly elected Republican member of Congress in a New York district that includes parts of Long Island and the Bronx, was recently accused of lying during the campaign about several important items in his personal story, including his education and job history, but also about his parents and perhaps even his sexual identity.  A furor erupted, with calls to deny him from being seated as a Member of Congress.  On Monday, he admitted some of the lies, but made it clear he intended to claim his seat.

The lies he admitted to were exposed in a story by the New York Times, for which the reporters deserve credit.  But the whole matter raises the question: why wasn't the story published before the election?  Then something could have been done--by the voters--to keep Santos out of Congress, instead of the very likely futile efforts to deny him now.  

The information as to whether he got a degree from a college when he said he did, or had the jobs he said he did, is not hard to find.  The failures to find it are multiple.  The Democratic party and its candidate failed in this relatively simple background check.  But so did the media, and it's beyond embarrassing.  There are lots of places in the country now where there is no local newspaper, and no real political reporters to speak of in any news medium.  Candidates there can get away with anything. New York and Long Island are not those places.  They have more journalists per square foot than anywhere else in the country. This is a big journalistic failure.

It may be that the kind of stretching the truth that candidates normally do did not prepare journalists for candidates lying about easily checkable facts about themselves.  But this is becoming a trend, and part of the reason is that people are getting away with it.  They are getting away with it on job resumes and in creating their public story and persona.  If people aren't routinely checked and called out for these lies, they will continue, and the concept of a fact will take yet another hit. 

The Gift

Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one

 that your life conceals, the one waiting outside

 when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at

 in her crochet design, the one almost found

 over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.

 It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.

 You get killed now and then, violated

 in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.)

You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait

 and pray, and maybe good things come---maybe

 the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.

 You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.

 It's a balance, the taking and passing along,

 the composting of where you've been and how people

 and weather treated you. It's a country where

 you already are, bringing where you have been.

Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,

 turning the world, moving the air, calling,

 every morning, " Here, take it, it's yours."

---William Stafford

Happy Holidays, All

R.I.P. 2022: Arthur Giron

 

Arthur Giron was a distinguished American playwright and educator who died in February 2022.  He was 85.  A founding member of New York’s venerable Ensemble Studio Theatre, he was known most recently as the author of the book for the musical Amazing Grace, which had a brief run on Broadway in 2015 and has since found more success in other venues. Several of his subsequent works for stage and film are in process and may yet be realized.

 Probably his first bold call on theatrical and media attention was Edith Stein, a play about a real person and actual events, a Jewish woman who converted to Catholicism and was murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust.  Many of his later plays were also on historical subjects, including biographical explorations of such figures as physicist Richard Feynman, the Wright brothers (a script that has become the basis for several musicals), and the passionate relationship of Voltaire with the scientist Emilie du Chatelet, in a play that won the Galileo Prize for illuminating scientific innovation. Even given their subjects and historical sweep, Giron explored the emotions at the heart of these achievements.

  Giron was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera Guild to write a bilingual (Spanish/English) opera, The Golden Guitar.  At that point, Edith Stein had itself already become an opera. 

 His plays often dealt with moral and political questions, none more so that A Dream of Wealth, which dealt with the defining influence of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala, the country of his family’s origins.  “I think the theatre in general is the last haven of the truth,” he told a Los Angeles Times reporter during a rehearsal of this play.  “We in the theatre have the responsibility to get under the surface of things…”

 Arthur Giron grew up in Los Angeles, where his father was a “dentist to the stars” at MGM.  During World War II, Hollywood was a haven for the displaced artists and intelligentsia of Europe whose relationship with the movies was uneasy, but some of whom were passionately committed to theatre, not yet prominent in southern California. As a precocious young stage actor in his teenage years, Arthur absorbed this passion and commitment.  (He describes this period in an essay, “The Golden Silence,” posted onhis website.)

