With apologies to “I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream,” The New Beverly Cinema is hosting a Harlan Ellison festival for the next week. I’ll be out of town, but that doesn’t mean you should miss it. I’m posting the schedule above — the festival is mostly made up of Ellison’s favorite films, things he thinks you should watch, lending further credence to his viewpoint that it’s his world and we’re just visitors in it.

Ellison made an early and probably deleterious impact on my writing, which I’ve yet to fully scrub out. Viewing just the trailer for his autobiographical self-produced documentary, below, reminds me why I stopped reading him almost 25 years ago. The only thing less self-indulgent than his writing was his self. (Reason number two was that I got tired of an ongoing feud via printed letters that we had for a couple of years.) (Reason number three was the zealotry of his acolytes; I almost got into a fistfight at a Directors Guild screening about 20 years ago when I had the temerity to venture to the friend of a friend that Ellison is, well, an asshole.)

Judge for yourself:

Garth Risk Hallberg argues that “Watchmen” isn’t fairly called a graphic novel, unless its film version is called a “paper movie.”

I understand where this preference for the term “graphic novel” came from:  from comics fans tired of suffering the slings and arrows of derision from people who didn’t know what they were talking about and didn’t understand and respect a great American graphic form.  If only these tossaway booklets could be collected into something with a spine and preferably in hardback, perhaps they would merit better treatment. Now we may have the opposite problem:  Drivel getting collected into $150 “omnibus” editions while John Donne goes unnoticed on Amazon.om in the absence of book stores.

I agree with Hallberg that “Watchmen” is a wonderful comic book. And if the term graphic novel is to persist, yes, it’s an exemplar. But a great novel, in a field that includes “Anna Karenina” and “The Great Gatsby?” The idea is comical.

Bill O’Reilly recently added the Chicago Sun-Times to his “Hall of Shame.” No, that’s not the corridor that all the Bush apologists have disappeared into; it’s a place for “media operations [that] have regularly helped distribute defamatory, false or non-newsworthy information supplied by far left websites.” (In other words, the sort of thing that Fox News does for far-right nut jobs.)

Getting slandered by Bill O’Reilly is high praise for most of us. Roger Ebert thanks O’Reilly for the compliment (and reduces his manhood in the process).

Thanks to Paul Crist for alerting me to this fun piece of writing.

It’s holy writ among playwrights that a bad production can screw up even a masterpiece. (Don’t believe it? Imagine William Shatner doing Shakespeare — or just singing “Rocket Man.”) But some plays hold up better than others under all circumstances, and after seeing a production of it this past Friday in a tenement theatre in San Francisco I’m thinking that Neil LaBute’s “The Shape of Things” is one of them.

The basic premise is just so much fun:  An average college nerd given a chance with an unconventional and attractive young artiste is remade in the process and left wondering, in the end, who he is and what just happened. This particular production was the directing debut of a recent college grad, and the casting reminded me of many a production I have myself featured in somehow as director or producer or (worst) playwright:  This actor’s great, this one’s good, this one’ll do, and this one… we’ll make work somehow. One actor telegraphed the play’s finale — if you didn’t know the final twist, you could certainly guess it from every actorly indication starting with Moment One. (Note to young actors (or bad actors, or all actors):  Please don’t play the end, and please don’t play the intention; and please don’t play subtext; just be. Please.) Another was physically wrong in almost every way but brought such bonhommie to the role that I grew to appreciate him and his oddly accidental comic moments. The lead was a sensation. And despite whatever faults — including the introduction of an intermission that the playwright expressly doesn’t want — the production worked well, got laughs, and held the attention of the audience. LaBute’s play asks smart questions about the essence of identity and the nature of art and the authenticity of sexual attraction; its success stems from its ability to entertain while being provocative.

