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February 28, 2007

Gone South

To the Hellman Wyler Festival, where they're celebrating Lillian Hellman's plays and William Wyler's Hollywood film versions.

South means Birmingham, Alabama, and the town of Demopolis in Marengo County not far from there.

Why there? If you ever saw "The Little Foxes" you'd know. Hellman, who was born in New Orleans, based the scheming Hubbard clan in "Foxes" on her mother's family, which came from Demopolis.

The festival will be staging "The Little Foxes" and screening the film, along with three other Wyler-Hellman pairings: "These Three" (based on her first play "The Children's Hour"), "The Children's Hour" (a remake more faithful to the play), and "Dead End" (based on a Sidney Kingsley play that Hellman adapted).

As a Wyler biographer, I've been invited to take part in panel discussions with Deborah Martinson, Hellman's latest biographer, and many other invited guests.

Back next week.

Postscript: March 2 -- I've returned home with several trophies. This one was bagged in the Demopolis town square.

The festival continues in Birmingham through Sunday.

Posted by jherman at 3:26 PM

February 26, 2007

Hersh Abbreviated

Don't have time this ayem to read Seymour Hersh's lengthy New Yorker report on our Banana Republic's new strategy in the Middle East? Here's a short analysis by Ian Black in The Guardian. No time to read that, either? Here's the lede of The Guardian's news story about Hersh's report: "[The President With His Head Up His Ass] has charged the Pentagon with devising an expanded bombing plan for Iran that can be carried out at 24 hours' notice. ..." Quicker still: N.O Mustill's yummy collage. When it was first published in 1969, in VDRSVP, it was titled "The Vietnam Question." Today it could just as easily be called "The Iran Question." Anyway, you read last week's Apocalypse When and Surging With Chomsky. Right?

Postscript: On a separate issue, how's this for hair-splitting? The International Court of Justice in The Hague, the main U.N. judicial organ, "today overwhelmingly acquitted Serbia of committing genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Balkan war of the 1990s but" -- get this -- "found it guilty of failing to prevent genocide in the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica," a U.N. press release says. Yeah, we know. It's all about the legalisms. This way Serbia doesn't have to pay reparations.

Posted by jherman at 9:09 AM

February 22, 2007

'Just Get to the Verb'

Five little words of wisdom. Robert Altman's words. Words cited earlier this week in a tribute to the late director at the Majestic Theatre in New York. Smarter words than the old Hollywood cliché cut to the chase, which of course is what he meant. Fitting, too, given the paradox of a filmmaker who loved words, especially words that overlapped.

It wasn't only Altman's words that dazzled the crowd at the tribute, which ran uninterrupted for more than two riveting hours.

"I do not think he was a lover of truth as much as he was a hater of lies," Robert Reed Altman, one of his sons, told us. "He did not like conformity," Bob Balaban remarked. "This is an understatement. Bob never met a status quo he didn't hate."

The wire reports I read -- AP's in USA Today and Reuters' in the NY Times -- give a pretty good account of what was said, including Balaban's remark and others I took down in my notes. (Tim Robbins: "He would not only not suffer fools, he'd make fools suffer.'' Garry Trudeau: "I just talked about my old friend for several minutes without interruption, with no overlapping dialogue, without him being able to change a word. He would have hated it.")

But the funniest words of the afternoon -- Julieanne Moore's -- went unreported. Moore recounted the thrill she felt when she was cast in "Short Cuts" early in her career. Altman warned her to read the script before accepting, she said. The role he was offering called for frontal nudity, and it was "not negotiable." She said she didn't need to read the script. Plus, she added, "I've got a bonus for you: I really am a redhead."

That is how Altman always told the tale of "my bush," she said. But he told it so many times to so many interviewers that she became sensitive about it and asked him to stop. Besides, she didn't remember making that comment -- not exactly, anyway. Of course he would stop, he told her. He was a gentleman, after all.

Then one evening over dinner at one of his typically convivial gatherings with lots of friends, including Moore, Altman's wife Kathryn began to tell the tale of the bonus. Altman looked up, and true to his gentleman's word, politely shushed her. "Julieanne," he said, putting his fingers to his lips, "doesn't want us to talk about her pussy."

Posted by jherman at 1:59 PM

February 21, 2007

Surging With Chomsky

Shuttling among poetry, art and politics, yeah. Here's more politics. It's an excerpt from "Chomsky on Iran, Iraq, and the Rest of the World," the latest commentary at Foreign Policy in Focus. He was asked, "What do you think the surge is for?"

