November 2008 Archives

Floating around cyberspace for at least a month and a half, via White Rabbit, this leetle coupon saver caught the staff's attention only the other day.

Though we were slow on the uptake, we did notice that no toaster coupons were available to match the many lesser-known banks that failed in the last year.

Given the so-called change said to be coming to the BananaRepublic, it may be seen as cynical to recall this Thanksgiving Prayer, first offered 20 years ago this week and dedicated to John Dillinger. But Uncle Bill's words of gratitude have a certain je ne sais quoi ... the ring of truth maybe? Listen or, if you prefer, watch and listen, and decide for yourself.

Have a listen to the sweet nothings William S. Burroughs offers, by way of Philip Hunt's extraordinary animation short. It was pointed out to me by Supervert.

I'd say the film is an ideal accompaniment to Malcolm Mc Neil's "lost art" exhibition, which has been extended through January.

That's Burroughs reading his text, of course. The music is by John Cale, who also performs it. It comes from "Ah Pook The Destroyer / Brion Gysin's All-Purpose Bedtime Story," the fourth track on the album "Dead City Radio."

Hunt won the Media Prize for Best Experimental Technique, in 1994, at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. "Ah Pook" was also named "Best Animation Film" at the Dresden Film Festival, in 1995.

Is it something in the November air? Doubtful. Maybe it's the god of artistic collaborations wanting to set the record straight. Let's say it's strictly dumb coincidence.

Whatever the reason, this month provides a happy occasion for legions of Jack Kerouac fans, to say nothing of William S. Burroughs cultists, who always seem eager for new revelations about both writers' works and personalities. And if nothing else, it will add several strong threads to their already embroidered legends.

First came And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which has just arrived in bookstores only 64 years after William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac wrote it.

Jed Birmingham has a fascinating review at RealityStudio that discusses, among other things, why they cast its tale of murder and homosexual obsession as fiction and had to disguise the identities of the real-life characters.

[R]eviewers of Hippos have treated the book as a straight telling of the Carr-Kammerer story, more period memoir than novel. This is a dangerous practice. If we think of Hippos in terms of memoir, we have to be acutely aware of what is missing.

Now comes the lost art of Ah POOK IS HERE, opening Friday (Nov. 14) at the Salomon Arts Gallery in downtown Manhattan. It features Malcolm Mc Neill's collaboration with Burroughs a mere 38 years after the two of them teamed up for a word/image novel that they tried — and, sadly, failed — to get published.

Well, better late than never.

Mc Neill's "ah pook" artwork includes all sorts of fantastic sketches, drawings, and cartoons. Fantastic in the true meaning of the word. One vivid panorama is so large — "End of Days," measuring 25 feet x 24 inches — that the gallery display will have to be monumental.

In a riveting, unpublished memoir about their collaboration — Observed While Falling, which I've had the privilege of reading — Mc Neill writes that he was 22 years old and just out of art school in London when he began working with Burroughs, who was then 56 and famous — infamous might be the more apt description — as the author of Naked Lunch.Oddly, Mc Neill had barely heard of him, let alone read any of his books. "The fact that I knew nothing about him before I met him was certainly my greatest asset," Mc Neill writes. "If I'd had any sense of his formidable intellect, or his intense personal history, I would have been intimidated to say the least." The memoir continues:

Apart from the age disparity and the unprecedented nature of his writing, he embodied an extreme persona for which I had no frame of reference at all: an avowed homosexual heroin addict, who'd shot and killed his wife, then essentially abandoned their only child. [This was] a scenario in which none of the elements were familiar, much less made sense. The need to try and make them so, however, was irresistible.

"I accepted him at face value," he notes, and Burroughs turned out to be "one of the sincerest, most unassuming normal people I'd ever met."

Although their seven-year project was left unfinished because they couldn't get it published — a text-only version eventually appeared — Mc Neill writes that the collaboration "changed my perception of many things, and now, many years later, continues to do so." He adds, "The one lesson above all that working with Bill Burroughs had taught me [is] that art is a magical process."

In other words, Mc Neill came to believe that art is not only prescient, but can actually make things happen. Which is not as weird as it sounds. Even Hemingway believed it. He put it this way: "The only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined. That made everything come true. Like when he wrote 'My Old Man' he'd never seen a jockey killed and the next week Georges Parfrement was killed at that very jump and that was the way it looked." But I digress.

For much more about the "ah pook" collaboration, there are several spellbinding online interviews with Mc Neill at Big Bridge, RealityStudio, and Beats in Kansas.