What undoubtedly added to the enjoyment for me was that my son was seeing it with me. We went to San Francisco very last minute for three days on some personal business and decided to see a play on Friday night. My heart is usually found in a smaller theatre, so that’s where we went. Thirty years in, it’s hard for me to look at these things without a critical eye (but boy, when I love it, it is a joy to behold); but for Lex, this sort of thing is still new and young. His enjoyment of the play, which he’d already read, rubbed off on me. Whatever relatively minor faults of the production, I left feeling that I wanted to see another play in another small theatre right away.

The next night, after a day full of errands and obligations all over San Francisco, we went to the movies. We both wanted to see “Taken,” but it wasn’t playing near our hotel, so we wound up seeing “Fast & Furious.” Throwing us, in one night, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Let me just say that if ever in my life I’m having the stuffing beaten out of me, if someone is to grab me, throw me against a hard wood table so hard that it breaks in half, pick me up and hit me eight times hard to the craniofacial area, I hope it’s Vin Diesel, because judging from the recovery of Paul Walker it must be like getting pummeled with soft pillows. Walker sits up, wipes an invisible dripping from his nose, and talks down Vin Diesel with soothing words:  It’s the classic misunderstanding, but it’s all for the good, and no hard feelings. You or I would be on life support, but Walker is made of movie stuff. Earlier in the picture, Diesel’s posse of roadway hoodlums south of the border power their muscle cars down twisting mountaintop expanses of secluded roadway at top speeds in reverse, dropping trailer hitches onto gasoline tankers so they can haul off the precious fuel. (I’m assuming this was conceived when oil was at $150 a barrel, not the $50 it’s hovering at now. In 2009 if you want to make off with that much money, you just get a federal bailout.) The fuel swipe goes awry and Vin Diesel and his car find themselves trapped between a rock and a hard place:  hurtling toward one truck on a dead-end mountain pass while another tractor trailer endlessly flipping and bouncing from midair to hard ground is tumbling precisely their way. His solution:  Expertly timing when the tractor trailer is in midair and driving beneath it, getting out from under by the skin of his paint job. This trick is so neat that, of course, the movie repeats it again later. In big-budget action-adventure movies, if once is good, twice (or more) must be better.

For me, the movie dies 10 minutes in with Michelle Rodriguez’s character. No, I don’t know why I care about Michelle Rodriguez. I just know I can’t take my eyes off her. It isn’t purely heat; she’s got that indecipherable screen charisma that some people have and some people don’t. In a season of “Lost” that I don’t remember much about and didn’t care much about at the time, she was magnetic. (As was Michael Emerson.) Even surrounded by nitro-fueled steroid cars and whatever has been injected into Vin Diesel’s muscles and head, she stands out. But then she dies. In retrospect. We don’t even get to see it (except later). My son, who knew of my interest in seeing this movie because of Michelle Rodriguez, whispered “Uh oh” when we learned she wasn’t going to be reappearing in this movie. Not that her disappearance was a surprise, either:  Once your action-adventure hero somewhat unwillingly parts with his leading lady but leaves her a note (or, in this case, a big whopping bundle of cash; nothing says farewell my lovely so well as stacks of dead presidents), you know she’s doomed. But then, nothing, absolutely nothing, is a surprise in this movie, up to and including the identity of the mysterious drug lord everyone is hunting, and who turns out to be precisely who everyone (except our hero) thinks it is in the first place.

