Posted 9:39 PM by Michael

LATEST POSTS: Deep Snooze The, uh, truth about, uh, that Watergate thing • Bubba Mullah Falwell and Islam • Sin Visible The Church thinks differently • The Two and Only Bob and Ray, miracle men • Things Left Undone Notes for the next day after

DEEP SNOOZE

To judge by the press, the world is fairly consumed at the moment by a single question—who was Deep Throat? Was it W. Mark Felt? Pat Buchanan? Old suspects like Kissinger, Haig, Rosemary Woods?

Meanwhile, most of America is consumed by a single question rooted in a complex mystery—how do I work the damn Memento DVD? The identity of Deep Throat, on the other hand, is right up there with "what's in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction?" on the list of questions that most people have long since stopped pondering—that is, most people who are not in the endlessly self-fascinated fraternity of the press.

Even a couple of years ago, Timothy Noah in Slate was marveling at the notion that no one seemed that interested when an article in The Atlantic pretty convincingly fingered FBI bigwig Mark Felt (who just happened to have all kinds of connections to one Bob Woodward). For people who still pine for the rich vein of commentary and parody that Nixon offered in the 70s, the idea that the rest of America barely remembers him is hard to accept. There are still enough Nixonhounds out there that no less than two Nixon movies (the unintentional comedy Nixon and the intentional one Dick) got greenlighted in the last few years and promptly died of indifference. Somewhere out there, David Frye is still wagging his jowls, denying his crookdom.

But let's remember that Nixon isn't even the most recent president to face impeachment. After Monica, Watergate seems as dry as the Sherman Adams scandal. It's like a 70s movie (say, Peckinpah's The Getaway) that seemed so thrilling when you saw it back then, and now seems, despite a certain gritty verisimilitude, to be kinda dull next to the much more hyped-up thrillers of our time.

But to the press... now there's a different story. To them, after all the sleaze they've bathed in during the Monica-Chandra years, Watergate seems like a golden moment, when what they did was true and right and above all, validated by that mysterious grownup in the parking garage who told the kids with long hair that they were on the right track (or berated them, like a tough but loving drill sergeant, for not trying harder). For the press, All the President's Men isn't a political story—it's a tale of youthful promise golden and unattainable in this imperfect world, like Le Grand Meaulnes or A Separate Peace or (note 70s Redford connection) The Great Gatsby. Deep Throat is the page one story across the water, to be gazed at and never had again.

So, who was Deep Throat? Well, he was more than one person. He was Mark Felt or somebody like him, plainly, some of Woodward's information clearly had an FBI source. And it suddenly looks really, really good that it was also Pat Buchanan—you know that one just feels right, that Loose Buchanan is exactly the sort who would tattle to the press he officially hated... after extracting a lifetime pledge on a stack of Bibles never to tell. He did damage to Bush Sr. in New Hampshire, who would say that he wouldn't be capable of stabbing Nixon in the back in a parking garage?

I think Felt (and/or others) had the real info that helped the Post. But it was Buchanan who would have created the myth of Deep Throat by insisting on all the spy play, and secretly thrilling to his fame. And that puts a whole new perspective on the way the Deep Throat scenes with Hal Holbrook in the movie play—if it was Buchanan, suddenly the grownup gravitas of Holbrook needs to be replaced by a jittery, manic, two-timing juvenility, thrilling to the danger and the hugeness of his role in history, even as he flirts with self-destruction and hears the secret police around every corner.

If Spielberg can change E.T., we can imagine a 30th anniversary edition of All the President's Men with the Buchanan Deep Throat that really was replacing sober Hal. Dennis Hopper, for instance, would have been the right age and type at the time; so would Bruce Dern. The authentic picture of Deep Throat might be Hopper's speed-freak acolyte of a leader gone mad in Apocalypse Now—or maybe the twisted veteran Dern played in Black Sunday, who was so bummed by the 70s he just wanted to blow everything up.

Posted 1:38 PM by Michael
BUBBA MULLAH

A Muslim group has condemned Jerry Falwell for things he said about Islam.

Where to start? Or is this beyond commentary, let alone parody?

How could a Muslim group be surprised that Jerry Falwell thinks Islam is a false faith and a pernicious one? Obviously they think the same about his. And considering that Falwell got into trouble right after September 11th for suggesting that the attacks were a righteous punishment for something he didn't like (a DVD release of The People Vs. Larry Flynt, I think), there's more congruence between the two points of view than there's difference.

In fact, the only difference I can see is the society around the two fundamentalisms. Falwell lives in a society where even Southern Baptists dare not commit wholesale murder (as they did as recently as the 1960s against the integrationist heresy)—and where, if you speak the obvious tenets of your primitive creed in public, such as that all other religions are false and their adherents doomed to boiling pitch for all eternity, you have to hire a PR agency to get you out of trouble. Muslim fundamentalists are under no such societal restrictions, though once again we find them taking advantage of our western ways to whine in public in a way they plainly wouldn't at home, since no one would even know why they were complaining (he called Mohammed a pedophile? Well, what do you expect from the slave-lackeys of the Jewish blood-drinkers? We will have his tongue for calling us violent!)

It is again to the West's credit, if not to Falwell's, that our mullahs have to behave themselves according to a considerably more civil standard than in the Arab world, where becoming more extreme is as sure a path to popularity as it is here for new Fox TV shows.

Posted 3:49 PM by Michael
SIN VISIBLE

At a sort of religious town hall meeting in Chicago recently, Catholic parishioners reacted with scornful disbelief when a priest suggested that there needed to be some "wiggle room" in a zero-tolerance policy for pedophile priests. "Is that the same wiggle room that the Church allows on divorce or abortion?" was the general response.