This is part of his reply:

It's very hard to predict [President Huha's] administration today because they're deeply irrational. They were irrational to start with but now they're desperate. They have created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This should've been one of the easiest military occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the worst military disasters in history. They can't control it and it's almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out would be to concede the reasons why they invaded.

We're supposed to believe that oil had nothing to do with it, that if Iraq were exporting pickles or jelly and the center of world oil production were in the South Pacific that the United States would've liberated them anyway. It has nothing to do with the oil, what a crass idea. Anyone with their head screwed on knows that that can't be true. Allowing an independent and sovereign Iraq could be a nightmare for the United States. It would mean that it would be Shi'ite-dominated, at least if it's minimally democratic. It would continue to improve relations with Iran, just what the United States doesn't want to see. And beyond that, right across the border in Saudi Arabia where most of Saudi oil is, there happens to be a large Shi'ite population, probably a majority.

Moves toward sovereignty in Iraq stimulate pressures first for human rights among the bitterly repressed Shi'ite population but also toward some degree of autonomy. You can imagine a kind of a loose Shi'ite alliance in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the United States. And much worse, although Europe can be intimidated by the United States, China can't. It's one of the reasons, the main reasons, why China is considered a threat. We're back to the Mafia principle.

China has been there for 3,000 years, has contempt for the barbarians, is overcoming a century of domination, and simply moves on its own. It does not get intimidated when Uncle Sam shakes his fist. That's scary. In particular, it's dangerous in the case of the Middle East. China is the center of the Asian energy security grid, which includes the Central Asian states and Russia. India is also hovering around the edge, South Korea is involved, and Iran is an associate member of some kind. If the Middle East oil resources around the Gulf, which are the main ones in the world, if they link up to the Asian grid, the United States is really a second-rate power. A lot is at stake in not withdrawing from Iraq.

Chomsky had a lot more to say. Read the whole thing.

Posted by jherman at 9:25 AM

Boris on the Bill

Are you ready for three nights of "Shoah and Pin-Ups," a documentary about the NO!-artist Boris Lurie? I am.

Screenings begin this evening in Manhattan. The first one, at Hunter College, is free (followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers). The second screening, on Thursday, is at Makor ($15); the third, on Friday, is at Anthology Film Archives ($8).

"Most of the film's protagonists will be at the AFA screening," Matthias Reichelt, the curator and art historian who collaborated on the film with the director Reinhild Dettmer-Finke, tells me. Appearing at the AFA "makes sense," he adds. "It's a substantial downtown art institution that's well known, and it's linked through the great Fluxus artist Jonas Mekas to the good old days of the '50s and '60s" -- when Lurie and his fellow NO!-Artists flourished. Did I say flourished? In fact, it is precisely the opposite of what happened.

Unfortunately, Boris Lurie, who's in his 80s and lives in New York, will not be able to make the screenings. "For understandable reasons," Reichelt says. After recovering from heart surgery, "he had two strokes and has been in hospital for more than one year now."

Here's the screening schedule:

HUNTER COLLEGE (Free admission)

Wednesday (2/21) 7:30 p.m.
A presentatioin of the Visual Culture Roundtable
Screening followed by Q+A with the filmmakers
695 Park Avenue at 68th Street
Room 1527 Hunter North Building


MAKOR ($15)
Thursday (2/22) 7:30 p.m.
At Makor/Steinhardt Center
35 W. 67th St.
NY, NY, 10023
T: 212-413-8821
F: 212-413-8860

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES ($8)
Friday (2/23) 7:30 p.m.
Special Screening
32 Second Ave. at 2nd St.
F or V train to Second Ave; 6 to Bleecker.

Posted by jherman at 8:51 AM

February 20, 2007

Cloud Nine

Norwegian master photographer Tom Sandberg's first solo exhibition in the United States -- on view at P.S.1 MoMA -- made me feel like I was walking on air. That's my groundling's take on what one expert, Yngve Kvistad, describes as the "ambiguous surfaces that do not quite reveal themselves" in Sandberg's large-format, often painterly, black & white photographs. It's not just in the "titanic, almost monochrome skyscapes" that there's "an invigorating presence of visual paradoxes" or a "tangible absence revealed." It's in the portraits, too. They show what Derrida called the "invisible interior of poetic freedom," Kvistad notes. I'll leave the technical terms to the experts and philosophers. Here's what the Sandberg exhibit did for me: It turned my eyeballs into flotation devices.

