Buy Your Own Groceries: Jose Mujica

I once went to Germany and they put me in a Mercedes-Benz. The door weighed about 3,000 kilos. They put 40 motorcycles in front and another 40 in back. I was ashamed.  Jose Mujica, in the New York Times.

Jose Mujica, former President of Uruguay and my hero. As president, he refused to live in the palace and continued to live in his tiny tin-roofed home. He drove to work every day in a Volkswagen Beetle.

“I was ashamed.”

He is mortally ill with cancer and chooses to reflect, eloquently, on our consumerist world. I am an absolute heretic on world leaders and their phalanx of bodyguards and bullet-proof limousines. I want my leader to drive his own car or ride his own bike and shop for her own groceries and get stuck in traffic like the rest of us. People will tell me that’s not possible. I believe it’s “not possible” because nobody does it, and one of the reasons some delusional idiot wants to take a shot at a leader is precisely because he has never seen him pay for his own groceries.

Amy Walter Gropes

I like Amy Walter, now the editor and publisher of The Cook Political Report.  I have been watching her on The PBS Newshour every Monday night for many years, usually teamed with Tamara Keith, a reporter with NPR.   They disappeared briefly when Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett succeeded Judy Woodruff as the anchors, then reappeared shortly afterwards.  I suspect viewers let it be known that they were missed.  I missed them.

Walter’s strength is in poll analysis.  Keith was more inclined to the political side.  I thought they complemented each other well, as well as adding a fresh, more youthful perspective to the Newshour, though Walter is now 56 and Keith is now 46.  That’s not really “youthful” but it is by TV news standards.

Walter is good at studying polls.  Who is ahead?  Who is gaining?  Which states are in play?  What effect will political developments have on a particular politician’s popularity or electability.  She is sober and serious and objective.

What she is not good at is the politics itself.  PBS is now beginning to give her more of the role played by Jonathan Capehart and David Brooks and previously by Mark Shields (whom I miss).  What does it all mean?  How do these recent developments fit into the overall tilt of the political landscape?  Where did this come from?  Where is it going?  What is Trump really up to?  Why is Vance such a bad pick?  Where might Harris run into trouble?

In a recent telecast (August 19) at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Walter struggled and groped and poked and pumped but couldn’t stop repeating the same basic tropes and couldn’t find a breakthrough point that would give any heft to her commentary.

She was out of her depth.  After rambling somewhat aimlessly for a few moments, Judy Woodruff stepped in and pointed out what a peace agreement in Gaza might mean for the Harris campaign, a very important, consequential, and neglected point.  Walter missed it completely.  And it struck me immediately that that was unsurprising.  She could tell you how Americans feel about Hamas.  She struggles to tell you why Netanyahu doesn’t really want a peace agreement, or why Trump might want Netanyahu to not agree to a ceasefire.

I regret saying it because I do like her.   But this is not the first time I have watched her struggle to develop a coherent perspective recently.  She also appears on Washington Week with The Atlantic and occasionally on Meet the Press and Face the Nation.  And, apparently, on Fox News.  I rarely think to myself, “that is a good point”  or “I didn’t think of that” when she speaks.   She often gropes in vain for a striking or useful point and ends up repeating what she already said or what has long been obvious: Harris will need to get more votes in Pennsylvania than Trump to win the election.  We know.

I miss Mark Shields a lot.  I can’t count how many times he came up with something that nobody else on the panel had thought of, which all of them immediately agree is important and useful.  David Brooks is pretty good.  Occasionally, he seems desperate to rescue conservatism from Donald Trump and the current joke of a Republican Party.  He really likes Biden.   Jonathan Capehart went off the rails when the Democrats were trying to persuade Biden to step down this year irrationally insisting that he was entitled to the nomination even though he basically hide from primary voters for a year– deceiving them about his health and acuity–  and then stumbled through the worse debate performance against the worst imaginable candidate in history and followed it up with very weak public appearances when he desperately needed to prove he was fully capable.

