The Goode Family

The show's got a good start. Mike Judge has a really keen eye for all of the little indignities and petty intimidations of mid-level, white collar life, and addressing it to a family trying to be as ecologically moral within their limited means offers some promise. Most of the jokes were spot-on: I really liked the sequence in the supermarket, with expensive degrees of locally-farmed pesticide-free organic produce, and the electronic board showing the decimation of the rain forest in real time. 

Downsides were few. The son, an overweight blond 16 year old of limited vocal skills, reminded me too much of Chris from _Family Guy_, and the daughter's not too different from the daughter of _American Dad_. The vegetarian dog joke's as old as tofu, but decently done here, and there was only one joke that just clunked on the floor: the housewife fretting "WWAGD-- What Would Al Gore Do?" The canvas shopping bag labelled "An Inconvenient Bag" was better. 

I liked the more subtle, pointed moments. For example, the fact that the Goodes are hovering just above lower-middle-class existence, and their lifestyle choices force them beyond their means. And that they make the choices on the basis of public appearances and guilt and intimidation from their equally-proper neighbors. Or, one neighbor at the checkout lane reminding Mrs. Goode that Mr. Goode works _for_ her husband, not _with_; that's a joke that's a little more incisive than simply making fun of the oddballs. 

Fans of the show ought to go look up a book that I'm certain _none_ of you have ever read. Cyra McFadden's 1977 novel _The Serial_ told a year-long story of Kate and Harvey, two residents of Marin County during the growth of what was the "human potential" movement, where yoga, est, Reiki, body integration, TM, rebirthing and the like were exploding in the upper-middle-class regions around Esalen, and combining with a fuzzy-minded fascination with alternate cultures and one's own spiritual growth. McFadden's voice was a Sahara-dry approximation of Marin-speak. 

The only online excerpts of _The Serial_ I was able to find were on a blogsite (http://draust.wordpress.com/2008/07/05/marin-ated-in-woo/). Here, a kid named Che is sent to a summer camp run by Marinites:

“When [Che]… broke out into a rash, envisioning himself brought to a rolling boil in the hot tub, his Surrogate Parent for the session made him drink a lot of lemon-grass tea. “Listen, Che,” said [his surrogate parent], “you’ve just made a conscious decision. You’re the one that decides to get sick or stay healthy. Listen, you want your body to call the shots?”

Che just wanted the camp to call [his mother] and tell her he’d forgotten his cortisone ointment. Maybe she’d come and bring it to him and he could hide out in the trunk of the Rover. Otherwise he was in for two more weeks of unstructured freedom that stopped short of “pharmaceuticals”…

Glumly, he consulted the bulletin board, listing the afternoon’s activities, posted outside the communal yurt: belly dancing, spear fishing and herbal medicine. Che didn’t know what herbal medicine was but suspected lemon-grass tea was part of it.”

Note that the kid in this 1977 book, and the dog in _The Goode Family_, are both named Che by their owners. Which makes me wonder why _The Serial_ isn't as well-known as it should be. It's a bit of a period piece, but the period and place has expanded to the rest of the country, and it's not difficult to read 1970s fads and substitute more modern ones. (Okay, they _did_ make a bad movie of the book, written by mid-1970s sitcom veterans, offering us the spectacle of Christopher Lee as the leader of a gay biker gang. That'd kill a good book.) 

So, if you're in a good used book store, look under McF for _The Serial_ and enjoy. And if not, let's see how Mike Judge works what's still a pretty fertile field.

Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I usually like Ron Rosenbaum's essays. His column at the New York Observer was called "The Edgy Enthusiast" for a good reason; I like his energy, and his willingness to pursue a subject into some rare and odd realms. He's able to do a piece on, say, Yale's Skull and Bones society, speculate on what its odd legend does to the members who eventually run a lot of the country, and avoid falling into conspiracy-theory bullshit. He seems to enjoy writing about _other_ enthusiasts, and two of his books, _Explaining Hitler_ and _The Shakespeare Wars_, are more about the history of scholarship about those men. (He's also been instrmental in getting Dimitri Nabokov to publish the index cards containing his father Vladimir's notes for his last novel.) 

He's got a piece at _Slate_ discussing what he sees as a new wave of "nuke porn," novels and stories about nuclear war and its aftermath. "The new nuke porn is hard-core, more graphic and full-frontal than the Cold War version of the genre. Instead of the anticipatory excitement (Fail-Safe, Strangelove) or the post-coital tristesse (On the Beach) of First Era nuke porn, we get real-time blast-burns and melting flesh. There was always an erotic component to apocalyptic literature—those end-of-the-world sects were notorious for their doom-fueled orgiastic behavior—but I always wondered why most nuke porn was about looking forward to the approaching act or looking back on its consummation but rarely about looking directly at it..."

Later on, ther's a comment about post-apock cannibalism, which Rosenbaum sees as a particular aspect of new nuke-porn, as in Cormac McCarthy's _The Road_ and William Fortschen's _One Second After:

"One of the things they come upon—and you know it's coming and dread its coming; there's almost a kind of pornographic buildup to this unbearable money shot—is an act of cannibalism so horrific I refuse to describe it further. [...] But then two years later, cannibalism showed up again in [One Second After], and it occurred to me that cannibalism may be a unifying theme of the new nuke porn. Like The Road, One Second After envisions the time after a blast, though by contrast it offers a "happy" ending. (Only 80 percent of the residents in the post-nuclear community he focuses on die.) [...] In this case, the crippled government's failure to secure the food supply in a post-EMP situation results in a descent into savagery by many across the ravaged countryside, and despite the attempts of ordinary folk to do the right thing for the sake of the whole, the peaceful home-folks are menaced by a rampaging mob that kills and eats all humans in its path. 

Why cannibalism here and in McCarthy? I think it has something to do with self-consumption: We did this to ourselves. Our appetite for power is what caused us to create the equations for the nuclear weapons that will consume us. We consumed ourselves."

I think Rosenbaum misses a few things in favor of continuing a "literary" association of fiery nuclear death, porn, "money shots," and the "poetic" interpretation of "we consumed ourselves." Not that these are wrong, or are misleading. It's just that I come away with other ideas. 

I've said this before, but I've always seen apocalypse and post-apocalypse stories as a kind of wish-fulfillment. Nobody reads these things and thinks that they're going to be one of the people who _die_; we read them because we want to see a lot of our everyday bullshit swept away, so we can have lives of adventure while still getting to use all the stuff we have right now: cars, buildings, weapons, and all the rest. Every decision we make will be _important_ in the way that our current everyday decisions _aren't_, and of course, we want to think of ourselves as competent, capable, intelligent, skilled campers. Or in post-Rapture religious novels, as participants in the biggest morality play of all time. Or in survivalist fiction, as ultraviolent badasses who don't struggle with that "morality" stuff. 

