Mark W Tiedemann

Category: culture

  • Koan

    A note I jotted to myself sometime in the past.  I don’t recall the circumstances, but the question posed feels universal.

    The spiritualists cringe and argue against any description of self-conscious life as mechanism, that any mere machine is necessarily only an accumulation of parts and processes that can never rise above its own origins.  They offer in its place a description that makes of us a vessel to contain an essential self that is gifted from without, a near complete something that a priori transcends the mechanistic.  From where?  Choose your own myth of origin.  But they all presume a Maker.  The question must then be put—what separates the divinely made from the “naturally” made or, later, the self-made?  Are they not in the end all simply made things and as such all mechanisms?

  • Seekers and Sowhats

    I don’t keep abreast of new television very well.  I’ve drifted into a mental space wherein I’m dimly aware of new things.  I hear about them on the radio or from friends or occasionally I see a notice on a website.  But I’ve long since lost the habit of keeping track.

    So when I started hearing about this new fantasy show, Legend of the Seeker, it seems that it was already airing and I’d heard nothing about it beforehand.  I didn’t get much in the way detail from anyone, other than short recommendations (“Oh, you should see it, it’s good!”) or facial expressions that were difficult to interpret.

    Normally, as I’ve said before, I can watch fantasy.  Movies and television, whatever, I can sit for an hour or two and suspend my disbelief, and just go with it.  I have a very difficult time reading fantasy.  My idea of really good fantasy is basically material that, if it had a more rigorous grounding in the plausible, would be science fiction, but doesn’t make the cut.  I liked the fantasy of The Twilight Zone (both the original series and the 80s remake).  Ray Bradbury comes to mind as a fantasist I can read.  Or Harlan Ellison.  Occasionally Ursula LeGuin.

    In terms of epic, sword & sorcery, thud and blunder stuff, I have no patience.  I very much enjoyed Delany’s Neveryona books, but they were more anti-fantasy.  As was, in its way, China Mieville’s excellent Perdido Street Station.  I enjoyed Hal Duncan’s Vellum though I haven’t yet gone out of my way to read the sequel.  I look at my book shelf and see very little in the way of that sort of fantasy.  Mary Gentle’s terrific Ash saga, Avram Davidson’s Phoenix and the Mirror, Jack Vance’s Lyonesse…

    It’s a short and elite list.  I receive this sort of stuff in the mail now to review and I give them a few pages.  You can see it pretty quickly, certain conventions of language and character, setting and conceit, that work their way between the cracks of the words to say “here there be no sense or reason, only action and portent.”

    As I say, usually I can watch these sorts of things and just go with it.

    I watched most of the premier episode of Legend of the Seeker last week online.  (I can do that now that I have dsl!  It’s cool!)

    I say I watched most of the premier.  Did not finish.  Too much predictability.  Too much of it based on stupidity.

    Let me just take the opening sequence, which is a chase.  We begin in media res with two women fleeing on horseback.  They are not exactly dressed for this, the one wearing a screamingly white gown that billows around her.  This gown is also a swoop neck affair that shows off her chest quite nicely.  Bridget Regan, playing the part of Kahlin, is nothing if not fetching.  More on that later.  I can forgive the wardrobe malfunction under the assumption that they didn’t have time to change clothes—at least until later, when they tell the story of the fall of their order, and you get the distinct notion that there was time not only to change clothes, but to make a better escape, one less fraught with the possibility of imminent capture.

    But back to the chase.  Here are these two women—witches of sorts we learn later, but it is implied by their dress and demeanor—who weigh in at about 115 to 125 pounds, riding two fairly good-size horses.  They are being chased by four men in full medieval-style armor.  Assuming they are the best available, they’ll weigh in between 180 and 220.  Add 30 lbs of armor, a bit more if you include the swords and knives.  Their horses are no bigger.

    But they’re catching up.  There’s a sequence of a bowman shooting from horseback at the two women.  Not a bad shot either, but at full gallop any accuracy would be pure luck.  Nevertheless, he hits one square in the back.