I hope PBS takes a long sober look at Walter’s performance on these recent episodes and looks for someone else to provide commentary.  Walter should stick to the polls.

Monkee See

Here’s the well known story about the Monkees:

In the mid 1960’s– 1966, to be more precise– Screen Gems decided that a TV show inspired by (read– copied from) the Beatles’ movies “Help” and “A Hard Day’s Night”– might be a hit.  They already had a young British singer and potential heart-throb Davy Jones under contract so they put out an ad in Variety looking for young male singers/actors and held auditions. They ended up with a couple of actual musical artists in Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith, and a singer Mickey Dolenz.  They were hired as employees of Screen Gems and put to work.

The whole project was a typical piece of exploitive corporate derivative trash.  It was conceived of as trash, executed as trash, and will never not be be trash, no matter how much nostalgia one wafts over it.  It catered to the most manipulable segment of the television audience, adolescents and pre-teens.

The original sin of this project was Screen Gems trying– not too, too hard– to make it look like the Monkees were a real band.  They tried to hide the fact that the musicians on their first album were all paid studio ringers, though the vocals were provided by the actual Monkees.  On the TV show, the Monkees pretended to be playing their instruments as they performed the songs.  They were also pretending to sing, but that goes without saying– almost every piece of dreck at the time used studio recordings dubbed over the video of the performance, even on American Bandstand and Hullabaloo.  (Ed Sullivan was, generally, the rare exception.)

The boys did record the vocals, in a studio.  Producer Don Kirshner quickly discovered that they had to bring the boys in one at a time or they would clown around endlessly and run up expensive studio time without getting a decent take down.

Here’s the popular conception about it today: the Monkees really wanted to write their own songs and play their own instruments and they complained bitterly that the studio, led by a crass producer, Don Kirshner, wouldn’t let them.  Most writers about the issue today are sympathetic to the band members.  They were oppressed and exploited by Screen Gems and their talents cruelly repressed.

Because, after all, they really were a great band.

Let’s get that out of the way for a moment: the Monkees were a shallow pop band of no artistic significance whatsoever.   Like ABBA and Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy and the Partridge Family, they were a product, shallow, derivative, inane, and trivial.  The studio musicians used on the recordings were competent– sometimes excellent– but they were interchangeable parts of a complex of almost mechanical production.

(I saw a recent interview with Bobby Hart, one half of one of the song-writing teams that wrote songs for the band, and he was quietly lobbying for more respect by insisting that “Last Train to Clarksville” was actually a protest song because the narrator had been drafted and was going to Clarksville to be sent overseas: “I don’t know if I’m ever coming home”.  Yeah.  Deep.)

They began to believe their own press.  They became delusional, attributing their popularity to something magical they had in themselves, outside of the entertainment complex that nurtured and managed and exploited them.

I am not sympathetic.  I absolutely believe that Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork, and Davy Jones, and Mickey Dolenz should have been completely free to not sign contracts with Screen Gems, not audition for them, and embark on musical careers on their own, play gigs, rehearse, practice, go to New York, whatever they want.  On their own.  Without the massive and overwhelming support of the Hollywood machinery that made them famous.

Nesmith might well have had a career.  He had money– his mother invented Liquid Paper (that’s a whole other era!) and time.  Tork was somewhat known as a solo artist in New York, though I doubt he would ever have become famous.  Dolenz and Jones were not going to have an impact anywhere, though Jones might have made it on TV as a Bobby Sherman type teen heartthrob for as long as it lasts.  They were all born on third base and thought they hit a triple.

But this righteous indignation!  If I had been in Kirshner’s position (as much as I despise him), I would have fired them all and enthusiastically encouraged them to go for it: embark on careers in the music industry and fulfill your heart’s most passionate desires, to write songs and perform with your instruments, and the best of luck to you.

Does that mean we won’t be on TV in prime time every week for a couple of years?  Well, no: that’s the job you turned down.