After starting out doing cartoons in the underground press, Mc Neill went on to a mainstream career as a high-tech artist/illustrator. His work has appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times and Rolling Stone to National Lampoon and Marvel Comics. Eventually he got into television as a "live action / effects director," winning an Emmy, in 1984, for "Outstanding Graphics and Title Design" of the opening credits sequence for "Saturday Night Live." Now that is weird.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Because of something Ralph Nader said on Election Day -- he asked whether Barack Obama was going to be an Uncle Sam or an Uncle Tom -- I feel obliged to take note of an interview (as posted on YouTube) that Nader did shortly afterward with Fox Report news anchor Shepard Smith, who was shocked by the remark.

Here's my transcription of the interview, followed by my own conclusion. I've also embedded the YouTube video because it conveys the nuances of tone, showing at least to my eyes and ears that Smith was calm, levelheaded, and wholly different from his bombastic colleagues at Fox (despite what looks in print like an excited opening that attempts to bait Nader).

SMITH: Guess who's here? The Independent Party candidate Ralph Nader. This is his second run for the presidency since he played spoiler in the close 2000 contest. This year he was on the ballot in 45 states, plus D.C. This year he was polling about one percent. Ralph, you spoke to Fox News radio's Houston affiliate today and said this [sound excerpt of Nader]:

To put it very simply, he is our first African-American president, or he will be. And we wish him well. But his choice, basically, is whether he's going to be Uncle Sam for the people of this country or Uncle Tom for the giant corporations.

Really. Ralph Nader, what was that?

NADER: It's very simple. He has gone along with corporate power from the moment he entered politics in the [Illinois] state senate. Voted for the Wall Street bailout. Supports expanding the military budget that is desired by the military-industrial complex. Doesn't really have a tax-reform thing for the ordinary fellow in this country. Opposes single-payer full Medicare for all because the giant HMOs, Aetna and Signa, do. Doesn't have a living wage [policy]. He's supposed to be respectful of the poor. Hardly mentions them in his speech. It's all the middle class.

SMITH: You talk "respectful" and you utter the words "Uncle Tom"? Are you kidding me?

NADER: That's the question. Yeah, that's the question he's got to face. He's the first African American --

SMITH: He didn't have to face it until it came out of your mouth. I just wonder if you don't realize you had a number of supporters out there. You were running a percentage [sic]. This year you were reduced to irrelevant, and I just wonder now if that's what you want your legacy to be: The man who on the night that the first African-American president in the history of this nation was elected you ask if he is going to be Uncle Sam or Uncle Tom.

NADER: Yeah, of course. He's turned his back on a hundred million poor people in this country -- African Americans and Latinos and poor whites -- and we're going to hold him to a higher standard. It's just not an unprecedented career move in[to] the White House. We expect more of Barack Obama. It's his big chance --

SMITH: You were reduced to irrelevance here. You weren't able to play spoiler. Will you run again?

NADER: Look, I don't like bullies like you. I can't see you. You can pull the plug on me. I'm look at a dark camera.

SMITH: You said "Uncle Tom. I didn't say it, sir. With respect, I did not say it.

NADER: I said, that's the question he has to answer. He can become a great president, or he can become a toady for the powers that have brought both parties to their knees against working people in this country, and have allowed our country to be highjacked by global corporations who have no allegiance to this country other than to ship its jobs and industries to fascist and communist dictators abroad who know how to keep their workers in their place. This is reality here. This is not show business. It's not celebrity politics. There are people suffering in this country. We expect a great presidency from Barack Obama, and we're going to try and hold his feet to the fire.

SMITH: I just wonder if in hindsight you wish you used a phrase other than "Uncle Tom"?

NADER: Not at all.

My own take is that I understand Nader's points about policy and agree with him, but he should have offered some kind of apology for the personal nature of his attack on Obama, or at least said something to clarify what could be heard -- and doubtless was heard not just by Smith -- as a racist remark.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

If you think people have gone nuts for Obama memorabilia -- they bought stacks of newspapers marking the Obama victory -- get a look at the book collectors' market.

With enough scratch you can pick up a boxed set of Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope for a meager quarter mil. Here's the pitch: Book Price $250,000. Quantity: 1

You think 250 grand is too costly? Hey, it's signed. But if you're really looking for a bargain, check out this list of signed Audacity copies priced from $1,275 to $9,800.

Not incidentally, that boxed set is being sold by a bookseller in Arizona, of all places. Ya think the Gasbag might want the set? He can afford it, and he could inspect it in person. All he would have to do is hop into his SUV and take a drive over to Scottsdale.