Finally — and I really can’t leave this subject without a word about this — let’s discuss Vin Diesel. I know that we shouldn’t discuss anyone with the name Vin Diesel, and I realize that each of us has only a limited time on Earth and I’m now spending some of mine on Vin Diesel,  and you’re spending some of  yours reading about Vin Diesel, but I can’t resist. Somehow I didn’t mind him in “The Chronicles of Riddick.” Maybe that’s because Judi Dench was in it. Maybe it’s because it was a science fiction movie with enough distractions, including Thandie Newton. (No Michelle Rodriguez, but she’ll do.) But “Fast & Furious” had me asking myself if Vin Diesel isn’t the flattest “actor” since Charles Bronson. An actor who was in a couple of my plays in the 1990’s did a movie with Charles Bronson in that period. I asked him what Charles Bronson was like. His reply:  “Like cement.” Just an inert slab that happened to be there for you to bounce lines off. I recently watched “Death Wish” again — and no, I don’t know why — and it’s true:  the “distraught” Charles Bronson upset over his wife’s murder and daughter’s rape is indistinguishable from the “workaday” Charles Bronson doing business out in the desert is indistinguishable from the vigilante Charles Bronson shooting would-be muggers in the park is indistinguishable from the murderous Charles Bronson evading police pursuing him from the subway station. Each has the emotional consistency of drywall. I couldn’t think when I’d seen that since in a major name film actor — but then seeing Vin Diesel in his latest solved that riddle for me. Say what you will about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who can’t deliver a comic line to save his schwarzenegger, but at least he can crack his face into a smile.

Oddly, though, for all its obvious problems, “Fast & Furious” is every bit as unwreckable as “The Shape of Things” — probably moreso. The latter is clever enough to withstand the uneven application of artistic ability. The former is so witless, so amped up on steroids and meth, that no amount of artistic ability is needed, or even germane. “What I learned from you is to have a code,” Paul Walker’s character tells Vin Diesel; from all evidence, that character’s code is to do whatever he wants whenever he wants wherever he wants, no matter the impact on anyone else. (We call that hedonism. No, Virginia, it is not a basis for heroism.) The movie’s code is similarly easy to grasp:  maximum impact, but no repercussions. Repeat. Faster. Repeat.

I’ll never forget the first time I started to read Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” in my late teens. Or the second time. Or the third time. Without finishing it. There had to be something to this book, its advocates were so legion, but whatever it was, I wasn’t finding it. Each time, I experienced the first 100 pages  as a cascade of names and items I couldn’t place or keep straight:  the Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit, Feyd Rautha, various Atreides and Harkonnens, stillsuits, weirding modules, heighliners, and on and on. Now there’s a Wikipedia page covering just the technology. At the time, there was no such resource. There was just the lonely labor of trying again and again until something started to make sense. Three times, I bailed on this book, until finally one night, pruning in the tub, I made it past page 100 and actually got interested.

The other night my wife saw me hunkered down in front of the bookcase on my side of the bed, looking for the next novel to read. In general, I read two or three books (and multiple magazines) at the same time. I’m looking forward to finishing the history of Germany  under the Nazis (especially delightful because I know how it ends) and then returning to the account of Roman Empires, as well as finishing Julian Barnes’ meditation on death and that account of how censorship ended so many comic artists’ careers. But in the meantime, I was looking for a novel, having recently finished T.C. Boyle’s “A Friend of the Earth,” as noted here previously. My eye landed upon Cormac McCarthy’s border trilogy:  a one-volume compendium of “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Crossing,” and “Cities of the Plain.”

However overstylized his writing may be (or perhaps because of its trickery) I find McCarthy to be a wonderful writer. No matter his overuse of polysyndeton, he has a grasp of vocabulary and flow and scenic description that at times beggars belief. I get caught up and keep reading. In addition to “All the Pretty Horses,” I’ve read “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road,” and enjoyed them all immensely. But I got stopped cold about 160 pages into “The Crossing” by an endless monologue given by an old man unmoored from this life. This old man goes on about… something… for so long I felt trapped in purgatory with him. And finally freed myself by putting the book down. A quick check-in with my son revealed that, unprompted, he had stopped at precisely the same waystation. Neither of us knew what the old man was talking about, endlessly and with seemingly no purpose, and both of us had ditched.

