NEVER MIND THE BUTTER

Johnny Rotten's Country Life commercial. Punk is still dead. Somebody please kill me.


"Your future dream is a shopping scheme..."

THE KISS

Last night, in the East Room, while awarding the Kennedy Center Honors to this year's artists--president George Bush fearlessly kissed Barbara Streisand. And while the lion and the lamb didn't actually lie down together, we can't help wondering if this smooch signaled endtimes, a shift in the zeitgeist, or the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Probably not. Most likely it was just an impulsive mistake, an awkward moment in the ceremonial duties of an unpopular, outgoing president. Still, we'd like to think that for one brief sparkling moment there was love among the ruins.


Now that he expected nothing, the incident of the kiss, his impatience, his vague hopes and disappointment, presented themselves in a clear light. It no longer seemed to him strange that he had not seen the General's messenger, and that he would never see the girl who had accidentally kissed him instead of some one else; on the contrary, it would have been strange if he had seen her. . . .

The water was running, he knew not where or why, just as it did in May. In May it had flowed into the great river, from the great river into the sea; then it had risen in vapour, turned into rain, and perhaps the very same water was running now before Ryabovitch's eyes again. . . . What for? Why?

And the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to Ryabovitch an unintelligible, aimless jest. . . . And turning his eyes from the water and looking at the sky, he remembered again how fate in the person of an unknown woman had by chance caressed him, he remembered his summer dreams and fancies, and his life struck him as extraordinarily meagre, poverty-stricken, and colourless. . . .

--from "The Kiss" by Anton Chekhov

WHY ART?

Who needs Art? We're in a recession, right? During tough economic times we've always slashed health care, education, environmental protection, and programs designed to help the hungry and the homeless--critical social services--so why worry about something as ephemeral as "the arts?" Surely, we can jettison a few poems and paintings in favor of more pressing concerns...right? After all, who really needs painting, music, and literature?

The novelist E. L. Doctorow gave this speech before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee in the fall of 1981. It remains a timely statement on the value of art to the human spirit.

For the Artist's Sake

I have always disliked the phrase "the arts." It connotes to me furs and black ties and cocktail receptions, the patronage by the wealthy of work that is tangential to their lives, or that fills them not with dread or awe or visionary joy but with self-satisfaction.

"The arts" have nothing to do with the loneliness of writers or painters working in their rooms year after year, or with actors putting together plays in lofts, or with dancers tearing up their bodies to make spatial descriptions of the hope of beauty or transcendent myth.

So as a working writer I distinguish myself from the arts community. I am confirmed in this when I look at the National Endowment for the Arts' board and program structure. In the past, a very small percentage of the arts budget has been given over to literature, to the grants made to young writers or dramatists or poets of promise. In all the time since its founding, the N.E.A. has found only four writers worthy to sit on its immense board. Instead, the heavy emphasis has been on museums, opera companies, symphony orchestras: just those entities that happen to cater to patrons of "the arts."

I suppose I would have to confess, if asked, that I feel about opera, for instance, that it is not a living art in this country, that we do not naturally write and produce operas from ourselves as a matter of course as, for example, Italy did in the nineteenth century, and that, therefore, as wonderful and exciting as opera production may be, it is essentially the work of conservation of European culture; opera companies are conservators of the past, like museums, and their support by the National Endowment reflects this strong bias or belief in the arts as something from the past rather than the present.

The National Endowment programs I value most are just those likely to be proscribed: first, the programs of individual grants to individual artists in whatever medium — the programs endowing directly the work of living artists; and, second, those programs that do not separate the arts from life, from our own life and times but emphasize the connection — the artists-in-education program, the poets who go into schools, for example, and help children to light the spark in themselves. I cannot imagine anything more responsible than the work persuading a schoolchild to express his or her anguished or joyful observations — and to be self-rewarded with a poem or a painting. Whole lives ride on moments like that.

Or the inter-arts programs, the folk arts, the expansion arts — all bureaucratic terms for encouraging experiment and risk-taking on the part of artists, and for bringing artists in contact with people everywhere in the country, connecting people with the impulses inside themselves. Programs that encourage participation rather than the passive receipt of official art of the past are the ones I think most important: all the programs that suggest to people that they have their own voices, that they can sing and write of their own past — people in their churches, students in their classes or prisoners in their cells. These programs — just the ones branded so vilely by the Heritage Foundation Report as instruments of social policy or public therapy and slated for extinction by our new budgeteers — are the ones I value. And not from any vague idealistic sentiment either: I know as an artist where art comes from. I know there is a ground-song from which every writer lifts his voice, that literature comes out of a common chorus and that our recognition of the genius of a writer — Mark Twain, for example — cannot exclude the people he speaks for.

Art will rise where it is least expected and usually not wanted. You can't generate it with gala entertainments and $200-a-plate dinners. You can, if you're an enlightened legislative body, see to it that you don't ipso facto create an official state art by concentrating your funding on arts establishments. Other people may talk of how many billions of dollars of business is produced from the arts, but to me that is beside the point.

But saying even this, I cannot avoid the feeling that it is senseless for me to testify here today. People everywhere have been put in the position of fighting piecemeal for this or that social program while the assault against all of them proceeds across a broad front. The truth is, if you're going to take away the lunches of schoolchildren, the pensions of miners who've contracted black lung, the storefront legal services of the poor who are otherwise stunned into insensibility by the magnitude of their troubles, you might as well get rid of poets, artists and musicians. If you're planning to scrap medical care for the indigent, scholarships for students, day-care centers for the children of working mothers, transportation for the elderly and handicapped — if you're going to eliminate people's public service training jobs and then reduce their unemployment benefits after you've put them on the unemployment rolls, taking away their food stamps in the bargain, then I say the loss of a few poems and arias cannot matter. If you're going to close down the mental therapy centers for the veterans of Vietnam, what does it matter if the theaters go dark or our libraries close their doors?

