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30 May 2004
In honor of the Memorial Day weekend I decided to start packing my collection of WWII books, which filled up two tall
bookcases in the center room of my loft. None of the books is exceptionally rare or valuable, but many of them are hard to
find and most of them are good reading copies in excellent condition. It's a fine small (or not so small) collection of the
principal literature on the war. I hate to commit it to boxes and to the tender ministrations of long-haul movers, but there's
no choice.
I once followed the whole route of Patton's Third Army during the war, from its first base in the English town of Swindon
by way of Utah Beach and Bastogne all the way to Austria, where Patton saved the Lipizzaner Stallions and where my friend
and mentor Lincoln Kirstein saved much of the looted art of Europe, hidden in an Austrian salt mine awaiting installation
in a museum Hitler was going to build in Linz in honor of his mother. (In his last days, Hitler said that if the German people
wanted to erect some small monument in honor of his service to the Fatherland, they should complete the Hitler Mother Museum.
He was a sentimental and modest man to the very end.)
It was an amazing journey, and the WWII books were a way of continuing and expanding it . . . now the route links up with
the road to nowhere. The motto of Patton's Army was "Lucky", chosen by Patton because he believed soldiers fought
better if they thought of themselves as lucky. Given how well his soldiers did fight, he may have had a point. He called his
field headquarters "Lucky Forward".
I guess you have to feel lucky to imagine Las Vegas as a good place to live, so . . . lucky, forward . . .
And to every single man and woman who served in the armed forces of the United States between 1941 and 1945 -- thanks,
pal . . .
10:12 pm pdt
29 May 2004
Yesterday, Lang Clay rang the buzzer here on 29th Street. I've known him since we were 13, in boarding school -- he was
one of the ringleaders of the Sixth Form Letter protest in our senior year which I wrote about in the entry of 15 May. I
hadn't seen him in New York for about 20 years and hadn't laid eyes on him for about 18 -- but friendships that are old and
deep are like bamboo . . . they have a way of springing back to life just when you least expect it.
I made my first visit to Las Vegas on a cross-country drive with Lang in 1970, right after I dropped out of college. On
that same trip we met the photographer Bill Eggleston in Memphis and saw his work for the first time -- an event that changed
both our lives and helped give Lang his vocation. He's now a successful commercial photographer and still doing his own quirky
personal work, which is characterized by a subversive deadpan wit married to a strict, indeed Palladian formal classicism.
Back in the late 70s he got the idea of recording at night the entire block of 42nd Street between Broadway and 8th in a series
of images taken with a large format camera (8 x 10 color negatives.) I was one of the friends who volunteered a night or two
to stand guard as he clambered up a step ladder to make the pictures -- the Times Square area was a pretty scary place back
then. He joined the printed images together into a long panorama nearly ten feet long and the result was visually stunning
-- and now of course, almost a quarter of a century later, the panorama has become a unique and extraordinary historical document.
He's reissuing the panorama using digitally-scanned files from the negatives, which enables him to better align and balance
the lighting between the individual segments of the panorama and also to bring out details in them that were lost in the earlier
printings. A very large (15-foot) limited-edition version of the new edition can be yours for 12 thousand dollars, a 9-foot
version closer to the size of the original contact printing for $7,500. Of course you also need a big wall or long hallway
to display it. I'll be taking that into consideration as I look for a new home in Las Vegas.
I'm also going to do my best to persuade Lang to dig up the negatives of the photographs he took on that first visit to
Las Vegas, and if I can I'll post them here. In 1970, Caesar's Palace was the only mega-resort on the Strip. Lang and I stayed
at the El Sombrero Motel, for 9 dollars a night. I also budgeted 11 dollars for gambling, which I quickly lost to the nickel
slots. The El Sombrero was technically on the Strip at that time, but so far out in the desert that you could barely see the
Strip lights from it. Now it stands in the shadow of the Mandalay Bay, the southernmost mega on the Strip. Somewhere along
the way it got renamed the Pollyanna, but still has the sombrero-shaped sign out front. It's been abandoned, surrounded by
barbed-wire, slated for destruction no doubt.
I have pictures of it now. Lang has pictures of it then.
8:53 am pdt
28 May 2004
I took a train out to Brooklyn yesterday in the late afternoon, walked from Grand Army Plaza to an apartment on St. Mark's
Place which is generally recognized as the center of advanced book packing in the world today, because it's where Maya and
Juniper live. They have a delightful place with a big garden, where they fired up a grill and had a cookout last night for
some friends, because Maya is going off for a while to write and work on her various film projects.