You could probably create a revealing psychological taxonomy with apocalypse fiction. _On the Beach_ seemed to appeal to Puritans who felt that self-flagellation over collective guilt was only right and just. Stephen King once said that _The Stand_ was like _Lord of the Rings_ in an American setting, and he's right, but he had to wipe out 99.9% of the world to create that particular crusade. The Zombie Apocalypse is pretty self-aware of itself; George Romero's _Dawn of the Dead_ played the thirst for adventure for laughs, and it was pretty overt in showing how its characters got off on _owning a mall_. 

Okay, cannibalism. It's been a marker of primitiveness (all those cartoons of boiled missionaries, the scummy rednecks of _The Texas Chainsaw Massacre_) and of extreme deprivation under horrible circumstances (the Donner Party and the Franklin Expedition in Dan Simmons' _The Terror_), or as an easy satire on conquest, or power, savagery under a facade, or just not being a vegetarian (_Ravenous_, _Parents_). The pseudo-cleverness of "consuming ourselves" is nice, but really, it's mainly the marker for how much civilization has been wiped away, and how desperate people are to survive. That's pretty much how McCarthy uses it in _The Road_, which can be read as a "cautionary tale," as a bleak existentialist tragedy, or as an adventure novel. 

On the other hand, Fortschen (who's collaborated with Newt Gingrich on a novel or two) comes out of the Jerry Pournelle/Tom Clancy school, which are "cautionary tales" only in the sense that they're encouraging us to want it all to happen. So he's going to be focused not only on the nuts and bolts, but the prestressed concrete, the cell-phone scramble algorithms, the technological capabilities of particular terrorist groups, their internal structures, interrogation techniques, the phenomenal training of elite military units, tough guys joking about rag-heads and how liberals can't run civilization... and this is where we get those interesting mixes of technological expertise mixed with fantasy xenophobia. Yes, Tom Clancy really did name a character "Ali bin Sheik," and Pournelle's _Lucifer's Hammer_ has black soldiers embracing cannibalism within a few months of a few comet strikes. Maybe ethnology's a tougher subject than engineering for some people. 

(And being _eaten_ is one of those fears that hits certain unique buttons about one's ego. It's not just a fear of dying or even if violent death: being reduced to food negates everything _else_ about you. I mean, here you are, an intelligent, educated person, you care about your family, you've got this neat skill-set and a career and you want to _matter_ to people... isn't it more than bleak to wind up as, basically, _food_ for something else? If we're going to imagine someone who treats us like cattle, who consumes us literally or metaphorically, we don't want to think it'll be grubby inbred rural fuckwits, or grubby vulgar rich people of the Leona Helmsley sort. If we're going to be consumed, it had better be by someone with all the "superior" signifiers, like glamour and court intrigue and supernatural intelligence and refinement and nobility and good taste in wines. Like vampires, a guild of lycanthropes, or Hannibal Lecter-- you know, verifiably superior Apex Predators. So we don't look like _easy_ prey.)

So while Rosenbaum sees these themes as something new, I really don't; they've always been there, and maybe they're getting more emphasis these days.

Why Dane Cook is a bad comedian

There's a consensus that Dane Cook just isn't a funny comedian, which is belied by the fact that he sells out stadiums to crowds who cheer wildly at nearly every sentence that comes out of his mouth. There aren't many comics who can fill a big hall like that: last one I recall was Steve Martin's mid-70's period, and Richard Pryor in his prime. And the guy works his Internet fan base really, really well, and I'll give him credit for that.

But he just is't very funny, and since you all know me, then you know what's next-- several paragraphs working out _why_ I don't think he's funny. 

First of all, the guy directing this show is a moron-- he cuts between camera angles every half-sentence. And when the camera angles aren't very different, the whole thing is jittery and clippy, as though a film had been sliced into foot-long segments and tapes back together. 

I'll focus on two routines Dane Cook did in the show I'm watching. And yeah, my paraphrases aren;t going to try to capture his performance, which involves a lot of arm-waving and gesticulating. One was a riff on Oprah Winfrey, who's not exactly unplowed comic territory. He says there are two kinds of Oprah shows. The first is the happy show, where she gives away things, "Everybody gets a _school_!" You get a school! You get a school!" The second is the serious one about pedophiles. 

Now, in this routine, Cook had a couple of lines that could have been funny. Parodying Oprah's gifts can be done neatly by having her give out almost surreal gifts, like schools. Good choice on Cook's part. As for the Oprah-pedophile show, he had a line about being diddled by your uncle in a closet, and how you'd focus on the board games on the shelves which _commented on the situation_, like "Sorry!" and "Risk" and "Candyland." 

These are actually good lines, and could be very, very funny... but Cook's delivery is _awful_. He spouts them off quickly and frenetically, when he could have gotten a lot of mileage out of a slower, calibrated, properly _timed_ delivery. And you have to wonder; since everyone understands that standup comedy requires careful delivery and timing, why doesn't Cook work on this even with good material? I think I know, but I'll use another example to lead up to it.

Cook also did a routine about those late-night commercials showing starving children in some African shithole. He mentioned the Burl Ivesish fellow who steps in and pleads for fifteen cents a day to send these kids to Oxford. And he suggests that, maybe, they should get as a spokeman some tough-looking biker who yells at the viewer, "What is wrong with you? Fifteen cents a day? Get two friends with nickels!" Etc., etc. 

Okay, so Cook tends to go for easy, well-worn targets; faithless girlfriends, late-night commercials, Oprah's gifts. But this routine _begs_ for a comparison with the late Sam Kinison's routine, one version of which is below.



In case you can't see or play the video, Kinison's routine is _really_ aggressive: he demands to know why starving people don't _move to where the food is_. In the version on one of his alvbums, he pantomines yanking a starving African over to look at the ground. "See this?" he says, in a patronizing, angry voice. "This is _sand_. You know nothing can _grow_ in this shit? nothing's GONNA grow here. You live in a FUCKING DESERT." And it's one of the funniest routines I've _ever_ heard. 

