Conspiracy theory #2,012

February 19th, 2010

Why are all UFO photos blurry? Can’t anyone produce a clear, detailed photo of a goddamned intergalactic spacecraft?

Oh … right. Then you could read the embossed trademark on the hand-tossed PIE TIN.

Seriously, UFO photos were so much more common and exciting before digital auto-focus cameras came along. You could get away with a good alien invasion conspiracy using just a fuzzy UFO still or a jerky, grainy video.

But let’s not pile on the UFO fakers; we could all still be blown away one day by some amazing and irrefutable footage or evidence. And I’ll be the first to celebrate us not being alone in the Universe.

And what about all the other conspiracy theories, and the people who lap them up?

I was one of them.

Who really killed John F. Kennedy? Been there, done that. I read the books, magazine articles, watched Oliver Stone movies,  and attended lectures by authors such as Mark Lane, who made a cottage industry out of spinning new theories and co-conspirators (besides the CIA, Mafia, pro-Castro-ites, anti-Castro-ites, and Vice President LBJ).

Behind it all was disbelief that the charismatic leader behind one bright shining moment of Camelot could ever be snuffed out by a lone doofus such has Lee Harvey Oswald.

It didn’t stop there for me. When Reagan was president, I attended lectures by Colonel “Bo” Gritz, a former Green Beret commander, who revealed how the bullet that nearly killed Reagan was not fired by Hinckley, but from the pistol of one his own bodyguards discharging a plastic fleshette bullet while stuffing him into the limousine. He also explained how we were preparing nukes to blow a new canal through Nicaragua once we turned the Panama Canal back over to its sovereign owners. And there were plenty of ‘insider leaks’ about how Reagan’s people secretly made a deal with the Ayatollah to hold release of the Americans held hostage in Iran until after Jimmy Carter was defeated in his re-election bid and Reagan was sworn in as the 40th president. Well, okay, I’ll concede that one was probably true.

I listened to audiotapes from K.C. Depasse explaining how all the gold in Fort Knox had been sold away during the Nixon administration back in 1973, and the entire American financial system was now backed by … nothing (except, eventually, oil petrodollars).

I watched “Capricorn One” reveal how NASA faked the moon landing, and how we later discovered an alien race on Mars that had erected a massive Easter Island-like statue of a face.

You name it, I bought it.

And now? Now I’m in the Twelve-Step Program for former conspiracy nuts whose heads finally cleared after they retired the bong. That’s Step ONE in the program (unless your brain chemistry NATURALLY leans toward paranoid).

Step TWO is accepting the painfully common reality that the simplest, most banal answer is more often the truth.

What’s changed?

Dis-information is still out there by the gigabyte. Conspiracies DO exist. Just not most of the grand ones people spend all their fear-addled synapses obsessing about. And usually none that involve any more than a handful of powerful people.

Why do I accept this now?

All these accumulated years of studying and observing basic human nature serve my revised database. My college anthropology minor finally kicked in. Every person living long enough and experiencing life first hand, instead of just through media or the Internet, eventually goes through this process of evolution to accept these conclusions (except, of course, for the chronically paranoid, or those receiving alien messages). The longer you live, the more you become aware of the common traits, foibles, weaknesses, narcissism, greed, personal agendas and the basic fallibility of your human kindred under pressure, fear or temptation.

It’s also simple math. The more people involved in a conspiracy, the more likelihood someone- anyone, would spill the beans … for attention, for money, for spite, for glory, or just for fuck’s sake. Why do teenage computer hackers choose to screw up your PC with a remote Bot or virus? Because they can. (But then it could be Apple …)

Never mind the Mythbusters rational, point-by-point disproof of every conceivable theory or photographic ‘evidence’ about how the Apollo lunar landings were faked … Do you really think the hundreds of people who would have had to be involved could hold their tongue for more than 40 years before wagging it on 60 Minutes, Larry King or Oprah?

That’s far more unbelievable than any conspiracy theory I could concoct. And it’s also why they seldom survive close examination. Real people are involved. Some hard as stone. Some soft as snot. Some cuckoo as a clock.

Maybe the Knights Templar, or the Druids, or the Masons of past centuries, or even our stoic parents’ generation could hold their mustard, or keep a secret about the bloodline of Jesus, the hidden powers of levitation, or the metaphysics of our nation’s founding fathers beyond ten minutes, but not in today’s ADD environment. Not in this every-attention-whore-for-themself-24-hour-Internet-cable-television-text-twitter information orgy.

Welcome to the Blabfest.

As much as this orgy of information constantly breeds new conspiracies (such as our government’s  ‘controlled demolition’ of the Twin Towers), the same conspiracies are simultaneously being reputed by other information spit out with whatever degree of credibility you can either accept or ignore, depending upon your disposition to be genetically paranoid or swamped with feelings of powerlessness.

Sure, you can argue that power is in the hands of the far too few, and manipulated for their ongoing interests, or to sustain them in power, but THAT’S NOT A CONSPIRACY. That’s just basic reality.

A conspiracy theory, at least by my interpretation, has to be somewhat shocking or sensational to one’s normal sensibility or the common knowledge of facts by the public. There’s nothing shocking about five to seven banks owning and running the world and essentially giving world leaders their marching orders (and bail-out demands).

What would really shock me is if the need or urge for a conspiracy behind every upsetting event suddenly went out of style, died on the vine, and people stopped unquestionably buying every one that comes along.

But as long as people smoke weed, feed off paranoia, or watch Fox News, that’s just not going to happen.