    The wounded one tries to continue, but ends up falling off her horse, rolling down a hill to a stream bed, there to die after the other one—her sister—abandons her horse to minister to her.  The death scene takes a couple of minutes.  A secret book must be gotten to somewhere else.  Leave me, sister, I’m done for.

    Meantime, the four soldiers, who weren’t that damn far behind—close enough, in fact, to hit one of these women with a bow shot—are nowhere to be seen.  Finally they appear at the top of the hill.  Pausing to watch.

    Convinced to continue on, the surviving sister picks herself and runs.  And the four men on horseback, who had been catching up, can’t catch her now.

    At this point I’m thinking, “oh, this isn’t good.”  Not about Kahlin’s plight, but about the story itself.  This is idiot plotting.

    But Kahlin’s an eyefull and worth watching.

    There’s a barrier, a mystical field of energy, which Kahlin manages to open with some magic.  She enters the rift and escapes her pursuers.  Who then sit and argue about whether or not to pursue, and then decide to.  Meanwhile this barrier has obligingly remained open, waiting for them to finish their ruminations, and as soon as they enter, it closes up.

    How come it didn’t close up immediately after Kahlin entered?

    Well, if that happened, then the rest of the show could not proceed along it’s absurd path.

    We come now to the Seeker, who is a young fellow who doesn’t even know he’s special.  He was brought as an infant into this country to be raised by a good man and his wife, who had no children then, if the tangled thread of his origin story is to be understood.  They vowed to do their best.

    They then had another son, who ends up being the guy in charge of the land.  But while dad tells this son that his brother isn’t really his brother, he doesn’t tell him anything else.

    Huh?  Why tell the kid anything?  That would guarantee, of course, that sibling in charge couldn’t be tricked into thinking his brother (not) is evil and to be hunted down in league with the men who had been chasing the witch.  Who has come to find the adopted kid, of course, and the wizard who’d brought him here.

    These people act like idiots in very specific and annoying ways.  The action carries the story as long as you don’t think too hard about any of this, but since motivation all hinges on what all these people know or don’t know, it becomes difficult to understand why they did or do what they did or do.  Simple things, like KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT ABOUT THE KID, HE’S IMPORTANT AND SOME BAD MEN WANT TO KILL HIM.

    But furthermore, the faithful brother, who ostensibly grew up with this orphan as a brother, turns on him without too much deliberation on the word of a stranger who had come to this land from somewhere it should have been impossible to come from.  Because of the barrier, you see.  Familial feeling, presented as solid in the one instance, decays almost instantly.  Now the circumstances would seem sufficient, but given all the other idiocies to this point…

    I said I would come back to the scoopneck gown.  Yes, yes.  Bridget Regan…she’s the stuff of fantasies (sexual in this case, at least in my case), a real beauty, fiery eyes, graceful, fine skin…and a nice bosom.  Would be a shame to hide that bosom.

    Sp when everyone who is supposed to be hooked up for the quest finally is, it’s determined that she needs different clothes.  That white gown would stick out like a bonfire under the right conditions.  Better she wear something that would blend with the forest.  We’re in Robin Hood territory now.  So a friend takes them to his home and they get kitted out.  The wife makes an outfit for Kahlin.  She comes out to show it off.  Very woodlandy, now, long sleeves, leather, green and brown—with a scoopneck front, depending from shoulder tip to shoulder tip.

    Everyone else, mail or female, is pretty much covered up to the chin.  Not Kahlin.  Can’t hide that cleavage, now, can we?

    At this point I turned it off.  I was turned off.  The Seeker acts like a dunce—he’s been told nothing, but that doesn’t forgive his lack of any common sense.  The wizard doesn’t really want to be bothered with all this and thought he’d ducked it by coming to this land on this side of the barrier.  Silly wizard, he knew all about Destiny, which is what the Seeker is caught up in, and should know better.  Things catch up.  And they do.

    There are any number of minor quibbles up to this point, but the major one I have is the rather unsubtle co-option of the religious subtext into a second-rate fantasy plotline.