And heres where I think Dane Cook might never become a good comedian. He projects himself, and perhaps _needs_ to project himself, as a _nice, normal guy_. One who makes the occasional sick joke, or who plays a bit of a goofus, or capable of doing something craven to his girlfriend, but he'll _never_ do a joke that puts him in the position of possibly being a really awful human being. With Kinison, you _embraced_ the chance to laugh at some genuinely _awful_ thoughts; he came at you without any fear of what you'd think, batter down any moralism you had, and have you laughing at things you knew you _should_ be shocked at. 

And if a comedian has to say something awful or evil or offensive for a joke, he _shouldn't care_ if people thought less of them. Take Bill Hicks, who had the following opener: "Speaking of Satan, I was listening ro Rush Limbaugh the other day.... Doesn't Rush Limbaugh remind you of one of those gay guys who likes to sit in a tub and have other men pee on him?" WONDERFUL line. Hilarious, shocking, offensive, _accurate_, and nastier than anything the Oxycontin King could come up with. And Hicks simply didn't _care_ if you thought it was homophobic or disgusting. It was _funny_. Comedy is NOT about being _nice_.

And it's not just being a _nice_ guy, but a nice _normal_ guy. The better standups-- Pryor, Tomlin, Carlin, and others-- have _not_ come from the mainstream culture. Pryor came from shitty Peoria, Carlin was an Irish street kid and hippie, Tomlin was an intelligent woman. You watch people like Mitch Hedberg or David Cross, and you know that they're just not like most of the thuds you deal with in the office cube farm every day. Hedberg had a wonderfully surreal imagination, and Cross is a fiercely intelligent crank. (He's brilliant, by the way.) I hate to resort to glib terms like "outsiders," but comics have always worked best as an "outsider" of some sort or another. Comedy is also NOT about being _normal_. 

Dane Cook's stage presence, his dress, jokes, mannerisms, delivery, persona in movie comedies-- are all pretty much that of a fairly average twentysomething. And his audience likes him because he's, well, just like one of them, and like a lot of people they know. This alone doesn't make him a bad comedian-- Seth Rogen plays average guys too, and he's fine-- but Dane Cook's way with a joke indicates that he does _not_ want to risk having people _dislike_ him. Which is sort of a guarantee that he could have the biggest crowds a comoedian's ever had, and still never become better than the mediocre comic he is now.

Drood

Drood: A Novel

I'm past the two-third mark on this one, and it's wonderful for reasons beyond its ultra-spooky Victorian decor. You see, the narrator of the book, Wilkie Collins, put the un- in "unreliable narrator," so half of the fun of the book is trying to figure out whether he's describing an actual event, a heavily-skewed version of a real event, or something his own brain's surprised him with after two glasses of laudanum. 

So this book might be titled _Victorian Psycho_ in that it parallels Bret Easton Ellison's book in certain ways. For example, in that book, Ellis's psychopath Bateman spends pages on the most appallingly detailed descriptions of murder... but no one seems to notice his victims have gone missing, and one even reports meeting something Bateman thinks he's murdered. So one wonders if these have been nothing more than severe fantasies, fuelled by Bateman's alpha-male personality and crimson-red hatred of women. 

In _Drood_, Wilkie Collins is a successful writer, but he's also smart enough to know that his success will never match that of his friend, Charles Dickens. He is consumed with jealousy over Dickens's success, but regards himself as the superior writer even though Dickens has been shepherding him through his career. When his plays fail, Collins blames Dickens's interference. When Dickens falls short of the family-man ideal, and divorces his wife by cutting her out of everything, Collins smacks his lips with nasty satisfaction... even though Collins keeps women on a string with promises of matrimony and a family life, treats his servants like garbage, and cuts them loose when they get troublesome. 

And let's add Collins's drug problem. The man is knocking back two glasses of laudanum at a time, which is enough to kill a healthy man. He's had lifelong visions of ghosts, including a doppleganger of himself he calls the Other Wilkie. So he's unstable, a junkie, and a fantasist, jealous over his friends' success, casually cruel to those below his station, and pretty much a complete prick without even the charm of an antihero. 

The story begins with Dickens surviving a train crash. He later tells Collins that, while tending to the victims, he encountered a caped figure flitting from victim to victim... all of whom died, while Dickens's tended to live. A nighttime visit to London's underworld, entered via crypts and catacombs, reveals this figure to be namd Drood, a nobleman's illegitimate son who's founded a criminal-Thuggee cartel in the sewers. Dickens gives Collins one version of the story, telling him that by "agreeing" to write Drood's biography, Dickens is preventing Drood from destroying the whole of London. Inspector Field, a sinister ex-policeman, tells Collins that Drood has murdered hundreds over the years, and needs him as an informant on Dickens's comings and goings. Collins isn't exactly torn over informing, since at some point he resolves that Dickens has committed murder, and that he, Collins should murder Dickens-- at the very least, to prevent him from the inevitable state funeral and internment in Westminster Abbey, final proof of Dickens's greatness and Collins's oen mediocrity. 

Has Collins gone genuinely mad? Or was he, in fact, kidnapped by the Voldemort-like Drood, implanted with a mind-controlling scarab beetle, and set loose? Did Collins actually murder his servants' daughter? He writes of her murder in detail... but a few pages later, her parents receive a letter from her that Collins cannot recall forging. Has Dickens been given a scarab of his own? Are his final public performances-- capping with an intense enactment of Bill Sykes's mruder of Nancy-- a form of mesmerism? Is he doing Drood's work? Is Collins? What are these legions of ex-policemen up to? 

_Drood_ is a wonderful cabinet of multithreaded literary connections. Many of the plot points and characters are echoes of the characters in Dickens' last novel, _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, and Simmons also shows us where Collins drew inspiration for his own novels like _The Moonstone_. The plot itself could be one of Collins's own stories (in many ways). Collins' murderous jealousy recalls that of Salieri towards Mozart in _Amadeus_, and Collins's ego and derangement call to mind Charles Kinbote of Nabokov's _Pale Fire_. I'm tempted to read the book through a _second_ time, just to see if Simmons is trying to pull of one of Nabokov's best tricks-- to have a whole and complete story going on that the narrator is not aware of, but which we can see if we extricate ourselves from his mind... or, remove the scarab beetle the author's dropped into our brainpans.

An informal appreciation of Charles Darwin

Much of what we admire about Darwin rests on how profoundly his ideas have shaped pretty much everything of interest in the last century and a half. We admire the accomplishment of having the insights on natural selection. We're impressed with how quickly his work reordered everything from taxonomy to research strategy. We love the exceptionally powerful moments, the great achievements, the climaxes, the balls hit out of the park.

