JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

Did you see Larry David on Craig Ferguson? I accidentally hit the interview when taking a break and surfing the ever-fascinating despair of late night TV. I had wanted to see the interview when it was promoted, but forgot, and then, look, there it was. I'm a big fan of Larry David. He has provided so much laughter with Seinfeld and then Curb.

Unfortunately the Ferguson interview did not exactly move the ball down the court. Ferguson, who is the loosest and most unscripted of the late night hosts, was not up to the task of interviewing David. Silly joking around instead of asking him anything interesting. It’s as though Craig didn’t know what Larry did, or had no interest in it. Larry David looked uncomfortable; like an adult trying to be indulgent with a hyperactive child.

One thing that was a little disturbing: Larry David looked frail. He seemed too thin. It appeared he was trying to mask a shake visible on the thumb of one hand. Hope Larry is doing okay.

Celebs reflect a society but they also reveal. Michael Jackson, like Elvis, like Sinatra, were mirrors back to the public, making available, if the public cared to see, insights into our society. People loved them for their talents and loved them later as representatives of their lost youth. Nostalgia can be painful — remembrance of things past.

Jackson seemed unusually troubled even for a celebrity. His career of 40 years played out on the public stage. The dissonance of his changing appearance, the voice that seemed to pull into itself. And then he would perform with an explosive energy that is the very best of the popular culture.

He was so talented. A great voice; a better dancer than the professional dancers who performed behind him. You can't emphasize the latter too much. He was inhabited by the music. His father worked him hard as a kid and he retained that work ethic, according to interviews. Enormous talent honed by enormous work — the definition of a pro. He marked the way for Prince and Madonna and many others.

When he said in an interview that people said things that hurt him he meant it. There was no calculation there, just the exposed nerve of a sensitive, lost soul. You can't help but feel badly for him — even with the doubts about his private behavior. In an interview, as he was traveling back to where he was born, he said, almost to himself, I grew up here, but I had no childhood.

We feel a great sadness that this flawed, talented man, came to so early an end. At his best he was a shaman. Peter Pan as shaman — a revealing symbol for modern times.

A funny piece about well-meaning impulses encountering the cold splash in the face of reality. Obama wanted to have an open government online forum and let the people speak.

So they did:

“Please, as fellow human beings of this great planet Earth, disclose all known information on space/UFO’s because the world needs to know,”…

The disturbing images coming from Iran, with thugs beating up the people of their own country, strikes a deep chord. You can't help but feel moved. The rousing protests around the world, the courage of the people who are fighting this regime of street punks, bigots and fools, is a drama that has not been seen so nakedly for many years. This is the Iran that hates America and England and wants to destroy Israel. This is the government that produces nothing on world markets and has self-lobotomized to the 14th century. The protesters have forced Iran's leadership to betray their rotten core.

The excuses being made for Obama's poor decision to remain restrained sound more and more hollow. Iran's leaders won't be more open to discussion because Obama withheld decisive support for Iranian protesters. Iranian leadership will feel contempt for his weakness and poor calculation. Thugs understand strength, character, conviction. Weakness evokes a curling lip.

If someone in Obama's team would clue him in: the Iranian regime has already tied America and England to the protests. And that is without a chirp from Obama. The idea that stating a view affirming American values will somehow offend the Iranian leadership is folly — a disservice to the American soul. Obama is getting bad advice. And he is taking it.

Obama the realist vs Obama the idealist. Obama is a realist in the international community and an idealist in his own country. A repellent regime in Iran is suppressing its people, suppressing a desire for democracy or free speech or any semblance of a modern, decent society, and Obama calculates the best “realist” move. The press explains Obama’s caution away: he doesn’t want to push the regime to go further. Even worse could happen — a still uglier regime come to power. All because we spoke up and supported democratic ideals. We don’t want to offend thugs.

Years ago a pro football player who was known to speak his mind about other players was asked if he worried that his behavior might make him vulnerable to retribution on the field. “What are they going to do, tackle me harder?”, he asked.