    The Seeker is Richard Cypher.  How clever.  A cypher, a code, as if we didn’t realize that this was pure allegory.  The code here, of course, is that poor Dick is Jesus.  Look at the plotline.  The evil lord Darken-Rahl took over the land where Cypher was born and, because of the prophecy that the Seeker would find him and kill him, he orders every firstborn male child slaughtered.  Jesus/Moses/Richard escapes, grows to manhood, and has to come back to fulfill the prophecy.  He’s the chosen one, the one who can read the cryptic language in the Book of Lost Shadows (cryptic = code = cypher) and can weild the sword of power (of course you knew there’s be a special sword).  Swords are always good stand-ins for the Cross, of course.

    Richard’s brother is Michael.  I predict at some point in the series Michael will become Richard’s lieutenant—the archangel, avenger, etc.

    Kahlin…intriguing spelling for a name whose roots are apparently from Catherine, which means “pure.”  Hence the white gown?  Her title is Confessor.  Well.  And the men who confess to her fall in love with her.  I’m seeing by circuitous paths a road to Mary here.  Mary Magdalene or the Virgin?  Does it matter?  When she touches a man she is able to make him do her bidding.  (I’m thinking, because of the nature of the effect of her Confessor role, she’s more Magdalene than Mom, but I doubt they’ll push it much past the platonic.)

    It gets thicker, of course, but the bottom line is that whole Seeker saga is loosely based on Christian mythology.  No surprise, a lot of fantasy is.  But, as is also the case in much fantasy, it is Christian mythology through the lens of a Crusader, ala King Arthur, Percival, the knights, etc.  This is Jesus with a sword set to actually supplant the king and free the country.  Robust, aggressive Christian allegory, no wimpy sermons or anything like that, and Richard’s John the Baptist (the wizard Zed) kicks ass.

    And of course, Darken Rahl is just plain evil, much the way Herod the Great was depicted.  He’s easy to hate.  (Darken Rahl…hmm…Darth Raul?  Would they dare?)

    Why am I picking on this little tv show?  Because it is clear that a lot of money has been spent on it.  The acting is pretty good, the sets are nice, the special effects are none too shabby, and some effort was made to establish a story arc that has a lot of symbolic meaning.  Lots of money.  For what is essentially substandard fare.  We are to look at it and be awed.  Kahlin’s marvelous chest is to be ever on display and will probably be ever out of reach, so a degree of ongoing sexual tension will be permanently in place.  Likely as not, she’s a virgin, and probably at risk to lose her powers if she sleeps with a man.  That’s a cheap prediction, but so much else is so derivative in this thing that I’d almost be willing to wager real money on it.  So Richard and Kahlin will travel on, probably collecting a band of followers (merry men?  disciples?) along the way, and never consumate the quite evident desire already between them.

    As I said at the beginning, normally I can watch this sort of thing with nary a twitch.  I can find all the flaws later, but when it comes to movies and television I’m a bit of a sucker.  I always turn into a ten-year-old and am willing to be amazed and delighted and generally that happens.  But sometimes it just doesn’t work.  It just gets more irritating, beginning with the essential idiocy of the characters.  It is a plot driven by people who seem incapable of simply asking a straight question.  Information is withheld for no good reason and the consequences are always dire.  Sure they are.  If you don’t tell someone that there’s a hidden pit with spikes at the bottom in the field they want to walk across, well how hard is it to predict their surprise, shock and horror at betrayal when they step in it?

    This could have been much better.  They have a lot of talent, obviously, but alas no brains.

    Oh, and that magic sword?  Didn’t do Richard a lick of good the first time out.  Is it possible that someone actually has to learn how to do something in this world?  He picked it up and the scrollwork along the blade glowed with promise.  But he lost his first fight, which also cost him the book he was supposed to keep out of Darken Rahl’s hands….

    It may also do well.  But I think largely because the audience will care not a whit for anything other than how it looks and the allegorical buttons it pushes.  And after all, Richard has—wait for it!—A Destiny!  There is no way he can (a) get killed or (b) fail.  Really.  He can’t fail.  People in fantasies with destinies don’t.  It’s in the contract.  To agree to have a destiny commits the powers that grant such things to ensuring that, no matter how few brains the recipient of said destiny possesses or how little ability is demonstrated in using what brains exist, the recipient will, somehow, succeed.