We like the theater of the whole thing. Most of us haven't sat down to read _On the Origin of Species_, but I'm sure a lot of us have enjoyed watching Fredric March and Spencer Tracy duke it out in _Inherit the Wind_. Which have you paid more attention to-- the Federalist Papers or _1776_? And why not? It's fun to watch an electric personality with a switchblade wit make the older guys look like buffoons.

Even the legends of evolution go for the razzle-dazzle. There's a famous account of the 1860 debate on Darwin's ideas, where Darwin advocate Thomas Huxley squared off against Archbishop Samuel Wilberforce. The story has it that Wilberforce asked Huxley whether he was descended from apes on his mother's or father's side: Huxley replied to the effect that he wouldn't being related to a monkey, but he'd be ashamed to be related to someone who used sophistry to suppress the truth. It's a great comeback, and the legend has the room exploding in an uproar at that moment. But that exchange was an uncharacteristic spark in a dry and generally responsible scientific debate.

I spend a lot of time thinking about comedians. (How's that for circling wide of the topic?) When George Carlin passed away, he got a lot of praise for truth-telling-- the sort of thing that's been pushing the posthumous Bill Hicks legacy as well. As much as I love those two, I don't look to comedians for truth-telling: Sam Kinison was at least as funny as Hicks or Carlin, but I wouldn't call his routines "speaking truths." And Harry Shearer's a fine performer, and knows his issues, but his radio show's pretty turgid stuff. So performance requires a trade-off. If you work hard at understanding and presenting facts and reasons, you're also restraining yourself a performer. If you go for the performance and the spectacle, you have to shortchange the research and simplify the issues in favor of the witty comebacks and funny one-liners.

This is one thing I truly admire about Charles Darwin. He wasn't an expert rhetoritician. He spent two decades carefully working up his arguments... and a lot of that work was anticipating objections, and working out strong, scientifically valid responses. He didn't spend days working on _le mot juste_ to play to the balcony and skewer an opponent: he worked at presenting an intellectual case for a new and complex idea as clearly as he could. He didn't treat objections to his theory as attacks from ideological opponents. He treated them as necessary correctives to his own work.

Darwin serves as an example of how that wonderful moment of insight, that little click that happens in your mind when some new idea settles in and reshapes the way you see things, can come about from careful intellectual work-- probably the least glamorous job in our society. It's tedious. It requires reading. It means doing shitloads of math. It means paying careful attention to what your opponents think, acknowledging when they're right, and slogging on. Even scientists would rather think of Einstein and von Neumann and Godel as otherworldly savants instead of number-crunchers.

Remember that old joke about people who do hallucinogens for the first time-- the goop-eyed fascination with "really looking" at your hand for the first time? Well, hands really _are_ fascinating. How do the bones form? How do they move so smoothly? How complex can their movements be? Why do we have three knuckles instead of two or four? When we hold a stick in our hand, it angles out from our arms at nineteen degrees: why that particular angle? What is the impact of the opposable thumb? Well, some of these can be answered, and in a way that explains a lot more than just that _particular_ question. It can lead to a pretty profound appreciation of morphology. Maybe even a career. (Dropping acid, however, doesn't seem to help much with _developing_ an insight, much less a career.)

And that's just when you have an insight _explained_ to you. Imagine the thrill of _creating_ that insight. That amazing moment when your _own brain has surprised you_. I'd get it when I tried writing fiction, but it was a rare moment, and I really envy writers who can sit down and just Have It Come. You have to envy Darwin on this, because not only did he have that brilliant moment, he spent at least a decade refining, grinding and polishing it. And he knew it was _profound_. This wasn't just a neat connection that explained a particular natural process; he knew he'd hit upon something that explained tremendous swathes of the natural world. I can't even _imagine_ his excitement. You can't even call it a "Road to Damascus" moment, because that was someone being force-fed a world-view. Darwin's wisdom wasn't received, but _achieved_.

That's part of what I admire about Charles Darwin. We hear about scientists as brilliancies or eccentrics. But Darwin, probably the greatest of all, was neither. He gives hope to those of us who may not be terribly great at seizing and holding other people's attentions, but who work hard and honestly try to understand things.

Tagging Shepard Fairey

Assuming you don't have a couple of the Obama "Hope" posters, stickers, signs and their variants about the house, here's the story. Artist Shepard Fairey, previously best known for his "Andre the Giant has a posse" stickers and their variants, was the graffiti artist who caught the bijou for the Campaign Poster of the Century. 

This month, Fairey's got problems, but they're problems that any American artist with a desire for political relevance would welcome. First of all, the Associated Press is now claiming that his famous "Hope" poster infringes on the copyright of one of their photos of Obama, shown above. Fairey acknowledges that he used the photo as the basis for his poster, but he claims in his countersuit that his work transformed it into "stunning, abstracted and idealized visual image that creates powerful new meaning and conveys a radically different message." (I don't see any political motives on the AP's part. They have to protect their copyrights.) 

Over at Print magazine, Milton Glaser weighs in (http://www.printmag.com/design_articles/MiltonGlaseronShepardFairey/tabid/492/Default.aspx) by saying that Fairey's work doesn't seem as transformative as it could be. In this case, I disagree, but I link to it because it's Milton Glaser and his opinion shouldn't be ignored. To my amateur's eye, the Fairey poster uses the AP photo as a basis, but it doesn't try to reproduce it, and I think it's sufficiently different to qualify as a separate work. 

Okay, now for the critical stuff. This month, the ICA in Boston has opened a show of Fairey's work, and concomitant on that, Fairey announced that he'd be tagging the town as he has been for years. A few Andre stencils went up around town, so the Boston police promptly arrested him. Fairey claims that the timing of the arrest is politically suspect, which is actually pretty funny when you consider that he'd done the tagging to drum up attention for the art exhibit in the first place. 

It'd be even funnier if another artist were to start tagging around Boston, get arrested... and turn his or her case into a referendum on the disparities in legal representation between unknown graffiti artists and famous, marketable artists with big social and gallery connections who can attract high-power legal help. 

Here's where we can see a real and profound difference between Shepard Fairey and Banksy, a British graffiti artist whose work is at least as well known. Yes, both have courted controversy. yes, both have courted confrontation with the Law. And yes, both have had gallery shows. They have that in common. 

But Fairey just isn't much of an artist. His work says almost nothing beyond his skill as a graphic designer. He's got a great design sense, and he's developed solid technique. (Or he may just have that trace-from-bitmap function in Photoshop down pat.) Fairey himself is adept at reciting the boilerplate complaints about consumer society, marketing, corporate culture and the like, but there's no special insight there. (I mean, I've been reading Noam Chomsky for twenty years, and that doesn't make my blog posts or Clark Park newsletters "political.") But, because Fairey does commercial-grade work, and sells to a market that claims progressive politics, he's considered a political artist. And he's one who gets gallery shows and top-notch legal help when he prods the cops for some publicity.