I first met Arthur Giron in the early 1990s, when he was head of the graduate program in playwriting in the Drama Department at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the most prestigious theatre programs in the country. He was mentor to my partner, playwright Margaret Thomas Kelso.  Though at that time she was no longer a student, having earned her MFA and gone on to also teach, we saw a lot of Arthur in the years before we left Pittsburgh for California, and he returned to New York.

 He was tall and handsome, his height and appearance enhanced by an erect posture that was unaffected and constant.  He could be funny and acerbic but he earned his air of authority.  When he was a guest artist at a southern California university, the predominantly Latin theatre students addressed him as Maestro.  That was Arthur.

 At the same time, he deployed the kindness, courtesies and soft voice of an old world gentleman. I once saw his gallantry on display at a surprise birthday party for Margaret at a Pittsburgh restaurant I arranged with her friends.  After dinner there was dancing, and an elderly woman guest was watching alone until Arthur asked her to dance.

 With his principled idealism he was also practical about playwriting and the business of artistic survival. His work observed the power of passions. He endured tragedies in his life, but his bulwark was his devotion to his wife Mariluz.

  Although I was not one of his students, he encouraged my writing.  Margaret directed a short theatre piece I wrote, and the next day Arthur left an effusive phone message of praise, which he repeated the next time I saw him.  This is just one instance of his interest.

 I saw an early version of his Wright brothers play at CMU, and one of his one-acts at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in Manhattan.  Probably his most produced play—mostly by university theatres unafraid of large casts and challenging staging—is Becoming Memories, and so far I’ve seen three productions of it, each memorable in its own way.

 Becoming Memories follows five small town families through three generations from the frontier to modern days, beginning in 1911.  It is based on the memories and family stories contributed by members of the Illusion Theatre in Minneapolis.  The first scene depicts the rescue of a teenage girl on horseback—when I first read it, I couldn’t see how this would work on stage.  But this imaginative dimension in a realistic story often characterizes Giron’s plays.

 The first production I saw was created by my partner Margaret when she was the entire theatre department of a small college in central Pennsylvania.  However small, the college had a fine old theatre with a large stage, and Margaret used that space and a large student cast to create a colorful epic.  Most memorable to me was how she staged the final scenes of each act to produce an emotional, ecstatic effect. Other audience members felt it, too.  (Arthur had visited the cast during rehearsals and talked with them about the play.)

 The second time was a university production in Vancouver, B.C., where I happened to be while researching a Smithsonian story on the Haida artist Robert Davidson.  This time the stage was much smaller, an improvised space in which the audience was close to and on pretty much the same level as most of the action (though there was creative use of ladders and platforms as well.)  This produced some revelatory and magic moments, particularly the personal moments we witnessed close up.  Afterwards I met its actors backstage, and when I told them I knew the playwright and would be seeing him when I returned to Pittsburgh, they all signed a production poster for him. I was pleased to deliver it to Arthur in his office at CMU.

 The third time was at the University of Pittsburgh.  One of my nieces living in a town east of Pittsburgh was about to enter high school, and I gave her a day in the city as a gift marking the transition.  We were to end the day with Becoming Memories.  But earlier in the afternoon, I took her on a tour of the CMU campus, where we happened to run into Arthur just as he was leaving.  So I was able to introduce her to the author of the play she would see that evening.  The production itself was on a scale between the previous two, and once again it illuminated different aspects of the story.

 These are some of the virtues of theatre that sets it apart, and so Arthur Giron’s plays will continue to generate new and even surprising permutations. May he rest in peace.  His work certainly lives on. 

Also lost in 2022 was the epic British theatre director Peter Brook.  After a decade of Shakespeare productions with many of England’s great actors, he electrified theatre internationally in the mid-1960s with his production of Marat/Sade.  He introduced his version of India’s Mahabharata to western stages, and brought a visual lyricism to unconventional productions, notably of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970.  He then moved to France and created many productions there, while experimenting with new acting and narrative techniques.   He also directed films, notably the 1963 Lord of the Flies.