But now I picked it back up and climbed into bed. Even if the plot didn’t advance — and clearly, that’s what I was missing, some action, some sense of forward movement, something that would pick me up and carry me along in the way that made “No Country for Old Men” utterly unputdownable — I figured I would find myself entranced again by some of the prose before quietly slipping off to sleep. Without the aid of a bookmark, I found where I had left off probably six months ago, near the terminus of the old man’s interminable monologue, and started up again. And then found myself reading for hours. Here’s what happens:  The existential treatise ends a mere page or so after I had quit, with the old man bidding our protagonist, 17-year-old Billy Parham, farewell. Billy rather speedily crosses the border from Mexico back into the U.S. (New Mexico; nice touch) and returns to his family’s ranch to discover that the ranch has been cleaned out and his parents murdered. He heads into town and gleans what information he can from the sheriff, then picks up his younger brother, who somehow escaped the onslaught, and returns with him to Mexico, where they seek their horses and, no doubt, the men responsible for the murders.

In other words, now the book is a page turner.

I related this to my son, getting up to the point of Billy’s return and what he finds, when my son called out, “Stop. Maybe now I want to finish reading it.” He’ll have to wait for me to finish it first.

Is all this a very long way of saying that story is important? Perhaps. Is it the most important element? Maybe not. I loved “The Incredibles” because I got so caught up in Mr. Incredible’s personal crisis (a hero forced to reject his heroism, and so subject to the predations of bureaucracy and the 9 to 5); by contrast I in no way care about Ginormica’s problem in “Monsters vs. Aliens” (a young woman supported in marrying the wrong man by her friends and family discovers her true family when she is imprisoned with friendly monsters, of which she now is one). (More about this later.) The key difference is not in the story elements, but in the thematic and character elements. But story is important, and it seems oddly irritating in 2009 to have to say this. It is especially irritating to have to say this with regard to the theatre, where somehow it has become laughable to suggest that we should care what happens, and that actions should have consequences, but here is Theresa Rebeck, in today’s LA Times, having to defend these notions for us. I have stood in her shoes too many times. It’s especially galling to have cut one’s teeth on Ionesco and Beckett and to have one’s view of theatre derided as “nostalgic.”

Audiences aren’t stupid and they don’t lie. With drama we can more easily fool ourselves, but comedy is the truest form because it exposes all falsehoods:  Either it is funny or it isn’t, and either the audience laughed or it didn’t.  It’s that simple. No, not all experiences are universal.  There were many who loved “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” but if I never see another newish Neil Simon play it will be far too soon. (Seeing “The Dinner Party” was for me a singular event; it was the very evening in which I swore I would forever after more cautiously guard my time. This after two hours of feeling my life drain away.)  Every play is not for every body; but many new plays are for nobody — nobody except the people who make them. If the language poets killed poetry, I’m afraid their ilk have now turned their sights onto the stage. Twenty-five years ago, an undergrad professor told me that if poetry lost the educated, the enlightened, the readers, the people it already had and should have, then the fault lay with the poets. I think about that every time I come across a new poem utterly inflated with its own word play and cleverness but resolutely impregnable of meaning. But where I feel worst about this is in the theatre, when audiences are left cold by something obtuse that the playwright and the director are so unjustly proud of. The underlying purpose of all theatre must remain catharsis — that frisson of fellow-feeling, when the emotional brutality of the event whether comic or dramatic is brought upon us. When language is made pre-eminent over feeling, all we’re left with is puns.

Something I noted about the film version of “Watchmen” was that it was mostly faithful to the comic book — to its detriment. “Watchmen,” let’s remember, was not a “graphic novel” — it was a comic book, delivered in 12 serialized installments. As such, it made much of classic comic-book storytelling construction. Each issue had a strong set piece (Rorschach escaping prison; Nite Owl and Silk Spectre rescuing people from a fire; Dr. Manhattan and Silk Spectre debating mankind’s future) and a cliffhanger. By transliterating what worked so well in separate chapters released 30 days apart in a literary format, the film is saddled with a start-and-stop structure antithetical to action-adventure movies, which rely upon the classic Aristotleian structure of rising action and catharsis.