    A neat twist to this would be to discover that Richard is, in fact, Darken Rahl’s son.  That would be interesting when it comes to the final showdown.  Will junior axe dad?  Or will he “save” him?  Stay tuned.  I can’t wait.

    But I won’t watch.  No, not even for Kahlin’s marvelous charms.

  • Quotes

    The desire for social equality is not unmixed with a certain eagerness to be rid of the bother of pity.                               Jean Rostand

    Intelligence would seem to exist primarily as a way to outrun natural selection      Samuel R. Delany, 1995

    Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers need ruin to make them grow.   Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

    Action is consolatory.  It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.  Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates                                                                                                       Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

  • Poetry For Sale

    Last January, Missouri was granted its first official Poet Laureate.  At the inaugural celebration, Walter Bargen read a new poem for the occasion, a poem which spoke to Missouri and dreamers and possibilities, called Moonwalk Missouri.

    The Missouri Center for the Book has produced a fine letterpress broadsheet.  It is now available.  Go to

    http://www.columbiabooksonline.com/

    and click on the Walter Bargen link on the left side.  There you will see at the top two versions.

    The money will go to support the Poet Laureate program, which MCB hosts, and will ensure its continuity.  It’s a little late in the season, perhaps, but these would make good gifts.  They were produced by Little Truck Press on a 1960s era Vandercook SP15 Letterpress, using an essentially obsolete process.

    As president of the Missouri Center for the Book I’d like to add that Walter Bargen has been terrific.  We could not have asked for a better poet laureate and as our first one he has been everything we could have hoped for.  This has been a great program for the state.  Walter has traveled to virtually every corner to date and this has only been the first year of a two-year term.  These broadsheets are excellent commemorations of what are too-rare instances of “official” support for the arts, especially the literary arts.

    In any event, I wanted to let everyone know that these are available.

  • Sibelius

    I love Sibelius. I find his themes, motifs, melodies absolutely immersing. He was touted once as the heir to Beethoven and while I think Dvorak rightly deserves that title, in the 20th Century it’s hard to beat Sibelius.

    I’m reading Alex Ross’s history of music in the 20th Century, The Rest Is Noise. It’s a fine book. Ross has a gift. Every once in a while I run across a piece of writing that is just begging to be shared. Today I read this, about the place where Sibelius lived.

    Ainola stands much as Sibelius left it. The atmosphere of the house is heavy and musty, as if the composer’s spirit were still pent up inside. But you get a different feeling when you walk into the forest that stretches out on one side of the house. The treetops meet in an endless curving canopy, tendrils of sunlight dangling down. The ground is uncluttered: many paths fork among the trunks. Venturing a little farther into the wood, you lose sight of all human habitation. A profound stillness descends. The light begins to fail, the mists roll in. After a while, you may begin to wonder if you will ever find your way back. Many times in Sibelius’s music the exaltation of natural sublimity gives way to inchoate fear, which has less to do with the outer landscape than with the inner one, the forest of the mind.

    Mm!

    And yes, you can certainly get that from the music. Especially the later symphonies. But I can talk about that another time. For now, I just wanted to share this piece of exceptional writing.

  • Why I Write

    From time to time someone asks me (as, no doubt, they ask other writers) why I do it.  Why, specifically, I write fiction as opposed to nonfiction.  It really is hard to explain to those who seem tone-deaf to what we call Art.  Sometimes it’s hard to explain to yourself.  The short answer for me is that I love it.  I love creating stories and weird stuff and making up plots, because I always loved stories.  (When I was a kid, I’d watch movies in which a group of people are thrust into a really cool adventure and at some point one of them would talk about wanting to just go home and having everything return to normal.  And, as a kid, I’d think why would you want to do that?  Can’t you see that what you’re doing now is so much cooler than going back to a dull life?  That was a kid talking, of course, because the stories were in fact so much cooler than what passed for my “real life.”  It’s only later that you realize that part of your “real” life was the freedom to indulge stories, pretend, and thrust yourself—quite safely—into adventures.)  Telling stories just felt like the coolest thing to do.