Comings and goings were the theme of the party in general, at it turned out. A writer was just about to take off for
a stint in Normandy, which she hoped to finance partially by selling her editor on the idea of an article laying out a roadmap
to French cheese. A performance artist talked about her upcoming move to Berlin in the Fall, where she thinks she can pursue
her art more comfortably than in New York today. We agreed that New York was over, if not about where the next place might
be. A film editor mentioned an upcoming trip to Macedonia. Juniper had just returned from five days in Puerto Rico, where
she said she read a lot, floated in the ocean a lot and ate a lot of fruit. I myself, of course, was just taking a small roadside
break on the way to Fabulous Nowhere, Nevada.
A lot of journeys with complicated geographical trajectories, but they all intersected at a back-yard barbecue in Brooklyn
on a beautiful May night . . . and for a moment New York was itself again.
12:08 pm pdt
26 May 2004
THE SILENT LAWRENCE
I saw "Lawrence Of Arabia" when it came out in 1962, in the sort of grand roadshow presentation big movies used
to get back then -- reserved seating, an overture and intermission and an expensive souvenir program on sale in the lobby
(I still have mine.) My dad used to take me to these big roadshow presentations of big films -- it was one of the great rituals
of my childhood.
"Lawrence" blew me away back then, at the age of twelve. I saw it a few times later and was less impressed.
As an adult (and apprentice screenwriter) I found the dialogue excessively literary and aphoristic -- every line was a bon
mot, a philosophical nugget, an intellectual construction. Real people, I thought, in real wars, don't talk like that -- even
if they're Oxford-educated British officers or wise old Bedouin chieftains.
Then I saw the restored version back in the Eighties, on a big screen, and realized how wrong my second thoughts were.
What I'd lost touch with was the power of the images -- the extent to which the images ARE the story of this film, its narrative
and its subtext, its spectacle and its subtlety. The moment of revelation came watching the shot where Lawrence walks along
the top of the captured train. His Bedouin followers run along the ground below him. In the shot, we only see Lawrence's shadow
on the sand -- his followers chase his shadow.
This is the whole film in a single image -- the essence of the filmmaker's view that Lawrence both invented himself in
Arabia and lost himself . . . created an image that had no substance beyond the events it inspired, yet cast a real shadow
into the future. In the last shot, as Lawrence is driven away from the scene of his betrayed triumph, we see his face through
the windshield of an open car. A reflection on the windshield suddenly obliterates his face, and the film is over.
This is a mode of filmmaking, in which a film's deepest truths are conveyed by images alone, which belongs in the silent
era of cinema, which is rarely seen today except in the theoretical film experiments of Jean-Luc Godard. I began to see the
dialogue of "Lawrence" in a different light -- as the functional equivalent of title cards, which offered a kind
of running literary commentary on or clarification of the images but did not drive the narrative or the drama.
In short, I realized that "Lawrence" is essentially a silent film -- in the same sense that "Titanic"
is essentially a silent film, a film whose dialogue is virtually irrelevant to the actual meaning of the work. Relatively
unsophisticated twelve year-old boys and girls, for whom the experience of a film is primarily visual and visceral, who feel
no intellectual need to translate a film into literary terms before being able to appreciate it, have easier access to such
sound-era "silents". They are, in this, sometimes wiser than their elders.
9:57 pm pdt
25 May 2004
DUMPLINGS
Jae Song writes to say that the Korean dumpling place we ate at on 32nd Street is called The Mandoo Bar, mandoo being
the word for dumplings. Mool means water -- steamed/boiled dumplings are called mool mandoo, fried dumplings are called yaki
mandoo.
The Mandoo Bar also has a branch near Union Square.
Highly recommended.
[Incidentally, Little Korea is located on a few side streets EAST of Herald Square, not west as I incorrectly stated in
an earlier post.]
8:07 am pdt
24 May 2004
BEYOND IDEOLOGY
There are paradoxical truths about the war in Iraq which conventional ideology cannot comprehend.
For example . . .
The war was absolutely justified by Saddam's utter defiance of the cease-fire terms of the original Gulf War. Although
these terms were set under the auspices of the U. N., and the U. N. chose not to enforce them, the U. N. was utterly corrupted
by bribery from Saddam, and we had no moral obligation to follow the lead of this corrupted body.
The war was absolutely justified by the mere possibility that a madman like Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.
At the same time, the misuse of ambiguous intelligence to positively assert that he did possess such weapons was a crime against
American democracy, and those responsible for this crime should be impeached.