 Other theatre artists who died in 2022 (apart from actors, to be named in a later post) include: playwright Charles Fuller, director Derrick Golden, playwright Terry Teachout, playwright and theatre scholar Paul Harrison, playwright and musician Jo Carol Pierce and French theatre director Francois Tanguy.

These Books Matter 2022

 Lots of books are published each year, and many of them contribute in some way: they inform, remember, correct the record, advance a new idea, edify, inspire and/or entertain.  But there are a smaller number of books that matter.

Though what matters can mean different things.  Some books matter because of their consequences over time.  Novels (like plays, movies and songs) can become beloved, or in the overused term, "iconic" or even "classic." Typically they speak to different people in different ways, saying different things to each.  Yet they remain memorable for many, and eventually become cultural touchstones that nearly everyone knows at least a little.  

However, identifying such books is best accomplished years afterwards.  Less time needs to pass perhaps to see a novel's influence in the world.  For example, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future, published almost two years ago,  has clearly become a book that matters.  Not only is it the author's best-selling novel but it has entered into, and in some ways focused, discussions on how to address the climate crisis future, not only in the U.S. but perhaps even more strongly in Europe and internationally.  Richard Powers' two most recent novels, The Overstory and Bewilderment, have also exerted strong responses and focused emotions, inquiry and discussion on a range of related topics: not just forest issues, but questions of what constitutes life and intelligence, and the relationships of humans to the rest of life--what is increasingly called the "more than human world."   

Nonfiction books can perhaps be more easily identified more quickly as books that matter.  Published nearly a decade ago now, Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is clearly a book that matters.  Applying contemporary economic and historical analysis to very basic questions, Picketty both inspired and coalesced important thinking about basic changes in economic structures needed to make a stable and better future.  Its analysis of the failures of today's economic order and prevailing conservative philosophy, particularly showing the dangers of the huge gaps between the few at the top and everyone else, has become influential even to approaches less radical than Picketty might favor, such as a simple return to the Keynesian economics that prevailed in the U.S. from FDR until Reagan.  That analysis which shows that prosperity is attained by supporting the middle class and public sector investment is becoming U.S. policy again under the Biden administration, in what journalist Michael Tomasky is calling Middle-Out Economics, the title of his new book: perhaps a candidate for a book that matters. (In the meantime, this Politico piece and interview is a good summary.)

But books can matter before their influence is measured simply by being crucial contributions on crucial topics. They are groundbreaking in important ways, though not necessarily unique.  Their importance depends as well on how riveting they are to read.  I have several candidates for books that matter on this basis, published in the past year or so.  It's not an exhaustive list; perhaps the minimum.  The order in which I present them does not imply rank.  What links them is that they present in a generous if not full way a dramatically new synthesis that tells us something startling about our world that upends conventional wisdom and offers a new framework for perceiving and acting in the world.  In that sense, they bring the news.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Published towards the end of last year, this book is already influencing newer work.  Its scope is enormous: nothing less than the human story.  The linear story of development (or evolution of society) is a comfortable one for many reasons.  It simplifies textbook categories, and it leads logically and inevitably to contemporary "advanced" societies, the apex of it all: from caveman to capitalism.  Who loves this story?  The same type folks who extracted "Social Darwinism" from the complexities of Darwinian evolution.  Robber barons like John D. Rockerfeller and Andrew Carnegie saw that it was good, and gave it their monied blessings.

According to the two Davids, both archaeologists, the story is wrong, right from the beginning. Modern humans weren't the sole apex of evolution--other humanoids had real societies, too, with all the elements of intelligence and expression.  We carry some of their genes. 

Society did not develop or even change from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to urban.  All these forms coexisted and intermingled, and there were many hybrids.  There were urban societies without kings or rulers, and tyrannical hunter-gatherers.  The Davids may be a little judgey in their descriptions of the varieties of Native (North and South) American societies, but they make their point--they were not simple or primitive or identical; they were often sophisticated, complex, various and sometimes large.  