Postscript: Speaking of a "tangible absence" ... A sense of the enormous scale of Sandberg's work is missing from the skyscape sampled above. Without that scale, you don't really feel the true impact of his photographs. So here's a snapshot from the exhibition to give you some perspective. The skyscape behind me, "Untitled," is one of Sandberg's latest. It was made in 2006.

Suggested title from an ol' glider pilot: "Hang Time."

Posted by jherman at 9:55 AM

February 19, 2007

Apocalypse When

Chris Hedges was way ahead of the curve. Back in October he wrote on his blog:

War with Iran -- a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East -- is probable by the end of [Prez Huha's] administration. It could begin in as little as three weeks.

Probable? Was he nuts? Three weeks? Really nuts? Well, his timing may have been off, but the clock is still running.

This administration, claiming to be anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and especially the Middle East, defined three states at the start of its reign as "the Axis of Evil." They were Iraq, now occupied; North Korea, which, because it has nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and Iran. Those who do not take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped orchestrate the disastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and who now handles the Middle East for the National Security Council. He knew nothing about Central America.  He knows nothing about the Middle East.  He sees the world through the childish, binary lens of good and evil, us and them, the forces of darkness and the forces of light.  And it is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips most of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a crisis of epic proportions.

This morning, interviewed on Democracy Now! about his latest book, "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America," Hedges repeated his warning: "Before the end of [Huha's] administration, they [the BananaRepublic] will make a strike against Iran. ... I think these people live in an alternate reality."

Hedges cannot be easily dismissed. You'll see why when you check out the interview.

Posted by jherman at 8:54 AM

February 16, 2007

Emmett Williams, RIP

Another old friend is gone. We spent many a winter night together in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, keeping ourselves entertained over a bottle or two. He died in Berlin. He was 81.

Emmett Williams was a poet who'd mastered "the write of arting." Here's an interview worth reading that fills in lots of details about him. And here's an excerpt from "THE VOY AGE," which "started out," he once explained, "as a long kinetic poem celebrating the travels and exploits of Two Buk Tim in Tim Buc Too." The format is based on a mathematical progression, the words a mere taste of Emmett's playfulness.

During our time in northern Vermont, after I had succeeded Emmett as editor of the Something Else Press, we taped a long conversation about poetry and art that was later published in the West Coast Poetry Review, in an issue devoted to his work. I asked him if he agreed that he was "a poet before anything else."

"I agree, with a few reservations," he said. "The 'anything else' bothers me."

We sat on a rolling lawn beneath giant pines in a high clearing. Jay Peak could be seen some thirty miles to the north at the Canadian border.

"I was a pretty good bartender once," he went on. "And foreman of a landfill project. I can wield a mean axe in the forest, too. Yes, I'd call myself a poet before anything else, though I wouldn't call it my occupation. Call it my preoccupation. Making poetry is the thing I've always done, or wanted to do, whatever else I was trying to accomplish. The thing that interrupts whatever else I'm doing. A 'disturbance' that I can't tune out."

I said he made it sound painful. "I know," he said, "I'm very romantic about it." He continued:

I see no practical reason whatsoever for making poetry or art. But that's what I do, and there must be a reason for it. I wrote a spooky poem about it once, about this disturbance, how it was like the sound of a baby crying somewhere, you don't know where, and nobody else hears the crying, but you feel compelled to look in every room, comb the fields and forests, and you never get to the source of the sound. Something deep down inside that pushes you on full speed ahead even though you don't know where you're headed. And the poem, or painting, or whatever, is a by-product of the search. It sounds melodramatic, I know. But face it, it's something of a curse. The curse of Erato. Say, that's a good title!

I pointed out that his love poetry was peculiar. In one love poem, for instance, he substituted "objects and activities for the letters of the alphabet." According to the documentation of a performance in London, "the word 'love' could have been spelled the smoking of a cigar plus blowing a silent dog whistle plus eating a chocolate off the floor like a puppy plus tooting a little ditty on the flute."

But "read on," he said. "It says that during the Darmstadt performance it could have been spelled peering at the audience through a hole in a piece of paper plus offering a cigar to a girl plus extracting an egg from a portable vagina plus covering my eye with a patch. And so on." He continued:

The poem is as depersonalized as the letters of the alphabet the twenty-six objects and activities are substituted for, and using an alphabet of objects and activities to spell "love" or anything else is bound to produce combinations that go far beyond the barriers of logic and common sense. Chance encounters make strange bedfellows.

How come he didn't call the poem a Happening? "I call it a symphony," he said, referring to the title ALPHABET SYMPHONY, "though it's a poem, of course. A poem that gets off the page."

