Category Archives: journalism

can you hear me major tom?

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So I’ve been of late calling myself “Billy Pilgrim,” when people ask me how I am; digging tenaciously through those mad years we call “the Vietnam era,” which I subtitle as “When Everything Blew Up and Everything Grew.” What, she’s not done yet? Not yet, not when I spent thompsonnearly three weeks with the likes of Hugh Thompson (left) Ron Ridenhour (right) ron5 and the ubiquitous Tod Ensign,  as well a the guy below (hidden three rows behind Jane Fonda) who hasn’t yet talked to me about what I still think of as his proudest hour. (Also buds like Steve Morse, Bill Perry, and Susan Schnall, who’ve given me so much of their time…)  The whole thing makes me weirder than usual. I’m boring to be around: scattered, listening constantly to Hanoi Hannah on Pandora.com to get in the mood, etc. etc.

kerryfonda1

But this week, I realized that Vonnegut is far too noble an antecedent to call on here: better that  TV show “Life on Mars,” (thus the David Bowie above). So now, when people ask me “How’s the book??” I won’t say I’m Billy Pilgrim. This week, at least, I’m Sam Tyler – a 21st-century creature who keeps thinking they’ve moved on, only to be dragged right back to 1973, one more time.

don’t know much bout eco-nomics

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My bankruptcy lawyer, among others, is quite aware of my financial illiteracy (something I’m not proud of). Which has likely made it amusing, for the five to ten regular readers of this blog, as I worried about having to get an MBA in order to understand NYC’s then-peaking real estate market. I wanted to simultaneously get a Ph.D. in philosophy, so that I could find a way to articulate that whatever allowed these guys to get away with what they were doing,  it was wrong.

Now, thanks to the invaluable Sullivan, I learn that the degree I was really missing? I could have written their kind of lucrative fictions – but I needed to use advanced mathematics.

I can’t wait for the episode of the show above entitled The Gaussian Copula.

non-state of the union, semi liveblog

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You know you’ve spent too much time doing nothing but write when you show up at a party of sorts – the Philadelphia Drinking Liberally, featuring cool folk like Duncan and Jeremy and Roxanne – and end up fading into the background. You know you’re hanging out with bloggers when you realize its been way too long since you posted, so you might as well liveblog a presidential speech.

I wake up to find that my publisher was just like those purple lines of joy we saw dancing at the bottom of the speech. I just posted her love letter here: go click on it, if only for the Jimmy Stewart film clip. Then read below, for my somewhat-snarky-almost-grateful musings.

The group that was clustered at the bar is now all crowding into this conference/semi-banquet room, which was also cold until filled with bodies.

Frankly, it’s been a relief to hear someone reasonable at each press conference- but as I write this I hear that Obama is going to announce *here* that he’s not going to withdraw troops from Iraq as he’d promised. Ouch.

Keith and Rachel trying to figure things out as they go. We’ll see what we think by what’s actually said.

Lots of brass in the  house. Young men in dress uniforms and Purple Hearts, shyly greeting Jane Harman et al.

Jill Biden (god, she *is beautiful)  shaking one of their hands. Someone serving with Beau?

Kirsten Gillibeand looking incredibly short. Rache calling her “Senator from the Lollipop Guild.”

The Cabinet files through: Hilda Solis –  confirmed today! – grinning in the crowd. She and Susan Rice also in the short crowd 😉

This room erupts in applause when Ginzburg shows up – looking pretty healthy, surprisingly.

I personally love the Baltimore-born Italian San Francisco girl at the head of the room, gently clapping as her Prez shakes hands along the way.

To have the Supreme Court clapping for you: I can’t imagine how  that must feel.

Ohhhhh FUCK those lines, like in the debate. NOOOOOOOOOOES!

Peanut gallery (the bloggers): “si se puede!” when he says “We will rebuild.”

Professor Obama: “It is only by understanding how we got to this moment..”

For too many years we ignored crises in:

energy, healthcare

global economy

more debt than ever before

short-term over long-term

‘surplus became an oppty to transfer wealth to the wealthy,” thank you.

Pelosi looking tired/worried now

“begins with jobs,” gets applause. applauds stimpak, are Reeps applauding?

Kerry grins a little much, as if he’d been drinking. McCain absolutely has.

“A proven and effective Inspector General.” That guy, who looks like he’s just been told his wife is pregnant again?