The military action leading up to the removal of Saddam was a brilliant and humane feat of arms. The failure to heed reasonable
advice about keeping the peace afterwards was an act of monstrous arrogance and incompetence, which now threatens the long-term
success of the military action.
A moderately humane and free Iraq set in the midst of the medieval dictatorships of the Middle East is the best hope the
world has for future peace, which necessarily involves the utter destruction of radical Islam, root and branch. Radical Islam
has achieved a level of moral degeneracy fully equal to the moral degeneracy of Nazism, and poses an equal threat to the civilization
of the whole world. Like Nazism, it has no reasonable goals, cannot be appeased by any reasonable compromises, and will not
retreat from its madness in response to humane actions by it enemies. It can only be dealt with by violence aimed at its total
eradication.
The criminal mendacity and incompetence of the Bush administration, and the barbaric acts these things have led to, do
not vitiate the moral good the war has led (and can lead) to -- anymore than the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo vitiated
the moral good that resulted from the destruction of the Axis by the Allies in World War II.
However, the only important question now is -- what next? Get rid of Bush, elect Kerry, stay in Iraq, enable the desire
of the majority there for freedom and prosperity, internationalize this effort as much as practicable, given the moral depravity
of allies like France, and enjoy the benefits of the Bush grand strategy without the blunders of his ideologically-derived
tactical stupidity . . . just as, under Clinton, we enjoyed the benefits of Reagan's dismantling of the Soviet Empire without
the lunacy of his domestic agenda.
Think outside the box, get real . . .
7:41 am pdt
22 May 2004
A NEW NEW YORK NIGHT
I don't get around much anymore. I stay in and sort and pack, and worry about if and when the co-op board will approve
the buyer for my loft. Yesterday, expert book packer Maya Allison was over, filling up boxes with maniacal efficiency -- we
worked into the early evening, then I poured Maya a stiff shot of good Bourbon. She drank it and headed off to meet friends.
I met up with Jae Song and we headed off to Little Korea, located on a few side streets west of Herald Square, for some Korean
dumplings.
We found a great place (called Mool, I think) and feasted on fried and steamed dumplings stuffed with pork and other stuff.
We talked about "Nowhere", which Jae is going to shoot. Afterwards we wandered around the Korean supermarket on
32nd Street, which has an astonishing selection of Korean food, much of it frozen and mysterious. Got a call on Jae's cell
from John Sosnovsky, who'd just rolled into town for the weekend from his film job in Philly.
A New York night had begun.
We met up with John and his brother Justin, who designs DVD interfaces for Criterion, at the Bowery Bar -- because it
has a big smoking patio . . . but like all smoking areas in New York bars, it isn't big enough. By the time we got there there
were no tables and the place was jammed. We lingered nevertheless because many of the people jamming the place were women,
underdressed to the nines in the warm summer air. Then we headed deeper into the East Village in search of a smoking bar with
seating. Found a place full of Yuppies showing a basketball game on big screen TVs with a twenty-minute waiting list for the
tiny smoking area -- this is the future of nightlife in Bloomberg's New York -- and moved on.
Wound up at the No Malice Palace, whose backyard area was open (until 12:30!) and had some tables. We got caught up in
an intense discussion of digital cinematography -- centering around a new idea John has for doing transfers from mini-dv footage
to 35mm using some intermediate steps which no one has apparently thought of before. The patio filled up very quickly -- astonishing
numbers of cool-looking women just kept pouring in -- but suddenly it was 12:30 and the patio was unceremoniously closed,
everyone hustled out gruffly by a big bouncer.
We drifted over to Hole, a hip bar on 2nd. It was ladies night, but there were plenty of guys in the mix and the gay vibe
wasn't exclusionary. New York at its best. Hole is a hole -- a fairly small black box decorated with 80s-era subway graffiti,
now a historical design curiosity. People smoke freely at Hole, even though it's illegal for the bar to allow this -- one
reason it's considered a hip place. By that standard, every bar in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where Big Nanny hasn't yet removed
the ashtrays, would be considered hip.
O. k., New York is New York -- there's nothing like it and never will be. But you have to work too hard for it now, look
too hard for it. It has turned against itself, the best of itself, and set it on the road to nowhere . . .
8:21 am pdt
19 May 2004
E. Johnson rolled into town last night -- called me from a limo heading to Quo Vadis, a club in west Chelsea, and asked
me to join her. I'd just taken a bath, slipped into a filmy peignoir and popped open a nightcap beer -- a half hour later
I was standing outside the club, fully dressed, waiting for E. to come out and get me into the private party held by the Gersh
Agency for people in the TV industry gathered in Gotham for the announcement of the upcoming network schedules.