This same point has been made by others—that on a graduated scale of morality running from, say, cussing to genocide, the Church takes a much harder line toward some things that many don't believe belong on the List of Bad Things at all (i.e., divorce, homosexuality) than on other things that seem unspeakable and horrifying (using one's position as a priest to rape seven-year-olds). From a criminal justice perspective, in which Bad Things are purely linear and the worse/further down the scale something is the longer a sentence you get for it, this seems a case of badly screwed-up priorities on the Church's part.

From the Church's perspective, however, it makes sense—and in some ways may even be more realistic about human nature. The danger in the linear view of crime and/or sin is that it makes it easy to draw a cut-off point—ordinary people may cheat on our taxes and have affairs, but there's a line beyond which lie the monsters who do what you or I would never do (rape seven-year-olds, deal heroin, stick up gas stations, ethnically cleanse the neighborhood). Where the Church knows that (in theory) we are all capable of anything; sin is in all our hearts, temptation always exists. There but for the grace of God go I.

For the Church, it's the state of sin or sinlessness that matters more than the individual sin—which is why continuing in a lesser sin like divorce or homosexuality is worse than a single act of utter depravity. Thus it was possible for the notorious Crusader-turned-child-murderer Gilles de Rais to make a genuine repentance. He still got burned at the stake for his horrible crimes, but it is a matter of faith that he then walked straight into Heaven, soul cleansed—as unjust as that may seem by modern standards.

Unfortunately, I think that this point of view starts to present its own temptations when, like so many priests today, you don't believe what you're saying about divorce and homosexuality and birth control any more than your parishioners do. If you're cutting divorced parishioners slack outside the official system, the temptation is surely there to cut your fellow priests slack as well for their adult affairs (straight or gay). It's only fair, right? And if the system in turn encourages you to see the priest who raped an altar boy as having succumbed to a temptation that could have overcome any of us, and as having made a genuine repentance, then that doesn't leave much of anybody or anything for you to condemn morally. Call it laissez-faire Catholicism.

Hypocritical though the criminal-justice model may be, for allowing us to draw a distinction between ourselves and the monsters that is by no means as clear as we'd like to believe, the Church's approach is worse if it discredits the notion of any distinction at all. When everybody's a sinner, everybody gets a pass. To force a large body of men to preach a moral orthodoxy (on birth control, homosexuality, divorce) in which few of them actually believe must have the effect of eroding the solidity of their moral convictions on every other subject. The Church has become a machine for producing publicly prudish, privately tolerant libertines.

Is there a way out? Obviously I think that the popular suggestion on the right (weed out the gays and shore up the orthodoxy!) is what produced this crisis, not the solution to it. I don't see any way other than the one that the Church has always taken (eventually) and always denied that it was doing: change with the times. The Church has accepted human progress before. It cooperates with other faiths it once sought to destroy, it has become a voice against war and the death penalty after long holding the record for most blood spilled. It will eventually find a way to take all these "sins" that no one believes in any more off the list, even as it denies doing any such thing. And then, with these distractions removed, maybe priests will be able to see the sin of child rape as clearly as the rest of us do.

Posted 5:28 PM by Michael
THE TWO AND ONLY

As the father of Letterman writer/Farrelly Brothers actor Chris Elliott, Bob Elliott could hardly be a more perfect specimen of an older generation of comedians. So it's easy to think of Bob and Ray, the comedy duo he formed with Ray Goulding from 1946 until Goulding's death in 1990, as representing the tail end of a tradition of classic radio comedy which—however fondly recalled—is as dead today as ventriloquism or trained dog acts. Or, for that matter, as dead as Albert Brooks' father, who (in a manner unimaginable now) actually made a living on radio as a Greek dialect comedian called "Parkyakarkus."

But consider that both the critically acclaimed comedy Election and The Simpsons have made in-jokey reference to a school assembly parody on an album by the counterculture comedy troupe Firesign Theatre—which itself was a fairly close lift of an anarchic commencement scene from Bob and Ray's "Lawrence Fechtenberger, Interstellar Officer Candidate." Somehow I doubt there are many third-generation references to Parkyakarkus, or even to Jack Benny or Fred Allen, turning up in hip indie films today. It's the kind of recurring subterranean riff Greil Marcus could build an entire alternative history of America on.

In fact Bob and Ray weren't so much the last of a breed now gone as they were the first of a type that has never been more omnipresent—the smartass morning dj. That's not to blame them for the dick jokes that fill today's airwaves; two cleaner comics were never born, even in Boston. But it is to give them credit for sweeping away the blanket of smarm that once covered mass media, annihilating it so completely that—like the subject of an H.L. Mencken book review—it survives now only in the brilliant ridicule it provoked.

We forget how much of radio and early TV was taken up with homespun schmaltz like The Breakfast Club and Tony Won's Scrapbook and especially Arthur Godfrey, whose folksiness and prickliness and relentless shilling Bob and Ray sent up for decades as "Arthur Sturdley." It's bracing to hear how, in Bob and Ray's hands, the familial humbug of these shows inevitably gives way to the kind of bickering that suggests real families—"Oh dry up, you old windbag," the hostess of "Aunt Penny's Sunlit Kitchen" is wont to snap to her announcer-"nephew" Danny.

When a Queen For a Day-type program reunites a brother and sister after 60 years (they turn out to have nothing to say to each other and can't wait to get back to the bus station), mass media's pretense of caring lasts about ten seconds before Ray is crabbily urging the frail old woman, "Could you hurry it up, lady, we've got a show to do!" (You have to think for a minute to realize that that's Ray urging Ray to hurry up-so he can meet Ray.)