The losers: the people of Iran and our national identity. America is just another country with interests now. We are no better than anyone else. America is not special — who are we to lecture others? You know: American exceptionalism — it is a dirty word. That is, with the exception of Obama’s lecturing his own country, of “affirming our values”, when Obama discusses torture. The people of the world look up to us because of our values, Obama says. This is one confused guy.

From a Robert Kagan column @ WaPo:

The worst thing is that this approach will probably not prevent the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon. But this is what "realism" is all about. It is what sent Brent Scowcroft to raise a champagne toast to China's leaders in the wake of Tiananmen Square. It is what convinced Gerald Ford not to meet with Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the height of detente…

Terry Gross has pretty much jumped the shark. It is hard listening to her anymore. Except when the subject is exceptional, as in the Rashid interview mentioned a few days ago, she has become a wind-up toy version of herself. Not the sharp interviewer of old. She had long been drifting to a simple partisanship — the presidential election catalyzed the decline of many in the media.

(Look at Letterman’s recent self-sliming in his despicable comments about Palin’s 14 year old daughter. Today he stuttered that he was talking about an older daughter — Dave has become his own joke.)

In this interview with Woody Allen all of Terry Gross’ worse traits have coalesced.

You would never think an interview with Woody Allen could bring out this stuff. Gross was interested primarily in the sensational aspects of Allen’s biography. She didn't ask obvious questions about his lifetime profession: the craft of writing comedy. His development over a lifetime of making 40 movies. His feelings about movie as a craft or the many actors he has worked with. Even in the realm of interior biography she had nothing to ask in a 40 minute interview about his many years in psychoanalysis.

Instead Gross tried several access points to her primary interest — it was coarsely apparent — Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi. Combine that focus with Gross’ tone, which has become, as I say, self-parody — an ingratiating, cajoling, oily manipulation; it was appalling. There is a cognitive dissonance in seeking to ingratiate as you pump for personal disclosure.

After Gross’ florid thank you to Allen — which can only be parsed as pure hypocrisy after Gross’ performance —Woody Allen sounded as though he was glad the interview was over and you could hardly blame him. He was there to promo his movie and maybe explore some ideas. He must have known the more sensational material in his life, which has some interest but is fundamentally private, would be brought up. It is clear, whatever the details of his relationship with Soon-Yi, that Allen did not do himself proud, causing much pain. But he could not have known how far gone was Fresh Air and still agreed to appear.

Like Allen, the audience also felt grateful that the spectacle had concluded.

So last night I turn on Charlie Rose and listen to his interviews about the economy. The last interview, with Richard Posner, is worth listening to — twice. You have to get used to the disconnect between Posner's lucid, shyly delivered comments, and the drama of the content.

Here are some notes:

Posner doesn't talk about recession. He says we are in a Depression; right now. He says politicans just can’t say the D word. Posner’s book has a subtitle of "Descent Into Depression".

Posner is deeply disappointed in Obama, although it takes some teasing out by Rose to get to Posner's true feelings. Those feelings are: Obama was incompetent after being elected; afforded a long transition time, he made no plans about how to deal with the economy. What Obama is doing is ad hoc — improvisation with trillions of dollars. With so much uncertainty, and that uncertainty fueling a freeze in the economy, it was contingent on Obama to come into office with decisiveness and an underlying plan of action.

Posner thinks that Obama’s approach of, "not wasting a crisis", is stupid. Posner said that with the economy hurting, spending yet more money without first making real progress on the deficit is madness.

Posner feels that things have devolved to a toss up — a gamble. No one knows what will happen and no one knows what to do and we have very little control in the outcome now. International challenges combined with the bumbling of the administration are leaving the fate of the country to a flip of the coin.

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My own note: Obama thinks his speech making is the same thing as governing. In many ways he is reminiscent of Bush who left it to his staff. He is off on ten paths, all at once, hoping movement will be parsed as leadership.