As I watched glamorous and would-be glamorous people pass through security into the club, I also beheld the grotesque
spectacle of the smokers's holding pen outside, where patrons from inside had to go to smoke, squeezed together like cattle.
It made me realize I wasn't in the real New York anymore -- I was in the provinces, Dorktown. The triumph of Big Nanny was
complete.
E. came out and whisked me inside. The scene was what you'd expect for a non-smoking club with expensive drinks -- a lot
of older people pretending to party, putting in time. The few younger people were astonishingly tall and thin women, probably
on the make -- they looked a little bored by the prospects in view.
E. and I soon moved on -- to the Half King bar nearby, where I remembered a smoking patio. It was closed, because it was
after 11 -- the result of noise complaints from neighbors, I imagine. The waitress helpfully suggested that I could smoke
at the tables out front, which, as it happened, had all been stacked and moved to the side. Dorktown.
E. and I had a drink and talked about old times in Gotham, new times in Vegas. I've known E. since she was a 16 year-old
freshman at Yale and frequent visitor to New York. She was an awesomely mischievous teenager back then -- eventually graduated
from Yale and went back to her hometown of Memphis, where she worked as a commodities trader. I think she did well at that,
but in time she followed my trail-blazing move to Hollywood. She started out working as secretary and assistant to my manager
at the time, became a manger herself, handling my career, among others more illustrious. When she moved on from my manager's
office I moved with her.
She's a powerful woman in Hollywood now but has never been overly impressed by what that means. She's married with kids.
She doesn't look much different than she did when I first knew her, though she's a bit less mischievous. As we walked off
the drinks afterwards, we noted the changes in the neighborhood -- the ghosts of our younger selves walked along with us and
were good company.
I put her in a cab and wandered home to that nightcap beer. I have a lot of sweet memories of E. in Gotham, and they're
all still alive and happening in the ghost town this has become -- an exquisite ghost town, like Paris, where the future used
to happen but doesn't anymore.
As E, waved goodbye from the cab she said, "Next year in Las Vegas!"
Quo vadis is a question in Latin -- "Where are you going?"
Nowhere.
8:22 am pdt
16 May 2004
UNDERTAKING
With the help of my sister Libba and two expert book packers from Brooklyn, Maya and Juniper, I've managed to put almost
half my library into boxes -- nearly a hundred boxes.
Every day I consign the volumes to darkness, lay them to rest in cardboard, send them into the realm of Nowhere. The sealed
boxes seem to radiate confined energy, like powerful batteries -- and indeed it is almost impossible to imagine all the passion,
excitement, searching, cherishing which each volume in each box represents. Each one of them mirrors some firing of synapses
in my brain, which the sight and touch of them sets off again in a kind of mental echo . . . and some part of my past, some
long-lost train of thought or desire is recovered.
It is also hard to imagine what it will be like to bring them into the light once again -- what sort of intellectual fortification
they will form themselves into in the middle of the Mohave desert.
Though they were never arranged in any comprehensive order on the shelves here, I could almost always guess where any
single one of them was -- I had a faint image in my mind of where I last saw it. That subliminal indexing system will not
be operative when they emerge from darkness in Las Vegas. The prospect of new combinations of and alliances between their
emblematic meanings is exciting.
Meanwhile the grave and strange undertaking continues . . .
9:08 pm pdt
15 May 2004
Today, a friend sent me a link to an article on The New York Times Website about John Kerry's years at St. Paul's, an
all-boys boarding school which I also attended some years later.
The article reads in part:
"Mr. Kerry arrived here in what his classmate Piero Fenci recalls as 'the last gasp of a dying era.' The winds of
change -- civil rights, student activism -- were just barely beginning to blow. Eleven years later, Mr. Kerry's younger brother
would graduate in a class whose senior-year protests helped prompt sweeping changes, including coeducation and more scholarships.
"But the school Mr. Kerry entered was in some respects much like the one his brother's class described in an angry
manifesto in 1968: "Spontaneity, openness, honesty and joy in general are not encouraged. Relationships are often based
on one-upsmanship of the most vicious sort. Open frankness is often greeted with cynicism; and as one master has remarked:
"For someone to say to another person, 'I like you' is almost unthinkable.'"