From local radio in Boston and New York in the 40s and early 50s to national syndication, television in the 60s, and NPR in the 1980s, Bob and Ray carried on the work of destroying professional broadcasting begun one Halloween by Orson Welles. They exploded the idea that radio was theater of the mind with feats of daffy surrealism like "Matt Neffer, Boy Spotwelder," in which the sound effects man clumps Matt and his friend Todd up four flights of stairs, Todd carrying on a conversation all the way, only for Matt to undercut him at the end by blandly announcing "I'm over here in the sewing room, Todd."

Ray Goulding was the great character actor of the pair, a big, hearty Irishman who played the deluded dreamers who were their most famous characters, like the butterfly trainer who spends two years training creatures who rarely live that long, or the historian who didn't like to stop to check facts when his writing was really flowing, and as a result made errors like calling our first president Nelson Washington.

But it was goggle-eyed, deadpan Bob Elliott who made perhaps the pair's greatest contribution to American attitudes by relentlessly puncturing the serenely stupid professionalism of the news anchor, the stentorian cluelessness of the self-important interviewer. Hear enough of Bob Elliott, and you can never watch Peter Jennings again.

He was Wally Ballou, winner of 17 major diction awards who can't interview a light bulb collector without dropping his exhibits, who goes out to do a man on the street interview and interviews... another man on the street interviewer. (That was Bob finding Bob, incidentally.) He was the one who had the world's largest jukebox on his show, then couldn't find a quarter in the studio to play it. Elliott may not be Albert Brooks' father, but Wally Ballou is plainly father to Brooks' flop-sweat-soaked character in Broadcast News.

Once their media-subverting work even carried with it real courage. Joe McCarthy was dead five years before Hollywood dared make him The Manchurian Candidate; but Bob and Ray watched the Army-McCarthy hearings every afternoon and came back the next morning integrating what they'd heard into their soap opera parody "Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife," with Ray as the slurring, insinuating Zoning Commissioner Carstairs, producing doctored photos to railroad Mary and Harry Backstayge for building a 26-story home in their suburb of Skunk Haven. (In equal opportunity satire, Bob also does a dead-on version of McCarthy's pious opponent, Joseph Welch.)

One of their successors has (quite exaggeratedly) called himself "King of All Media," but Bob and Ray, who over 44 years had successful careers in radio, TV and as a stage act (and even sold a few books and records, too), would never have dreamed of claiming vainglorious dominance over something so plainly preposterous as American mass culture. In fact, much as boxing fans enjoy hypothesizing the results of, say, a Joe Louis-Mike Tyson matchup, I like to imagine what the pair would have done with their most famous modern heir in New York morning drivetime comedy. Perhaps "Howard Sturdley, Extra Large King of All Mediums?"

Posted 5:28 PM by Michael
THINGS LEFT UNDONE

I saw the end of the world once. I was watching a movie with some friends when a streak of orange flame appeared out the window, so still in its spot in the sky that it had to be miles up in space. There are not many things that would produce such a sight in Kansas, and all of us said "Holy Jesus!" or more scatological words to that effect.

Then it was gone, and because there was nothing else we could do, we went back to our movie, each wondering if, in a moment or two, the night sky would turn to high noon and an instant later the house would be blown apart around us as we baked to a crisp.

This really happened—in fact, it was even the Russians who were responsible, as we learned from the next day's paper. The orange glow was a space station or satellite of theirs which fell to earth some time around 1985. But what's interesting to me now was our reaction: in a state where people are so used to tornado warnings that they routinely keep radios and playing cards in the basement, we didn't budge from our chairs. If the end of the world in fire was coming, all we could do was shrug and wait for a hideous death. While watching the rest of the movie.

That kind of passivity and inability to act to save your skin is, I suppose, understandable in a group of ordinary citizens. It is a good deal less encouraging, or forgivable, when it comes from our president, our secretaries of State and Defense and Transportation, our Attorney General and the directors of our major intelligence and crimefighting agencies.

I understand why all those worthies went to the airwaves to cover their collective butt on the possibility that a terrorist attack will happen again in the United States. They had gotten beaten up in the press over what could have been known before September 11th, and the conspiracy hounds were salivating, since there are always people who, observing that 2 was seen in both Minnesota and Florida, will leap straight past "the FBI should have put 2 and 2 together" to "the president himself knew 4 all along."

What worries me is that announcing that a terrorist act will happen again seems to be the only thing they're doing about it. Like us, they've accepted the orange streak in the sky as an inevitable fact, and they're just sitting in their chairs waiting for it and watching the movie. So when the next one comes, as they say it will, look over this list, and see which of these things which might have prevented it have been done:

• Passenger-profile-based rather than random airport security checks

• A restructuring of the CIA, including the replacement of director George Tenet by a non-insider; or the creation of an entirely new intelligence agency to ultimately supersede it

• A serious overhaul of the FBI, dedicated among other things to rooting out sexism the way the Army has worked to rid itself of racism

• A bipartisan congressional investigation into intelligence failures

• The termination of SDI, our Maginot Line in space, since it is now obvious that the bomb that comes our way will not be carried on an ICBM launched from a recognizable state

• A well-funded program to help the former Soviet states keep track of their nukes—and their nuclear scientists

• Serious pressure on the Saudi government to stop the funding of terror and of extremist madrassas in other countries, both by the government and by Saudi citizens

• Nation-building in Afghanistan, to ensure that a few years from now we aren't facing a strongman there (to be initially fawned over by certain parts of our government, as Saddam Hussein and others were in their time)

• Lifting of textile tariffs, to help Pakistan develop industry and get all those future terrorists off its streets and into jobs

• "Regime change" in Iraq, and a clear message that the same awaits anybody else who decides a nuclear or biological weapons capability would be a worthwhile project for a small, poor country

• Willingness to consider whether the tax cut passed last year is unaffordable in the present emergency

Many of these things would be politically difficult—but when is that ever not true? If you're not going to do hard things when you have 90% approval ratings, when are you going to do them? For a Bush to kill SDI, to get really tough on his oil business pals the Saudis, to say that the tax cut has to be at least slowed would be as startling, and as powerful, as it was for that anticommunist attack dog Dick Nixon to be the man who met with Mao. Remember that George W. Bush is the descendant of two presidents, however, and if his father was Nixon's Chinese ambassador, on the other side he comes from one of the timekillers who occupied the office to no effect while waiting for the Civil War, Franklin Pierce. The mere fact of being in office during a crisis is no guarantee of action—or of honor in the history books.