Think I'm being unfair? Take a look at Banksy's work. You can't imagine him doing posters for some political candidate; it'd be like getting Ralph Steadman to draw baby-food labels. He doesn't go tagging and expect to pull in high-power legal help from wealthy museum patrons: he goes tagging on the separation walls in the West Bank and expects to get shot at. While Fairey's actively courted the sympathies of wealthy liberals, Banksy's as likely to savage them as anyone else. His work is savagely funny, in ways that don't confirm that you "already know." And Banksy can draw a lot better than Fairey, too.

You look at Banksy's work, and you think of Johnny Rotten and Monty Python. You look at Shepard Fairey's work, and you think of flyers on the virtues of fair-trade coffee shops.

A Historian Swandives into a Tank of Offal.

An historian named Andrew Roberts explains why he thinks Bush was a good President. 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/4241865/History-will-show-that-George-W-Bush-was-right.html

Let's admit, right at the start, that there was a lot of knee-jerk dislike of Bush throughout his presidency, even when what he did was, well, what Clinton or Gore or Kerry would have done. And I've never completely bought into the complaint that the case for WMDs was merely cooked up by the Bush administration; given what was known then, it would've been crazy to think that Saddam hussein had disarmed himself of those fabukous devices. The seeds of our current economic meltdown were planted by Bush's predecesors as far back as Reagan, and a lot of the damage of the past eight years could have been avoided if the Democrats had developed spines and integrity.

But this "historian's argument" rests on a lot of wishful thinking and willful avoidance. And it closes with a breathtaking display of dishonesty and amorality worthy of David Irving.

"At the time of 9/11, which will forever rightly be regarded as the defining moment of the presidency, history will look in vain for anyone predicting that the Americans murdered that day would be the very last ones to die at the hands of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in the US from that day to this." 

What this means is anyone's guess. Of course nobody would _predict_ that-- it'd be like saying that there would be no more hurricanes after Katrina. But, let's acknowledge that we've had eight years without Islamic fundamentalists working destruction within our borders. We could say the same thing on September 10, 2001, which was about eight years afer the first WTC bombing in 1993. So this guy is saying that nobody would have made a wholly unreasonable prediction. And that we've been fortunate since. What does this mean? Nothing. 

As for the failure of the Bush administration to _prevent_ the attacks? Unmentioned. 

"The decisions taken by Mr Bush in the immediate aftermath of that ghastly moment will be pored over by historians for the rest of our lifetimes. One thing they will doubtless conclude is that the measures he took to lock down America's borders, scrutinise travellers to and from the United States, eavesdrop upon terrorist suspects, work closely with international intelligence agencies and take the war to the enemy has foiled dozens, perhaps scores of would-be murderous attacks on America. There are Americans alive today who would not be if it had not been for the passing of the Patriot Act. There are 3,000 people who would have died in the August 2005 airline conspiracy if it had not been for the superb inter-agency co-operation demanded by Bush after 9/11."

Nearly all of the measures Roberts mentions would have been enacted by any President after 9-11, so it's not as if Bush deserves exceptional credit. And given the failure of his administration to _prevent_ it, I think we'd be pretty pissed if he'd failed to do these things.

But Roberts lists these only as rough principles and safeguards and general policies. He doesn't address _how_ these were implemented. It's one thing to give, say, Boss Tweed credit for building municipal buildings in New York City, but it's dishonest to _not_ fault him for making millions on kickbacks and sweetheart deals to do it. And with Bush... well, as I said, all of the above was pretty much mandated by 9-11, but hiring cronies and incompetents to run those programs really _ought_ to be considered when evaluating Bush. 

"When Abu Ghraib is mentioned, history will remind us that it was the Bush Administration that imprisoned those responsible for the horrors."

You have got to be kidding me, Roberts. The lack of oversight at Abu Ghraib was _typical_ of the Administration's handling of the Iraq invasion. Also, despite evidence that high-ranking commanders were aware of what was going on 9and are thus complicit), the only people who've been imprisoned are low-ranking soldiers. 

"The credit crunch, brought on by the Democrats in Congress insisting upon home ownership for credit-unworthy people, will initially be blamed on Bush, but the perspective of time will show that the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started with the deregulation of the Clinton era."

Oh, there's more than enough blame to go around on the regulation of our economy. And Bush was as eager a participant as anyone else; there's a reason why he found Kenneth Lay such a congenial partner in energy policy. So this "everyone else was doing it" defense really doesn't wash. 

Now for the climax, where Roberts takes a swan dive into genuine corruption. I don't know if you know the name of David Irving, a British historian and Hitler enthusiast who's spent his career trying to exonerate the Third Reich from everything, up to and including the Holocaust. Here, in his penultimate paragraph, Andrew Roberts stands alongside of Irving, as far as ethics are concerned. 

"The number of American troops killed during the eight years of the War against Terror has been fewer than those slain capturing two islands in the Second World War, and in Britain we have lost fewer soldiers than on a normal weekend on the Western Front. As for civilians, there have been fewer Iraqis killed since the invasion than in 20 conflicts since the Second World War."

In order to defend George Bush, Roberts has to compare our modern war to the _most horrific battles of the past century_. He says that the war may be bad, but it's not as bad as, say, the Battle of Passchendaele? That the fighting's been less vicious than that on Iwo Jima? Well, _no shit_, Roberts. Those were wars against _whole countries_ and their organized war apparatuses, using very different technologies and tactics. The Vietnam conflict cost the U.S. roughly 60,000 men over twelve years-- would you defend that conflict because it's less than the hundreds of thousands killed at the Somme? Apparently, yes. 

And look at that last, rotten sentence about civilian deaths. "Fewer Iraqis killed... than in 20 conflicts since the Second World War." Is that so? The Iraqi war has fewer casualties than _twenty other wars combined_? Why, merciful heavens, I had no idea!

This does beg all kinds of questions. For example... why _twenty_ conflicts? Why not nineteen? Why not ten? Or even one? Or, Mr. Roberts, did you _have_ to go to twenty conflicts before you could exceed the Iraqi civilian death toll? 

Now, I don't know how many civilians were killed in the Iraq war so far. I suspect Roberts does, because he's the one who had to go all the way up to _twenty_ to beat it. Maybe he cherry-picked his twenty, selecting wars with low body counts. 