That is not what you were hired for.  And that’s not the agreement that was signed.  You voluntarily signed up to be actors in a contrived, derivative TV program.  Then you decided you wanted to be co-creators of the TV show for which you were hired as actors.   The creative jobs were already taken when you signed on.  Good bye.

It is unseemly to take advantage of the monumental publicity apparatus Screen Gems provided them and the privileged access it gave you and declare that, as someone else observed, you really are Vulcans.*

It’s similar in some ways to Hilary Clinton running for president.  Yes, she may have been cute and had a great hair-style, but she obtained the platform from which to run by virtue of being married to Bill Clinton, who did start from nothing, built a career as a local politician and then a governor, acquired a stable of donors to fund a presidential run, and ran for and won the presidency.  He gave you some high-profile jobs in his administration– and a lot of privileged connections– which you leveraged into a Senate run and then a run for the presidency which, against all odds, you lost, to an idiot, the worst candidate for president in 200 years.

She may have been smart.  She may have been as qualified as any other presidential candidate in recent history.  But there really are lots of those around.  She was the fucking wife of a former president who leveraged her privileged access to the corridors of party politics to push herself to the front of the line.

  • * Peter Tork stated:  “The Monkees creating the album Headquarters was like Leonard Nimoy becoming a Vulcan”.  Here.

 

 

 

Kicking the Crack

Once in a while I just want to rant about some long-standing irritant.

A few years ago, Leonard Cohen– whom I deeply admire– issued an album with a song on it (called “Anthem”) with the lyric:  “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in”.  Many people I know have quoted this line to me– nodding their head as if in deep contemplation– as if it is profound or beautiful or deep.

Here’s the whole context:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

It’s not a great line.  It’s not even good.  It’s lame.  It’s a Hallmark Card of pseudo-profundity, and emblematic of Cohen’s exhausted talents at this stage of his career.  Nothing on any of his recent albums is as remotely interesting as his splendid earlier songs like “Suzanne”, “The Bell”, “Chelsea Hotel”, or “Famous Blue Raincoat”,  or “The Future”, or “If it be Your Will”.

I thought of it today as I was listening to the Bare Naked Ladies cover of “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” by Bruce Cockburn, and these lyrics arrived:

Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight
Gotta kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.

I thought, aha: that’s the same idea as Cohen’s crack about crack, but far more beautifully expressed.  The word “bleeds” gives it a more visceral punch.  The word “kick” alludes to desperation.

Cockburn never rose to the level of Cohen at his best, but he has written some exquisite songs and his musical skills are far more impressive.

Bari Weiss and the Unfree Press

And now comes Bari Weiss and “The Free Press”, yet another self-proclaimed “rogue” news source unbeholden to anyone, outspoken, and non-partisan, and permeated with self-pity (they hate me and persecute me because I think for myself!)

Just when you think she might be serious, she has Anne Coulter on.

I think it’s fair to say now that this multiplicity of supposed renegades are, in fact, so predictable and programmed that they are now the “establishment”, in every sense of the word, and those disciplined, accountable news organizations like CBS and NY Times and the Post– that rely on verifiable facts and first-hand accounts– are, in fact, the rogues. And yes, the people who do traffic in conspiracy theories and such are definitely “out to get them”.

Still… when I was in high school and didn’t know the answer to a question and just made up some shit and the teacher said I was wrong, I should have just said, no, no, I’m rogue. I think for myself. I can’t be manipulated by the establishment.

Just to note: I believe it might have been an article by Bari Weiss defending J. K. Rowling’s ambivalence about the trans movement that I found quite agreeable.  Like Jordan Peterson, and J.D. Vance, and Bill Maher, she’s occasionally right, occasionally wrong, and always whiney and self-serving.

Olympic Snoozefest

I find the Olympics boring. I would like to see an Olympics where every country sends a random group of 200 people. When they arrive, their first task is to sort out who competes in what. Then they have to learn how to do it. It would be way more fun to watch than this boring endless cycle of identical people .02 of a second faster or slower thanking their moms and dads and coaches and whoever and springing for the nearest exit to sign the most lucrative endorsement deal they can.