And so in my testimony for this small social program I am aware of the larger picture and, really, it stuns me. What I see in this picture is a kind of sovietizing of American life, guns before butter, the plating of this nation with armaments, the sacrifice of everything in our search for ultimate security. We shall become an immense armory. But inside the armory there will be nothing, not a people but an emptiness; we shall be an armory around nothingness, and our true strength and security and envy of the world — the passion and independent striving of a busy working and dreaming population committed to fair play and the struggle for some sort of real justice and community — will be no more. If this happens, maybe in the vast repository of bombs, deep in the subterranean chambers of our missile fields, someone in that cavernous silence will remember a poem and recite it. Maybe some young soldier will hum a tune, maybe another will be able to speak the language well enough to tell a story, maybe two people will get up and dance to the rhythm of the doomsday clock ticking us all to extinction.

--E. L. Doctorow

"For the Artist's Sake." E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations. Ed. Richard Trenner. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review P, 1983: 13-15.

WORK IT!

"Work it!" This classic clip from Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott is dedicated to my hardworking girlfriend Wendy on her last day of grad school. She gives her final presentation in a couple hours, and turns in her last paper, the culmination of sixteen months earning a Master's Degree WHILE working a full-time job. She worked it, all right! Only a couple more hours of a long, long hard trip. Respect, pride, and love to Wendy.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND: SCHOOL SESSIONS

"m79"

Vampire Weekend team up with a Julliard-trained string trio to perform three songs from their self-titled debut in the room where they played their first shows: Columbia University's ADP Literary Society.


"walcott"

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

CHE, THE MOVIE

Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh will release a four hour epic about the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The 257-minute biopic will be released in two parts in January. In a stroke of inspired casting, Benicio del Toro plays the Argentine revolutionary, for which he won top honors at Cannes. This preview trailer is for a special screening later this month in New York and LA.

The real Che

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was a hero to some, a villain to others, and just a T-shirt design to many Americans. Che was a doctor, an asthmatic, a fervent bike rider, and a revolutionary who fought in Cuba, Africa, and finally South America, where he was killed by Bolivian Rangers under the direction of the CIA. This isn't lefty propaganda--nobody denies it; in fact, those involved took special pride in hunting down the rebel. They took turns posing around his corpse. I'm sure their intention was to demystify Che as a mere mortal, but the pictures provided a haunting pietà to the fallen guerrilla fighter.

After his capture and execution. Bolivia, 1967.

A declassified CIA document, an "Intelligence Information Cable" dated Oct. 9, 1967, is the first intelligence report on Che's capture. The cable states that the Bolivian army is dispatching an interrogator to confirm Che’s identity. The CIA also dispatched its own operative, Félix Rodríguez, who interrogated Guevara, gathered intelligence on his operation, and took photos of his documents and supervised his execution. To read the declassified document, click HERE for the pdf file.

The young Ernesto took a year off medical school and traveled the backroads of South America on a 1939 Norton 500 cc motorcycle

Che's dramatic life has inspired several films, ranging from the good to the terrible. One of the best is "The Motorcycle Diaries" (2004) based on Che's journals. The film (and his journal) reveals a thoughtful young man gradually radicalized by the people he meets and the poverty he encounters traveling throughout South America.


A scene from "The Motorcycle Diaries" (2004) in which Che (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) and his best friend Alberto (Rodrigo De la Cerna) meet Peruvian peasants struggling to survive.

The worst film has to be "Che!" (1969) starring--believe it or not--Omar Sharif. Jack Palance plays Fidel Castro, I swear. Skip that one.

Read A. O. Scott's review of Soderbergh's "Che" in The New York Times HERE. For more on the life of Che, click HERE. Or HERE. Or HERE.


The rebel at rest: a candid shot after the revolution

"The laws of capitalism, blind and invisible to the majority, act upon the individual without his thinking about it. He sees only the vastness of a seemingly infinite horizon before him. That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists, who purport to draw a lesson from the example of Rockefeller — whether or not it is true — about the possibilities of success. The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this."

--Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928-1967)

LET'S GET THIS SHOW ON THE ROAD!

President-elect Barack Obama introduced the new national security team Monday, and then took a much-needed break. Dude has been busy, yo. The order of the day? Shake it, shake it, shake it like a Polaroid picture. Hey ya!

No big surprises at Monday's press conference, but Obama officially announced that former campaign rival Hillary Clinton will be the new secretary of state. Not that it matters, but bellowing gas bag Rush Limbaugh called the selection "brilliant."

But who cares what he says?

Obama also announced that Bush's Pentagon chief Robert Gates will stay on as defense secretary for continuity sake--we're fighting two wars, after all. In related news, Obama is ousting top Bush Pentagon officials, including many of Gates's top deputies. More from the Washington Post, HERE.

Other picks: Marine Gen. James Jones as White House national security adviser, former Justice Department official Eric Holder as attorney general, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano as secretary of homeland security, and Susan Rice as UN Ambassador.


Meanwhile, in another part of town, outgoing President George W. Bush told ABC News' Charlie Gibson "I was unprepared for war," and "I'm sorry" for the economic crisis.

Bush expressed remorse that the financial crisis has cost jobs and harmed retirement accounts. "I'm sorry it's happening, of course," he said. "Obviously I don't like the idea of people losing jobs, or being worried about their 401(k)s."

Bush pointed to incorrect intelligence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction as "the biggest regret of all the presidency."

"I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess." When pressed by Gibson, Bush was clear. "That is a do-over that I can't do."

This ABC interview raises many questions, the most salient being: "Can Barack Obama start early?"


The ABC News interview with outgoing president, George W. Bush, 12/01/08