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Ray Bradbury, I’m so sorry

January 25th, 2010

Dear Ray,

Okay, this is really embarrassing. You are the legendary science fiction author of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked this Way Comes, and hundreds of classic short stories such as The Illustrated Man, I Sing the Body Electric, The Fog Horn, The Veldt. I read them all as a kid. I watched them adapted into episodes of my favorite television shows, on The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Suspense. They were a key inspiration for me to write short stories in my youth and to pursue a career as a writer.

Your brand of science fiction was different than many of the technological or hardware-oriented genre writers of the day. Your stories were humanistic. You were less concerned with some new gadget or where a planet was located in the galaxy, and more interested in what effect that invention or discovery had on humans and their relations to one another. It was science fiction with soul. And it moved and inspired me. You were an idol.

And I diss-ed you to your face.

Oh, it wasn’t deliberate, or premeditated, or by any means intentional. I didn’t even realize it was supremely disrespectful at the time, heck, I was in my twenties, but I do now. And that’s why I’m writing this note to say I’m sorry.

Cut to 1983 and I’ve already had a little success as a screenwriter in Hollywood. I wrote a couple comedy feature scripts for National Lampoon that were going to be produced by Universal Pictures, but never quite made it to the screen. You first tried your hand at screenwriting as early as 1956, when you were hired to adapt Moby Dick for the screen, starring Gregory Peck. I was following the same path.

I had a meeting with an independent producer to possibly adapt a science fiction novel called Space Vampires by Colin Wilson for a feature. These weren’t your usual bloodsucking vampires, but vampires from another planet that sucked the very life force or energy out of your body until you were a withered piece of crust. I liked the story and the inherent metaphor of ‘energy vampires’ who drain you (we all know one or two), and was very excited about working with the director, Tobe Hooper, who shocked audiences with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

But Cannon Films, which was going to oversee, market and produce the picture had another project they wanted me to interview for instead that they were also excited about. This was going to be a 3-D extravaganza called Escape From Beyond about a bounty hunter in space. There were already a director and producer attached who just had success with their previous ‘revolutionary’ new 3-D picture, Comin’ At Ya! This would be their big science fiction follow up, and they were interviewing well-known veteran science fiction writers for the gig and some up-and-coming hot screenwriters. I was one of the up-and-coming hot screenwriters who interviewed for the gig. And you were one of the veteran science fiction writers.

But I got the job.

Now, of course, I understand the decision made was not entirely based on merit, or just because I might have a younger or hipper approach to the material. The deal with me was undoubtedly finalized because the budget of the film had been targeted at about $2 million total, and my negotiated fee was about $17,000 and your agent was probably asking somewhere around $100,000 minimum. Your fee was definitely a factor, if not the factor.

I didn’t know that you were up for the same film until after my deal was in place. They didn’t even want to pay me as much as they did, but I was already a Writer’s Guild member and my agent and I insisted as part of the deal that they become signators of the Writer’s Guild (make a formal agreement to abide by union rules and minimums for professional screenwriters) and pay me the union minimum for a writer on a feature motion picture. I had some clout as the hot newcomer. I was always very proud of the fact a company that had previously underpaid and probably abused screenwriters for scores of projects finally went legit with my deal. Of course, $17,000 is still a LOT less than $100,000, but that didn’t make me any less proud. I had successfully ‘scored’ a screenwriting gig over a childhood hero.

Now, if it makes you feel any better about losing this particular gig, you will be pleased to note I was seriously abused for this victory. The fact they became WGA signators and had to abide by union fees, didn’t mean they couldn’t take their pound of flesh out of me in other ways. I eventually wrote about seven full drafts of the screenplay, working with an Italian director who spoke little English, and a temperamental actor-producer. The film went from a space bounty hunter picture to a medieval Spain chariot picture to-, well, at one meeting with the president of the film company, he said to me in the most serious and dramatic Israeli dialect and tone possible, “Vee got Charles Bronson.” Yes, could I somehow turn this original science fiction epic into … Death Wish IV?

Escape From Beyond poster in Reporter

The Charlie Bronson part of the deal never came through. His fee would have chewed up about $1.5 million of the $2 million budget (minus the $17,000). And by the time they had hired the chariot stunt crews and started building the sets in Mexico to film the medieval Spain version, the budget started to look more like $10 million and they pulled the project as being too costly. But not before they had pre-sold the film at the Cannes Film Festival using posters and art with my name as screenwriter, along with two other ‘producers’ who had nothing to do with the script. More abuse.

The money they didn’t have to spend on Escape From Beyond probably went to the budget overages for Space Vampires, which had gone before the camera earlier. This film was eventually released as Lifeforce; a film most horny science fiction fans will remember as the movie starring this unbelievably voluptuous naked chick walking around sucking the life energy out of every man within kissing distance. (She was Israeli, didn’t speak a lick of English, and was the company president’s girlfriend at the time, I’m told).

This brings me to the moment where I unfortunately diss-ed you.

You were making an appearance at a local science fiction bookstore, A Change of Hobbit, to sign copies of your books along with another of my writer heroes, horror scribe Robert Bloch (Psycho).

I waited patiently in line with paperback copies of your Golden Apples of the Sun and Bloch’s Stuff that Screams Are Made Of. And when I got to the front, I shook your hand, effusively talked about how you had been my childhood inspiration; how I was now successfully making it as a writer in Hollywood; and how I had even got a job you were up for.

You betrayed no distress at my hideous lapse of manners, and graciously signed the book, but the conversation quickly and awkwardly ended. I grinned excitedly at finally meeting you, and under these unique circumstances, and walked away on air.

And later felt like a total douche bag.

My only excuse is that, I was just so excited about finally getting somewhere trying to walk your very same path, I didn’t realize when I was stepping on your toes (or heels). It was the move of an ego-pumped amateur. An upstart. And I’m sorry.