    But then you grow up and actually try to do it and if you stick with it long enough to discover all sorts of other aspects to it that you couldn’t imagine as a kid just looking for a neat ride.  And that’s the art.  And that is hard to describe to people who don’t read fiction, who don’t Get It.

    Dan Simmons wrote a novel called The Crook Factory about Ernest Hemingway in WWII.  He lived in Cuba then and he ran an amateur spy ring, hunting submarines, for a time.  This much is true.  Simmons built a very intricate and thrilling novel around it.  His viewpoint character, though, is a FBI agent who is one of those with the tin ear, who doesn’t Get It, why someone would write fiction.

    Late in the novel they have a conversation about it.  Here is part of it.

    “Why do you do it?”

    “Do what?

    “Write fiction rather than write about true things.”

    Hemingway shook his head.  “It’s hard to be a great writer, Lucas, if you love the world and living in it and you love special people.  It’s even harder when you love so many places.  You can’t just transcribe things from the outside in, that’s photography.  You have to do it the way Cezanne did, from inside yourself.  That’s art.  You have to do it from inside yourself.  Do you understand?”

    “No.”

    Hemingway sighed softly and nodded.  “It’s like listening to people,  LUcas.  If their experiences are vivid, they become a part of you, whether or not their stories are bullshit or not.  It doesn’t matter.  After a while, their experiences get to be more vivid than your own.  Then you mix it all together.  You invent from your own life stories and from all of theirs, and after a while it doesn’t matter which is which…what’s yours and what’s theirs, what was true and what was bullshit.  It’s all true then.  It’s the country you know, and the weather.  Everyone you know…the trick in fiction is like the trick in packing a boat just so without losing trim.  There are a thousand intangibles that have to be crammed into every sentence.  Most of it should not visible, just suggested…

    “Anyway, the…trick is to write truer than true.  And that’s why I write fiction rather than fact.”

    That’s one way to describe it.  I didn’t realize truth had anything to do with it until I read an Algis Budrys review of a Gene Wolfe novel.  He said of Wolfe that he told the truth well.  I puzzled over that for a time before it clicked.  I’d been saying something of the sort for a long time concerning philosophy—that there’s truth and then there’s fact.  Occasionally the two meet and become tangled up and are in many respects the same thing, but mostly there are facts, which have no meaning.  Truth is the meaning, which must be derived or extrapolated from fact.  Which led me to the conclusion that Truth is a process, an ongoing experience of recognition.  One of the places I’ve found it has been in good fiction.

    I don’t know if Hemingway ever actually said the above—it sounds like something he would have said, though, which makes it true, whether there is the fact of it or not.  And that is what fiction does.

  • The Curmudgeon Speaks

    The curmudgeon in repose observes the feckless maunderings of the primates in their dispeptic self-justifications.  Christmas is coming.  You can see it, feel it, sense it.  Not only in the more pleasant garnishments appearing too early (and hopefully) in stores and streets, but in the renewed efforts of those who can’t get past their own distorted misapprehensions and so fling the feces of their discontent at the crowds.

    A couple years ago I received one these from an anonymous source.  It purports to be a letter from Ben Stein, based on a broadcast he did one Sunday on CBS.  From the page you’ll see that it was added to, taken out of context, and corrupted.  The source from whom I received it this year surprised me, so I shot back the link to this site.  Naturally, the person in question was miffed.  No one likes to be told they’ve been a patsy.

    There’s an ugliness to this kind of thing that upsets me a lot.  Basically, it is the linkage of No Prayer to Ruin and Death.  All those people in New Orleans, in this formulation, lost their homes and lives because people elsewhere had stopped praying.  So god let the waves in to punish us—and then didn’t bother to tell us that’s what he’d done.

    Never mind the whole dubious connection between prayer and anything remotely like the salvation of a whole city from a hurricane.  I recall once seeing a news broadcast from Italy of a priest standing adamnantly flinging holy water at approaching lava from a volcano, as if it would do anything to dissuade the destruction to avert.  Coincidence and serendipity account for enough weird conjugations in this world so anyone with a mind toward conflating unrelated events can point and say “See!  It Works!”  But really, all this attests is the cloying desire to feel that something in the universe actually cares other than your next door neighbor or the dog.