On September 11th Rudolph Giuliani, asked what the likely death toll of the World Trade Center attack was, replied (in one of the finest phrases ever to come extemporaneously out of a politician's mouth), "More than any of us can bear." But if that were really true, we wouldn't be passive, we'd be tearing the world apart to keep it from happening again. The fact that we have accepted the inevitability of another such attack without doing everything we know we need to do to prevent it suggests that, as it turns out, 3000 dead was well within our capacity to bear. Perhaps next time we'll find out if 100,000 or 10 million is closer to the mark.

POSTSCRIPT (6/2): Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom referenced this piece but questioned my inclusion of two items: SDI and sexism in the FBI. Here's why I see those as significant, if not perhaps top-tier issues. SDI is simply a weapon for fighting the last war, as surely as the Crusader is. It's not only ineffective against the threat we actually face, it encourages the sort of attack by which a Saddam induces an al-Qaeda to attack us without leaving an easy-to-spot trail back to him. Recognizing all this would be the first step toward putting resources into things that would be effective—and would free up a serious chunk of change and manpower at our top labs.

As for rooting out sexism at the FBI, well, that's an indirect weapon to be sure. But surely the good old boy, white socks and black shoes culture at the FBI is a big reason why nobody listened to people like Coleen Rowley—why she was still being blown off until days ago. At the very least, I suggest the entire FBI should be forced to watch the first series of Prime Suspect with Helen Mirren....

POST-POSTSCRIPT: (6/4) And another blog, Rat's Nest, does me the surprising courtesy of delving deeply into several of the items on my list, to which (for time reasons) I can only discourteously respond briefly right now with some quick points more of amplification than disagreement, since I mostly don't disagree:

1) Just because passenger profiling (in other words, grilling Arab men—if we're going to advocate it, let's be honest about it) wouldn't have been politically feasible before September 11 doesn't mean we shouldn't be serious about it now; there are a whole lot of ways that we were slack for years (all of a Democratic administration and the first several months of a Republican one) that we shouldn't be now. I'm not interested in hanging this on Clinton, Bush, the FBI, the CIA or anybody else besides al-Qaeda; that's a (literally) deadly distraction. But the fact that the FBI didn't even come close to stopping September 11— or rather, the fact that Minneapolis was getting close and Washington stopped them like a brick wall— requires some serious shaking up of priorities and structure. And if top officials lied to Congress, as it seems pretty clear they did, they should go to jail. And if that sounds harsh, it beats the hell out of being in the Hoover building when it collapses.

2) As for the point that the problem was the FBI and CIA not talking to each other, that could be. I suspect one of the big problems we have is too much of certain kinds of information and not enough perceptive analysis. I remember what somebody said about East Germany's Stasi— that they were hands-down the best spy service in the Soviet world, they knew absolutely everything that was going on in East Germany, except that the regime was a week away from collapsing. (A great book on this subject is Timothy Garton Ash's The File, in which journalist Ash gets his own Stasi file from 20 years earlier and finds it a very weird memoir of his own youth, sometimes more perceptive than he was, sometimes totally clueless.) So anyway, no, I don't really have a plan for fixing the CIA as such— just a deep-seated conviction that a once-vital agency has turned into an employment plan for WASP mediocrities.

3) As for whether the FBI could be turned too PC by the "Loony Left"... well, it seems an unlikely danger at the moment, any more than rooting out racism put the Army in danger of having too much of da funk!

Posted 11:18 PM by Michael
WIGGLE TOWN

Everywhere in Chicago there are lessons for children, if only we have the eyes to see them. Take for instance my experience buying tickets at the Chicago Theatre for The Wiggles (if you're a parent of a toddler, you know, and if you're not, you don't need to).

My son and I stood in line, anticipation on his little face. Tickets went on sale at 10:00 am and by 10:03 we were at the box office window. "Two $20 seats please," I said.

"We only have rear balcony left," came the terse reply.

And so we walked away ticketless, tears welling up in my son's little brown eyes as he struggled to understand how all those tickets could have been purchased in just three minutes. "So we don't get to see... The Wiggles, daddy?" the little tousle-haired lad asked me sadly.

"Fear not, son," I replied, and pulled out my cell phone, dialing a local ticket broker. "Do you have tickets for The Wiggles?" I asked.

"We just got them," came the answer at the other end. A quick depletion of my son's college fund, and we had seats close enough to be tickled by Captain Feathersword's hat.

"How come they got tickets and we didn't, even though we were right at the beginning of the line, daddy?" asked the little fellow.

"Because this is Chicago, my son, and standing in line and playing by the rules is for chumps and downstaters," I replied sagely. "If you want something in this town, you have to know where to go and whose palm to grease."

"Didn't that cost a lot more money?" my bright-eyed urchin asked, and then a new enthusiasm overtook him: "Wow, maybe we could sell the tickets for even more money!"

"No, son," I replied, "if we were to sell the tickets for more money, we'd be scalpers and breaking the law."

His little face clouded. Then it brightened again. "At least this way, The Wiggles get lots of money to make more videos!"

"No, son," I explained, patting his little towhead, "they do it this way so the artist doesn't get any of the extra money. Ticketmaster and the ticket brokers keep it all."