Karma caught up with me on the nightmare that was the rest of that project, and I have no doubt that neither you nor your agent would have put up with the blood I was made to spill on those seven different drafts (when the WGA supposedly only allows one revision per fee).

And I never made it much further up the path you blazed in terms of fame, fortune, or movies produced or adapted from your own stories or novels.

But for that brief moment, I felt like I could look a childhood hero in the eye from the same height and share the rarified air up there.

Thanks for not calling me a punk, and kicking my ass off that cloud.

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My Top 10 for the First 25

January 7th, 2010

Columnist Michael Ventura, who writes the excellent Letters at 3AM column for The Austin Chronicle (and used to write for the L.A. Weekly), suggested this ‘exercise in know thyself’ for the New Year:  “List the Top 10 cultural artifacts that shaped you most. Be honest and unembarrassed. That’s the dare.”

Here’s mine for the first 25 years of my life:

10) MAD MAGAZINE “The usual gang of idiots” introduced me to the wonderful world of parody at an impressionable age (9-14), and showed me how to laugh out loud at the absurdities of the world and the way people behave. This was the earliest influence on my satirical brand of humor, and I have done my part to ‘pay it forward’ ever since, with no sacred cow un-tipped.

9) PERU Okay, not technically a cultural ‘artifact,’ but definitely a cultural experience that changed my life. At 17, I left a very coddled home life to spend several months as a foreign exchange student in Peru living with a family that spoke no English and lived in conditions Americans (but not Peruvians) would call poor.  Not only did it open my eyes to the wide world out there, and how other people live, but it proved to me that I could live away from home, adapt, survive and seek adventure (I spent two weeks hitchhiking through the Andes with my Peruvian mother just to go 500 miles from Lima to Cuzco and Machu Picchu). When I got back, I knew I would leave my hometown and ultimately seek my fortunes and adventures … out there.

8. STANLEY KUBRICK’S “A CLOCKWORK ORANGE” I saw this (also at 17) just before going to college at the University of Miami and it cemented my direction toward a career in film. As cinema art, this film was the perfect combination of bold story, stunning cinematography and awesome music.  The fact that it was about a 15 year-old gang member who terrorized future London with acts of rape, murder and ‘ultra-violence’ shocked audiences so much that it was banned in England for 20 years, and I remember people angrily storming out of the theatre at my first viewing. But that only inspired me more to believe in the power of film to go beyond mere entertainment and provoke a visceral response, even if it was disturbing. Now, if I had only had the good sense at the time to realize it was an extremely poor choice for a ‘date’ movie, I might have gotten luckier earlier.

7) TRAMPAS ON ‘THE VIRGINIAN’ Trampas, as played by Doug McClure on the mid-Sixties television series The Virginian, became one of my earliest role models. He was a hard-working cowhand on the Medicine Bow ranch in Wyoming in the late 1800s, but as hard as he worked, he played even harder. His joy for life was infectious, and the fact that he maintained an innocent spirit in the face of every obstacle or adversary was somehow even more appealing. I wanted to BE Trampas. Imagine my thrill when a mutual friend introduced me to Doug McClure (and his fifth wife) 18 years later at his Beverly Hills Four Seasons suite and I discovered … he WAS Trampas. We hung out and he wanted to party non-stop, and he had the attention span of a kid desperately seeking the next distraction. It was exhilarating at time, but at a burn-out pace, like a ride best enjoyed in short bursts – but that was how he was 24/7, and no doubt what contributed to his early death. So, in life, the experience that was Doug McClure totally matched Trampas. But it also taught me the potential costs of just living to do as you please from moment to moment without ever thinking about ‘the big picture.’

6) MARVEL COMICS ‘SILVER AGE’ These were the great titles from the Sixties, where Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, the Avengers, and Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos were first introduced and became the heroes of my childhood reading. These superheroes differed from their DC counterparts like Superman or Batman because Marvel heroes had hang-ups and were emotionally vulnerable to their situations. They were more like the angst-ridden teenagers we were all becoming. My mom would stop at the local Drug Fair every week on my way to get an allergy shot so I could pick up the latest issues at 12 cents each. I collected almost every title from number 1 to number 50. This was before collecting comics in preservative bags went mainstream and rendered comic collections ever since not worth much (because they just aren’t as rare). I had X-Men No. 1, which eventually reached auction prices up to a staggering $18,000. I sometimes wonder what my entire Marvel collection would have been worth today and where I could have retired comfortably to for having sold them now. But I sold the entire collection for about $400 during my freshman year in college to buy an awesome pair of speakers … which I still listen to today. So, at least in some way, though I’ve grown past my comics age, they are still entertaining me.

5) PLAYBOY MAGAZINE At the same time comics began losing some of their steam, my libido was quickly swelling with it.  I can still remember buying my first Playboy at the Aspen Hill 7/11 at age 15. To accomplish this extremely intimidating feat at the time for an underage kid, I also purchased a comic book for me … and a “To Dad” birthday card. It was a brilliant strategy. And Playboy offered the ultimate male fantasy of life that every James Bond-loving teenager could imagine; filled with high tech gadgets, sexy cars and naked women. And since this was before video, you had the advantage of never having to listen to these bimbos actually speak to ruin the fantasy. The very first writing job I was ever paid for in Los Angeles was creating potential cable television specials for Playboy Enterprises. What a fantastic gig! I even ran out and bought a great silk bathrobe just like Hef would wear. But then I found out I was not to be invited to the Playboy Mansion because the 50 year-old has-been actors who hung out there didn’t want any competition for the 22 year-old playmates from guys the same age as the girls who could relate better and keep their ‘attention’ up longer. Now that I’m in my 50’s, the invention of Viagra doesn’t make that predatory scenario any more appealing or less creepy. But Playboy and I were both born the same year, and it still holds a nostalgic value for what I yearned for as a horny young kid, and what I’ve evolved to be as a horny old man. But if Playboy ever wants to get its former readers back, it should stop featuring playmates shaved bare, which makes anyone lusting after them feel like a pedophile.

