Infospigot: The Chronicles

Old Business

I'm always a little relieved to discover that I'm not the only person in the world with procrastination and lack-of-work discipline issues. We watched the movie "Adaptation" again; we saw it on DVD around the time it came out, but I didn't remember it well, and I certainly didn't recall how much it dwells on the scriptwriter's neuroses and lack of productivity. One passage, a voiceover as the writer sits down to his assignment, is perfect: "To begin... To begin... How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. So I need to establish the themes. Maybe a banana nut. That's a good muffin."

So, after having gone to the kitchen to refill my coffee cup, here's something new on the procrastination/discipline front: a Wednesday op-ed from The New York Times on the biology of willpower. The basic take is this: We only have so much self-control; if you spend it on one thing--getting your writing assignment done on time--then you won't have as much left over for that other good habit you want to pursue, like working out. But that's not the end of the story. If you understand you're working with a limited store of self-control, you can manage the supply; and the researchers say that practicing this kind of control is a form of exercise: it actually helps you develop more willpower:

"... It can be counterproductive to work toward multiple goals at the same time if your willpower cannot cover all the efforts that are required. Concentrating your effort on one or at most a few goals at a time increases the odds of success.

"Focusing on success is important because willpower can grow in the long term. Like a muscle, willpower seems to become stronger with use. The idea of exercising willpower is seen in military boot camp, where recruits are trained to overcome one challenge after another.

"In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well."

***

And speaking of procrastination: Here's something held over from a week ago. Robert Fagles, the most recent great translator of Homer and Virgil and others, died last week (here's the New York Times obit; and here's a little side-by-side comparison of his translations compared to past masters of the art--Fitzgerald, Pope, and Chapman). Nothing to say, really, except to take note of someone who was a superb storyteller in his own right.

"... They harnessed oxen and mules to wagons,
they assembled before the city walls with all good speed
and for nine days hauled in a boundless store of timber.
But when the tenth Dawn brought light to the mortal world
they carried gallant Hector forth, weeping tears,
and they placed his corpse aloft the pyre's crest,
flung a torch and set it all aflame.

"At last,
when young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more,
the people massed around illustrious Hector's pyre . . .
And once they'd gathered, crowding the meeting grounds,
they first put out the fires with glistening wine,
wherever the flames still burned in all their fury.
Then they collected the white bones of Hector--
all his brothers, his friends-in-arms, mourning,
and warm tears came streaming down their cheeks.
They placed the bones they found in a golden chest,
shrouding them round and round in soft purple cloths.
They quickly lowered the chest in a deep, hollow grave
and over it piled a cope of huge stones closely set,
then hastily heaped a barrow, posted lookouts all around
for fear the Achaean combat troops would launch their attack
before the time agreed. And once they'd heaped the mound
they turned back home to Troy, and gathering once again
they shared a splendid funeral feast in Hector's honor,
held in the house of Priam, king by will of Zeus.

"And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses."

--Robert Fagles: "The Iliad," Book 24

Technorati Tags: fagles, new york times, writiing

No Tele, Plenty of Vision

I've mentioned several times that we've become TV-less here at the HQ. That's true, and a truly wrenching experience that I'm backing into; but it's also not like the old days -- pre-DVD, pre-VCR --when turning off your TV was the media survival equivalent of pouring a drum of ice water on the fire you were counting on to keep you alive through the winter. In other words, our little electronic fireplace can still keep us warm. The "tele-" part of the TV might be switched off for now, but there's plenty of "vision" left in the box if you have the requisite hardware hooked up.

We have some DVDs of old TV shows: "SCTV" and "Saturday Night Live," "NewsRadio" and "Mad About You" and "Taxi," too. "NewsRadio" is the only one we've been watching; Phil Hartmann's show all the way, and I'm simultaneously surprised by how good he could be and shocked, still, that he's dead.

But you could say TV on DVD -- even inspired TV, which I admit exists -- is nothing but the vast wasteland without the commercials. True, but that's a great improvement. The last week or so, we've gone on to the part of the vast wasteland that comes out first-run in theaters and then comes home on DVD: movies.