I wrote those words when I was 18, in what became known as "The Sixth Form Letter", the sixth form being what
the school called 12th grade. I did a first draft, Rick King, the class president, added an additional section, five or six
of us got it mimeographed in Concord, N. H., at our own expense, so we couldn't be accused of misusing school equipment, and
we posted it everywhere, at the same time seeking the signatures of other classmates to the manifesto, which originally went
out unsigned.
The next day we got word from sympathetic teachers that the school administration was trying to identify the author or
authors and the distributors of the letter in order to expel them. We were at the time just a few weeks from graduation. Fortunately
we were soon able to present to the Rector (the principal of the school) a copy of the letter signed by a majority of our
classmates, whereupon expulsion became an impractical response to the letter's message.
Instead, the school convened a study group for the summer following graduation, hired Rick and myself and a few other
classmates to participate in it, and began the process of self-examination which led to many reforms in the years ahead, including
acceptance of our strong recommendation that the school enroll women.
It is very strange to see these words reprinted in "The New York Times" so many years later. We were proud of
what the letter accomplished -- it seemed a far more sensible form of protest than marching or occupying (or fire-bombing)
the administration building, the sorts of things that were happening on college campuses all over America at the time. But
I never imagined that our words themselves would survive in anyone's memory.
But words, like bamboo shoots, are hardy things, awesome things . . .
[Finally, content in the Fists Of Fury section . . . boxing reports -- girl fights . . .]
9:52 pm pdt
13 May 2004
J. B. White writes to nominate the Talking Heads song "Road To Nowhere", from the album "Little Creatures",
as the "Nowhere" theme song:
Well, we know where we're goin'
But we don't know where we've been
And we know what we're knowin'
But we can't say what we've seen
And we're not little children
And we know what we want
And the future is certain
Give us time to work it out
We're on a road to nowhere
Come on inside
Takin' that ride to nowhere
We'll take that ride
Feelin' okay this mornin'
And you know,
We're on the road to paradise
Here we go, here we go
We're on a ride to nowhere
Come on inside
Takin' that ride to nowhere
We'll take that ride
Maybe you wonder where you are
I don't care
Here is where time is on our side
Take you there...take you there
We're on a road to nowhere
We're on a road to nowhere
We're on a road to nowhere
There's a city in my mind
Come along and take that ride
and it's all right, baby, it's all right
And it's very far away
But it's growing day by day
And it's all right, baby, it's all right
Would you like to come along
and you could help me sing this song?
And it's all right, baby, it's all right
They can tell you what to do
But they'll make a fool of you
And it's all right, baby, it's all right
It's all right, baby, it's all right
We're on a road to nowhere
A well travelled road, clearly . . .
11:21 pm pdt
12 May 2004
In a Report From Gotham dated 22 June 2001, published elsewhere on this site, I wrote about the coming of the bamboo plant
to my terrace. I enjoyed its gracious mystery tremendously, the sound of its leaves rustling in the breeze. Then business
took me out to California and the plant sat out on the terrace neglected for almost all of 2003 and through the harshest part
of the winter of 2004. When I got back here this year it was dead, its leaves brown, its stalks hollow and desiccated.
Before I could dispose of it, however, it came back to life. I looked out onto the terrace one day and saw that a small
green shoot had popped up from the root ball, and since then the shoot has grown wondrously, as bamboo will, and is now almost
two feet high. In the storm last night I could almost feel it drinking in the rain for its renewed majesty.
The resurrection is miraculous to me, inspiring, and I understand a bit better the almost mystical reverence in which
bamboo is held by Chinese culture. "Better to have a bamboo plant than food" the Chinese say, undoubtedly reflecting
the power of inspiration which bamboo's nearly invincible beauty can supply.
While I was away, the bamboo's life vanished from view -- it inhabited the realm of Nowhere . . . and I think I'll take
it with me to Las Vegas, the Floating World, where its inspiration will no doubt be useful again, in ways I can't even imagine
. . .
[This post is in honor of Maya Allison (see Favorite Links) who yesterday made a brief visit to Nowhere, by way of general
anaesthesia for some tooth surgery. Happily she has returned to Somewhere (Brooklyn) apparently none the worse for wear and
with her majesty fully restored. Perhaps she will write and tell us of her time in the Quartier Nulle Part.]
9:03 pm pdt
11 May 2004
Tonight lightning rips across the sky -- striking so close to my building that it seems as though it's aimed at the bamboo
plant on my terrace. Thunder rattles the walls around me on the 16th floor. Rain beats down with an almost tropical violence.