4) EDGAR ALLAN POE Long before there was Playboy (around age 7), there was the melancholy of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories and poems. Maybe it was the women of Playboy that later cured this melancholy. But I believe every young kid is either born with, or experiences a period or tinge of melancholy. Perhaps when we first discover that people – and people we know or love (such as ourselves) can actually die. Or maybe it’s just genetic. But Poe speaks to that dread in all of us in a language dripping with melancholy in all of its manifestations – and perhaps helping us to purge some of it at the same time. I can’t say I was obsessed with Poe as a young reader, but I read everything he wrote many times, and I knew that he died and was buried in the very city (Baltimore) that I was born. So I rode that tenuous connection through a lonely period of my youth where everything unspeakable and unfathomable to what my normal Leave it to Beaver home life was really like, spoke to me from the other side.

3) “ROCKET MAN” BY ELTON JOHN/BERNIE TAUPIN If there is a song that best describes that melancholy born of the ultimate aloneness we all … share, it has to be Rocket Man; which, to me, in 1972, was an instant revelation of what a fantastical mood, melody and lyric could produce. What budding creative artist would not feel an affinity to the metaphorical lyric of being a space explorer as your regular gig, nine to five? Of sometimes feeling like you’re ‘burning out my fuse up here alone?’ I heard Elton sing that one phrase over and over again as he improvised his way through a stunning, extended version of the song live at the L.A. Amphitheatre in 1979, and the autobiographical depth of the song hit like a ton of bricks. Elton may be gayer than Richard Simmons with a pink curling iron at a hair salon, but never forget that hetero cowboy Bernie Taupin writes the lyrics. Elton is merely the melody, and he always does melancholy better than anyone (just start with Candle in the Wind, Funeral for Friend, Daniel, and Sacrifice for beginners). Taupin articulates the mood by writing the lyrics first, and Elton later interprets it to a melody. My mom’s generation had Rodgers and Hammerstein for this perfect synergy of talents. We have Reg Dwight and Bernie Taupin.

2) THE OUTER LIMITS While we’re on the subject of melancholy and outer space, how about the most original and never equaled version of gothic horror science fiction to ever air on television? This show has influenced more creators in the field of science fiction media than anyone (except perhaps number 1 below). James Cameron copped the episode “Soldier” to create The Terminator. Alan Moore’s Watchmen stole the whole premise from”The Architects of Fear” (but at least acknowledged it). This show terrified me for the two meager seasons it aired from 1962-63 (and my son 47 years later), and I adored every minute. So much so that I later wrote the writer Joseph Stefano to thank him for his fantastic work and influence, and I even called the composer Dominic Frontiere in his Beverly Hills home from my college apartment in Miami to rave to him about his beautiful, haunting themes. Skip the revived version of the show that could never capture the perfect B&W film noir of the original, which added to the mood. But remember the ‘control voice,’ which reminded us over and over that our very next experience would be beyond our control. Shit, was he ever right.

1) ROD SERLING AND “THE TWILIGHT ZONE” Okay, so I watched a lot of television as a kid, and still do. But here was the single greatest inspiration for me to pursue a career in writing for television or film. Rod Serling wrote about soulful, important, moral issues with an unbridled imagination that often disguised their target or impact but, ultimately, never their human message. These 156 timeless episodes of The Twilight Zone are nothing more than the Aesop’s Fables for our generation; the moral nuggets covered with a chocolate mystery surprise that delight our taste buds, but also nourish our souls. Who else in 1962, before the Civil Rights Act was ever passed, could get away with a story on national television where a black man unjustly convicted is to be hung at dawn … and the sun never comes up? Or my favorite episode, Walking Distance, where a super-stressed man from now somehow takes a train ride back through time to the idyllic town of his youth, confronts the trouble-free kid version of himself, tries desperately to reconnect to him on a carousel and stumbles, is warned by his own father back then that there’s “only one summer to a customer,” and returns to the present newly crippled from the experience. Nostalgia CAN cripple our ability to live in the now and to look forward in our lives no matter how hard we want to avoid the stresses we face every day. But every once and a while, like this list or yours, we just need to go there.

Later … Top 10 for the Next 25 (the grown up years)

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Merry Christmas!

December 25th, 2009

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Who doesn’t want a smart President?

December 22nd, 2009

Republicans, apparently.*

I swore I would stick to cultural topics and not discuss anything political in this blog, but since I can’t offend anyone who isn’t reading, and this topic stuck in my head like a brain barnacle, here goes …

Exhibit A: The last four Republican presidents … Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, George W. Bush:  None of them with an IQ higher than their body temperature.  Gerald Ford could trip over his own thought balloon. Ronald Reagan never had a thought that wasn’t scripted by someone else (or he didn’t mistake from a movie). George W., well, we need not even go there, but suffice it to say that he was Pinky, and Dick Cheney or Karl Rove were “The Brain.” And George H. Bush? Well, this is what the last smart GOP president had to say about him on his oval office tape recordings when Bush Sr. was ambassador of the U.N.  … “Loyal, but no brains.” And remember … he is considered the SMART one of those four.

The fact that Richard Nixon was the last smart Republican says everything. He was deeply paranoid to the point of creating a foaming-at-the-mouth enemies list, and then surreptitiously ordering a break-in to the files of the Democratic National Headquarters, which eventually got him impeached. Even Republicans never trusted him and haven’t been the same ever since.