This book emphasized an historical point that has since been taken up by others: that the form of democracy that governed the Six Nations Confederacy (the Haudenosaunee) that lasted longer than our democracy has so far, was patiently explained to Benjamin Franklin and others by some of its leaders, and informed the formation of the non-Native American democracy.  Too bad it didn't also adopt the Prime Directive of the  Haudenosaunee: in all decisions take into account the seventh generation to come.

This book of 692 pages is replete with examples, written with verve and wit, so it can read like a wonder book.  We don't really need Marvel or the other purveyors of outsized fantasies:  it's there in the histories that have either only recently discovered or studied, or conveniently ignored because they complicate or contradict the main story--the one that has gone a long way towards the fix we're in, on the brink of destroying it all.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

by Ed Yong 

In Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, the character that most readers noted and remembered is a woman scientist who discovers that trees in a forest communicate with each other, and help each other chemically to ward off disease.  She is ridiculed by scandalized scientists and forced out of academia until her research is vindicated, and she becomes a kind of folk hero.

 This character is based on a real life researcher, Suzanne Simard, whose book Finding the Mother Tree subsequently became popular.  But even more popular was a book on the same theme published a few years earlier by forester Peter Wohlleben, with the more arresting title The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate.

 That book’s success, expanding on revelations about the complex life of the forest, led to a series of similar books by Wohlleben and many others, with titles often beginning with “The Hidden Life of” or “The Secret Life of” various animals, plants and other natural phenomena, including ice.  These books reflected new research but also observations that had gone unnoticed or derided because they contradicted established views on the natural world as comprised of simple if sometimes mysterious living objects, of interest mostly as exploitable for human ends.

 All of this helped prepare readers for the June 2022 publication of An Immense World by the much praised science journalist Ed Yong. It turns out that everything has a life hidden to humans, partly because our current preconceptions block awareness, but also because other lifeforms experience the world in vastly different ways.

 The key concept here is umwelt, named by early 20^th century zoologist Jakob von Uexkull.  It refers to the sensory world of animals, determined by what senses they have and what they can do.  As Yong demonstrates through scientists he visits, these vary considerably.  Some creatures taste with their feet, others hear ultrasound or see into the ultraviolet. They may sense electromagnetic waves.

   Senses that we share with other animals are used in different ways, and the balance among them can be radically different.  Dogs smell and hear better than they see—so their world is one of aroma trails.  Even their color vision is different, and one of the more startling illustrations in this book compares the colors in a typical room that we see, and how dogs see them.

Though sometimes based on dismissed and forgotten insights, most of the research is new, as scientists use new technologies to dispel old assumptions.  That birds can’t smell is one of them, but there are many more.  Some of these discoveries are astonishing:  for instance, the vocalizations and communication that goes on out of human hearing range.  We can detect only a fraction of whales’ songs, and it turns out that mice sing to each other.  At some points this book starts to sound like Douglas Adams’ humorous takes in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (that mice actually run experiments on humans, that dolphins can escape human catastrophe) may have more substance than expected.

 Apart from the wondrous details, there are larger points here.  Humans assumed a lot about other life based on their own sensorium, but we’ve missed quite a lot.  “Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way.  To us, it feels all-encompassing.  It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know.  This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.”

 But science and other forms of observation at the service of human imagination can help us see not only some of the ways other lifeforms live and communicate, but how our own activities disrupt their lives.  Light pollution wreaks havoc on various birds and other animals; noise pollution in the oceans endangers whales and other sea creatures.  

Despite the book's length, Yong's precise but informal voice and his flourishes of wit make it eminently readable, yet the science reporting itself is admirable. Even the footnotes are interesting reading. It helps that what the science is reporting remains continuously fascinating. 

 This research has greatly complicated human conceptions of what other lifeforms are, and expands the notions, extent and range of sentience and intelligence. It is this theme that James Bridle takes up in his book.

 Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for Planetary Intelligence

By James Bridle 

Bridle writes and thinks chiefly about technologies, and his disquiet about the direction and limitations of artificial intelligence sent him to explore other kinds of intelligences in the natural world.