I sit surrounded by books packed in boxes, papers piled up to be put in other boxes. I'm somewhere else -- projecting
my psyche forward into the time when I'll be unpacking these boxes and greeting the books in them like old friends returned
from perilous expeditions.
But the storm jolts me back here, reminds of where I really am. Nowhere . . .
11:25 pm pdt
10 May 2004
At the end of his life, Leo Tolstoy saw a moving picture show, and wrote this about the new medium:
"It is a direct attack on the old methods of literary art. We writers shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy
screen and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary. I have thought of that and I can feel what is coming.
But I rather like it. This swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience - it is much better than the heavy,
long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed. It is closer to life. In life, too, changes and transitions flash
by before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The camera has divined the mystery of motion. And that
is greatness."
From "Masculin Feminin", by Jean-Luc Godard, 1966:
"It wasn't the film we dreamed; the film we carried in our hearts; the film we wanted to make and secretly wanted
to live."
10:56 pm pdt
9 May 2004
Along with everybody else, Donald Rumsfeld keeps saying that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq doesn't represent "who
we are" as a nation . . . but of course it does. We are a nation capable of making mistakes, of committing inhumane and
barbaric acts, of abusing its power. We have ideals and laws and traditions which restrain our capacity for such behavior
to an extraordinary degree -- to a degree often not sufficiently appreciated by America's enemies and critics, at home and
abroad -- but those restraints are just that, curbs on the restless demons within us, which are part of who we are. The arrogance
and self-satisfaction of men like Rumsfeld lead them to ignore that reality.
Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the Army Chief Of Staff George Marshall set up a team to prepare for the occupation of
Germany and Japan -- an instance of American optimism and practicality, to be sure, but also an instance of American humility.
Once the American economy mobilized for war and the American people set its mind on winning it, there was really no doubt
that we would defeat the Axis powers. But Marshall lost no time in focussing on the aftermath of victory, when the peace would
be won or lost. He knew that the invincibility of American arms would take us only so far.
Later, Marshall pushed hard for an early end to the combat in Europe -- urging Eisenhower to advance faster than he was
inclined to advance, resulting in greater casualties than might have been strictly required. Marshall wanted to move on to
Japan and get the war over as soon as humanly possible, because he was afraid that extended control of American society and
the American economy by a wartime government might undermine America's democracy, inuring its people to the expanded powers
Washington assumed at home in order to assure victory abroad.
After the war, Marshall, the prime architect of that victory, became the architect of the Marshall Plan to reconstruct
Europe, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize, the only professional soldier ever so honored.
Marshall was a genius of military organization and tough as nails, ruthlessly promoting younger and more capable officers
like Eisenhower and Bradley over the heads of complacent peacetime generals with more seniority. But he also understood, as
Bush and Rumsfeld and Ashcroft do not seem to understand, the limits of military action, and the dangers inherent in the expanded
powers of a government in wartime, powers he himself wielded so brilliantly.
He understood the dark potential of his profession, and of his fellow citizens. He understood who we really are, as well
as who we would like to be or believe ourselves to be in the imagination of our hearts.
10:29 pm pdt
8 May 2004
The film project "Nowhere" will be shot in digital video. Its look will be unusual -- different from anything
you've ever seen, in both subtle and spectacular ways. We won't, however, be going for a "film look".
At this point, any video short of HD cannot approach a "film look" -- trying to get a film look on video creates
a weird bastardized image that has the virtues of neither film nor video. It's a cosmetic trick.
On the other hand, there's more to cinema than perception of the surface of the image and its grain structure. Many movies
shot on film don't exploit the virtue of the medium because of flat lighting, poor composition, poor camera movement or poor
choreography of movement within the frame.
Standard video always looks flatter, even at its best, than film at its best -- the video image just seems to lie on the
surface in its own unique way. Trying to create an impression of spatial depth on video is still a wonderful challenge, however
-- even if it can never succeed at this in the same way film can. The dynamic between a flat screen and the illusion of depth
remains exciting.
To me, what's mostly unsatisfying about the video look, as we mostly encounter it, is that videographers simply give up
on the idea of spatial depth and take the line of least resistance with the medium -- overusing the zoom, underlighting, executing
camera movement by hand when it looks "o. k."
If people abandoned the idea of making the video surface "film-like" but applied to video the cinematic disciplines
for creating spatial depth in an image, the results could be amazing -- different from film but satisfying in their own way.
It would be a way of minimizing the trade-off between image-quality and cost. It would, of course, require more work and craft.