 

Exhibit B: The last three Democratic presidents … Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. All of them with measured IQ’s above the genius level (150). Jimmy Carter was a nuclear physicist, for crying out loud (and a preacher). Bill Clinton had a 180 IQ and could eloquently and informatively talk about every topic on the planet from stem cell research to Keynesian economics. And Barack, well, come on, he’s a black man named Hussein who convinced a good majority (10 million more than his opponent) Americans to vote for him. Just overcoming the ‘black’ part required a communication and intelligence skill set that would set back most Harvard graduates.

So this isn’t a discussion of the actual merits or policies of the candidate, but just the fact that Republicans or conservatives have no problem voting for someone they’d like to have a beer with, but not someone who they perceive is smarter than they are. I don’t get this. Why wouldn’t we want the smartest man possible for the job? Why wouldn’t we want someone as president who makes our entire country look smart to the rest of the world? 

This leads me to inevitably conclude that what makes someone either conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, ultimately has nothing to do with politics, but is more about how people are hard-wired either emotionally or genetically.

For example, you will rarely find a writer in the arts (or should I say a good writer; Tom Clancy doesn’t count) alive who is a Republican. There’s a very simple explanation for this. Anyone hard-wired for empathy, who by their very emotional skill set and craft has the ability to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and walk a mile to either create or fill that character … is just not going to think like Republican.

George Carlin articulated it best when he said the Republicans are all about property rights (or as I like to characterize it … “I got mine, screw everybody else”), and Democrats are all about human rights (or, “Even when I GET mine, I’m not going to feel as good about it unless someone else has a chance at it.”)

So if you’re genetically hard wired against empathy, chances are you are a Republican. (Sorry, Jesus, you don’t qualify).

I would also suggest a couple other genetic traits that might put you in that camp are fear of change (hello, reactionaries), and paranoia about those things or people you don’t understand. Government is just some monstrous entity that’s going to come and take away your guns. Gays are going to convert your children into homosexuals and devalue your marriage (but Tiger Woods won’t). Hispanics are going to ruin the value of your neighborhood and force you to speak Spanish to order a cheeseburger. Anything a Republican, reactionary, conservative is not overly familiar with, somehow poses a threat. It doesn’t make them curious – no, never any genuine outside interest or curiosity; just a threat. This wouldn’t be the case if the knee-jerk reaction to anything they don’t understand was to pause for a reflective moment trying to understand, instead of just being angry or afraid (again, the empathy vacuum).

Conservatives like to say that a liberal is a conservative who’s never been mugged. This just proves my theory about being hard-wired for paranoia. They’re always basing their mindset on a negative event in the future. But a liberal always thinks deeper than that, to what actually helped create the mindset for the mugger in the first place (walk in their shoes, remember?).  Somehow, they didn’t get theirs, and now they want YOURS. A liberal doesn’t put the mugger into a ‘ME versus THEM’ category, but at some level understands that … “There, but for the Grace of God, (and some really nasty crystal meth), go I.” There are more forces creating this scenario than just … he’s a bad man who wants my stuff. I mean, c’mon, it’s ONLY stuff.

What person in their right mind wouldn’t want to know for sure that, if they or one of their loved ones suffer a catastrophic illness, they wouldn’t be financially ruined? We are the only civilized nation in the world where you can go bankrupt simply by the cost of your health, or lack of it. That’s insane. Worse; it’s morally bankrupt. Anyone with empathy, again, has no problem understanding this.  Republicans say, “I got my insurance, what’s the problem?” Again, without projecting out of their own experience to sympathize with others, how could they understand? Because, if you’ve EVER spent a long portion of your life, perhaps as a free lance artist or just an unemployed, walking on a tinderbox being uninsured, you WOULD understand…completely.

Smart, empathetic leaders do. That’s why most of us voted for one this time.

The Jesus who preached at the Sermon on the Mount was definitely hard-wired for empathy. In fact, the only people he couldn’t empathize with or tolerate were, well, greedy bastards who said, ‘I got mine, screw everybody else.’

So, let’s review. If you’re hard wired to be paranoid of things you don’t understand, then of course you’re going to feel threatened by a leader who is smarter than you because … well, they’re obviously going to try and trick you out of your money or your stuff.

And it’s your stuff, goddamit, screw everybody else.

 

*(Republican here being defined as any conservative who voted for George W. Bush twice, or who thinks Fox News is real news)

 

***

This one’s for my dad … the smartest man I ever knew, a WWII veteran, and a true Democrat who would have gotten a smile out of this.               (April 22, 1921-December 22, 2001)

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Record reviews: Second place winners

December 3rd, 2009

Susan Boyle and Adam Lambert have nothing in common other than the fact they both came in second place in national talent contests and they both vaguely resemble a female.

Here’s something else they now have in common: they both released albums on the same day and, though worlds apart in mood (but not theatricality), they both demand a good listen and deliver.

Susan Boyle is the 47 year-old Englishwoman who stunned audiences (and Simon Cowell) on Britain’s Got Talent when she opened her mouth and sang beautifully. The audience was stunned because they have been trained by a discriminating and shallow MTV culture to only expect beautiful people to be allowed on their TV screens and or in their faces.

The song she sang was “I Dreamed a Dream” from the play Les Miserables, and though on the surface you might assume it to be some harmless uplifting pap, listen closer and you’ll discover a much darker song about how that ‘dream’ was shattered by “this hell I’m living;” which, in the eerie coincidence of her life imitating art, occurred when Boyle was stunned herself to only get the runner-up award and promptly had a nervous breakdown.