So: the comic book was great. The movie has some wonderful things in it (several of the performances, many of the special effects), and one major improvement: the ending. The ending in the comic book was an unintentional swipe from “The Outer Limits,” was utterly unconvincing in uniting humankind, and seemed only tangentially related to most of the comic’s main themes. The movie’s ending, by contrast, is far more plausible because everyone on Earth has already seen Dr. Manhattan’s power, and works better because it ties in with many other plot elements and themes (the ethical responsibilities of heroes; the moral ambivalence of vigilantism; the unintended side effects of employing great power, however well-intentioned). Ironically, against a backdrop the fanboy legion insisting upon apostolic faith to the source material, it is the element of greatest change that succeeds the most.

So then I wondered, what if they had really changed the comic book? Really done a different take on the material? Then I came across this, below, and was reminded of reading the Denny O’Neil issues-oriented era of “Justice League of America” comics, while seeing the antimatter universe version called “Super Friends” on my TV set on Saturdays.

Some of us are old-fashioned. We believe in something called evil. It goes by various terms, and sometimes it’s dressed up as mental illness, but in general it equates with people getting hurt in very bad ways and sometimes on a large scale and for generally no good reason or for reasons that could have been avoided.

Some of these are easily identified. Hitler = evil. That’s an easy one. Often it requires more thought, no matter what the scale. Dr. Jack Kevorkian — savior to the suffering, or someone who seeks to legitimize his personal thrill in ending a life? But in general, I think we could agree that an atrocity on the scale of killing billions of people in an effort to extinguish an entire race should rightly be seen as:  evil.

Except on “Battlestar Galactica,” where it appears to be God’s will. Or an unavoidable part of a natural cycle. Or something.

I watched the show’s finale last night and as much as one can be troubled by popular entertainment, I found it troubling. Troubling not just because the ending calls into question the entirety of the series’ supposed noble purpose, but also because it has been met with just unthinking universal acclaim, both in the mainstream media and on message boards.

On the macro level, Cylons and Humans reconcile, intermingle, and repopulate — and we are their offspring. But the way I understand the series, Cylons wiped out about a dozen planets full of humans, reducing the entire population to 39,000 that they ardently sought to wipe out.  Welcoming them with open arms to end a cycle of violence is akin to setting aside the morals of the enlightened to embrace the Nazis.

On the micro level, we have Gaius Baltar, an unrelentingly self-interested and self-serving race traitor who allows Caprica Six entree into the inner workings of human defense so that he can get laid. In the finale, we learn that Baltar was a poor lower-class farm boy who in adulthood strove to leave behind his past and who makes one — one — gallant effort, in joining a small firefight in the climactic battle scene. So, I guess, now that we understand the shame of his boyhood all is forgiven for those  billions who were murdered. (It’s interesting that the vice-president and a ship’s officer are court-martialed and executed by firing squad for leading an insurrection that kills a few dozen, while Baltar, the greatest mass murderer in history, is free to return to his roots.)

Dressed up as it is in the show’s liberal politics, where all can be forgiven if only we share our feelings, we are reassured at show’s end that all is according to God’s plan. Because of our bipolar nature — good/evil, Cylon/Human — we are forced to repeat this cycle until we decide to break it. Which would be fine — except we now learn that much of the action of the series has been guided by — wait for it — angels. The Caprica Six who has appeared to Baltar from episode one:  an angel. The Kara Thrace who returned from death? An angel. What I would ask is this — and I understand that these are age-old questions — what hope can humans have to break a cycle that is ordained by the almighty? If God wanted us to break a cycle of violence, well, why doesn’t He do it? Or, at the least, why doesn’t He simply stop sending angels and demons who keep us stuck in the groove  of this neverending cycle? Even more disturbing, if this is God’s plan, then how can we ascribe blame to Hitler, Stalin, Ted Bundy, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, the architects of the Spanish Inquisition, Cheney, Bush? How can we judge against them, if they are part of a divine plan?