Hmm ... maybe he would prefer to pick up, oh, 10 signed copies instead -- like this $2,500 marvel -- one for each of his residences, or however many he owns. Whaddya think?

Now that America has elected a black fist bumper to the presidency, take a look at the newspaper he has in his hand. Take a close look. The photo, shot during the election campaign, shows him carrying The Wall Street Journal.

As everybody knows, the Journal's editorial page falls somewhere between Barry Goldwater and Attila the Hun. It is even further to the right than Bill Kristol, the doofus whose unreadable, once-a-week column was added to the opinion pages of The New York Times to "balance" its so-called liberals.

Nevertheless, it is the Journal in a column this morning by the eminently readable Thomas Frank -- a once-a-week addition to the Journal's opinion pages to balance all the resident rightwingers -- that puts Barack Obama's election victory in the proper perspective.

What grabs Frank's attention is not so much the new tactics that Obama brought to the campaign -- all that Internet reach, for instance, which made possible his humongous fund-raising in small donations. It's what he and the Democrats did that was old. Frank writes that "2008 made retro politics cool again." And he's not talking about the old-style "ground game" of get-out-the-vote volunteers, either.

In place of a showdown between a folksy "middle America" and a snobbish "liberal elite," Democrats needed to offer the real deal -- the conflict between a public that craves fairness and an economic system that enables the predatory. ...

Watching the Dow get hacked down, seeing the investment banking industry collapse, hearing about the lavish rewards won by the corporate officers who brought this ruin down on us -- all these things combined to make a certain Depressionesque fury the unavoidable flavor of the year. When your mortgage is under water and your neighbors are being laid off, the need to take up the sword against arrogant stem-cell scientists becomes considerably less urgent.

Equally important, it's also what the BananaRepublicans did that was old, which led to their massive defeat. "The Republican response, of course, was to double down on the righteous rhetoric of red-state grievance and spin the wheel one more time," Frank notes.

So make no mistake: Despite a peculiar headline doubtless written by a diehard rightwing opinion-page editor -- "Conservatism Isn't Finished" -- which distorts the column's essential point, Frank attributes the Gasbag's loss to his BananaRepublican themes, out-of-touch arrogance, and over-the-top contradictions.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Oh shit. Studs Terkel has died. He was 96. He was the blackest white man I ever met. Blacker even than his lifelong friend the novelist Nelson Algren, another black man who happened to be born white.

Anyway, here's what several former Chicago Sun-Times colleagues of mine had to say.

Roger Ebert: "Was he the greatest Chicagoan? I cannot think of another. ... If you met him, he was your friend."

Henry Kisor: "More times than I can count I was the recipient of his extraordinary personal generosity. ... He was looking out for you, not himself."

Rick Kogan: "Studs sought the daydreams and 3 a.m. truths of many a person who never made a headline. They were all somebodies to him."

The last time I saw Studs was in 1995, in Los Angeles, where I was working at the LA Times. He'd come to town to promote his latest book of interviews, "Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It," and he insisted I have lunch with him. We'd met years earlier in Chicago, through Algren.

Lunch, it turned out, was served in a private Times dining room. The editor in chief, Shelby Coffey III, was waiting for him and surely not expecting him to bring along an uninvited guest. A mere reporter at that.

Studs didn't care. What he cared about was that I'd been a friend of Algren's. And that's how he introduced me.

Of all the personally inscribed books by Studs that I have on my bookshelf, the inscription in "'The Good War': An Oral History of World War Two," which won a Pulitzer, pleases me the most.

Naturally.

Postscript: Best tribute to Studs that I've read.

PPS: Nov. 22 -- The New Press is to host a memorial celebration of the life and work of Studs Terkel on Sunday, Dec. 7th, at 4 p.m. in The Great Hall of Cooper Union (7 E. 7th St. at Third Avenue) in Manhattan. It is open to the public and free of charge.

Participants will include: Jimmy Breslin (author and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist); Steve Earle and Allison Moorer (musicians); Laura Flanders (host of GritTV and RadioNation, and bestselling author); Sydney Lewis (Studs's longtime friend and collaborator); Victor Navasky (author, publisher emeritus of The Nation, and Director of the George Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at Columbia Journalism); Andre Schiffrin (founding director of The New Press and Studs's editor and publisher); Dan Terkell (son of the late Ida and Studs Terkel); Katrina vanden Heuvel (editor and publisher of The Nation); Gary Younge (columnist and feature writer for The Guardian); Howard Zinn (historian, activist, and prize-winning author of A People's History of the United States).