So, in an ironic touch, that song is also the name of her debut album … which sold 410,000 copies in Britain alone the first week. So, maybe there is karma in the world. Or a hell of a lot of people who are sick of mediocre-talented former cheerleaders (Paula) or Mousekteers (Britney) getting recording contracts based on how they look instead of how they sing.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote a great song when they composed and recorded the original “Wild Horses” some 40 years ago. But the true test of a classic song is how it can be twisted and re-interpreted, and Boyle’s producer, Steve Mac, delivers a haunting and original arrangement here. Even Mick was blown away.

Boyle probably had some songs she has sung her whole life that she wanted to include, so you get the spirituals, “How Great Thou Art,” “Amazing Grace,” and the Christmas Carol, “Silent Night.” But, somehow it all works with the ethereal mood of the album.

The producer also brings slow, haunting, and original arrangements to such sixties chestnuts as “Daydream Believer,” and “The End of the World.” I think Madonna’s flamenco-edged version of “You’ll See” fared better than the one here, even though Boyle has an infinitely better voice. You also can’t top Patty Griffin for interpreting her own songs, so “Up to the Mountain” doesn’t quite reach the summit on Boyle’s version.

Still, overall, this is a really satisfying album of creatively arranged and tastefully produced covers sung by a voice that can provide the necessary goose bumps.

Adam Lambert’s debut album “For Your Entertainment,” on the other end of the spectrum, is designed to give you a hard-on. The solid, pumping, dance floor action never stops (well, for at least 11 out of 14 tracks). It also plays like a history of all the gay-influenced dance music of that last quarter century (which was always a positive thing for dance music), from Freddie Mercury in Queen, to David Bowie, to Animotion, to Abba, to Jimmy Sommerville, Erasure, and the Scissor Sisters. You don’t have to be gay to spot the influences or enjoy the outcome.

Everything is way way over the top, but it gets your blood going, your feet moving, and  it has more hooks than a cold storage meat warehouse.

“Soaked” offers this great Mid-eastern flourish up front, before dropping into a very eerie almost a capella vocal that Freddie Mercury would have shaved his moustache for. 

The most obvious hit track is “Whataya Want from Me,” which pretty much sums up the whole attitude of expectations foisted upon Lambert after his American Idol notoriety. Getting simulated blown by a male dancer on the American Music Awards was apparently not the response most prime time viewers were looking for as an answer to that question.

I don’t follow all the contemporary writers and producers who jumped on board to showcase ‘Glambert’ on this album, but I appreciate the sheer energy and enthusiasm (and hooks) they brought to the project.  I haven’t done the disco scene in many years, but this disco-rock-infused extravaganza will keep the clubs pumping for weeks to come.  And isn’t that what was really really wanted from him?

Someday, maybe when he gets all his ya yas out, and his shock rebel streak out, we’ll get that beautiful vocal album that his fantastic cover of “Mad World” hinted at. But you’ll find nothing remotely subtle here. Either get into it, or get over it.

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I think it’s gonna be a long long time

October 28th, 2009

I live less than 50 miles from Cape Canaveral, formerly Cape Kennedy, and formerly Cape Canaveral before that.  Talk about an identity crisis.

And now it’s going through another one: What’s the mission?

This week there’s a scheduled launch of an unmanned Ares rocket, which could replace the Shuttle, now on its last scheduled flights in … well, forever. NASA has submitted several mission proposals and budgets to the government, but the government’s got its own budget problems. How can we send a spaceship to Mars when we can’t get our own Earthship in order? Why should we go back to the moon when we’ve already been there? And are we content to just send astronauts up like janitors to regularly empty the Porta Potty on the Space Station?

I find these choices and questions somewhat sad.

Fifty years ago, in 1960, I was playing with my Cape Canaveral toy set as an excitable young boy growing up in Maryland and dreaming about our great big space adventures to come. Our rival superpower, the Russians, had beaten us to space with Sputnick, and now President Kennedy was promising we would beat them to the moon within 10 years.

And, by golly, we did. In the most amazing run of technological breakthroughs, NASA team dedication, personal sacrifice, and fast track government and popular support this world has ever witnessed, we went from stranded on Earth in 1960, to stepping on the moon in 1969.

But we dreamed much bigger than that.

Our favorite prime time television cartoon at the time was The Jetsons, where a family like ours lived in a penthouse perched in the sky and traveled around in their own personal flying saucers. They also had a cool robot pet dog that fetched the newspaper. (Paper newspapers? In the future? Now that’s science fiction).

Our favorite books were science fiction treats like The Martian Chronicles and R is for Rocket by Ray Bradbury, who wrote of international space travel, aliens and other worlds as if they were already here, and a natural part of our daily life experience.

We went to the movies and watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, which evo-leaped us in the single tossing of a bone from raging primates to commercial passengers on celestial spaceships waltzing through the galaxy to “The Blue Danube.”

David Bowie sang about Ground Control to Major Tom in Space Oddity, and Elton John picked up on Ray Bradbury’s working stiff astronaut theme by singing as a Rocket Man, who punched a clock and did his job five days a week, but also had time to ponder why he was, “burning out my fuse up here alone.”

Star Trek, Space 1999, and Star Wars delivered us warp speed to a time where we had so distantly moved on to exploring (and fighting with) other worlds that living on Earth wasn’t even an afterthought anymore.

And beyond going to the moon … none of these things happened.

And none of them likely ever will. At least the way we’re headed now.

It was all just a fever dream fueled by huge leaps in rocket technology, hope, and great expectations.

My childhood imagination soared on those expectations.