We walked a little further, as my adorable moppet took in this new understanding of the way things work in this old world of ours. Finally he had another question for me. "But Dad, if the artists don't get the money— that's just as bad as burning a CD of music, isn't it? Isn't that what they say, that it's wrong because you're stealing from the artists?"

"Yes, son," I said, marveling at the ragamuffin's wisdom beyond his years, "it is wrong for you and me to steal from the artists. But stealing's different for Ticketmaster and the ticket brokers, my son. Because this is Chicago and they have a license for it."

Posted 4:50 PM by Michael
BLITHERING DIGITAL

Think about the most awkward, unconvincing dialogue delivery you've seen in recent movies—Keanu Reeves in one of Branagh's Shakespeare films, Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence, things like that. Normal American teenager types forced to speak the arch historical stuff meant only for the mellifluous tones of Ian McKellen. Now imagine such obvious actorly discomfort lasting for an entire movie, and you have Star Wars V: Attack of the Clones.

Once or twice in the genuinely painful (but endlessly protracted) scenes recounting the budding love of Darth Teenager and Queen Senator Whatever, you can see the possibility of the kind of amusingly offhand, self-kidding moment of repartee that makes Spiderman tolerable and Maguire and Dunst so likable (or that, in a galaxy far far away, made Ford and Fisher likable, too). But as Jack Benny said to me, timing is everything, and you can't have comic timing when what should be a three-word throwaway line has to be intoned in an unnatural pseudo-Sir Walter Scott-speak that takes 10 seconds to spit out. You have to go back to the very earliest days of sound cinema to find dialogue this overwritten and unsayable; if Lucas had written Casablanca, its most famous line would be "Truly the playing of that song again would not disturb my heart more than it has hers, my piano-playing friend Sam."

More disturbing than Lucas's tin ear for dialogue is his tin eye for our awareness of plagiarism; in what must be some sort of speed record for getting someone else's scenes into your movie, he blatantly rips off high points from Fellowship of the Ring almost line for line, not that the comparison is ever to Lucas's benefit. To be sure, the Peter Jackson movies only got made because they resemble Star Wars, which is because Lucas stole Gandalf in particular from Tolkien eons ago, and so on. But it would have been one thing to, say, rip off a technique from The Matrix (as a zillion movies did), and another to do so while literally casting Hugo Weaving in a dark suit and sunglasses, which nobody dared do. Yet here's Christopher Lee again, falling under the spell of a greater evil wizard, and making unnatural armies deep below the ground, and shooting sparks at a good wizard in the prison of his tall, pointy castle. The only difference is his haircut. When Lucas stole from The Searchers nearly line for line in the first movie, at least only film critics recognized the fact, but everyone must notice what a pale ripoff these scenes are. (He steals from The Searchers again, too, by the way.)

Yet it's not that Lucas is a mere hack. If he were, he might manage something as trashily watchable, and forgettable, as Independence Day. What's so awkward is that Lucas has gotten himself into a project of Shakespearean darkness while still being trapped in a comic book reader's body. The one-time pal/protege of Francis Coppola wants to make his own Godfather II, yet the character he's chosen to plumb as deeply as Michael Corleone is a pulp villain out of Batman. (That's not a slam, either; thanks to the combination of his walking-black-dashboard look and James Earl Jones' mighty voice, the determined, semi-cursed Darth Vader was about as good as pulp villains get.) The hints we had of his past helped make his evil interesting and multidimensional (in a way that, say, Peter Cushing's bureaucratic Grand Moff Tarkin never was), but to put it mildly, Lucas's made-up cartoon universe does not compare to the Italian-American experience in the 20th century when it comes to providing a backdrop rich and meaningful enough to support the exploration of such a character's descent into evil. It's like making a movie exploring what drove Colonel Klink to become a Nazi. (Actually, it's like making three movies.)

So, a pretty dispiriting experience, as I had to have known it would be. Why did I bother, you ask? My curiosity about digital projection got the better of me. I saw a DLP system (in the company of a friend who had earlier seen the Boeing system at another theater) and from a position of extreme doubt I now must admit, I can believe this technology is here to stay—if the economics can be made to work for theater owners, that is. My friend considered this system plainly inferior to the Boeing system—there were too-hot video colors in some scenes (although they worked in some places, as when the light sabers truly seemed to glow), and a lack of contrast in darker scenes. And clearly there's a learning curve ahead for cinematographers in achieving a look as pretty as film's, since the video-harshness of direct lighting was not always flattering to Natalie Portman in particular. There were also jaggies on type, which my friend said he didn't see with the Boeing system. But if you want this kind of super-clear look (and I'm not sure you always do) for the kind of computer-created imagery that a film like this has, it is astonishingly crisp and may very well lead to a certain audience dissatisfaction with plain old film. I didn't believe the epic battle of film vs. digital cinema had truly been joined yet, but it has been.

This is the lesson of Star Wars V. The technology keeps advancing. And everything else Hollywood ever knew has been forgotten.

Posted 10:33 AM by Michael
FATHER OCCUPANT

The Catholic Church has, as all the world knows, proven very resistant to the notion of its top leaders stepping down for sins that would have sent secular leaders of any sort to jail. One priest blogger (perhaps the only priest blogger) suggested that a reason for this is that the Church doesn't see things the way that a corporation does—an archbishopric is not a vice presidency, the repository of a bunch of privileges and rewards; instead, it's a duty, and one that may in fact become more of a punishment when it has to be carried on, with dignity, in the face of the kind of shame and contempt that a Bernard Law must now face.