His contradictions abound, even so early on in his administration. This applies as well to his international actions. In his Cairo speech he said that America has no right to tell other countries what to do and then tells Israel what its policies should be on settlements. Obama’s trip to Europe, seeking money and help in Afghanistan yielded zip. A humiliation the press forgot to mention. The media played it like it was the second coming of JFK but what Europe liked was hearing criticism of America.

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The other interview, with David Leonhardt, Alan Blinder and Alan Auerbach made the same point. Obama came into office with no plan to handle the deficit and has done nothing since taking office to address the issues.

If you add the above tale of woe to a Fresh Air interview with Ahmed Rashid you have good reason to take Prozac. Rashid is an extremely knowledgeable and generous interviewee. He offers a tremendous amount of information. It spills out of him. He feels Obama has dropped the ball on Pakistan with horrible consequences a real possibility now. His book's title, resonating with Posner's book, is Descent Into Chaos. Rashid is speaking about Pakistan, but it doesn't take much to globalize such an assertion.

It’s hard to know what to make of Louis Menand’s article in the New Yorker about creative writing courses. His articles are lengthy, studious — in the sense that he gives the reader of knowing everything about his subject, like a good student trying to impress his teacher — and they are filled with clear and interesting ideas. But what did this article add up to?

Menand starts with the cynicism of disregard. You can’t teach creative writing. Even those who teach it, or have taught it, or ran such programs, sometimes feel that way. Then he lists all the famous writers (this is supposed to mean good writers) who have passed through these programs.

What other choice did they have really? That is the path the society offered. Then he says that he took creative writing courses and he loved it. He took a creative writing course on poetry and doesn’t write poetry anymore. But he loved it.

A significant figure in the university creative writing movement is quoted by Menand as saying,

[R. V. Cassill, a founding father of creative writing courses] thought that writers had become complicit in the academic logrolling and gamesmanship of publish-or-perish: using other people’s money—grants from their universities and from arts agencies—they devised ways to get their own and one another’s work into print, and then converted those publications into salary increments (which is apparently how Cassill thought that most professors operate). They wrote poems to get raises. The academic system was corrupting, and it was time for the writers to get out. “We are now at the point where writing programs are poisoning, and in turn we are being poisoned by, departments and institutions on which we have fastened them,” he said.

The socialization rituals of universities are at a loss when it comes to creativity. Mostly they are places to learn to join or be burned. Or to join and be burned anyway. Mostly, they burn — by all accounts that seemed credible. Outpatient clinics for cliquish career advancement at a later date. There have been so many accounts of the acidic stupidity of such courses, of their general worthlessness, that you feel it must be that surviving such an experience makes one honestly condemn the encounter, or dishonestly value the worthless out of self-resassurance that one’s time was not wasted; or crave companionship so badly in the lonely task of creating art that the group identity trumped the creative value. The latter seems to leak through the cracks in Menand’s piece.

Menand is always worth reading. He knows a lot. Too often though, he leaves value, judgment and quality out of the mix — it would be inconsiderate to come to a conclusion: not collegial.

Here is an entertaining discussion between Robert Hughes, eccentric art critic, and R. Crumb, eccentric: Mr. Comix.

HUGHES: One of the reasons you've been so popular is because we think of you as fearless and crazy. You are one of the few Americans I have ever come across who seems to be totally unaffected by the notion of political correctness.

CRUMB: Maybe I should be more correct.

HUGHES: Why?

Good question Bob. Why don’t more people ask themselves that question?

Hughes says,

… you're the kind of loon who thinks that if he tells the truth about his own inner drives and if he exposes things, then people will love him.

Hughes points out…

But you see you're horribly wrong.

CRUMB: I realize that now. You can't make everybody love you. It's an exercise in futility and it's probably not even a good idea to try.

