On a late summer stalk
A forgotten growth in papery husk
Onetime ear of sustenance
Now dried and colored
No hint of midsummer sugar
A tattered orange brown
The alien heart of coiling growth
Desiccated on rattling stalk
To be trampled
And lie under winter’s flake
Knowing without knowing
Ripe pods will rise anew
Someday to spread the cracks and reign
Robert Shaw, left, as Henry VIII and Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons (1966)
It’s a bit silly, of course, to base historical observations on a movie, but I’m going to do it anyway. Playwright and screenwriter Robert Bolt was not alive in 1530s when Sir Thomas More mouldered in the Tower of London, obstinate in his refusal to sanction Henry VIII’s break with his first wife Catherine of Aragon and the Church of Rome. But his screenplay for the film A Man for All Seasons, while not historically accurate in all details, provides enough of the reality of the times to make the case that More (and probably his brilliant and learned daughter Margaret who kept many of her father’s writings alive) would have been largely copacetic with the ideals of the American Revolution 240 years later.
What’s striking about Bolt’s script, ably helmed by Hollywood regular Fred Zinnemann (who knew about dictatorship as an Austrian Jewish refugee from the Nazis who lost his parents in the Holocaust), is not so much Bolt’s erudite dialog, as good as it is, but the emotional reaction it provokes in the viewer that under the political system of monarchy, especially a powerful and paranoid killer like Henry VIII, you are only a whim away from losing your head.
There’s a scene in the film that brilliantly underscores this. We see a wedding party held for the Henry after he has broken with the Catholic Church, rid himself of Spanish Catherine and married Anne Boleyn. He’s immensely pleased with himself and needs only one thing to make the day perfect: the acquiescence of More to the situation. Henry, played as a volcanic egomaniac by a young Robert Shaw, thinks he spies More across the room during the revels. He’s excited by the prospect that More, Henry’s chancellor, has given in. So he pushes — he’s an asshole and a king so he really pushes — his way through the crowd to greet the man he thinks is More, loudly exclaiming “Thomas!” When the partygoer turns around we see that he is not More, however, the reaction of Henry is first surprise, then anger and finally a murderous gaze that heralds all that is to come for More. Shaw handles this beautifully, giving his initial reaction at the mistaken identity, then a short head turn away and then the final sulfurous look. You expect Henry to order the poor lookalike to be killed on the spot.
And that’s the true emotional kick of Bolt’s script, not the tearful reaction of More’s wife and daughter to his long imprisonment prior to his beheading. When your life hangs in the balance of a tyrant’s ever-shifting whims, you could be toast at any time. More attempts to buck this system by using the protections of law and due process. But a powerful autocrat can subvert those protections and get at you anyway, as Henry did with More. Regardless of the reasons that More won’t pledge allegiance to Henry’s marital whims, the point is that he shouldn’t have to just to keep his head.
This pushback against royal power is one of the reasons for the American Revolution. The reality of the rebellion is much more complex than that, of course. And the British themselves had already largely joined More in the realization of the need to reign in their kings and queens via both the English Civil War (1642-1651) and the 1688 Glorious Revolution — when Parliament required William and Mary to sign a document that restricted their power before allowing them to be crowned the new king and queen.
So while More would likely have been appalled in many ways by America in 1776, part of him may have been on board with the concept that a nation of laws is the way to go — not the tides of a monarch’s, or a dictator’s, fevered psyche.
Published in 1980, four years before his death at age 56 of lung cancer, Walter Tevis’s novel Mockingbird is a powerful vision of future mankind on the decline. The novel does incorporate some major threads of previously-explored dystopian Sc-Fi thought, but Tevis still manages to make them his own. Mockingbird is an underrated book that should be considered a classic of Sci-Fi, alongside Brave New World, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Fahrenheit 451, The Children of Men, I am Legend, etc.
This past winter the success of the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, based on a Tevis novel, revived the author’s profile. During the course of his career, the talented Tevis had three of his books turned into feature films: The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Color of Money. Since I binge-watched Gambit and enjoyed it, I was intrigued by Tevis. I decided to dive into Mockingbird and was delighted by the plunge.
The novel has three main characters, one of whom is a world-weary robot. The story occurs in a world that’s running down, as humans are no longer reproducing and thus inexorably dying out. Almost as bad, however, they’ve already died intellectually. The majority of humans have forgotten how to read. Their lives are coddled by pills, cannabis and legions of robots. In constructing his future world, Tevis invents clever terminology that is similar to, though not as lush as, the verbal inventiveness of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.
It’s a elegiac story of human decline that is nearly perfectly balanced between the sadness of a vanished human past and its terminal future. While that sounds like an unpleasant journey, Tevis is a gifted writer who understands the power of simple truths, chiefly the beguiling pull of love. Mockingbird is sad, but it’s also beautiful, inventive, strangely heartfelt and emotionally true and carries a seed of hope to the end.
High level folks skate, low level soldiers get it in the neck. Okay, not a glitteringly original observation — what American paying attention doesn’t know that? A fascinating documentary now on Netflix, Made You Look, clearly underscores this point. Instead of greedy Wall Street criminals, corrupt defense contractors or real estate sharks, however, this doc dishes on the art world in NYC in the late 90s early 00s. A more genteel venue than those more hard-elbowed grifters’ haunts, yet apparently still well-equipped with conmen, fraudsters and shady operators willing to ride the train for as long as possible.
It’s an engaging, well told story by director Barry Avrich, the prolific producer/director who also made the profound Prosecuting Evil (2018), a look at Ben Ferencz, the last surviving Nuremberg Trial prosecutor. Made You Look has a famous art gallery, a well-connected art dealer, a genius painter churning out the fakes and then there’s the low-level type who’s working the scam. So what happens? [SPOILERS BELOW]
When the fraud is uncovered the gallery owner claims to know nothing and closes the gallery, the art dealer professes innocence and the genius painter escapes to China. And the low level operator gets arrested and goes to jail.