    Basically the notion here is what?  We have barred public prayer from public school classrooms and tossed a couple of creches off public property and the result is that god, irked, inundates a city?  Or just allows it to happen?  And why would that be when the overwhelming majority of citizens in this country profess to believe in god and pray a good deal?  Once again we are told god is some kind of emotionally-stunted adolescent who needs our total attention, lest he throw a tantrum and kill a few hundred thousand people every now and then.  And then we go to church and are exhorted to give thanks to a god who “loves us” so much that…

    I don’t need to address in detail, you all know what I mean.

    Come on.  Do people really buy that?  I mean, the whole Christmas decoration thing is irritating and I can understand people not wanting their holiday messed up with politics, but to make the extra leap and suggest that we’re being punished over some superstitious equivalent of not throwing salt over our left shoulder when we spill it is a bit much.

    Yeah, I know, some people really do think that way, but a lot of other people just tacitly let it go by as challenging it might make them look like Scrooge or something.  It’s such nonsense.  Why shouldn’t we be able to call something like this garbage without looking like curmudgeons?  It’s ugly.  It’s false.  It’s a lie on its face.  But some people just have to let the rest of us know how much we’re Not Getting It.  Some people have to send these lovely missives out just so we don’t get the feeling that Christmas is a time of love and good cheer and giving and that we should feel better about the world.  Some people just have to act like the midges they are and try to make us the same way.

    Sigh…. and just when I was starting to feel festive.

    So the holiday season begins.

    Bah Humbug.

  • Rio Bravo

    I had to go to Wal-Mart this past weekend.  I know, I know, big box store, destructive of small town America, yadda-yadda.  I hate them, but once a year we do a Wal-Mart run for all kinds of stuff that, frankly, just ain’t as cheap anywhere else—toilet paper, vitamins, tissue paper, day-to-day Stuff.

    Usually I go with Donna.  This time she was in Iowa and I did it solo.

    Since I was there anyway, I browsed the big stack of remainder DVDs they always have and I went a little bonkers.  I bought the first season of the original Robin Hood with Richard Greene.  I remember the show as a kid and loved it, so for $5.00, why not?  (A real stitch, too, to see all these young actors who later did so much better—a skinny Leo McKern was a real hoot!)

    Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Shane, The Mask of Zorro… I’m filling gaps sort of.  But I came home and immediately watched Rio Bravo.  You know, the movie got made over at least twice, maybe three times.  The best remake was El Dorado, but the original has something about it that the rest lack.  I loved the soundtrack, the overamplified gunshots, the seriously deficient acting of Rickie Nelson.  It’s a real jumbled mess, you know.  Dean Martin’s performance was the best thing in the film and it’s actually really damn good.  Wayne was, well, John Wayne.

    There are two John Wayne movies from back then that I think showcased what the man could actually do.  I think he was such an icon that he really couldn’t be seen as anything else, so some of his performances were seriously underappreciated.  Anyone who thinks the man couldn’t act hasn’t seen The Searchers, which is a very disturbing movie and Wayne played a very disturbed character.  The other one was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  Wayne isn’t the main character.  Not quite a supporting role, but definitely part of an ensemble, and it really is a rather convincing, sometimes moving performance.  It’s very much about the waining (pardon the pun) of the macho guy of the West.  His character is tough, independent, building his life competently, laying plans, and being, in the larger scheme of things, a Good Man.  But he loses it all to the educated Easterner who shows up in the guise of Jimmy Stewart carrying a stack of law books.  Both men get a lesson in realities, but where the lesson destroys one, it makes the other, and it is anything but a simple formula western.

    (I suppose you could throw Red River in there as well, but then we could go down the list of great Wayne westerns that were just…well, pretty fine, actually.)
    Rio Bravo, though, is the pure stuff of early western myth.  It’s formula to the core, but Howard Hawks made it work like a well-tuned V-8.  The photography was terrific and this DVD had restored Technicolor print.  When Technicolor was good it was the best.  There were times, though, when it didn’t work very well, but that was the cinematographers’ fault.  Here it works.