If the idea of transposing one set of symbols into another was essential to his poetry, or at least some of it, so was a compulsion to make pictures. "Why does a poet make pictures?" I asked.

"Something Kandinski said years ago about his own poems is as good an answer as I could give, to the effect that writing poetry was for him simply a 'changement d'instrument,' and that the driving force behind all his work -- paintings or poems -- remained always the same. He was a fine poet, you know, only most art historians are too busy with the pictures to bother with the poems."

Emmett made a living through the sale of his lithographs and prints, as well as by teaching. But, "one thing I'd better say right here," he said:

I consider myself a Poet, capital P, without any qualifiers. Not a concrete poet, not a visual poet, not a veri-voco-visual-something-or-other poet, just a plain poet. But a poet who has found his expressive form in some untraditional ways of using language, of using it as raw material. My methods are closer to composing and painting and sculpting than to the methods of most other contemporary poets. I can write sonnets, too, and I have a fairly large body of more or less traditional verse, but that's not what interests me. I feel much more at home in the restricted landscape of "programmed" books like SWEETHEARTS or THE VOY AGE. Maybe restricted is a misleading word. I mean it the way Paul Valery uses it, where he says that the greatest freedom comes from the greatest strictness. I don't like to run off at the mouth in poems. I do that all day long. I'm not a diarist, or a politician, or a hysteric, or an analyst, or merely a recording instrument. A poet is a maker, a creator, and I take that literally.

The conversation went on like that, running off at the mouth for more than 20 pages. It touched on all sorts of subjects, from his early career in Europe as a feature reporter at the Stars and Stripes, to the artists and writers he knew and admired and whose work influenced him -- Diter Rot, Brion Gysin, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filiou, Jean Tinguely, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Hamilton, Ay-o, Wolf Vostell, Claus Bremer, Hansjorg Mayer, Jackson Mac Low, Jerry Rothenberg, David Antin, Dick Higgins, John Giorno, Ian Hamilton Finlay -- to his interviews with Ezra Pound, to his Kenyon College days as a student of John Crowe Ransom.

"I went to school with Tony Hecht, and James Wright, and William Gass," he recalled. "And so what. It's really irrelevant. There are a lot of people on the planet, and you bump into a lot of them as you travel around. Damn few of them become your traveling companions, though."

Postscript: There will be A Memorial Celebration for Emmett Williams in New York City on Sunday, April 1 (from 7:00 p.m.) at the Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway (at Spring Street), 2nd floor. The program will include videos and live performances of Williams' scores by artist friends and his son Garry Williams. Cake will be served. Event organizer: Geoffrey Hendricks. Contact: 212-431-8625 or cloudsmith@aol.com

Posted by jherman at 4:51 PM

February 12, 2007

John Bryan, RIP

They left 12 roses on his doorstep along with half of their kidnap victim's California driver's license. He was grateful for the roses. "They could have been 12 bullets," he said.

The kidnappers were the Symbionese Liberation Army. The license belonged to Patty Hearst. The year was 1974. The roses were both a warning and an invitation. He'd done an "interview" with the SLA and printed it in his newspaper. This was their response.

The interview was faked -- nobody knew where to find them -- but their statements were real. He'd cobbled them together from fugitive literature, mainly a manifesto they'd issued. I'm talking about John Bryan, cherished friend and colleague, who died in San Francisco on Feb. 1.

As Warren Hinckle once described him, he was "the Peter Zenger of the underground press ... unconquered and ungovernable by the puny laws of journalism."

The world is a much poorer place without him. Here's the obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, which gives an accurate (though necessarily incomplete) account of his life and career.

That warning-invitation led to meetings with the SLA. John became a go-between for the Hearst family in an unsuccessful ransom attempt. The SLA had claim it wanted to trade Patty Hearst for SLAers Joe Remiro and Russ Little, who were in jail on murder charges (for the assassination of the superintendent of the Oakland schools, Marcus Foster).

John eventually wrote a book about Remiro (a Vietnam vet) and the SLA, "This Soldier Still at War." It was one of several books he wrote, in addition to the tons of newspapers he published. John was nothing if not prolific.

What the Chronicle obit doesn't say -- I dunno why -- is that John killed himself. He'd been suffering from full-body rheumatoid arthritis for more than a decade and was in constant pain. The last time I talked with him, in September, he was working at an indie bookstore, the Abandoned Planet. He sounded reasonably well, considering, though hardly like the roaring tornado I was familiar with during the good old bad old days -- when he was fiery, almost crazed, with anti-establishment fervor. I admired many things about John, his unrelenting conviction especially, but what I admired most was his raw personal courage.