9:20 update: Lecture re “if we don’t get lending restarted”

new lending fund – auto loans, student loans, etc

Won’t help speculators, will help others struggling w/declining home values……

When we learn a major bank has serious problems,we hold accountable, fix them. Is he talking receivership w.o talking recerivership?

Joe Lieberman sucks on a sour lemon.

“..private jet. Those days are over.” easy applaue line.

McCain voters happier than Obama voters? (from the lines….)

My job is to solve the problem. Thats what this is about. Not helping banks but helping people.  Trickle-down theory of bank fixes.

What exactly i this reform u speak of? I know, I know, this is a night for big concepts…..

Eric Cantor’s forced smile: what he been smoking?

Civil war railroads, public high schools, GI Bill – big government you can believe in?

Govt catalyzed private enterprise. Three areas: energy, healthcare, education.

Energy: Van Jones approach? Camera goes to Steven Chu when Obama mentions how much further along China is on this stuff.

Double supply of renewable energy, research, power lines. – clean energy! market-based cap on pollution..

re-tooled auto industry. “the nation that invented the auto cannot walk away from it.” how???

healthcare: The real issue here. Can’t afford to put healthcare reform on hold. Applauds S-CHIP. Now on to electronic health records, etc. Curing cancer. Where’s the word universal health care?

“quality healthcare for every American” = universal? Mandate, as Ezra says Obama finally accepts?

“Will not wait another week.” Better mean it.

Education: more charter schools. at least one yr of higher ed for every American. (Now? On top of what we have, or?)

by 2020 America will once again have highest proportion of college graduates in the world

If you’re volunteering or serving your country, we’ll make sure u get thry college

Hatch-Kennedy National Service Act?

“No substitute for a parent.” Lindsey Graham playing with his hair obviously needed one.

“The deficit e inherited” gets applause, but what now?

$2 trillion in savings over the next decade. Payments to large agribusiness, no-bid contracts in Iraq, cold war weapons systems we don’t use. Ending  tax breaks for corps that ship jobs overseas.

McConnell and Hoyer lean in as if they’re buds.

When he talks abt including both wars in the budget, both line go up and up.

The men in uniform, many with gray hair and tons of medeals, lean forward as people applaud. Then they applaud, too.

Obama does a coin pose.

expanded health care for vets.

Closing of Gitmo, “swift and certain justice.” But what of Bagram? Still, no-torture pledge is worth something.

Closing phrases. diplomacy, envoys, forge alliances, incl G-20 on trade etc.

Now the poster children: Leonard Abess, bank prez who gave  his bonus to employees, Greensberg, KS (new green town post-tornado), and Ty’Sheoma Bethea, girl from SC school who wrote to Congress. She smiles when he quotes her saying “We are not quitters.” This feels like that pre-election movie from October. Camera on Sully Sullenberger.

“We must show them we are equal to the task before us. ” Knows everyone loves this country and wants it to succeed. (really?)

“This was the time.” Reminiscent of South Carolina speech. Totally jazzed and relaxed at the same time.

now time to make the long, wearying trek back to  Nofeast Philly…..

hearting Keith Olbermann one more time

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Before it gets too old:  Paul Schindler at Gay City News (one of the hardest-working and most brilliant journos I know) sends this report from the weekend’s Human Rights Campaign dinner, where Keith Olbermann (above) schooled the lawmakers in the room:

In an evening when the governor of New Jersey made his most forceful statement to date in support of marriage equality, the new Senate majority leader in New York State pledged to make gay marriage a reality here, and New York City’s mayor once again promised to lobby the Legislature in Albany to help get that done, the crowd’s heart at the February 7 Human Rights Campaign gala in Manhattan’s Hilton Hotel, it seemed, belonged to a cable television political commentator.

In honoring Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC’s nightly “Countdown,” with its Ally for Equality Award, HRC took particular note of a “Special Comment” he made about California’s Proposition 8 six days after the election. As Olbermann was poised to take the stage Saturday evening, a clip from that “Special Comment” was replayed to a hearty standing ovation.

The rest of the piece is a must-read: Schindler explains the complexities of gay and progressive  politics with his usual elegance. He also includes video of Majority Leader Malcolm Smith wading into those complexities.

waiting for the blessed break.