We've been watching a mixture of old favorites and some stuff we've been curious about. To wit, the past five days have featured "Young Frankenstein," "A Night at the Opera," "Mr. Brooks," "The Flying Scotsman," and "Zodiac." The capsule reactions and reviews:

"Young Frankenstein": First viewed decades ago. Not as sharp or funny as I remembered it. Teri Garr and Marty Feldman -- not as funny. Neither was Madeline Kahn. Cloris Leachman: inspired. Gene Wilder -- nah. Peter Boyle and Kenneth Mars: very good. But the main thing: The first time through this and other Mel Brooks films, you don't really mind his penchant for trying to pound you into submission, for the constant reminders that what you're watching is funny. Coming back to it, some of the bits are inspired, but more are painful. I'll come back to this in 2020 or so.

"A Night at the Opera": Wanted to see this after watching the last third, close-captioned, on a TV at the bar where we occasionally go for pizza and beer on Friday nights. It's as good as I've always though it was -- which is very, very good.

"Mr. Brooks": You sit down and willingly watch Kevin Costner and Demi Moore, you've got no right to complain about it. And for the first half of the movie, in which Costner plays a company CEO who's also a kinky serial killer and Moore is the multimillionaire homicide detective fumbling to find him, I wasn't inclined to gripe. Much. But after Costner's daughter turned out to be a killer, too; and after daddy had to go down to Stanford and commit a copycat murder to get his girl off the hook; and after daddy set up a dazzling plot to get rid of the annoying Moore and some idiot who accidentally figured out daddy was a killer; and after daddy has a nightmare lifted right out of "Carrie" -- after all that, the movie went from interestingly implausible to absurd. William Hurt was given the scary job of being Costner's alter ego and did more than OK, as usual.

"The Flying Scotsman": True story of a Scots cyclist who sets out to break one of the legendary marks in cycling -- the one-hour record -- and does it on a home-built bike. Find it and rent it if you're remotely interested in the world of bicycle racing or in the world of depressed Scotsmen. So: kudos for the story. But the movie shares the usual modern flaw of minimizing characterization in favor of plot. Yes, movies have always had to find dramatic shortcuts to inform you why George "It's a Wonderful Life" Bailey is the way he is and why he was a big enough sap to stay in Hooterville and try to run his family's stupid bank. But compare the time and detail Frank Capra devotes to explaining George to the stick figures thrown at you in "Mr. Brooks." Capra, in the midst of a light entertainment, practically gives us "War and Peace"; in the midst of what someone must fancy to be a psychological thriller, "Mr. Brooks" barely matches "Ren and Stimpy" in terms of character development.

"Zodiac": Continues a trend that began several weeks ago when watching, "The Hoax," an adaptation of Clifford Irving's account of inventing Howard Hughes's autobiography. The trend is that people I've worked with -- Frank McCulloch in "The Hoax," Paul Avery in "Zodiac" -- are showing up as characters in movies (if you've seen these and your curious about where I am, I'm the guy berating some poor obit writer in the background). But on to the movie: I though it was good, almost great; I think that's because the movie actually spends time with the characters -- though here again, would it be too much to ask the writer and director to give us a little on why Avery was such a wildman and why Robert Graysmith, the editorial cartoonist who is the movie's main character, became so obsessed with the case? Maybe not, though; maybe both characters, the overwhelming dimension of their dysfunction and obsession, is enough. That perhaps involuntary spurt of bile aside, "Zodiac" was worth the now-extraordinary two hours and thirty-eight minutes running time.

'Made It Ma! Top of the World!'

Deplorable movie moms: A brief tribute on this most maternal of days.

Ma Jarrett ("White Heat")
Margaret White (Carrie's mom in "Carrie")
Elizabeth Stroud ("Birdman of Alcatraz")
Kate "Ma" Barker ("Bloody Mama")
Lady Macbeth ("Macbeth," especially the Roman Polanski version)
"Ma" Alien ("Aliens," especially)
Zinnia Wormwood ("Matilda")
Petal Bear ("The Shipping News")
Ma Vicious ("Sid and Nancy")

'Beyond Vietnam' ... and Beyond Iraq

Kevin Morrison, an old softball teammate of mine, just put together a four-minute montage of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech at the Riverside Church in New York. He juxtaposes images of Iraq over King's words to devastating effect. Kevin also did a Q and A on the historical context of King's speech, available at a blog called Pop + Politics.