Questions of divinity and morality are only the most obvious disturbing element. The show has also been relentlessly anti-technology. For the record, technology is not evil in itself (although it can be used for evil purposes) and throughout human history has greatly improved the lives of billions. It seems foolish to have to say this, but in an age when people esteem mysticism (angels) and naturalism (chaos) over rational improvement, I suppose we should all of us take more time to stick up for civilization. In the series premiere, it was made clear that the Galactica survived only because as a museum piece it was not hooked up to Baltar’s integrated defense system. This is a favored trope of many a nostalgic Westerner:  that while your newfangled car’s computerized engine can be counted on to fail, that old rustbucket in the yard will always start right up. This is the kind of thinking that would have kept life nasty, brutish, and short. I make my living almost entirely through two devices, one called the phone, the other the computer; for much of human history I and everyone else would have been relegated to, paraphrasing Steinbeck, working in the dirt with a stick all day. Anyone who complains about office work hasn’t given it enough thought. The prehistoric alternative is hunting/gathering, and dying young from wild animal attack, other injuries and infectious diseases. If you are troubled by technology, then by all means, try the alternative.

(As a side note, this is why I so thoroughly enjoyed T.C. Boyle’s  “A Friend of the Earth.” The chapter where the Earth Firsters decide to live naked in the woods for 30 days is instructive. Any thoughts of sex or enjoyment or the wonders of nature fall away quickly when the imperative turns to finding another two-ounce lizard to eat raw. Boyle is no deluded fool, succored by indoor lighting while railing against the electric company.)

The organic alternative is where the Galactica’s various species — Human, Cylon, and hybrid — wind up. They redub Sol III as “Earth” and settle here, engendering the rest of  human history. In so doing, they reject cities and ships and weaving and printing and everything else manufactured from their past and go rustic. I watched this scene and asked the basic questions that the writers would rather you didn’t:  “What happens when those clothes fall apart?” “If they don’t build structures, how will they survive the cold and rain?” “What happens when the medicine runs out?” and on and on. Laura Roslin was already dying of cancer, but it seemed hard to believe that the first time someone had an infected cut they wouldn’t be sorry they’d destroyed all the penicillin. How many millions of lives has penicillin saved, and how many died in the past for want of it? These are the questions that are left utterly unasked, and they are the right ones.

In place of all these hard questions, precisely the sort of hard questions that inform global actions every day, questions of morality, and of choice, of individual responsibility, what we’re left with is the freefloating sentiment that mankind should just decide to get along together. Yes. I agree. Just as I wish that every board, panel, committee, and commission I have ever sat upon, or indeed every play-production group to which I have ever belonged, would just agree. But we don’t. We seem to have differing ideas. Individual ideas. And here’s the revelation:  Sometimes there’s a bad person involved. Someone who’s damaged or deranged, someone who is willfully malcontent, someone who enjoys actively undermining the efforts of others. Breaking bread with that person feeds him and leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. Certainly at this point, we’ve learned that, haven’t we? Seventy years later, haven’t we learned the essential difference between Churchill and  Chamberlain, and why we’re all of us in Churchill’s debt? Surely this is something about which we can all say, “So say we all.”

Y’know those celebrity tours where you can see Fred Astaire’s house, or visit W.C. Fields’ gravesite, or whatever?

Now you can go throw up where Charles Bukowski did. And visit the post office where he was infamously employed. And so forth.

And all for the “didn’t know there’s a recession going on” price of 58 bucks — which is about 53 bucks more than Buk ever had until the end.

Irony abounds.

The 1st Annual Bukowski Festival is this month in (where else?) Hollywood. Here’s the info:

Here’s a good interview on Flavorwire with T.C. Boyle.

I’m nearing the end of “A Friend of the Earth” and noting again Boyle’s existential humor. Half the novel is set 20 years from now, when the result of ecological ruin is raining down upon us; but the other half is set in the late 1980’s and shows the eco-warriors as naifs and fools. So I guess either way (do something about it or don’t do something about it), we’re fucked. Which I’m sure is great fun to write, but probably not the best call to action.