And now, as an adult, I don’t even want us to spend one more dime to go anywhere else in the universe. I just want us to get Earth … right. I don’t want us to burn one more drop of ultra high octane rocket fuel further depleting the ozone layer and exposing the Earth to deadlier levels of radiation. I don’t want us to send one more man or woman into space unless it’s for some reason to really help us back here on Planet Earth, today. It’s not enough to live on the fantasy of what travel through the universe can deliver us anymore. We’ve got to deliver here, first.

This isn’t some tree-hugging idealist writing.

This is … merely a realist.

A realist who doesn’t think we need to completely abandon our dream of space, but just abandon the last century’s model and method of how we get there.

The next leap in evolution could be some matter-anti-matter dylithium crystal device breakthrough that beams us throughout the universe without burning fossil fuel or using any more precious resources, but it won’t be constructed from any blueprints left behind from the existing technology paradigm. It will be another great leap of imagination that re-invents the way we meet the stars.

You see, I’m still hopeful that we will explore the space beyond, and maybe even live there one day. But the realist in me now understands we must the find the way way out by better exploring the space within.  That’s where we’ll find even greater answers to the questions of what’s out there. That’s where the bigger mysteries wait to spark our inspiration and be revealed. And that’s where the next phase of space exploration can begin.

Maybe Cape Canaveral will still be the harbor for this new evolution and rename itself Cape Higher-Consciousness.

I can’t wait for that play set.

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When did we become so mean?

October 22nd, 2009

Go to any of your favorite websites and read the posts or comments to the original blog or article. Try not to get distracted by the illiteracy and just focus on the mood or the message:

“He’s like this weird combination of gay and white-acting black. It’s really unappealing.”

This one’s from Kitalyn posting on Defamer.com to a story about Justin Timberlake on Oprah.

“If only it was to death.”

That’s how Texas Tranny reacts to the Superficial.com headline, “Britney is starving herself.”

“good riddance, ya die hard commie.”

That love note from a sensitive poster known as government is killin, posted in response to this obviously provocative headline on Politico.com: “Walter Cronkite dead at 92”

And these are the polite ones.

When did almost everyone in this country develop a vicious, foul-tempered opinion about every other person or event, and feel self-importantly compelled to express it publicly? Is it just the veil of anonymity on the web that allows these putrid and toxic blossoms to flourish? Or have Americans really become that hateful and, well, mean?

In more than 30 years of passively monitoring the culture, I can’t remember a time when anyone and everyone seemed so impassive about contributing their own bile to the topic, or “target” of the day. Gossip or political websites that spew poisonous diatribe and serve as a platform for hundreds or thousands more to do the same are sprouting up faster than fungi on feces.

I’m no Mr. Manners – I’ve been on the cynical bandwagon before the theme song ever started playing, but there used to be some restraint and, dare I say … art to putting someone else down.  Now it’s just pit bulls fueled on Red Bull in an open field with fresh meat tossed out hourly.

I wish I could explain what happened or why, and offer some way out of this dark and ugly mess. But then no one can figure out how to get out of Afghanistan, either.  Some shit holes (and assholes) defy any meaningful comprehension.

Perhaps it’s enough, or at least a start, to just notice that it’s happening. To take a closer look, even in the mirror, and admit we’ve slid down into a slimy pit. We can continue to read and watch and surf the things that interest us, but must we contribute to the negative, bitchy meanness of it all? Does the simple right and access to post a comment mean we have to crawl onboard? It’s so easy to toss something cruel, cutting or vile out there when you’re hiding behind some anonymous user name in an online forum. Imagine if you were standing up, fully revealed, in a well-lit room full of living, breathing, sensitive human beings …

… like a town hall meeting on health care.

Would you really still make those same comments?

Oh. Shit. It’s much worse than I thought.

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That old black (& white) magic

October 7th, 2009

Whenever I hear someone say they can’t watch a black & white movie or television show, I cringe … with pity. No student, lover or fan of cinema ignores the 50 plus years of artistry and lighting evolution that went into perfecting the black & white image on film … before color became the common palette.  And all that brilliant contrast of light and dark went the way of that gold dust blowing away into the wind at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Citizen Kane.  The Third Man.  The Maltese Falcon.  Casablanca. Strangers On a Train. Night of the Hunter. I’m sure you have favorites. And it wasn’t the lack of technology that made these classics black & white.  Color was around long before Dorothy landed on the Yellow Brick Road in 1939. In these and many other films, it was often the artistic choice of the director or cinematographer.

Many directors more recently have tried to recapture that look. Peter Bogdonavich with The Last Picture Show in 1971. Robert Rodriguez with Sin City in 2007. And even Hitchcock revisited it as late as 1960 with Psycho.  The very translation of the classic style of Film Noir is Film “Black.” Black as night. Full of inky black and veiled gray shadows, in alleys and across faces. There’s just nothing quite like it in color.

Especially for horror.

I wondered if my young son would ever watch black & white, let alone come to appreciate the gothic style horror lighting so perfected in black & white long before his time and even long before mine.

A few years ago, when my son was seven years old, he collected Yu-Gi-Oh bubble gum cards that included ‘monster’ cards. They reminded me of cards I collected as a kid from a science fiction horror TV anthology series in the early 1960’s called The Outer Limits. Each week a disembodied ‘control voice’ took over your television set and introduced a gothic-style horror or science fiction story with new characters, and featuring at least one new monster.

Because this was 1963 and most television sets could only play black & white, the show was filmed and broadcast in black & white. But this was the ‘perfected’ black & white shot by a master cinematographer (Conrad Hall), who would later go on to win Academy Awards. I was only about eight years old when the show first aired and I remember that it scared me out of my wits. I went to bed every Friday night with nightmares, and yet I couldn’t wait until the next Friday to have some new ones. Perhaps this was the beginning of an adrenaline addiction. I just know I wanted to be scared silly, and The Outer Limits never failed to do the job.