Technorati Tags: bush, iraq, vietnam

Today's Reading

Kate pointed this story out in today's New York Times, and read it aloud:

"He Confirmed It, Yes He Did: The Wicked Witch Was Dead"

"Like any coroner, he has seen some things. But one case stays with him nearly 70 years after the fact, like some old song he can’t get out of his head.

"He couldn’t shake this case even if he wanted to, what with all the videotapes, the DVDs, the television broadcasts replaying the gruesome aftermath over and over, in vivid Technicolor. Those striped socks, curling back like a pair of deflating noisemakers. ...

"The coroner’s name is Meinhardt Raabe, and he lives in a retirement community tucked between here and there. He can’t see or hear too well, and his short legs need the assistance of a three-wheeled walker with hand brakes. But none of this means that at 91 he has forgotten much, because he hasn’t — especially about that case."

It might be hard to believe a profile on one of the bit players in "The Wizard of Oz" might make compelling fare, but the story's worth reading just for the writer's touch; the story he tells is touching, too. There's a catch, though: For a reason that escapes me--probably because this is the work of a highlighted national columnist, Dan Barry--the story is only available online as part of the Times Select service (we get Times select because we shell out for a daily subscription to the paper). It's hard to see how this really helps the Times much. It's one thing to put op-ed columnists and older-than-two-week archives under wraps and make people pay to see them, though I wonder if even that's a winning proposition in the long term. This is just a lovely slice of life, and it comes as something of a rude surprise that it can't be shared (unless, I suppose, people want to make do with email copies).

Technorati Tags: media, new york times

Contentment

"... And I mean, I just don't know how anybody could enjoy anything more than I enjoy reading Charlton Heston's autobiography and, you know, getting up in the morning and having the cup of cold coffee that's been waiting for me all night still there for me to drink in the morning, and no cockroach or fly has died in it overnight--I'm just so thrilled when I get up, and I see that coffee there, just the way I want it, I just can't imagine enjoying something else any more than that. I mean, obviously if the cockroach--if there is a dead cockroach in it, then I just have a feeling of disappointment, and I'm sad. ..."

--Wallace Shawn, "My Dinner with Andre," 1981

Flying Back

There will be plenty of East Coast trip postscripts to come, but for now: We're sitting in a terminal at Kennedy airport; outside, it's about 100, and even people who have been working inside all day are complainng about the heat. Outside, one big difference between city dwellers and suburban folk shows itself. The urban types are out on the streets, walking to the subway, shopping, whatever they have to do. It's not like the sidewalks were packed in my brother's neighborhood, but people were out and about, even if lots of us looked a little wilted. Out in the suburbs: No one on the street, anywere; people out there -- and "out there" is probably any suburb you can think of -- live strictly a doorway to doorway existence during the worst weather. Glad the power grid is holding up for everyone so far.

This morning, getting ready to leave John and Dawn's place, we were talking about the latest bicycle fatality in the Oakland Hills. A guy out for a ride was hit head on up there on Skyline Boulevard, within a half mile or so of where I crashed in June, by a motorcyclist; the cyclist died of his injuries, the motorcyclist apparently walked away from the wreck. Not to place blame without knowing what really happened, but one of the risks bicyclists take riding up in the hills, a risk that's increased a lot in the last 20 years, is that we share the road with motorcycle riders and motorists who treat the twisting roads like a raceway challenge. I've often worried about getting hit up there.

Anyway. At one point, John said, "Hey, did you hear about that Wired editor who died during the marathon?" I hadn't. I looked up "wired editor marathon" onlne, and found a story on Wired News. The editor who died during the marathon was a guy named Bill Goggins. I knew him from my stint at the magazine in 1998 and from my days freelancing for the magazine. Bill was 43, and the news accounts say that he collapsed at mile 24 of the San Francisco Marathon last weekend and couldn't be revived. A friend who saw him at mile 21 said he was smiling and running strong, and a mutual friend had seen him twice in recent days and said he seemed fine. The thing about Bill, whom I never got to know well enough, was that he was brilliant and funny and charming and had a big heart that was right there for anyone to see. Forty-three. Hard to believe. See you, Bill, wherever you are.