I'd be interested to know if Roberts included Vietnam among his "twenty conflicts." It's the first one we Americans think of, when it comes to invading third-world nations and establishing governments. And in that war, in addition to the 50-60,000 American casualties, between three and four million Vietnamese were killed. Which leaves Andrew Roberts with a real problem.

If Andrew Roberts cherry picked his "twenty conflicts," then he's clearly done this to skew his argument, which makes him unscrupulous. But, if he _did_ include Vietnam in his tally... he's effectively saying that Iraqi civilian casualties have exceeded four million people. 

I don't think even the war's opponents have seriously suggested a casualty number this high. And Andrew Roberts is offering this as a _defense_ of George Bush.

Today and Tomorrow

Last night, I had a long conversation with my friend P about a whole lotta things-- race, Obama, our respective upbringings, and all of the marvelously complex issues and values and anxieties and history that have come to this great moment. P and I go back at least two decades, and we can say stuff to each other that we don't necessarily share with anyone else. It's been a great friendship, and we share this stuff on at least two planes. Basically, our sense of humor is similar, we think about things in a similar way, and I think we understand each other on a good, basic level as well. 

One of the things we can talk about is when our own feelings, and opinions, don't exactly match the common wisdom. Or even the better nature that we'd like to present to the world. So we talked about what January 2009 means to us. 

I hate to say that I grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, but I did spend almost all of my pre-twenties there. And for most of that time, black people were pretty rare in my neighborhood. Cherry Hill was a place where a lot of people moved to get away from cities. And if you look at the immigrant paths as a kind of filtration system, you have huge ethnic enclaves in the cities, and the more succesful generations move out to the burbs... as a result, the only prominent ethnic group in Cherry Hill was Jewish. Other than that, it was a homogenized a mix of Christian Europeans. 

I don't know how this sounds to y'all-- after all, the above description is usually associated with xenophobic grated communities. But I don't remember any sense of ethnic rivalry or hatreds or tribalism. Most of the diversity was in last names, so there wasn't anything to develop a grudge over. There were occasions where I'd hear one of my parents drop a racial or religious epithet, but those were pretty rare (or, in the case of my mom, when she started getting more demented over the years). 

Now, let me take you back to a fascinating time in this country's cultural history, the early 1970s, when the people who made the culture took a big interest in incorporating black America in its content, and made confronting prejudice and bigotry a big priority. Sure, Cherry Hill was an affluent, off-white slurry, but we did have newspapers and television and radio and movies, and a pre-teenage kid like me could receive signals about what was going on in the world. It could be a show like _All in the Family_. A TV movie called _Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan_. The presence of Stevie Wonder on the radio playlists. Reverence for Jimi Hendrix. I was home sick when _Sesame Street_ went on the air, maybe six or seven years old, and the idea that a kids' show was populated mostly by black people was _pretty fuckin' interesting_: it gave the show a fascinating exoticism. On the low-end, there were those Norman Lear sitcoms like _The Jeffersons__, _Sanford and Son_, and _Good Times_, and even then I got an ugly sense that Jimme Walker as "J.J." was a bad joke in so many ways. And later on, there was _Roots_, which dovetailed with the stuff we were learning in school about slavery. (And later than _that_, my high school library got me access to books like _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_, _Letters from a Birmingham Jail_, _Soul on Ice_ and many others.) 

This period of liberal cultural improvement-- and yeah, it was a period when liberals really did run the culture-- ran on two very appealing tracks. The first, the stated reason, was the desire to create culture that was both relevant and improving the country by reducing prejudice and exposing bigotry. The second may not have been conscious; it was that association with being black with being hip, that desire of many whites to be in touch with something more real, more vital, more creative and even vaguely dangerous, which they saw in black culture. It's been a constant in American culture for more than a century, and everyone from Stanley Crouch to Norman Mailer has addressed it in some way or another. And part of this cultural constant is this: to be regarded as an intelligent person, you have to be hip in some way or another, and this means not merely being aware of black culture, but immersed in it.

(Okay, maybe this is a little too much in the distant past for y'all. But do you remember when gay rights caught on as a civil-rights issue in the mid-1980s? It wans't enough to simply support the rights of gay men and women and to want to see an end to anti-gay laws and violence. One was also expected to develop a sense of gays and lesbians in culture; to catch jokes once hidden, to know who was and who wasn't gay. In other words, to be demonstrably hip to certain things.) 

(This begs an interesting question. Does a particular civil rights cause gain support because the oppressed minority offers some degree of coolness?) 

Years later, I realized this created a catch-22 where the two tracks crossed. Look at this from the perspective of a white kid in a mostly liberal-white community. On the one hand, you're told that you really ought to know a lot about black America. You have to know what slavery was, what Jim Crow was, what poverty was, what prejudice was and how it creates poverty and misery and crime. You have to remember that black people's experience of America isn't like yours, and that you have to keep this in mind because otherwise you might fall into idiotic prejudice, or offend or insult someone. That's all fine and wonderful. But, you're also supposed to know that a person without prejudices would deal with people of different backgrounds in a relaxed and mutually appreciative manner. You wouldn't _care_ what a person's ethnic background was beyond the appreciation of interesting differences. That's what a really _together_ person would be like. 

So you can see the catch-22. It says black people are both _no_ different and _very_ different than we were. You must be sensitive and keep the differences in mind, but you must not give in to _prejudices_, i.e., thinking they're different. 

There's an added bit of damage that comes from matters of hipness and merely Looking Cool... if you have to make an effort to understand another culture, that just marks you as being terminally un-hip. So all the stuff I mentioned above, like reading Malcolm X and watching _Roots_... well, isn't that just another example of how terminally un-hip white people try to grasp things beyond their racial understanding? It really does discourage you from asking honest questions, because you risk looking like a doofus. 

When I was talking to P about this, I told him a story about one of my first trips to New York City. I'd saved up money to buy a movie camera, and conned my mom into taking me to one of their legendarily cheap camera stores to get it at a good price. The store was run by Hasidic Jews-- first time I've ever met any Hasids, actually-- and while I'm watching the guy behind the counter turn Nikon lenses over, I notice the numbers tattooed on his arm. It was one of those genuine _Holy Shit_ moments, followed by two other thoughts. The first was that I was _not_ going to ask about it. The second was a silent prayer that my Mom wouldn't say anything about it, either.