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So I’m reading excerpts of Norman Mailer’s testimony in the trial of the Chicago Eight, trying to get a sense of the WWII-vet cabal that was supporting the protesters at the  Convention, when I get to this line: ” I was in my hotel room with Robert Lowell and David Dellinger and Rennie Davis.”  And no, I didn’t immediately jump to Mailer’s Armies of the Night, to search for signs of dialogue betweenDellinger, who co-edited pacifist magazines with Bayard Rustin before putting his energies to stopping the Vietnam War, and Army-vet Mailer. No, it was Lowell’s name that jumped out at me, because I’d just last night told a friend that he should revisit Lowell’s For the Union Dead. And yes, there’s a sign of the Lowell who got arrested with Mailer at the Pentagon and roomed with him in Chicago:

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statutes for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
when I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

But  my mind was blown already, suddenly understanding with all my reading of the past year or so:

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers.”

rgshaw1Shaw is Col. Robert Gould Shaw of the Massachusetts 54th (yes, the one played by Matthew Broderick in that movie.) Shaw’s “niggers” included lewisdouglassthe remarkable Lewis H. Douglass (left), and he likely knew another of my characters, poor Charles Garrison of the 55th. All of it placing Lowell, with his meditation on Shaw, and I in funhouse parallel universes.

Below is a clip from that film that envisions the night before the assault on Fort Wagner of which Lewis wrote to his girlfriend,”I escaped unhurt from amidst that perfect hail of shot and shell. It was terrible….”

But  I raise my virtual wineglass to Lowell, and savor how he envisions the hero in afterlife, quietly counting on justice’s long arc:
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.


hanoi hannah in philadelphia

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Still CRAZY deadlined. Spent much of the weekend in 1968, when — as Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan put it in their 1984 Who Spoke Up?: American Protest Against the War in Vietnam — “events happened so quickly, hammer blow after hammer blow, that in retrospect it seems astonishing that the national psyche survived intact. Perhaps it did not. ”  I didn’t even make it to the NYC re-release of the film above, though I’m being told about it by enough others who were there when it was first filmed. I’ll write more about them later, but in the meantime, here’s a glimpse of why I started my journey into this book in the first place. (Hanoi Hannah is a Pandora radio station that I didn’t start, but is giving me a soundtrack right now).

reasons to be anthony lane

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So that when you come across a movie that deserves it, you can write paragraphs like this:

Pausing only to borrow a private jet from his ex’s slimy husband, Mills [played by Liam Neeson] flies to Paris, where he proceeds to work his way, without mercy, through a personal alphabet of undesirable aliens. This being a brisk affair, of little more than ninety minutes, he gets only as far as Albanians and Arabs, but, if I were an innocent Bermudan, let alone a Belgian, I would be starting to get nervous about a sequel.

That’s Lane on Liam Neeson’s dash into the sleazy thriller world. (I guess a guy about to start filming Tony Kushner/Spielberg’s Lincoln wanted something less weighty, but really?).

when elephants walk

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Last time I posted a poem by this guy it was after having heard his voice for the first time in a while. Below, now, is the moment when, instead of traveling on a poetry fellowship, he shipped out for Vietnam. I’m not sure it’s the best way to start writing about that fact, but it seems only fair to him to keep his work shimmering in the back and front of my mind.

Elephants Walking

I.

Curled in a window seat, level with wind-swayed oak,

aching on a green vinyl pad,

I think of the fortunes spent on the hardwood, wainscot

study, and the slates fitted

for the arbor walkways, the labor it took to lug bricks out

to each overly articulated

corner, in which nook a child of fortune, cushion- tassel

between his fingers, might

look up from his reading to see in heat waves rising

over the pale, shimmering

delphinium, a plot miracle perhaps, the sudden death

by spontaneous combustion

and the child wondering how, why, and could it have been?

II.

My childhood bedroom, summer night, one hand marking

the book, the others palm

and fingers printing moist, disappearing shadows on the wall.

brownuniversity-harknesshouseThen the college library,

Harkness Hall, and aged, white-cowled Father Benilde

smelling of coffee, muscatel,

and Old Spice as he opened the doors at 7:30. First in line

I was all business, heading

straight to my end of a long, immovable table, to my first

reading of Dante, a paperback

infernociardicopy of Ciardi, with its cover of red, grinning, cartoon

Devils, which I in a fit

of verisimilitude (which word I had just learned)

add chard with a lighter.