And Crumb says further on,

It's just kind of annoying when a Marilyn Monroe silkscreen print goes for $100,000 when a drawing I worked really hard on [inaudible] I saw a small Breughel painting for sale for less than an Andy Warhol silkscreen print.

Why aren't these two on TV?

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Crumb just finished an illustrated Book of Genesis. Not a satire — an illustrated volume. It must be in the air: I have been working on a book related to The Book of Job.

In my case, I have been reading Robert Alter’s great books of commentary and translation of the Hebrew Bible. I'm still not sure I am interested in doing a book which would inevitably suggest an illustrated volume, when my drawings, unlike Crumb’s somewhat crudely literal approach, would have only a tangential, glancing relationship to the narrative of the most spiritually complex book of the Hebrew Bible.

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A parting quote; a fine insight by Hughes,

One of the great things in my opinion about cultural memory is that, if properly understood, it belies all that bullshit about avant-gardeism. Because everything is simultaneously present.

The late comedian Bernie Mac once said that at the beginning of his career a club owner came up to him after a set and said, “You’re funny, but they don’t like you.” Bernie Mac had to warm up his public presentation.

The problem with Conan is that he is likable, but he isn’t funny. You root for him but it’s uncomfortable watching him. His rhythms are off. Watch Steve Martin: Martin is a performer who has the physical grace and canny rhythms of a professional dancer. It is true about many comedians — even Jerry Lewis had a physicality that worked. Conan misses his verbal marks; he does not know when to stop trying. He tries too hard. He is stiff and can’t seem to relax onstage.

Conan’s likable sidekick Andy Richter caught the bug. Richter’s forced laugh — trying to help out his bud — made it all the more uncomfortable. You have to give it to Conan though; he called on his old friend to join him after he could have chosen anyone for the secure gig — a sinecure.

With all his tics Conan seems one of the most “normal” stand-ups in memory. His doctor dad was a Harvard professor and his mother a lawyer according to wiki. Conan is the third of six kids. Maybe he tries so hard because he feels he has so much to live up to and so many with whom to compete.

One note, to be fair, that contradicts: Conan might not have onstage rhythms, but in the opening sequence, where this stickman was running through the landscape, Conan displayed a balanced athletic gait. Most people have eccentricities when they walk and it becomes more apparent when they run — but Conan had a symmetry that is unusual, as anyone who runs regularly can attest.

It is possible after the initial nerves wear off and with a good group of writers and clever skits Conan can overcome inborn limitations. Maybe comedians can be made and not only born to the manor. You go Conan — we are rooting for you.

This too long article has some interesting things to say about Si Newhouse: Mr. Magazine. Newhouse inherited a publishing empire from his dad and his segment of the family biz was determined by pops to be magazines, which his son turned into a highly successful enterprise; the dad was a newspaperman and according to the article, the old man favored the other son's judgment — that son inherited the newspapers, presumably a more valued commodity to the elder Newhouse.

What I like about Si Newhouse is that he appreciates and pays talent. Writers are the instant rich via expense accounts and perks. Money is no object. I’d like a gallery dealer to hand me an insta-lifestyle boost and appreciate my work with such alacrity. Newhouse doesn’t interfere, and cares about what he publishes like early Hollywood moguls who for all their obnoxiousness, cared about the movies they put out, and would mortgage their house to do so. Problem is, if editor loses job, editor loses lifestyle.

Here is an example of what I don’t like about Newhouse:

Richard Beckman, a former British footballer…became, if not famous, notorious. One tipsy evening in 1999, Beckman, then publisher of Vogue, smashed the heads of two young female Vogue staffers together, suggesting he wanted them to kiss. One of the girls, says a friend “looked like she’d been in a car wreck.”

At another company, the incident would surely have ended Beckman’s career. Newhouse, though, loved the kingdom’s rambunctious egos, especially if they produced, and Mad Dog, as Beckman was known, performed well. Newhouse stood behind him, paying a reported seven-figure settlement to the girl, and eventually promoted Beckman to head of corporate sales.