That's not a bad default setting for interactions with other subcultures, I guess: you just try to put all of that stuff out of your mind, and behave reasonably politely and be friendly. Which is probably why a kind of universalist humanism seems both desirable and terminally uncool; it's a set of rules for people who aren't instinctively cool. It's what you hope society could be, but since you have to _think_ your way to it, and establish rules and principles, it's not exactly an exciting world of thrills and adventure. Heck, you could have an encyclopedic knowledge of black America from Crispus Attucks on down, you could tell W.E.B. duBois from Marcus Garvey from Booker T. Washington, you might know who Cheney and Schwerner and Goodman were... but to most people, that's just academic shit that's got nothing to do with what's _real_.

I grew up with a fair amount of these low-level anxieties, but they were just part and parcel of the anxieties I have with people in general. It's mainly a severe self-consciousness, of continually worrying about whether one's continual worrying is putting others off. After a while, the anxieties slough off because they require just too much energy to maintain. 

But given the way I grew up, and the values I absorbed, it was frustrating to _not_ get past these anxieties... and to watch others be more at ease with most of these things. I have no idea if everyone else felt the need to _work_ at being a decent person. But it's clear that younger people are far more at ease with different cultures. No matter how much work I put into _myself_, it hasn't been as effective as, say, being born ten or fifteen years later. You feel like someone who got a _touch_ of polio, worked hard to get to where you could walk and run and maybe dance a little, and then Salk and Sabin come along and toss polio into the dustbin of history. 

Which isn't a horrible metaphor for tomorrow. I don't like those metaphors of big steps, marks of progress, crossing divides, and the like, because they all imply a distance that's clear and distinct. (And there's just too much self-congratulation there, too. I like people giving out head-pats to feel better about themselves.) But tomorrow, we start moving a _lot_ of awful, deforming bullshit into our past.

Not enough words about Donald E. Westlake

Donald E. Westlake died on New Year's Eve, and I'm very sad about this.

Donald Westlake was a terrific writer, and if you pay any attention to crime fiction his name glimmers like platinum because, alongside of Elmore Leonard and Lawrence Block, he was one of the Great Living Old Pros. Maybe some of you have read Carl Hiassen's comic crime novels, and enjoyed them. They're fun, but look, take my word for it, _Donald E. Westlake_ is the master, and if you don't read him you are depriving yourself. 

Westlake wrote more than a hundred books, none of them bad, and some were juist brimming with tight, complex plotting, complex characters, and some of the nimblest writing since P.G. Wodehouse. I used to say that the Dortmunder novels were sort of crime fiction's P.G. Wodehouse, but this shortchanges Westlake-- who also came up with some of the grimmest novels around.

His finest novel may have been _The Ax_. The main character's a middle-aged paper mill manager who's been downsized out of a job. He hasn't been able to tell his wife. He leaves home in the morning, scans the want ads, occasionally getting interviews that go nowhere. He's been living on savings that are quickly running out. Westlake makes the man's desperation as deep and vivid as a paper cut. So when he outlines the scheme to get his career back, you're shocked at its evident brilliance, and even more appalled that he'll go through with it. 

Or, if you don't want to hunt down _The Ax_, rent _The Stepfather_, which is one of those low-budget thrillers that stands out as a real gem of the form. (Ignore the sequels.) Westlake wrote this as a favor to producer Brian Garfield, and the nature of the deal was that they couldn't change the script without Westlake's consent. And luckily enough, they hired an unknown actor named Terry O'Quinn to play the lead, and he was _perfect_. (It reminds me of another thriller worth checking out: _The Silent Partner_, with Elliott Gould and Christopher Plummer.)

How about something lighter? Track down _Kahawa_, an amazing crime story where the thieves go after a multi-ton trainload of Ugandan coffee. It's been years since I read this one (and maybe I oughta get a hardcover), but the characters include mercenaries, diplomats, villagers, assorted black-marketeers, and Idi Amin Dada. 

Or for a REAL comic romp, check out 1977's _Dancing Aztecs_, which is one of the greatest comic novels ever written, Westlake's his version of those epic comedies like _It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World_. Ready for the set-up? Here it is. A stolen gold statue has been smuggled into New York with sixteen plaster copies. Due to a mix-up, the statues have been given to the members of a citywide activist organization. So the crooks have to track them all down to find the real statue. BUT, while the crooks hunt all over Manhattan and its environs to find and break the plaster statues, a marriage among the activists breaks up, one of the crooks falls in love with one of the statue-owners, more and more people become aware of the gold statue and horn in on the chase, and a funeral director has to stage-manage a parade in Harlem full of the worst celebrity lookalikes he can hire. And two thirds into the novel, when we're down to the last statue, Westlake makes us SCREAM when he casually informs us that it's a fake, too. "Someone has made a mistake." 

But let's get to the two names that Westlake's known for, Parker and Dortmunder, who would be those masks of Tragedy and Comedy, except that Dortmunder could be _both_ of them and Parker really can't be either of them, so maybe they're not the masks of Comedy and Tragedy after all. (Yes, I cribbed that gag from Westlake.) 

Parker is an expert thief. He's not a dinner-jacket sophisticate, like Cary Grant in a Hitchcock movie. Parker is as ruthless and bone-dry as a bison skull in the desert. He evaluates a robbery, makes his decisions, lines up a crew (or ir recruited), and goes at it. But, life being as it is, complications ensue. Maybe part of his crew's just unreliable. Maybe the mark has his own agenda. But Parker manages to survive these treacheries, and once in a while, he comes out ahead. In the movies, Parker's turned up as Mel Gibson in _Payback_, Robert Duvall in _The Outfit_, Peter Coyote in _Slayground_, and even Jim Brown in _The Split_, but Lee Marvin was absolutely perfect in _Point Blank_. So think Lee Marvin. 

The funny thing is, the Parker novels were marketed as a numbered-series set of paperbacks, but they're actually very experimental. In most of the Parker novels, Westlake will bring us up to some excruciatingly suspenseful point... and on th next page, he'll double back a day or two earlier with another character's backstory. Quentin Tarantino, a Westlake fan, did the same thing in most of his movies (and yeah, _Reservoir Dogs_ feels like a Parker novel). Westlake spun one of the secondary characters into a short series of novels on his own, where actor-thief Alan Grofield took center stage... and there's a Grofield book and a Parker novel that begin with the exact same chapter. 

Dortmunder, on the other hand, got his start as Parker. Westlake began a Parker novel with the idea that Parker'd have to steal the same gem over and over, but it kept coming out funny. So Westlake came up with a different band of thieves. There's John Dortmunder, the expert planner with the world's worst luck. His crew usually includes eager-to-please buddy Andy Kelp, driver Stan Murch, mountain of fear Tiny Bulcher, and a handful other equally strange small-time crooks. The best Dortmunder film was _The Hot Rock_, and even though people felt Robert Redford was too glamorous to play the hangdog Dortmunder, I thought he was fine (and George Segal was perfect as Kelp). But Westlake once said that Harry Dean Stanton would have been a perfect Dortmunder. 