Heroes and Hoopleheads

"Deadwood" begins its third season tonight, a cause for division in our household. I love the show, with all its profanity and violence; for the same reasons, Kate can't tolerate it.

It has become commonplace to equate the show's fine scriptwriting with the work of Shakespeare (just Google shakespeare deadwood and you'll see what I mean). We create cliches because there's some truth in them, and that one's no exception. I've been tempted to stop episodes and transcribe characters' speeches just for the language. There's more to the show than the writing, though: It's beautifully acted. It's beautifully filmed. It's violent and tense as hell.

It's also conventional wisdom to think of "Deadwood" and the post-modern westerns dating back to "The Wild Bunch" as a new and better breed of drama: More frank about the blood and injustice and cynicism that older westerns soft-peddled. If you think so -- and I incline to that way of thinking myself -- check out A.O. Scott's long, long piece in today's New York Times on the DVD re-release of some of the John Wayne/John Ford westerns. He touches on how thoroughly Ford's visual sense, especially in "The Searchers," affected later filmmakers and films. But the heart of Scott's essay has to do with Ford's vision of the West and its settlement:

"The Indian wars of the post-Civil War era form a tragic backdrop in most of Ford's post-World War II westerns, much as the earlier conflicts between settlers and natives did in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. That the Indians are defending their land, and enacting their own vengeance for earlier attacks, is widely acknowledged, even insisted upon. The real subject, though, is not how the West was conquered, but how — according to what codes, values and customs — it will be governed. The real battles are internal, and they turn on the character of the society being forged, in violence, by the settlers. Where, in this new society, will the frontier be drawn between vengeance and justice? Between loyalty to one's kind and the more abstract obligations of human decency? Between the rule of law and the law of the jungle? Between virtue and power? Between — to paraphrase one of Ford's best-known and most controversial formulations — truth and legend?

"Ford's way of posing these questions seems more urgent — and more subtle — now than it may have at the time, precisely because his films are so overtly concerned with the kind of moral argument that is, or should be, at the center of American political discourse at a time of war and terrorism. He is concerned not as much with the conflict between good and evil as with contradictory notions of right, with the contradictory tensions that bedevil people who are, in the larger scheme, on the same side. When should we fight? How should we conduct ourselves when we must? In 'Fort Apache,' for example, the elaborate codes of military duty, without which the intricate and closely observed society of the isolated fort would fall apart, are exactly what lead it toward catastrophe. Wayne, as a savvy and moderate-tempered officer, has no choice but to obey his headstrong and vainglorious commander, played by Henry Fonda, who provokes an unnecessary and disastrous confrontation with the Apaches. In the end, Wayne, smiling mysteriously, tells a group of eager journalists that Fonda's character was a brave and brilliant military tactician. It's a lie, but apparently the public does not require — or can't handle — the truth.

"In telling it, Wayne is writing himself out of history, which is also his fate in 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' (not, unfortunately, one of the discs in the Warner box). That film — which contains the famous line 'When legend becomes fact, print the legend!' —throws Wayne's man of action and James Stewart's man of principle into a wary, rivalrous alliance. Their common enemy is an almost cartoonish thug played by Lee Marvin, but the real conflict is between Stewart's lawyer and Wayne's mysterious gunman, one of whom will be remembered as the man who shot Liberty Valance.

"What we learn, in the course of the film's long flashbacks, is that the triumph of civilization over barbarism is founded on a necessary lie, and that underneath its polished procedures and high-minded institutions is a buried legacy of bloodshed. The idea that virtue can exist without violence is as untenable, as unrealistic, as the belief — central to the revisionist tradition, and advanced with particular fervor in HBO's 'Deadwood' — that human society is defined by gradations of brutality, raw power, cynicism and greed.

"If only things were that simple. But everywhere you look in Ford's world — certainly in 'Fort Apache,' in 'The Searchers,' in 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' — you see truth shading into lie, righteousness into brutality, high honor into blind obedience. You also see, in the boisterous emoting of the secondary characters, the society that these confused ideals and complicated heroes exist to preserve: a place where people can dance (frequently), drink (constantly), flirt (occasionally) and act silly.