There are times when I think that the idea of video as "easier" is just as appealing to many filmmakers as the idea
of video as cheaper . . . but making beautiful, powerful, resonant images is never easy.
9:03 pm pdt
7 May 2004
Remembering the intellectual excitement I felt at the age of eleven, discovering the field of Civil War history, reminds
me of the most important intellectual event of my life, which happened about a year later, when I was 12.
I'd just entered the seventh grade at St. Albans, a fancy boys prep school in Washington, D. C. It was affiliated with
St. Albans Church, where my dad was assistant rector, and had been founded as the choir school for the Washington Cathedral,
on whose grounds it was located, but it had become a prestigious academy for the sons of Washington's elite (and the occasional
minister's son.)
Each year, the students in each class competed for "The Book", a prize volume awarded for the highest yearly
grade average. In my class, Paul Zahl had won it for his previous year's work, and he sensed I might be a competitor for the
prize this year. While checking each other out, and trying to impress each other with our intellectual credentials, we became
friends.
One day, walking to the stop where Paul caught his bus home to Georgetown, he asked casually, "Are you going to be
watching 'The Son Of Frankenstein' this weekend? It's on TV."
"I don't know . . ." I said.
"Some people consider it the best of the Karloff Frankensteins, but I think 'The Bride Of Frankenstein' is superior."
I was shocked to hear him discuss a monster movie in this way, in the tones of seriousness we might use comparing two
plays by Shakespeare. (At this point, Paul had read all the plays of Shakespeare.) I loved movies more than anything else
in the world, and I loved monster movies most of all, but this was the first time it had ever occurred to me that I might
consider them in intellectual terms, take them seriously and critique them as I might critique an assigned book in English
class.
My whole mental universe shifted in that moment, and everything I loved in life fell into place, realizing that I could
use the skills I had honed to get As in school in order to think about and appreciate a subject about which I felt nothing
but pure, intoxicating passion.
Soon after that, Paul introduced me to "Famous Monsters Of Filmland", the fan magazine edited by Forest J. Ackerman
which inspired so many future filmmakers of my generation, including Steven Spielberg. Soon after that, we discovered that
another classmate, Bill Bowman, had a serious collection of "Famous Monsters" back issues, and soon after that the
three of us were making our own 8mm monster movies.
About two years later I was walking up the stairs of my home in Cleveland Park and stopped in my tracks -- jolted by a
sudden idea. "I don't have to stop making movies when I grow up," I thought. "I can be crazy like this for
the rest of my life if I want to, and it doesn't matter what anybody thinks about it."
In one bolt from the blue I had acquired a vocation in life, along with the attitude I would need to pursue it seriously.
It was a great gift to have a such a young age -- a true blessing.
Here in the half-packed loft I have a wonderful 12" action figure of Karloff in "The Son Of Frankenstein",
beautifully sculpted by the magicians at Sideshow Collectibles. He'll be one of the last things I pack, and he'll go with
me on the drive to Vegas -- an old friend on the road to nowhere . . .
8:05 am pdt
6 May 2004
The road to nowhere passes through cyberspace, of course, where you are right now if you're reading this. The road disperses
here, like a river into a swamp, and becomes its own kind of indeterminate landscape -- a clear main stream diverted into
interweaving channels.
Cotty Chubb, partner in the expedition to the Paris poster shop in the Eighties, writes that he's reading my account of
it on his handheld while eating soup standing up in his kitchen. Pat Faulstich nominates "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere",
title track of Neil Young's first outing with Crazy Horse, as the theme song for the secret Las Vegas film project. Cool.
John Lettiere, a friend from the Bob Dylan newsgroup rec.music.dylan, writes to confess that he too is a Civil War buff,
enlisted in the ranks, like me, in 1961, when there was so much centennial-year celebration and commemoration. He doesn't
own the OR, but he does have the four-volume set "Battles and Leaders Of the Civil War" -- a collection of memoirs
by the principle figures in the conflict, written long afterwards, often in the optative pluperfect (as things ought to have
been.) It's still a major reference work and a splendid set of books, loaded with beautiful engravings, mostly from photographs.
As John suggested, it's probably just as well we didn't know we shared this passion earlier. We've wiled away so many
hours in joints, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and talking about Bob Dylan, that a subject of conversation as large as
the Civil War might have made it impossible to actually leave said joints. We'd have been sitting in them for years, perhaps,
trying to relate the lyrics of Dylan's "Mississippi" to Grant's campaign against Vicksburg -- and I'm convinced
that, given enough beer, that could actually have been done . . . though probably not before the New York smoking ban finally
sent us out into the late night streets, and so home.