If you've read a P.G. Wodehouse novel, like _The Code of the Woosters_, you may remember how the plot kept getting more complicated, and how Bertie and Jeeves would find themselves in greater and greater trouble. That's how Dortmunder's jobs go. In _Why Me_, Dortmunder's pulling a simple jewelry-store robbery, and almost by accident he acquires a national-symbol-grade ruby called the Byzantine Fire. So the cops are after him, the FBI's after him, several terrorist groups are after him, and since they're getting rousted by the cops the city's _criminals_ are after him. Or in the short story "Too Many Crooks," which could be the funniest crime story ever written, Dortmunder and Kelp drill into a bank vault and find themselves held hostage by _another_ team of bank robbers. The plots wind up tighter and tighter, and with every twist you're laughing because you can't _believe_ Westlake would _do_ that to his hero. 

Recurring gags, motifs, characters and situations abound, and a series just doesn't work as comfort food without things that _always_ happen or places we _always_ visit. The meetings at the O.J. Bar and Grill are always accompanied by notes on the decor, the "our own brand" bourbon, the signs on the bathrooms, and the hilariously inane arguments of the regulars in the bar. Andy Kelp's an enthusiast for nearly anything, especially electronic gadgetry, and when he steals cars it's always a doctor's Cadillac. Tiny Bulcher, "a monster brought to life by Claymation," terrifies everyone by sitting still. Stan Murch always has a new driving route through Manhattan. Fence Arnie Albright dwells on how detestable he is to his fellow man, but he make sup for it by giving better dollar than that other guy, Stoon. 

There's lots of play in the Dortmunder books too. In _Jimmy the Kid_, Kelp reads a novel that describes a kidnapping in perfect, plausible detail, so he convinces Dortmunder into following its blueprint. The book Kelp finds is _Child Heist_ by one Richard Stark, about a thief named Parker. In _Drowned Hopes_, the Caddie that Kelp's stolen gets reposessed by Ken Levine... a character from Joe Gores's novels. And the same scene turns up, written from Levine's viewpoint, in Gores's novel _32 Cadillacs_. 

The villian of _Drowned Hopes_ is an evil, grizzled, mean-spirited psychopath named "Tom Jimson," which is a great name in itself (as in jimson weed). But it's even more perfect when you recall that Westlake nearly won an Oscar for writing the script for _The Grifters_, from a novel by Jim Thompson. (Fun fact: director Stephen Frears asked Westlake to write the script under the Richard Stark pen name.).

There's just too much of Westlake to cover here. He created the Father Dowling mysteries. He did a nice "Starship Hopeful" series of funny science fiction storis for _Playboy_. He did a biography of Elizabeth Taylor under a pseudonym. He did a couple of mystery weekends with the likes of Gahan Wilson and Stephen King and Peter Straub. He did a good science fiction novel, _Anarchaos_, under the name Curt Clark. He did several series of novels under other pseudonyms, including some 1950s porn novels co-written with Lawerence Block to pay the bills. He did a book about the 1967 rebellion in Anguilla, a tiny Caribbean island whose people revolted _against_ independence and _for_ staying a colony of Great Britain... and Britain sent an invasion force to _put down the rebellion_. This was, other than the Liz Taylor job, Donald Westlake's only _non-fiction_ book. 

This April, Westlake's last novel-- one last Dortmunder, titled _Get Real_-- will be published. 

So, have I given you any incentive to read this wonderful, absolutely wonderful writer?

Happy New Year. Let's talk about the Holocaust.

(Note: Yes, I'm reposting stuff from my old LiveJournal blog.) 

A friend sent me the following item from _The Guardian_. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/03/kubrick-holocaust-installation-wilson-southbank

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Stanley Kubrick worked on an adaptation of Louis Begley's novel _Wartime Lies_. The story was of a young Jewish woman who managed to maneuver herself and her son through wartime Poland, posing as non-Jews. The working title Kubrick used as _Aryan Papers_. Although Kubrick had cast a lead and explored locations in Czechoslovakia, he decided to not make the film. Two art students have been given access to the Kubrick Archivs to develop a presentation of Kubrick's material on the subject. 

Excerpt: "Kubrick put an awful lot of effort into Aryan Papers: writing the screenplay, casting Ter Steege and travelling to the Czech town of Brno as a possible location for wartime Warsaw. That the film was never made seems to be due to a combination of factors. Spielberg's Schindler's List came out in 1993 and Kubrick may have felt beaten to the line. He may also have got sidetracked by his project to make the film AI – which Spielberg ended up making after Kubrick's death."

I can certainly see _that_.

There was piece at _Slate_ this December about how the basic approaches the film industry takes for the Holocaust. It's at http://www.slate.com/id/2207553/, but the basics are: Good but conflicted Germans, Jews who fought back, postwar justice, the lingering scars of the survivors, and Fables. There are some great films among nearly all of these, but it's really easy to simply ride with one of these and wind up with a conventional and not very compelling movie.

It seems to me that if you want to create a work of art that contains the Holocaust, in some kind of essential way, you're going to create something that stresses _hopelessness_. You're addressing the mass murder of millions, and there's no real guarantee that it won't happen again, and otherwise decent people were made complicit in it... well, where's the hope and uplift and moral lesson? There's not a lot there. If you're realistic about life and art, you can't even delude yourself into thinking that your work of art about the Holocaust art is likely to change anything or prevent another one. Picasso's _Guernica_ might inspire our respect, but it didn't give Hitler or Franco or Curtis leMay any second thoughts about bombing cities.

And this is _before_ you start thinking about the marketing campaigns and box-office potential. I would have loved to see what Kubrick would have created from _Wartime Lies_. But if he decided that it couldn't be done or that he couldn't bring himself to do it, I understand.

I think Spielberg once said something about the awful sensation of directing crowds of naked, shivering inmates on _Schindler's List_, and feeling a bit like a Nazi commandant. (That's one thing I like about Spielberg: he's actually very candid when he talks about his work.) Which-- thinking of Terry Southern's _Blue Movie_-- makes me wonder if a funny movie can be made about a filmmaker doing a Holocaust movie and trying to "get it right." Sure, it could be a comedy like _Tropic Thunder_, but there's the potential for something really disturbing there.