Besides, most of them are probably cheating.

Our Private Accommodations

You must embody a great reserve of self-abasement to be the wife of a VP nominee in the Republican Party. Easy for Mrs. Pence: she liked baking cookies. But for Usha Vance, a bit of a challenge. You get to give up your stellar career, revert to “Mrs” VP instead of Ms, act like you truly, really respect the megalomaniacal pussy-grabber at the top of the ticket, and be prepared to explain to your friends why the 1950’s was such an awesome time in American history and worth going back to and that you really, truly enjoy baking cookies and hosting teas– far more satisfying than your boring previous work litigating cases for Disney or the Regents of the University of California. And you also get to explain how your husband, who used to brag about being accepted at Yale and served on the Law Review now mocks his own alma mater and pretends to be just folk (with very, very rich friends in the Tech Industry to subsidize his career). And carefully avoid mentioning that his “military career” consisted mostly of pushing paper and taking pictures. Honorable but skimpy and no match for John McCain whom your boss derided as a loser. Watching “Mrs. Vance” on stage at the convention was dispiriting. As Roger Ebert said, commenting on the wonderful film “Junebug”, we all make our own private accommodations in life.

Trump’s Ear

Some of Trump’s followers apparently see God’s providence in his survival of the assassination attempt. I wonder if maybe God just isn’t a good shot.

On this day in history, December 23, 1888, Dutch impressionist Vincent van Gogh cuts off his ear | Fox News

 

Apparently some Republican politicians skipped the Politics 101 class where you learn that politicians criticize each other. And they used to mock self-pitying victimization tropes. So while they go around claiming that Biden has destroyed the country and the Democrats are communists and child-molesters, they get all whiney and teary-eyed when a reporter makes fun of Sarah Huckabee’s worshipful enthusiasm for Trump.

“You can’t believe the media”? I get the feeling that they don’t want you to believe the media because sometimes it reports stuff like the crime rate going down, unemployment at the lowest level in 50 years, sea levels rising, Putin imprisoning journalists, the Taliban winning the war in Afghanistan, Trump having planned to withdraw all U.S. troops the same way Biden did, Hamas didn’t care who was president when it attacked Israel, Brexit was an economic disaster, immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than native Americans, most fentanyl comes into the U.S. through land border crossings, vaccines work, Biden won the 2020 election fair & square, and 10% tariffs on everything along with a strict immigration ban will drive inflation up.

Haven’t seen anyone comment on the fact that Trump’s agreeing to debate Biden before the convention might, in the end, be the biggest blunder of the election year.

The Republican Convention 2024

JD Vance is a dud.

The CNN & PBS panelists need to sharpen their wits. If Biden is responsible for inflation why did all the developed nations have it? Inflation in Biden’s first year was about 6.0%. None of Biden’s policies could, at that time, have had an impact. Unless you believe presidents can go back in time, what he inherited was Trump’s inflation.

The Teamsters (Sean O’Brien) did NOT endorse Donald Trump. He has offered to speak at both conventions.

Unreported crime is up. Think about it. (The crime rate is actually down).

Real household income has increased significantly under Biden, even in Vance’s home town!

Trump endorsed the Iraq war before he changed his mind much later.

Home prices went up 27% under Trump.

Trump had initiated the plan to leave Afghanistan before he left office and Biden essentially merely enacted it. What is not often remarked upon is that the U. S. had been losing that war badly by then and short of an injection of 100,000 or more troops, could not have changed the outcome. Evacuations under those circumstances are always going to be horrendously messy.

Unemployment under Trump was 6.7%. (Biden: 3.6%)

Yes, Trump tore up NAFTA… and then replaced it with an almost identical trade deal.

The most promising move to counter China was Obama’s Asian-Pacific trade alliance … which Trump tore up, clearly out of spite.

Most economists predicted that battling inflation with higher interest rates would increase unemployment and slow GDP growth. Biden, remarkably, reduced inflation without the expected recession. Why don’t the Democrats talk more about that? It really was quite remarkable.