Which brings me to Las Vegas, of course, where all the streams of this swamp eventually arrive, where Bob Dylan and Ulysses
S. Grant can sit down for a drink and a smoke in any bar they want and hammer out between them the rough outlines of the next
campaign . . .
6:41 pm pdt
5 May 2004
When I was 13 or 14 I wrote a letter to Carl Sandburg, poet and biographer of Abraham Lincoln, asking him how historians
find out what really happened in the Civil War -- if there was one book that had all the facts in it. I felt it was probably
a naive question and never mailed the letter, and of course there is no such book, but there is a series of books which comes
close to being that source I imagined -- "The Official Records Of the War Of the Rebellion", published by the U.
S. Government in 1880. It collects in 127 volumes, plus an index and atlas, all the primary military documents that survived
the war, mostly battle reports from the field and mostly from the Union armies, since a great number of Confederate documents
were lost with the cause.
The documents, for all their military formality, are infused with the immediacy of the moments history was made, but also
distorted by the information not available to the participants in the fog of war. It is still a remarkable work. Shelby Foote
was able to borrow a copy from his local library for use at home in writing his narrative history of the war -- it was the
foundation on which all the rest of his research was based.
I saw my first copy of the series at the public library in Wilmington, North Carolina. All through my teenage years I
dreamed about owning a complete set when I grew up. In the Eighties, a publisher reprinted the series in facsimile and I bought
it, for about $1,500 dollars. A couple of years later, the publisher contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in selling
the set back to him for $3,000. The edition had gone out of print and demand for it had increased accordingly. It's probably
worth a lot more today.
Today, my sister and I packed up the set in boxes, five of them altogether. Most of the volumes still had the original
shrink wrap on them. The OR, as it's designated in most bibliographies and footnotes, is not a work you read through for pleasure.
Instead you will be reading something about a Civil War campaign or battle, get an urge to browse through the contemporary
reports of the soldiers involved in it -- and there it will be, somewhere in those 127 volumes.
Leaving aside the fact that the set was a good investment, you might ask why anyone would want to make a space in his
life for 127 volumes, plus an index and atlas, of a work so rarely consulted, so little penetrated in twenty years. Why he
would pack them in boxes and take them with him most of the way across a continent, to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he will have
to make room for them once again.
Some answers are obvious. They represent the fulfillment of a youthful ambition, the satisfaction of a collector's obsessiveness,
a completist's passion. They are also magical to me, since they constitute an incarnation of my imagined one-stop historical
source for Civil War facts. If I had sent my letter to Sandburg, and he had replied to it, he would certainly have pointed
me to "The Official Records" in answer to my question.
The presence of the books has often comforted me in less specific ways -- just knowing they were there to be consulted
if needed, explored in times to come . . . if not by me then by their next owner, whoever he or she may be. Perhaps the greatest
pleasure I get from them is knowing that when I do pass them on, they will be in much the same condition they were in when
I first got them, and that the sort of person who would buy such a set of books will appreciate that. And I wish him or her
the joy of them.
6:37 pm pdt
4 May 2004
Right now I'm packing up my home of twenty-two years, a loft in New York, and hitting the road to Nowhere -- specifically
to Las Vegas, the metropolitan mirage in the middle of the Mohave Desert. More importantly, "Nowhere" is the name
of an unconventional dramatic series, to be distributed by unconventional means, which I plan to start shooting in Nevada
almost as soon as I get there, sometime later this summer.
It's not possible at the present time to say much more about this series, but check in here for regular updates and revelations.
As I pack up the remains of my life in this place, I'm listening to about twenty hours of more or less random phone messages
I saved starting just before I moved in here, in 1982 -- little fragments of time past, alive with the urgency of remembered
and forgotten moments, sad or funny or sweet . . . all wondrously entertaining and making up a kind of mosaic narrative of
my last two decades in Gotham.
In the mass of papers and books and stuff here, I'm finding treasures tucked away that I'd forgotten I had, like gifts
left by the ghosts of former selves, to cheer the self coming into being now.
A beautiful lithographed half-sheet from the Belgian release of Welles's "Touch Of Evil", bought on a happy
expedition to a tiny movie memorabilia store in Paris with Cotty Chubb in the 80s, when the franc was cheap and our collector's
instincts keen. An original souvenir program from the first release of "2001". A set of pristine lobby cards from
"The Lords Of Discipline".
A ghost myself among the ghosts here, I'm halfway to Nowhere already . . .
8:11 pm pdt
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