Newhouse stood behind him? The guy was promoted? This evokes the unfortunate image of the king playing games with the lives of his subjects — all for a cheap thrill.

That is what the article says: Newhouse lives vicariously through the personalities of those who run his magazines and who represent aspects of his character. So apparently Newhouse has manifold personalities: Remnick @ The New Yorker, foisting cocktail party smarts into the conversation, because his value system parses this as impressive — as the writer indicates — and is evident in Charlie Rose interviews, to the down to earth Tina Brown, shamelessly populist, with an unerring sense of public fascination, to all the other editors, like the haughty Wintour @Vogue; all a pantheon representing Newhouse’s many-selves.

Once you start watching the National Spelling Bee you are pretty much hooked. It should be dry, arcane, of little more than local interest, but it isn’t.

Once again, the excellent production values of contemporary TV — on a show you would think it wouldn’t matter much — helped enormously. The skits with the kids singing, the profiles of the children, the camera following the children to their parents when they were eliminated. All just right. In that last arena, it was disappointing that one kid was devastated by his elimination but his mother didn’t even touch him.

The Spelling Bee seems to attract very solid families. The children had enormous confidence, yet, with only a few exceptions, weren’t obnoxiously precocious. Hearing how close one pair of sisters were for example evoked a hard to resist aw-gee that’s sweet. The kids almost all looked at their parents after a successful outing. This is one of the few presentations in the media that leaves you with a feeling of hope. It was surprising how rich the personalities were of children at that most awkward age — most of them were around 13. Even though the pop culture pumps jaded irony into every orifice at every opportunity, the kids seemed still innocent, even in competition.

You also have to give credit to the judges for finding words that have never ever appeared in an English sentence. Well, maybe once or twice. I would have preferred the word and definition consistently displayed throughout the appearance of each child. I remember in a course on the English Language hearing how early speakers rejected even French derived forms, let alone Greek, Latin, or those of exotic roots. Good ol’ Anglo-Saxon was the preference. At this stage in the evolution of our amazing language the richness of source and inclusion are to be embraced.

Like Jeopardy, winners are pretty much lucky. Geographical names and unpronounced letters in many words are daunting — it’s the luck of the draw which word you get.

(Like home-schooler Tim Ruiter, my favorite food is also Dark Chocolate.)

In a scienceblogs post Jessica Palmer notes a kerfuffle about Jared Diamond. He is being sued for his article in the New Yorker.

In a very well-done piece Palmer summarizes:

Here's the story. Last April, Diamond wrote an article for the New Yorker on tribal feuding in New Guinea, entitled "Vengeance is Ours." I read the article when it came out, and I can remember being shocked at the violence in it. Diamond's main source, a New Guinean driver named Daniel Wemp, told unrepentant tales of rape, murder, and theft committed during his quest to revenge himself on another tribal leader, Henep Isum. The article says Wemp's quest ended when Isum was paralyzed by an arrow. A troubling story - but it was in the New Yorker, under the heading "Annals of Anthropology," and more important, it was by scientist Jared Diamond. Despite my shock, I figured it had to be fact-checked and accurate.

Well, according to an expose by Rhonda Roland Shearer at stinkyjournalism.org, Diamond's article is mostly false. Isum is perfectly healthy, not paralyzed. Wemp says he never committed the crimes attributed to him. Neither man is a tribal leader. And now both Wemp and Isum are suing Diamond and the New Yorker's parent company for defamation, seeking $10 million in damages.

This interests me because Diamond, whom David Brooks calls a geographical determinist, is a currently fashionable representative of an aspect of theory-laden academic thinking that is toxic. Diamond thinks ecology and environment determined the success (“hegemony” in pc talk) of the West. Not culture, individual genius, or the advantages flexible societies have over traditional societies. Extrapolating overblown and often sophomoric ideas from facts is bad enough — but Diamond apparently is loose with the facts; he seems to me a conventional partisan using the aura of science, a great disservice to the objective voice the public expects in science and by extension science journalism. According to the piece, Diamond doesn't adhere to either scientific or journalistic standards. Read the comments section — this is not the immature gang that have become familiar.