The Republicans at the convention keep alluding to decaying infrastructure; Biden is the first president in decades to pass a substantial infrastructure bill.

Trump was a failure in business. He took a large capital stake from his daddy, blew it all on bad real estate deals, built casinos and golf courses that failed, owned a football team that failed, created Trump University (failed again), all while selling his image to gullible fans as some kind of business genius. He finally made money parlaying his fake image to a TV show (“The Apprentice”) which did, finally, make him a lot money. As H. L. Menken (maybe) observed, nobody every went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

The most striking thing about the convention so far is how the party has become the Trump Family Compact. Everything is Trump. Every speaker is required to genuflect to Trump. Every statement is calibrated to flatter and wheedle the divine leader. For a party that used to brag about being “rogue” and thinking independently, this slavish adoration a single personality must be humiliating.

One does begin to shed a few tears for how sensitive they are: they constantly whine about the “media” being mean to them and hurting their feelings. Poor Sarah Huckabee could hardly bear to be insulted by a TV hostess. I guess they all missed Politics 101 in which you learn that politicians should probably have some backbone, or find another profession.

Arthur Miller on Method Acting (The Lee Strasberg School of Mumblecore)

Arthur Miller on Lee Strasberg.

While filming “The River of No Return”, director Otto Preminger apparently grew quite exasperated with Marilyn Monroe because every time he gave her direction she would go to her private “coach”, Natasha Lytess, and take direction from her.  Lytess bizarrely coached Monroe to enunciate every syllable cleanly and counteracted Preminger’s desire for a more fluid, compelling performance.  Preminger should have fired Monroe on the spot but it was the nature of Hollywood then– and now– that big stars command deference, because audiences are stupid and choose their entertainment based on how much they care about the celebrity actors than the writer or director.  That’s why so many small-scale independent films are so much better than major Hollywood productions, especially the ones that feature older celebrities playing characters who should be ten, twenty, or even thirty years younger.

Lytess could never have written a screenplay if her life depended on it– she was a parasite, sucking the blood out of the real artists, and Monroe was a repugnant diva more obsessed with her own image and fame than with artistic achievement though she would frame her narcissism as “artistry”.

Anyway, this is an excellent dissection of the Strasberg school of acting:

The following was posted on Facebook 2024-07-09.

I think [Lee] Strasberg is a symptom, really. He’s a great force, and (in my unique opinion, evidently) a force which is not for the good in the theater. He makes actors secret people and he makes acting secret, and it’s the most communicative art known to man; I mean that’s what the actor’s supposed to be doing. …But the Method is in the air: the actor is defending himself from the Philistine, vulgar public. I had a girl in my play I couldn’t hear, and the acoustics in that little theater we were using were simply magnificent. I said to her, ‘I can’t hear you,’ and I kept on saying, ‘I can’t hear you.’ She finally got furious and said to me, in effect, that she was acting the truth, and that she was not going to prostitute herself to the audience. That was the living end! It reminded me of Walter Hampden’s comment–because we had a similar problem in ‘The Crucible’ with some actors–he said they play a cello with the most perfect bowing and the fingering is magnificent but there are no strings on the instrument. The problem is that the actor is now working out his private fate through his role, and the idea of communicating the meaning of the play is the last thing that occurs to him. In the Actors Studio, despite denials, the actor is told that the text is really the framework for his emotions; I’ve heard actors change the order of lines in my work and tell me that the lines are only, so to speak, the libretto for the music–that the actor is the main force that the audience is watching and that the playwright is his servant. They are told that the analysis of the text, and the rhythm of the text, the verbal texture, is of no importance whatever. This is Method, as they are teaching it, which is, of course, a perversion of it, if you go back to the beginning. But there was always a tendency in that direction. Chekhov, himself, said that Stanislavsky had perverted ‘The Seagull.'”

Arthur Miller Interview with Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron
The Paris Review, 1966