So I retrieved the treasured deck of monster cards I had collected back in 1963 to show my son. Each card featured a hideous creature from one of the episodes. There was the bug-eyed alien with the razor sharp boomerang from “Fun and Games;” the shimmering, negative image radioactive man from “The Galaxy Being;” and the one that gave me the worst nightmares of all … the over-sized crawling ants with human-like faces known as “The Zanti Misfits.” In this episode, these insect monsters crawled out of their spacecraft atop a military post headquarters in a deserted Western town named “Morgue” and attacked everyone in sight. I couldn’t sleep for weeks.

I went straight to my DVD box collection of the original series and put the episode on to show “The Zanti Misfits” in action. My son took one look at the rather primitive animation of the ants crawling out of their cheap, tin-looking aircraft and immediately scoffed in ridicule, “That’s not scary.”

I was crushed. What could be more terrifying than loudly buzzing, over-sized ants with human-like faces crawling up your leg and biting you with poisonous teeth?

I cued up another episode called, “The Mice,” that featured what appeared to be a man on two legs covered from head to waist with a huge blob of snot-like gelatinous material with two protruding, claw-like hands. It was obviously a man in a costume fitted with a huge glob of fake jelly slapped on top.

He watched this ‘Jelly Man’ picking up lake scum with its claws and stuffing it in what appeared to be a slit-like mouth. He watched the Jelly Man running through a forest back to a laboratory. He watched the Jelly Man use its claws to attack and kill one of the workers in the laboratory where the creature had first been transported to Earth. And he watched as they eventually captured and sent it back to the planet it came from in the same transporter. And that was it. No major reactions from my son. But somehow he couldn’t take his eyes off of the Jelly Man until he had seen its final moment on screen.

That same night he insisted his mom come and lay down with him in his bed when he prepared to go to sleep. He told her to leave the closet light on. And when he finally and fitfully fell to sleep, his mother came out to the living room with a sour look that and scolded me for scaring him with the ‘Jelly Man.’ She went to bed mad as hell. And, as soon as the bedroom door slammed closed, I found myself grinning from ear to ear.

An old black & white TV show that had scared me as a kid more than 40 years ago could still scare a kid today.

It may have been the ‘Jelly Man’ and not the human-faced crawling ants with poisonous teeth, but it still counted. That old black & white mojo still worked.

I shouldn’t be proud about scaring my son with this stuff, but when he so easily scoffed at one of my most powerful childhood fears with, “That’s not scary,” well, I couldn’t help but feel glibly vindicated. And so I grinned.

And a week later he was still insisting on sleeping with the lights on in the closet and secretly talking about the ‘Jelly Man’ to his mom (but never admitting his fear to dad, of course).  I apologize to him to this day. I’m deeply sorry.

But wait until he sees the episode with the space rocks that come alive and cover your face with smothering black goo.

Posted in Movies, TV | No Comments »

A Facebook intervention

September 25th, 2009

According to a poll by CNN.com, some 53% of us have a Facebook page. This doesn’t shock me, because anyone who has the time or inclination to go online, read CNN, and respond to an online poll, probably has three or four hours to kill customizing and managing their own Facebook page.

And there’s the rub. Facebook is like a pleasant distraction that soon becomes a relentless addiction for those who, like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, started off as earnest human beings living normal interactive lives with other normal human beings, but ultimately become slave drones in a nether world to an insatiable cannibal of their time, attention, energy and souls.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But if you didn’t have a great time with the cliques, popularity contests, achievement anxieties, competition, appearance comparisons, gossip, embarrassing surprises, and judgmental attitudes of high school, chances are you aren’t going to enjoy those attitudes or occurrences any better in this new, improved online yearbook version of your best or worst year at high school.

And God forbid you have anything less than 50 friends.

Facebook is like some diabolical global online game of Sardines in a Can, where you’re a nobody or an outsider in this universe until someone says ‘Pssst’ and you find where everyone is hiding, and then you are compelled to go and hide in plain sight with them.

And if you choose not to spend your time there, in that place where all these formerly familiar faces are huddling and conspiring, you will be made to feel that slightly uneasy feeling so prevalent and unpleasant back in those same high school years known as … peer pressure.

Worse than that, if you try to ignore it, they’ll ‘chat’ about you anyway through private instant messages filtered with the same degree of cliquish exclusion and airs of superiority.

Of course, if you actually enjoyed high school, this all comes as manna from heaven.

But for the rest of us, and provided as a public service, here are the …

Top Ten Excuses to Not Join Facebook

10. You stopped doing peer pressure in high school.

9. You prefer old or distant friends remember you as you were, not as you are (and vice versa).

8. You are in the witness protection program.

7. You didn’t USE protection many years ago and don’t want to suddenly find out you have a teenager looking you up. Or a biological half-sister from the mother who previously gave you up for adoption.

6. In basketball lingo, ‘Face!’ is an insult challenge meaning, “top this, motherf—–r” (so maybe it IS actually the same thing when you’re keeping score by posting 500 refrigerator photos of your friends, family, kids and grandchildren).

5. You already spend far too much time on a computer at YOUR FULL TIME JOB.

4. Your future career or stature could suffer greatly from the photos of you drunk and half naked in Cabo with a penguin wearing a strap-on tattooed on your ass.

3. The last time you tried to upload an image jpg file, you erased your hard drive instead.

2. You’re too busy creating new memories to cyber scrapbook older ones.

And the number one excuse for not joining Facebook …

1. You own a telephone.

 

Please post your own excuses or Facebook horror stories if you don’t see them here.

Posted in Reality | 2 Comments »

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