That sounds nice and medieval, and I have no reason to doubt that the priest who said it is sincere. But somehow I doubt Bernard Law, to name one, sees it that way. I'm sure he's holding on to his privileges as tightly as a Hollywood studio chief negotiating a development deal, and would find ending his days running a file room in the Vatican (or a prison) considerably greater punishment than sequestering himself away from parishioners in his mansion and only seeing subordinates who still address him as "your eminence."

It also neglects the purpose of the Church, which is not to serve as an elaborate apparatus for the cleansing of Bernard Law's soul, sort of like the fake environments they'd create on Mission Impossible to get some Soviet general to confess. That may be an admirable side product, but it should be secondary to ministering to parishioners, running schools, and a few other things like that. The problem right now is that quite plainly Bernard Law and his ilk are not secondary to much of anything.

If the ordinary Catholic has a hard time seeing why a Law (and an Egan and so on) should not step down, the reason has a lot to do with the policies of church leaders themselves. If the Laws of the church have been as favored and untouchable as CEOs, the ordinary priest in recent years has become as dispensable as a Lucent employee. Not that they're drummed out of the church for anything short of murder (or speaking their consciences on divorce or birth control), as the cases of priests like Shanley and Geoghan prove. But priests are shuffled from church to church in a constant game of filling temporary vacancies that there simply aren't enough priests to fill permanently.

Take the example of the church in the neighborhood where I grew up. Two priests seemed to be there through most of my childhood. One eventually moved on (though he hardly disappeared, since he was also a teacher at my high school). The other led a highly successful campaign to get the church out of the school basement and into a handsome new building of its own. In a real sense he devoted the best years of his life to making it happen. And halfway through the construction, after 20 years in the parish, he was transferred away, like Moses denied entry to the promised land. Not like a corporation? No, it isn't. A corporation wouldn't have been as cruel.

Is it any wonder that parishioners have come to see the priest as being a sort of temporary visitor in a community, to see themselves as the true continuity and management of an individual church—and to wonder why, of all priests, only a muckety-muck like Law can't be dislodged?

Posted 12:23 AM by Michael
WHERE IS THE SAUDI SOROS?

It is one of the heartwarming stories of wealth of our time, the sort that probably makes up for a dozen Enrons or even a Marge Schott. George Soros, born Jewish into one nightmare (Nazi-collaborationist Hungary), teenaged escapee from another (the post-WWII Stalinist regime), graduate of the London School of Economics, self-made billionaire in the American/global financial system. And, when it came time to give something back, a man who found and funded creative ways to prevent the nightmares from rising again—fax machines for dissidents, financial support for Solidarity, even making himself a too-rich-to-be-completely-ignored voice of reason against America's drug war.

The oil wealth of the Middle East has also produced a figure with that kind of creative thinking about his philanthropy and dedication to fostering grass roots political change. Unfortunately, his name is Osama bin Laden, and it isn't fax machines he likes to send other countries. It is perhaps not surprising that out of all that wealth, all those rich and idle sons, the Saudi kingdom should have produced the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur of terror. But why aren't we more surprised that it hasn't produced a single rich man willing to stand up for the unmistakably good things the West and the Western example have to offer the Arab world? In other words, where is the Saudi Soros?

It's not as if the Arab rich haven't been exposed to life in the West—far from it. They own Western horses, produce Western movies, co-own Western amusement parks, cavort with Western pop stars like Michael Jackson, become favored customers of Western plastic surgery clinics, and die in high-speed car crashes with Western princesses. But a hundred years ago Kemal Ataturk became the first of a series of Middle Eastern leaders to say that his nation had to put religion in its place, learn from the West, adopt its best features (separation of church and state, democracy, education for women), and stop wasting its energy on futile wars of anger and revenge. Ataturk was the first, and we're still waiting for the second.

In fact, you could cover the whole Arab world before you found a Muslim of any position who would endorse an Ataturkian view of how to build a modern society—because you wouldn't find one until you reached Mahathir in Malaysia. In the Middle East, no one dares raise his voice for these things—or even against murder.

After September 11th, some of the more westernized members of the Binladen family suggested that some public statement of apology, or at least weaselly shared sorrow, might be in order. If nothing else, such a gesture might be good for business—given that Binladen is one of the most famous brand names in that part of the world, and brother Osama had just done something for the family brand on a par with August Busch IV peeing in the Budweiser vats on live TV. But Daddy Binladen's dozens of surviving widows back in Saudi Arabia apparently vetoed it, for fear that even saying, "uh, sorry one of ours killed 3000 of yours" would inflame the Arab street against them.

So even those with the most direct business relationships to the West—at least until September 11th—dare not practice even the most basic decencies of modern civilization, for fear that jihad will be visited upon their mansions. What do you want to bet they've actually increased their secret donations to Al-Qaeda, as the industrialists of Germany probably upped their contributions to Hitler as they felt their puppet escape from their grasp? Osama-Hitler analogies are often overdone, but Binladen-Krupp sounds just about right.

H.L. Mencken once wrote how disappointed he was that John D. Rockefeller had put his fortune behind such banally respectable causes as Presybterianism. If he'd really wanted to have fun with that unprecedented fortune, Mencken suggested, he should have poured it into the Mohammedan cults flourishing among uneducated Southern blacks, and set the sparks flying in bastions of feudal white power like Mississippi. Mencken was half a world off, but otherwise he got it exactly right—unimaginable wealth was visited upon some of the least educated, least prepared people on earth—not just Arabs, but the Saudi nomads. And they in turn used it to spread the most regressive, backwater fire-and-brimstone versions of Islam on earth to their better-educated and once more reasonable neighbors.

Is it too much to say that any rich Saudi who has had so much as a tonsillectomy in a western medical clinic, who owns even a single German car, whose homes display even a single representational painting, who has enjoyed so much as a glass of California Cab in a four-star restaurant, has a moral obligation to stop being such a hypocrite and start lifting his people out of the murderous religious morass into which he and his privileged class have helped them sink?