 Again, the concept of Umwelt is evoked. Bridle also refers to both Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as starting points for his own explorations.  He ranges far and wide, from our humanoid ancestors to the intelligence of slime mold, and applies his observations to the new machines.  “The idea of forming new relationships with non-human intelligence is the central theme of this book,” he writes.  “It emanates from a wider and deeper dawning: the increasingly evident and pressing reality of our utter entanglement with the more-than-human world.”

 Bridle’s cogent and provocative musings apply not only to the possible futures of machine intelligence but, as Yong’s book does, to the endangered life of this planet and the necessity to actively preserve it.  As we discover and admit the extent of intelligent life and its beautiful complexity, we are close to destroying it.

 The singular and expressive organization of information and the inspired insights more than compensate for some slackness and an editorial lapse or two. Bridle's ideas and their expression in this book merit serious attention.

This recent run of books on non-human life, culminating so far in Yong and Bridle, should end any credibility given to the traditional notion of animals as natural automatons, important only as they are useful to humans, with no feelings to consider or intelligence to respect and learn from.  Gaia expanded the definition of life, and now we grapple with kinds of intelligence not only in familiar animals but plants, microbes and other life. We'd better start learning.

 One of the ideas that Bridle interrogates is the notion promoted by digital industries and other enthusiasts that intelligence is primarily based on calculation.  That is a theme in the latest novel by Dave Eggers.

 The Every: Or At Last A Sense of Order, Or The Final Days of Free Will, or Limitless Choice is Killing The World

A novel by Dave Eggers 

The Hollywood pitch for this novel might be Alice in Wonderland meets Nineteen Eighty-Four, or perhaps Brave New World would be a closer match to its onrushing dystopia.

 In this stand-alone sequel to Eggers’ The Circle, the Facebook-like corporation has merged with Amazon (referred to here as the Jungle) to form a monopolistic continuum, not only of business, not only of culture, but of shared reality.  Welcome to The Every.

 Delaney is a young woman intent on destroying The Every from the inside.  She is intelligent, intuitive, creative and acutely observant, but the plot hinges on her also being repeatedly naïve about the outcome of her efforts, as she proposes a series of outrageous changes that turn out to be big hits with The Every users, which seems to include Everyone.

 Eggers is not shy about stating his theme early in the novel: “the war on subjectivity.”  Everything is objectified to decision by calculation. (This includes the maximum number of allowable pages in a readable novel, which is 577—as it happens, the exact length of this book.) Ironically this also results in the disappearance of actual objects and authentic life, in favor of digital imagery and ideological judgments.  The result is a society caught in self-referential stasis, that punishes difference. 

 The novel does not fall easily into political categories. It exposes corporate conformism, but also its effect of cancel culture. The reasons (or excuses) given for much of the social pressure to conform are to save the environment and promote social justice.

 Delaney is a former forest ranger, so it may have seemed natural to her to organize an outing of The Every employees to visit Pacific Coast seals, but it was a disaster from start to finish, especially when they were confronted with the realities of these animals and their lives.  This incident is outrageously exaggerated and yet totally believable, and ultimately dystopic, especially given what these previous books tell us.

 It’s also funny, as is the novel generally, in a Dr. Strangelove sort of way. It has some characteristics of a satire of a monomanical corporate culture becoming a monoculture at large. Delaney’s best friend and fellow skeptic is the first to succumb to The Every’s embrace, supplying a horror movie vibe (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)  Delaney’s own fate involves a confrontation with the head of The Every, who was the naïve young woman protagonist of The Circle.

 There are many other related issues raised in the novel, in an entertaining narrative context that feels real right now.  The story is in development for a TV series, but right now this is a book that matters.

These four books matter because they give us crucial new information that creates a new context of how we see the world, our society and ourselves.  Right now there is no more important context that the relationship of humanity to the rest of life, and secondarily to the digital life humans are creating (for if we don't solve the survival problems associated with the first, the second won't much matter.)  They are robust enough to generate further discussion, and they cry out for action.