Technorati Tags: tv, deadwood

'Army Issues Warning About Iraq Documentary'

Someone recently told me in passing -- someone who should know, since he's there now -- that what's been happening in Iraq the last 38 months "doesn't really rate the word 'war.' " I think I understand the sentiment. We shouldn't raise the significance of a battle with a bunch of murderous thugs ("primitive screwheads" is the term my acquaintance used) with such an important appellation. But to me, even sheltered as I am from the reality of what's really happening over there, the suggestion this isn't a war just doesn't ring true. Call it what you want: People are dying by the thousands -- by the tens of thousands -- in a sustained siege of organized violence. Call it a picnic or a police action or the latest beachhead for democracy, the dead and wounded and the shattered pile up just the same, whether we're paying attention or not.

HBO is about to air a documentary on one of the remarkable stories of the war: the work of the frontline U.S. military trauma hospitals in Iraq. It is not an untold story: many big media organizations have dipped their toe into it already. The HBO movie, "Baghdad ER," is a little different, though, in that it's the product of a longer-term immersion into the world of combat medicine. The makers spent two months filming in a combat trauma hospital in Baghdad's Green Zone. And the movie's 63-minute length represents more than the usual gnat's-attention-span treatment that TV news accords such stories.

"Baghdad ER" is scheduled to air on May 21. It's graphic. The filmmakers say so, and the Army is backing them up, with the service's surgeon general issuing a memo advising the film may provoke flashbacks or nightmares among those who have served in Iraq.

(The New York Times had a different spin on the story over the weekend. Quoting Army sources, a Saturday article says the Army is backing away from the documentary over concerns "that its grim medical scenes could demoralize soldiers and their families and negatively affect public opinion about the war.")

Technorati Tags: iraq

The 11th

Here in the Bay Area, I left work early and went with Kate, who is off school this week, to see a late-afternoon matinee of "Inside Man." It holds up as an entertainment. The show was at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, recently pictured for its marquee broadside on fascism. It's one of the Bay Area's great old movie houses, subdivided, as they all are, a couple decades ago. But still beautiful in a way the old movie palaces are and still impressive for its outsize scale. We caught sight of it in the rain after parking on a hillside a couple short blocks away: its magnificent (and still operational) old sign backwards and stark. Afterwards, we thought about where we might be able to eat dinner and look out on the Bay while the rain fell. Kate came up with a true inspiration: The Dead Fish, a place in Crockett, about 20 miles north of Oakland overlooking the Carquinez Strait, the place where all the water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, and all the tributaries and reservoirs and mountains beyond, spills out into the Bay. We couldn't get a window table in the restaurant, but we found one in the lounge and had dinner gazing out on the channel and on the bridges that carry Interstate 80 across the water. Then we drove back to Berkeley.

In Chicago, I hear it was the kind of April day that belies the lack of greenery on the Wrigley Field vines (saw them on a baseball highlights reel this evening). It was 53 years ago today that Mom and Dad were married down at St. Kilian's, 87th and May streets, just four blocks from where Mom grew up. Not everyone in the Irish Catholic parish -- notably its pastor -- was too thrilled at the idea of one of the children who'd grown up coming to his church and school marrying an outsider -- that is, a Norwegian Lutheran. But there's no accounting for affairs of the heart, and everyone got over the mixed marriage they bore witness to that day. Today, Dad drove down from his place on the Northwest Side to Mom's grave and left a spring bouquet -- artificial flowers, but they'll last (I've never seen Mom's place down there without something, something she would have liked, to mark the spot). He stopped for a couple of White Castle hamburgers on the way back north.

Later, we talked on the phone about the cemetery and White Castle a little and a lot more about old movie houses, which Mom loved. The Cosmo, which I'm guessing was short for Cosmopolitan, in particular. I know it was air-conditioned in the summer and that the double bills changed twice a week. I don't know whether it had much of a sign, but Dad's guess is that the its gone now.

Technorati Tags: berkeley, california, chicago, rain, weather