Posted 9:49 PM by Michael

BUT IT'S WAAAAFER THIN!

In the interest of kicking this off with the most insanely eclectic mix of political/cultural material possible, I am now going to describe my dinner last night.

This was not any dinner. This was the 20-course "Tour de Force" menu at Trio in Evanston, IL. Actually 23, if you count everything from the amuse-bouche at the beginning to the Mango Lassi (just wait) at the end.

This adventure really starts with Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook, which is a wonderful cookbook if you want to look at pictures and read cooking philosophy, it only falls down when it comes to recipes that a normal person could possibly make. But it certainly makes you want to eat at a place where you get two bites of amazing, concentratedly gorgeous flavors, in a combination you would never have thought of in a million years (confit of electric eel with butterscotch topping! This Gigondas would go perfectly with that) and then it's off to the next one before you could possibly get tired of anything. And that's the philosophy that its ex-sous-chef, Grant Achatz, has imported (pretty directly) to Trio, along with a few other of Keller's tics (like making things that look like something mundane, like ice cream cones, but taste like something else entirely, like fungus).

We didn't plan on the 20-course menu at first, in fact we joked about its excessiveness on the way up. But as we were looking at the menu... well, there must be a lot of dangerous and foolish things in life that begin with two people saying to each other, "It's really the choice that makes the most sense, isn't it, honey?" It did seem to be the only way to try the most out-there things we'd read about (spiced water—a water course! Their meal had a water course! Yuppies will pay good money for anything!) By making valiant efforts to avoid eating a couple of baskets of bread along the way, we were able to ensure that after 23 courses, not only had no fish died in vain, no seaweed had even dried in vain for our meal.

By now it should be clear that this is the sort of meal that it's all too easy to make fun of. Tiny portions on big plates (well, with 20 courses they have to be tiny, unless you're Mr. Creosote), descriptions that practically give you the family tree of the animal you're eating, insanely "creative" combinations like chocolate and green olives, most dishes turned into something precious like foam (now I know who Charlie Trotter was sniping at when he said something in the Chicago Tribune about places that go crazy foaming everything), and one particularly pretentious innovation-- precise instructions on how to eat something. If the food didn't live up to it, there'd be a lot to mock here.

But it did live up to it. 6 or 7 things were astonishingly creative and delightful. Most were at least very satisfying. Only a few were questionable-to-icky (arguably nothing should be icky at these prices, but we're talking not just high cuisine but highwire cuisine, there are going to be a few falls). The other thing that made a real difference was that the service, anticipating how uncomfortable a meal like this could be if it was as highfaluting as the food, was uniformly gracious and disarming. I've been served well, but I've never before quite had the feeling that the staff was looking at me thinking, Ooh, you are so lucky that you're about to taste this.

So, herewith the lineup (using the names as given on the menu), plus notes on the accompanying wines when they were striking enough to remember something about:

Amuse-bouche: “Ice cream sandwich” of parmesan cracker and olive oil ice cream. Definite effect of cognitive dissonance, as your mouth says Baskin-Robbins and your tongue says Italian food.

[Champagne, with some vermouth added to it for Osetra Caviar course, which was interesting.]

Hot Coconut-Cold Coconut: Shooter with a top level of hot frothed coconut milk and lower level of cold coconut water (or something) scented with vanilla, served in a bud-vase-like glass sitting in a metal stand. Intended to be shot so hot salty milk and cold perfumy whatever swirl sensuously as they go down. Interesting, but a better example of this hot-cold effect was to come.

Morocco: Match A to B quiz, consisting of five dollops of whipped olive oil each seasoned with a typical Moroccan spice (saffron, coriander, cinnamon, etc.) to be mixed and matched with five little dabs of Moroccan foods (meyer lemon, green olive, eggplant, date and almond, sumac bread with couscous). Fun to play with, but you mainly tasted the whipped olive oil (which is not THAT different from mayo).

Osetra Caviar: The first knockout on the menu and one of the most memorable items: a cup with a lime foam on the bottom, a coriander-flavored disc of crisp sugar, and caviar on creamy avocado on top. The lime-caviar combination is so good and natural I can’t believe I’ve never seen it before (for that matter, so was the avocado-caviar combination, giving the roe a creamy richness); this is caviar for people who don’t care for caviar.

“Oysters and Beer”: Oysters and salmon roe in a froth of Anchor Steam beer. Not being an oyster fan, this was probably my least favorite thing of the night.

[Premium sake, served cold. All right, I guess. Not a huge sake fan, either.]

Wild Cobia Belly: Another seafood knockout, a great mix of Asian seafood flavors. Cobia belly, lobster crackers and a couple of seaweeds or something in a tamari foam. You know when you eat Japanese food and a piece of seaweed overpowers everything else with too strong a fishy flavor? That’s what this didn't do.

[French white wine, mostly viognier.]

Green and White Asparagus: Salad of itsy-bitsy asparagus, a dab of crab salad, a swash of lemon/chamomile foam and a glob of walnut jelly or gelee or something. Kind of an intermission between more ambitious things, the woodsy walnut flavor being the most interesting part.

Sherry Vinegar Sorbet: I can’t imagine having a big bowl of this palate cleanser on a hot summer day, but it was among the top courses in creativity. Sherry vinegar ice cream was surprisingly subtle and pleasant, the lurid green basil sauce it sat in (with a few miniature nubs of mandarin orange) was a trumpet blast to wake the dead.

Chilled Ramp-Top Soup: Ramps are like wild onions (yup, it’s hillbilly food at $20/plate); another lurid green item (served in a very pretty, not-quite-impractical gull-wing or Flying Nun's-habit dish), with wild abalone and “pine ice” (a granite made out of pine extract of some sort) in which oniony and sweet flavors kept surprising each other.