Palmer quotes someone at the Columbia Journalism Review about Diamond’s piece for the New Yorker:

'"The problem in this situation is that you've got a principal named source, and it's basically a one-source story... If you can't find the original source, then what do you do when you've got somebody named as being involved in criminal behavior?"'

Besides the cover thine ass enabling going on at the New Yorker, the real damage is to students who listen to Diamond without the critical intelligence to realize just how partisan he is.

Here is an extensive examination of the controversy. [via Palmer]

The fine reporter John F. Burns tells a tale of downfall in a mad scramble for status. Seeking an Oxford post, nasty e-mail messages about a rival were sent — cat-tee, as they would say on Seinfeld. Nothing more than a lust for status can poison the character as easily as greed. Unfortunately the charges were true.

Ms. Padel’s admission that she sent e-mail messages to two reporters last month alerting them to allegations of sexual harassment against her main rival for the Oxford post, the Nobel literature laureate Derek Walcott, was a stunning turn in a saga of skullduggery that had opened a bitter schism in Britain’s literary world.

Walcott was apparently guilty, according to the very article that characterizes the actions as “allegations”.

…Mr. Walcott was accused in 1982 of trying to seduce a student in his poetry class at Harvard, saying at one point: “Imagine me making love to you. What would I do?” According to the book, the student rebuffed the poet, and he gave her a C that was later changed to “pass” after the university reviewed the episode and reprimanded the poet… details of an allegation by a Boston University student, Nicole Niemi, who claimed in a lawsuit that Mr. Walcott demanded in 1996 that she sleep with him as the price of his helping produce a play she had written. The case was settled out of court.

In a further scramble for justification, all the other celebrated English reprobates enable Walcott:

Michael Deacon in The Telegraph cited Lord Byron (“womanizer”), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“drug fiend”), John Keats (“smackhead”), Rudyard Kipling (“imperialist”), T. S. Eliot (“lines that could be construed as racist”) and Dylan Thomas (“drank like a drain, begged and stole from friends”), among others, and concluded, “Not one of them, were they alive today, could hope to land the Oxford post — they just don’t meet the exacting moral standards set by people who conduct smear campaigns.”

(Note the one modifier, “construed”, for T.S. Eliot: “lines that could be construed as racist”; Eliot was an anti-Semite. Those most decorous English — when it suits them.)

One could easily make an argument that an abuse of power is worse than craven ambition.

What’s it like inside the Madoff household? Why did he do it?

This article comes close to an insight. My own take, paraphrasing and contradicting Tolstoy: honorable people are all honorable in their own unique way, but thieves are all the same. Indifferent to all but their own impulses.

The article describes a mini-Madoff. Only 4 million stolen. Only. But the mindset of the thief, robbing from those closest to him, without compassion, is complicated by his human, if not fully available for scrutiny, complexity. The man’s stepson wrote the article. He was the only person left to appear in the court galleries for his stepfather — everyone else disappointed or filled with rage at an individual once considered a “pillar of the community”.

The article doesn’t answer why. That is unavailable to everyone most likely — including the perpetrator — only Shakespeare could express what lies inside an individual who betrays so many. But the article can, and does show the ambiguities of love and connection.

I was in a Miami courtroom, watching my 66-year-old stepfather be sentenced to 63 months in prison for doing […what Madoff did]…But for better and worse, he’s my dad. He taught me to play tennis, bought me my first dog, gave me “The Great Gatsby” (talk about irony). He was the one who read my report cards, made me study for the SAT and sent me extra money when I went broke at college. More than my somewhat eccentric biological parents, he was the one who shaped me, made me into a guy with a good job and a mortgage and two children. You know, a semi-normal grownup.