He had a stroke in November, which prevented him from writing. That was the final insult. He downed a bottle of vodka and "blew his head off" with an antique rifle. Shades of Hemingway and Hunter T., whose company he joined.

Posted by jherman at 9:58 AM

February 9, 2007

Blogs Are Personal (in Case You Hadn't Noticed)

Been gone. Now back. Why gone? Flew out west to see an old friend and collaborator, Norman O. Mustill, in his desert hideaway. Hadn't seen him or his wife Norma in nearly 40 years. Here I am in their living room, leafing through a cherished item in his vast media collection -- Bruce Bernard's "Century," a massive volume of photos from London's Sunday Times Magazine chronicling the years 1899 to 1999. The main point of interest, however, is the partial view of Mustill's large collage from the mid-1960s on the wall behind me. It's one of several I used to see decades ago on visits to his former home in northern California. And there he is -- l'artiste lui-même -- standing next to another of his large collages.

Care for a further taste of his fun & games? Go to Down With Culture! Up With Barbarism! and Anthem for America.

Posted by jherman at 11:49 AM

February 1, 2007

Molly Ivins, RIP

Molly Ivins, who died too soon, published her last column a few weeks ago. Headlined "Stand Up Against the Surge," it was a sober, even solemn commentary without so much as a hint of the satirical wit for which she was famous. She called it part of an "old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war."

But Ivins wouldn't be Ivins if her thoughts weren't ripe with a sense of the ridiculous. She loved to skewer the President With His Head Up His Ass as often as possible. For good reason. (See The Molly Ivins Touch.) Her next-to-last column, "Iraq Exit is Up to Us," was more typical of her downhome style. "The president of the United States does not have the sense God gave a duck -- so it's up to us," it began. "You and me, Bubba."

There are many tributes to Ivins being published. Here are two at truthdig with a great photo of her. The headline on her obituary in Mother Jones, "Death of a Hellraiser: Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living," says what's needed. Or as she concluded in her last column:

We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous.

Here's a video interview with Ivins from July, 2004, when her last book was published. Click the link. There's also a transcript.

Postscript: My staff of thousands should have paid more attention. Whitney Balliett has also died. Doug Ramsey -- whose Rifftides blog on jazz I love to read -- waved good-bye with a note of appreciation that had, as usual, just the right touch.

PPS: I just got around to reading "Missing Molly Ivins," (this morning's, Feb. 2, Friday column) by Paul Krugman. It's too good to keep locked behind the NYT subscription wall. He writes:

I've been going through Molly's columns from 2002 and 2003, the period when most of the wise men of the press cheered as Our Leader took us to war on false pretenses, then dismissed as "Bush haters" anyone who complained about the absence of W.M.D. or warned that the victory celebrations were premature. Here are a few selections:

Nov. 19, 2002: "The greatest risk for us in invading Iraq is probably not war itself, so much as: What happens after we win? ... There is a batty degree of triumphalism loose in this country right now."

Jan. 16, 2003: "I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, 'Horrible three-way civil war?' "

July 14, 2003: "I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it would lead to the peace from hell, but I'd rather not see my prediction come true and I don't think we have much time left to avert it. That the occupation is not going well is apparent to everyone but Donald Rumsfeld. ... We don't need people with credentials as right-wing ideologues and corporate privatizers -- we need people who know how to fix water and power plants."

Oct. 7, 2003: "Good thing we won the war, because the peace sure looks like a quagmire. ...

"I've got an even-money bet out that says more Americans will be killed in the peace than in the war, and more Iraqis will be killed by Americans in the peace than in the war. Not the first time I've had a bet out that I hoped I'd lose."

So Molly Ivins -- who didn't mingle with the great and famous, didn't have sources high in the administration, and never claimed special expertise on national security or the Middle East -- got almost everything right. Meanwhile, how did those who did have all those credentials do?

With very few exceptions, they got everything wrong. They bought the obviously cooked case for war -- or found their own reasons to endorse the invasion. They didn't see the folly of the venture, which was almost as obvious in prospect as it is with the benefit of hindsight. And they took years to realize that everything we were being told about progress in Iraq was a lie.

Was Molly smarter than all the experts? No, she was just braver. The administration's exploitation of 9/11 created an environment in which it took a lot of courage to see and say the obvious.

Molly had that courage; not enough others can say the same.

That's just part of what Krugman had to say. truthout is likely to break the subscription lock and post the entire column tomorrow. So go there for it.

Posted by jherman at 9:30 AM