[White Bordeaux.]

Liquid Black Truffle Ravioli: One of the two dishes mentioned in every review, mainly because it illustrates the thing they do of instructing you how to eat something; pop the whole ravioli in your mouth and let it explode. One was topped with shaved parmesan, the other with a slice of truffle, there were pancetta and favas involved as well, and explode was the right word.

Spice Water: The other dish mentioned in every review along with its eating instructions, also because the idea of a “water” course seems so silly. Well, tasting is at least sort of believing. A top layer of salty-smoky hot froth, a lower level of cold spiced water, and the flavors (I forget which were on which level) were Jamaican peppercorn, star anise, allspice, black truffle oil (must have been on top), toasted hazelnut (likewise). This was like pure flavor without the distraction of food being involved.

Pushed Foie Gras: One combination I felt outright did not work. Foie gras was pushed through something so it looked like shredded wheat, and melted on the tongue. A licorice foam added something—not especially licoricey—to it. So far so good. But the red beet gelee was the wrong flavor to add on top of it, I thought, too fruity and root/dirt-tasting for the foie gras.

[White burgundy, much richer than previous whites, buttery, best white of evening.]

Frog Legs and Fenugreek Seeds: With caramelized cauliflower. Unusually subtle dish, fried frog legs only a little more exotic than you’d get at Phil Smidt’s thanks to a hint of fenugreek (an ingredient in curry) and a stripe of apricot-flavored sauce along the plate. Actually the caramelized cauliflower is what I want to try to replicate at home.

Maine Lobster With Rosemary Vapor: Candidate for next dish most likely to be mentioned in every review. Chunks of lobster in a wild mushroom sauce (including a whole morel head) were terrific. But then, the plate was surrounded with rosemary, over which steaming water was poured at the table, so you smelled rosemary “vapor” as you ate the dish. (It was sort of like being in a sauna for lambs.) Sounds preposterous (like Luis Bunuel's martini recipe—hold the bottle of vermouth up to the glass to let light pass through it to the gin), but it worked— in fact it worked so well we could tell when others in the room were being served the dish.

[Baga, an Italian red.]

Lavender-Scented Elysian Fields Farm Lamb: Slices of rare lamb in a sauce I seem to have failed to take notes on (some kind of cream, out-there things like little bits of citrus fruit, maybe the Ramp-Bottoms?) It was good, but evidently not as memorable as other things…

Grapefruit Cells--Smoke and Anisette-Cinnamon: A palate-cleanser of two spoons, the one facing left containing grapefruit pips and bitter chocolate diced, the one facing right holding a little clear gelatin cube with a center of brown anisette. The grapefruit and chocolate I thought made each other more bitter (and strangely brought back a seaweedy flavor from earlier), and prompted “yuck” faces on both sides of the table; the cube was fine.

[Peter Lehmann shiraz, one of the best Australian wines I’ve ever had, usual fruity characteristics but more structure and subtlety, not just grape flavors.]

White Pekin Duck: Ah, here are the ramp bottoms, pickled with slices of duck and a duck leg confit, and a bit of melysol melon, whatever that is. Not very Asian to me (guess that's why it's White), this improved with each bite, partly because the duck was especially strong and flavorful.

[Italian red, Dolcetto.]

Prime Ribeye of Beef: To be honest, after so many ethereal flavors and vapors it was kind of time for a bit of red meat in a robust wine sauce, and here it was. Crusted with pine nuts and something green, on the side there was not only a wine reduction but then a roux-like puree of bread crumbs with the wine sauce (another peasant food at aristocrat prices).

[Pommeau de Normandie—sort an apple eau-de-vie, harder than cider, not as distilled/high proof as Calvados. Much better than the food it inspired below.]

Wild Mushroom Cheesecake: This was odd. Said to be inspired by the wine above, and thus a savory-to-sweet transition to dessert, they said, this was a kind of mini camembert cheesecake with wild mushroom flavors. Pretty strong, far more savory than dessert-like, I wouldn’t have eaten a whole slice.

Sparkling Rhubarb Parfait: The hands-down winner of the desserts. One glass held a rhubarb parfait, nicely tart; a carafe held a homemade ginger soda which wasn’t ginger-ale-tart but light and floral; pour them together and drink with a straw, the result was wonderful, even for people who don’t like rhubarb.

[A Loire dessert wine, botrytisized Chenin Blanc, quite nice.]

Tea-Simmered Pear-Crystallized Nori: I’m not convinced that Japanese desserts are entirely a good idea, but this proved to be a strong argument for them—little slices of pear with a tea and toasted sesame flavor, a bit of pear sorbet, and surprisingly, a very successful little thing of ice cream and poached or baked pear between squares of a sugar-coated seaweed. (When I asked what nori was they promised I wouldn’t taste the seaweed; I did, but it was quite good anyway, if not quite so good that it didn’t make me wish those dark squares were simply chocolate.)

[“Curious & Ancient” 20-year Tawny Port. Probably best Port I’ve had, wine complexity and not just sherry astringency.]

Chocolate and Olives: Skeptical about that combination? Well, you still may be after eating it. A layer of dark on top, a layer of tart strawberry jam below, and in the middle—green olive ice cream, as strong as it sounds. My wife scraped it out entirely, I made sure to lead with the strawberry side tongue-first. On the whole, one of the failures.

Mango Lassi: With real confit of collie in a Little Tommy sauce! No, we conclude with one more glass of cumin-scented hot foam on top and cold something or other below. Too salty and too strong for the last stop on the dinner, I thought. Though technically speaking it wasn’t, since we received a pair of truffles (chocolate, that is) in a box as a parting gift. Unlike Mr. Creosote, we decided to save them for another day, and say "Enough."