Glad I went to see Ricky Gervais tonight at the Kodak. He was howlingly funny — and helped me forget that I live in a city where the major metropolitan daily newspaper is about to be one without an opinion section, a magazine, or a book section.

Apparently, the last standalone section of the Los Angeles Times Book Review appears this July 27th. (While I’ll be at Comic Con — a place where one can still find books, and hear them talked about.) The Book Review — or, as I’ve been calling it while it existed albeit in a diminished state, The Book Area — was the one section I read every Sunday when I was in town. I also wrote about 10 reviews for it when I was actively freelancing in the mid 1990’s.

Editorial is getting deep cuts. But chin up, says California Editor David Lauter. Here’s an excerpt from his email Friday to the editorial staff:

So, as we move into the weekend, please remember that we’re going to have fewer people, but we’re not going to have lowered standards or baser ambitions. Our readers demand first-rate journalism, our skill and dedication give us the tools to deliver it. And that’s what we’re going to do — now and in the future.

As ever,
David

I believe this is known as “whistling past the graveyard.” It’s beyond me how one doesn’t lower standards, or sacrifice “first-rate journalism” when one suddenly has 150 fewer editorial positions. Let alone no book section.

One could ask, “What should he say?” How about saying, “We can’t continue to operate this way. If they want to have any product at all, the publisher and the owner need to stabilize the newspaper, rather than cut it.” But I guess that’s further evidence of my quaint notion that journalism is about, hey, speaking truth to power. If you’re going down anyway, at least retain your pride.

Just so we don’t lose our humor in the face of the ongoing Bush disintegration (er, administration), as well as all the aiding and abeting our Democratic friends are doing, I share this brief video, which a friend sent me yesterday. Sometimes a little crude humor goes a long way.

A big thank-you to Isabel Storey for sending this in:

“Good news. Cleanup of the Bush legacy is on the way!

A San Francisco group has collected 12,000 signatures to name a sewage treatment plant after the outgoing president.”

According to the story, the White House “is not amused.”

Me neither, most days.

Well, no. I can’t do that.

But with your help, I can help to raise money that provides medical and dental care (and other services) for people suffering from the disease. I’m doing that by running in this year’s AIDS Marathon, and I’m asking you please to sponsor me.

Yes, I’m going to run 26.2 miles in October. (I’m already up to 8.)  But the sense of accomplishment in crossing the finish line will in no way compare with the feeling associated with knowing where the donations (mine included) will go:  to providing care for thousands of people with no health insurance and few alternatives.

Please click here to sponsor me in this marathon or to learn more.

Painter William Wray is opening his latest showing this Saturday night at a gallery in Monrovia, here in Southern California. Here’s information on the gallery and its friendly and knowledgeable owner, Laura Segil, and here’s info on the artist, and above is one of his paintings.

Some of us are more familiar with some other William Wray art. It’s the art he signs as Bill Wray, and includes animation and print work on Hellboy, Batman, and Ren & Stimpy. Here’s that Wray’s site, and here’s a representative illustration. (Although when he does, say, Bugs Bunny, it’s with a gentler touch.)

So I ask you: Which is the serious art?

The answer is: both.

I like that William Wray is both a fine-art painter and a commercial/comic illustrator. I like that my friend Gerald Locklin writes accessible poems that are also packed with meaning. I write marketing copy as well as plays, and I enjoy them both (although in different ways). Shakespeare wrote for the masses, but somehow wound up being artistic. Samuel Beckett, the doyen of litterateurs, loved detective thrillers (and I’m sure if he could have written one, would have).

We have this false notion that there is “low” art and “high” art. I don’t think so. I think there’s “good” art and “bad” art, and there’s art that’s more accessible (because the references are more easily understood by more people) and there’s art that’s less accessible. Moreover, I often wonder if the advocates of “high art” aren’t a little too interested in keeping more people from scaling their towers and gaining access.

Recently a colleague from USC came to see one of my plays and told me afterward how glad he was to see so many people laughing. (Intentionally: It’s a comedy.) For decades, he’s suffered the slings and arrows of a certain slice of the academy, where lighter material is frowned upon, and to be funny isn’t to be any good. (And we wonder what happened to the audience for poetry.)