    One thing, though—Angie Dickinson.  She got better, but she really wasn’t a very good actress.  Nice to look at though, and she actually held her own against Wayne, but…well, she got better.

    Wayne became a target in the Sixties and Seventies for people who were intolerant of any kind of unapologetic patriotism, and he did overdo the flagwaving.  It’s a shame, but it was a war of symbols.  When you talk to people who knew him, the public image was somewhat at odds with the man himself.  I spoke once with George Takei about him.  Takei was in The Green Berets with Wayne and, despite their differences politically, he had nothing but nice things to say about Wayne, who labeled him Captain Sulu from day one.  Takei said the rule on the set was No Politics.  It was a smooth, cordial set, and Wayne was responsible for keeping the latent heat at a manageable level, an impressive feat given the subject of the film and time it was being made.

    Wayne avoided military service in WWII because he had a family.  I don’t know exactly how that worked—lots of men with families went—but he somehow made the argument that his presence in films would be more beneficial than his presence on a battlefield.  Depending on how you look at it, he was right.  It raises the question of how authentic one needs to be to espouse patriotic feeling.  Did Waynes later flagwaving require that he make the ultimate sacrifice, or could he be a patriot without needing to wear a uniform?  He put on a television special in the late Sixties about America.  It was a bombastic jeremiad about how wonderful the country is.  He did, however, get a lot of interesting people on it, like Robert Culp, who was very much an anti-war protestor at the time.  Thinking back on it now, I realize that at no point in it did he advocate going to Vietnam.  He never said that to be a Good American one had to put on a uniform and pick up a gun.  He just pushed the idea that the country was worth loving.

    His last film, The Shootist, was a sad one.  He went out in a blaze of gunfire, taking out a number of old enemies in one last shoot-out.  It can be read as an unapologetic, last hurrah for the way of the gun.  But it was also an admission that times had changed and he was dying, and the fitting end to his life would be to die as he lived.  A little over the top, that, but in its way bravely tragic.  After seeing it, one could go back over a long body of work to see elements of that tragic admission that this was all over.  And probably just as well.  Nathan rescued Lucy from the Indians, brought her home, and then had to leave.  He didn’t belong anymore.

    Wayne was one of the first and for a long time the only Big Name Star who allowed himself to be killed on screen.  I don’t know if that was his idea or if he just accepted it as a necessary part of good storytelling.  But there are many Wayne movies wherein the “hero” must leave, because the violence necessary to resolve the conflict makes him unsuitable for the world he has just made safe.  I think that gets overlooked a lot.  Too much.

  • So It Begins

    This is a charming little story.

    Priest dumps all over his parishioners.

    Now, I was never a Catholic, but I once considered marrying a Catholic girl and went through some of the obligatory classes at her church.  We got to the part about promising to raise the children Catholic and I said no, that wouldn’t happen, and he (the priest) said then we couldn’t be married in the church and I said fine, then we’d continue living in sin and there wouldn’t be any children.

    Kind of brought the whole relationship to a screeching halt, if you take my meaning.  Probably the best thing for everyone concerned.

    I tell you this to give you some idea how I feel about priests (of any religious persuasion) threatening their audience.

  • Quotes

    A few of these seem particularly poignant given current events.

    They say Mitterand has 100 lovers.  One has AIDS but he doesn’t know which one.  Bushg has 100 bodyguards.  One is a terrorist, but he doesn’t know which one.  Gorbachev has 100 economic advisers.  One is smart, but he doesn’t know which one.                  Mikhail Gorbachev, 1990

    I’m Vanilli because Milli is in the White House.           Ted Kennedy at a Christmas PArt, dressed as Milli Vanilli,1990

    I believed in [Jim] Morrison’s incantation.  Break on through.  Kill the pigs.  Destroy.  Loot…All that shit.  Anything goes.  Anything.  I tried anything in that state.                                                   Oliver Stone, 1991