Everybody skates but her. So the lesson is clear: Don’t be the low level operative. Everyone above you? They’re all gonna get away with it. But you, you’re called the bag man for a reason. Cause you’re the one left holding it.
This book is an excellent sampling from the wartime reporting of the Soviet writer Vassily Grossman. “A Writer at War” not only has Grossman’s often grim, sometimes lyrical but always superb descriptions of the Eastern Front in WWII, it also has excellent wrap-around explanatory text and footnotes by the British military historian Antony Beevor. Grossman covered the Red Army throughout WWII on the Eastern Front for the Red Army newspaper. He never shrank from danger and was often on the front lines, especially in the summer and fall of 1941 during the months of retreat from the German onslaught, and was nearly captured several times. There is tremendous, sharply-observed detail in his writing about the soldiers and the suffering of civilians. And his piece on the Treblinka death camp is chilling in its almost novelistic approach to explaining the monstrous way the Nazis fooled people into thinking they were heading east to farm before being brought to the camp and gassed. Grossman was Jewish and tried to write about the deaths of Jews in the war and the Holocaust, but Stalin and Soviets authorities wanted only to describe the suffering of Soviet citizens, “no special commemoration of Jews.” After the war Stalin purged many Jews during the times of “the little terror” and “the doctor’s plot” and Grossman would likely have been killed as well, but luckily for him, Stalin died in 1953 just as the terror apparatus was gearing up purge him. Grossman also wrote novels about the war, the most famous being “Life and Fate,” which revolves around the Battle of Stalingrad.
The Safdie Bros. film, Uncut Gems is a impressive piece of work. Crazy energy and the insanity of gambling are seen here in stark terms. The rush of hitting a big score hooks some people and they can’t get over it. The sense of addiction is palpable. Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a character who scrambles to get the money to pay off to the mobsters (a nice touch having one of them be his brother in law), but he can’t resist the rush and the addiction of one more big throw. The film shows he’s got talent at sports betting but he ultimately pays dearly for his addiction. It’s a Shakespearian level tragedy set in a nasty, lowlife world. As the film begins the camera enters the fabulously iridescent black opal of the title and travels through on of the embedded gems before coming out the other side to show a monitor screen depicting Howard getting a colonoscopy. It’s a self-deprecating joke by the Safdie’s telling us that Howard has just entered a world of shit!
The novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami is a strange and immersive ride. Murakami’s writing is subtle and almost artlessly naturalistic. There are few huge twists or outsized dramatic moments, but he draws you in with steady, ingratiating details about the characters that make it impossible not to read on. The dreamlike, otherworldly nature of his prose is masterful. Even though I didn’t think the various threads of the story came together in a standard storytelling way, they did all work to present a sense of completion. The parts about the Japanese soldiers in Manchuria in WWII and later in the Soviet prison camp are gripping. The struggles of Toru and Kumiko and her family are elliptical and strange, yet also engaging and ultimately moving.
Here's something you may not know:
— Nuclear Energy Inst. (@NEI) December 31, 2019
The U.S. nuclear industry is recognized as one of the safest industrial working environments in the nation.https://t.co/tOJEGMnU6g
The Netflix movie 6 Underground is Michael Bay in default feverish overload. If Bay possessed something like restraint, his films would improve exponentially.
There’s no question that Bay knows how to compose kinetic, visually stimulating sequences. Critics have called this style is Bayhem: wildly kinetic images with an overloaded frame and spinning camera spinning. This Bayhem overload is taken to the Nth degree in his Transformer movies where robots reconfigure their physical structure as they’re falling, flying and rolling at high speed and smashing through skyscrapers, bridges or other urban ephemera. The prolonged effect of Bay turning it up to 11 produces boredom, not excitement.
6 Underground has an opening car chase in the streets of Florence that’s 30% longer than it needs to be. But with $150 million budget, black Suburbans need smashing and Bay is happy to step up. A fellow film nerd noted that Bay has his car driving through the Uffizi gallery and smashing art. A wry bit of self commentary by Bay. He knows where he stands and revels in it.
A signature use of the Bay style was in his retelling of the Japanese attack on Hawaii in 1941: Pearl Harbor. Here, the Bayhem not only turns the events into a chaotic visual mess, they also change the historical nature of the event. Bay shoots the air attack as if it carried out by thousands of aircraft. In Bay’s images we see Japanese planes at low altitude, medium altitude and up high. The sky is filled with planes. This might be considered more visually interesting, but it’s not close to what actually happened. The Japanese attacked with only 354 aircraft. and those were in two waves: 183 in the first wave and 171 in the second. Not the massive numbers Bay shows us.
Hey, it’s just a dramatic movie, not a documentary. It doesn’t have to be historically accurate, right? No. There’s never been an accuracy law in Hollywood. But Bay’s vision is unfortunate for two reasons: 1) it makes it seem that there was no stopping the massive Japanese onslaught, yet, in fact, if U.S. forces had been more competent and had gotten their aircraft airborne, they could have greatly blunted the attack; 2) it belittles the incredibly effective military operation carried out by only 354 planes. You don’t have to agree with the Japanese war aims to be impressed with what they accomplished via excellent planning and operational skill.
My eerie story “Shell Hole” is included in the new surreal and fantasy A Land Without Mirrors. And of all of the stories, mine leads the pack at page 1. Thanks to editor Cara Flannery for putting my World War I tale first.
In the story, a British soldier gets lost on a night patrol and runs across someone he thinks he knows in the blasted waste of No Man’s Land.