III

My first lines that year: “Butt, butt, bale beast.

I fear your horns not

in the least! My intended tone was courtly love

but the words were

apostrophe to a buffalo in Roger Williams Park,

one that had leaned

hard into a sagging hurricane fence near my date.

The lines came to me

as I woke after a nap in the library. I still love

to sleep in libraries

whenever I can. I fix my head sideways over

my folded hands

and make room for the little puddle of drool

I’ll quickly wipe away.

I wake into a barely believable clarity

throughout my body.

I’m ready to grapple with fate, love, sex,

the stirrings within.

Over readers and sleepers alike hovers a mist

or a pollen, and in it

I see words shuttling back and forth like birds.

In the darkness or dream

something hugely important had been freed,

to roam. Grateful,

I say to myself, “Elephants have been walking.”

IV.

“Son, we must give this country great poetry!”

decreed the older poet

to my nodding head, as he shook my hand after

the Crystal Room reading.

Later, as I walked back to my dormitory, sleet

failed to cool me,

I turned his pronoun over and over, thinking,

yes, we do, we do.

On the news there was familiar footage:

a Phantom run

ending in a hypnotic burst of a lift yellow napalm.

I knew the war

was wrong, but that was why, I claimed, I should go,

to sing the song

of high lament, to get it into the books. Like Ishmael

I would sign on

for a three-year voyage under a madman captain.

Frissons to be had

instantly, a pity-the-youth-soon-dying look in the eyes.

“Are you crazy?”

said my girlfriend. But I was filled with vibrant life

and felt neither suicidal

nor confused when I dialed the Marine recruiter: “Yes,

I look forward to reporting.”

Phone in my lap, I sat sideways, my legs dangling

over the arms of my red

leather reading chair. A warm spring wind was

melting the snow

down to bright medallions of ice. I felt clear-headed

and refreshed.

I just hoped the war would last until I got there.

Elephants were walking.

—

I do think I forgot the crucial question of the interview, after Marchant quoted this poem. As he packed for boot camp, did he bring a moleskin notebook? And in his heart was he following Homer, Hemingway or just Randall Jarrell?

project fahrenheit

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When I was a teenager, in the course of a few years I gobbled books by all the masters of science fiction — Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Harlan Ellison — paying more attention to plot than prose. That was mostly appropriate, both as  a 13-year-old and because for most, what made the books special was their exquisite and inventive plots. I know I read Fahrenheit 451: what I remembered most vividly was the ending scenes of old men whispering excerpts to one another, which is where its stellar plot takes you. After I left the boys behind for a more varied literary canon, I lumped Bradbury in with the others and never looked back.

This week, the book came into my hands almost accidentally. “OK, how come no one told me he’s  a poet?” I asked Rachel, astonished by its first pages.

It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. … Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame. He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man, burnt-corked, in the mirror. Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.

What a fool I was at 13, I thought.  Just as I was then sneering at Kerouac. in the Bradbury I sped past something that would have mattered to me a scant two years later, the year I discovered James Joyce. I looked at the copyright date, 1950, and first saw the obvious: Miller, HUAC Berryman. But I was also taken by its only-slightly-off-base prefiguring of our televisual age, which I now know Bradbury later identified as the book’s core message. In Montag’s house,the walls are alive: three of them, at least.  Those walls are filled with a story half-acted by people his wife calls “the family”, just as my students at CUNY saw J-Lo and Kobe Bryant as members of theirs. I think Bradbury also did pretty well for 1950 in predicting reality TV:

The homemaker, that’s me, is the missing part. When it comes time for the missing lines, they all look at me out of the three walls and I say the lines. Isn’t that fun, Guy?

“How long you figure before we save up and get the fourth wall torn out and a fourth wall-TV put in?” the protagonist’s wife asks him. “It’s only two thousand dollars.” That’s about the price of the bigger plasma TVs out there now, that are all the rage (a sale of which prompted those awful Walmart tramplings on Black Friday). And while the books are burned to keep control over the ideas within them, Bradbury knows by then that we’re not actually in Orwell’s world, we’re in Aldous Huxley’s. I wonder if the director of the inevitable new movie based on the book (superseding the visual poetry of the Truffaut film above) will know to riff on those themes, or if he’s planning to turn Montag into some Neo. I hear Tom Hanks has dropped out, which is just as well: this is obviously a job for Ironman.