So I celebrate William Wray and his alter ego Bill Wray. And early this Saturday evening I may drive out to Monrovia to meet them.

If Jesse Jackson wanted to do something nice for Barack Obama — which he didn’t — I can’t think of a nicer thing he could’ve done than this:  say on Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor” (of all places), with regard to Obama, “I wanna cut his nuts off.”

Now if only Osama bin Laden would endorse John McCain, the day would be complete.

Nothing has been left undamaged by presidency Bush.

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

Stan Lee is signing his new book next week at Book Soup.

‘Nuff said.

Imagine if you read this and then moments later looked at it and it seemed brand new, like you hadn’t read it before.

Imagine if you read this and then moments later looked at it and it seemed brand new, like you hadn’t read it before.

Imagine if you read this and then moments later looked at it and it seemed brand new, like you hadn’t read it before.

That’s a taste of what it’s like being Clive Wearing, as profiled in this New Yorker piece by Oliver Sacks. Twenty years ago when in his mid-forties, Wearing was struck by a brain infection that affected his memory. Since then, he has been reduced to a memory span of only seconds. This means that for Wearing, every experience no matter how often repeated is new.

It also means that Wearing lives his life on the surface. He has to. It takes time, and thought, and experience, to delve. Wearing is capable of only snap judgments (and these he would have to make again and again), and so his best adjustment to the terror of instant experience is to deal only with the surface of things. He is an everflowing fount of jokes, puns, and wisecracks. Like the obnoxious jokester most of us avoid in life, Wearing is doing his best to mask a deficiency.

When Wearing was first struck by this malady, he took to keeping a journal. The entries, a page of which is provided in the magazine but sadly not online, provide a terrifying look into the abyss. “I do live!!!!” reads one entry. Another from the same day on the same page reads, “Hurrah [times infinity] — I DO live. (First time known.)” There are endless repetitions of this theme: that for Wearing every moment is not just a waking moment but a birthing moment.

I am interested in this story for several reasons. There is of course the obvious bizarre subject, and the relief at not being that subject myself. Much of what passes for our entertainment is relief that we are not as bad off as those entertaining us. (Comedy is nothing if not savoring the thrill of others’ pain and misfortune.) I’m also enchanted by the way Oliver Sacks interacts with Wearing with all the objective expertise of a neurologist; our profession often prescribes our behavior. Sacks ascribes Wearing’s jokiness to “a weakening of the usual social frontal-lobe inhibitions.” As a playwright concerned with character and motivation, I would focus on Wearing’s moment-to-moment actions — how he copes with a daily life too similar to a needle skipping over the groove — and what that says about human experience, and our existence. Most (or all?) of my plays ask who are we, and how do we fit? If for Clive Wearing every moment is like being born, every moment before must be like being not-born, or dead.

Imagine the terror.

Wherever it’s written that it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, that writing is wrong.

I’ve come not to praise Senator Jesse Helms, who died today, but to bury him. Which is only fitting, given how many people indirectly buried by his actions.

During the emergence of the crisis, Helms led the fight against AIDS funding. He voted no on civil rights, no to the United Nations, no to arms reduction treaties. He eviscerated the National Endowment for the Arts.

That Helms died on the 4th of July, and with the knowledge that a black man is about to be nominated for president by a major party, gladdens my heart. The latter could not have sat well (despite the encomium today from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who said despite all evidence, “Senator Helms certainly was no bigot.”) The former gives us a wonderful opportunity to contrast Mr. Helms with two previous U.S. leaders who also died on July 4th.

John Adams: Led the independence effort. Negotiated a loan with the Dutch that financed the war for independence. Wrote the Massachusetts Constitution, which served as the basis for the U.S. Constitution. Created the U.S. Navy.

Thomas Jefferson: Wrote the Declaration of Independence. Doubled the size of the nation, in effect sparing us land wars at home. Founded the University of Virgina. Protected the rights of — and from — religion.

What will go on Mr. Helms’ tombstone?

“Against blacks, and gays, and peaceable assembly, and intellectual pursuits, he gave us Ronald Reagan.”