text:
The departure of Tavis Smiley leaves a hole in the programming calendar of BET, but that's only part of the problem.
Jean Clair, director
of the Musée Picasso in Paris and widely respected both as
scholar and art critic, has for some years been out of sympathy with
contemporary art. When he and I shared a platform in the Netherlands
a year ago, he spoke of a new aesthetic marked, in his view, by
repulsion, abjection, horror and disgust. I have been brooding on
this ever since, and particularly on disgust as an aesthetic
category. For disgust, in Jean Clair's view, is a common trait, a
family resemblance of the art produced today not only in America and
Western Europe but even in the countries of Central Europe recently
thrown open to Western modernity. We do not have in English the
convenient antonymy between goût (taste) and
dégoût (disgust) that licenses his neat
aphoristic representation of what has happened in art over the past
some decades: From taste...we have passed on to disgust. But
inasmuch as taste was the pivotal concept when aesthetics was first
systematized in the eighteenth century, it would be a conceptual
revolution if it had been replaced by disgust. I have never, I think,
heard "disgusting!" used as an idiom of aesthetic approbation, but it
would perhaps be enough if art were in general admired when commonly
acknowledged to be disgusting. It is certainly the case that beauty
has become a ground for critical suspicion, when its production was
widely regarded as the point and purpose of art until well into the
twentieth century.
Though "disgusting" has a fairly broad
use as an all-around pejorative, it also refers to a specific
feeling, noticed by Darwin in his masterpiece, The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals, as excited by anything unusual
in the appearance, odor or nature of our food. It has little to do
with literal taste. Most of us find the idea of eating cockroaches
disgusting, but for just that reason few really know how cockroaches
taste. The yogurt that sports a mantle of green fuzz--to cite an
example recently mentioned in a New Yorker story--may be
delicious and even salubrious if eaten, but it elicits shrieks of
disgust when seen. A smear of soup in a man's beard looks disgusting,
though there is of course nothing disgusting in the soup itself, to
use one of Darwin's examples. There is nothing disgusting in the
sight of a baby with food all over its face, though, depending on
circumstances, we may find it disgusting that a grown man's face
should be smeared with marinara sauce.
Like beauty, disgust
is in the mind of the beholder, but it is one of the mechanisms of
acculturation, and there is remarkably little variation in our
schedules of what disgusts. So disgust is an objective component in
the forms of life that people actually live. The baby is very quickly
taught to wipe its face lest others find it disgusting, and we hardly
can forbear reaching across the table to remove a spot of chocolate
from someone's face--not for their sake but for our own. What he
speaks of as "core disgust" has become a field of investigation for
Jon Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. He and his
associates set out to determine the kinds or domains of experience in
which Americans experience disgust. Foods, body products and sex, not
unexpectedly, got high scores when people were queried on their most
disgusting experiences. Subjects also registered disgust in
situations in which the normal exterior envelope of the body is
breached or altered. I was philosophically illuminated to learn that
of fifty authenticated feral children, none evinced disgust at all.
But I am also instructed by the fact that my cultural counterparts
are disgusted by what disgusts me, more or less.
overall consensus encourages me to speculate that most of us would
unhesitatingly find the characteristic work of the artist Paul
McCarthy, largely live and video performance, disgusting. There may
be--there doubtless is--more to McCarthy's art than this, but
whatever further it is or does depends, it seems to me, on the fact
that it elicits disgust. It may, for example, debunk a false idealism
McCarthy regards as rampant in Hollywood films, advertising and
folklore, as one commentator writes. But it achieves this just so far
as it is disgusting. It may relentlessly and rigorously probe the
airbrushed innocence of family entertainment to reveal its seamy
psychic underpinnings, to cite another critic. So it may show what
really underlies it all, the way the worm-riddled backside of certain
Gothic sculptures whose front sides were of attractive men and women
were intended to underscore our common mortality. But that does not
erase the fact that maggots count as disgusting. So possibly McCarthy
is a kind of moralist, and his works are meant to awaken us to awful
truths and their disgustingness as a means to edificatory ends. That
still leaves intact the revulsion their contemplation evokes. Disgust
is not something that can easily be disguised. Beautiful art, Kant
wrote, can represent as "beautiful things which may be in nature ugly
or displeasing." But the disgusting is the only "kind of ugliness
which cannot be represented in accordance with its nature without
destroying all aesthetic satisfaction."
"Nothing is so much
set against the beautiful as disgust," Kant wrote in an earlier
essay. So it is all the more striking that McCarthy's commentators
attempt to find his work beautiful after all. I wanted to think about
the question of beauty in your work, an interviewer murmured, to move
from the manifest to the latent. The New York Times speaks of
the "unlikely beauty of the work," adding that it is "not standard
beauty, obviously, but a beauty of commitment and absorption." I have
to believe that McCarthy's perceptions can be very little different
from the rest of ours. He has, indeed, almost perfect pitch for
disgust elicitors, and accordingly making the art he does must be
something of an ordeal. That may have the moral beauty that
undergoing ordeals possesses, especially when undertaken for the
larger welfare. But if it is that sort of ordeal, then it has by
default to be disgusting. As the Gothic statuary demonstrates--or for
that matter, the history of showing the fleshly sufferings of Christ
and the martyrs--artists down the ages have had recourse to some
pretty disgusting images for the ultimate benefit of their viewers.
(Taking on the iconography of Disneyland, as he does, is hardly
commensurate with overcoming Satan's power, but I'll give McCarthy
the benefit of the doubt.)
Something over three decades of
McCarthy's work is on view through May 13 at New York's New Museum of
Contemporary Art in SoHo, and since he is widely admired by the art
establishment, here and abroad, there are prima facie reasons for
those interested in contemporary art to experience it. The disgusting
works have mainly to do with food, but--citing Haidt--disgust is, at
its core, an oral defense. There is no actual gore, though McCarthy
uses food to evoke the images of gore. Similarly, there are no actual
envelope violations; no one is actually cut open. But again, various
accessories, like dolls and sacks, are enlisted to convey the idea
that the exterior envelope of the body is breached or violated.
McCarthy makes liberal use of ketchup in his performances, and in
interviews speaks of the disagreeable smell of ketchup in large
quantities. That is part of what I have in mind in speaking of his
art-making in terms of ordeal. There may or may not be actual shit,
but chocolate is what one might call the moral equivalent of feces,
as you can verify through watching a few minutes of his Santa
Chocolate Shop. Karen Finley used only chocolate to cover her
body in the performance that landed her in hot water with the
National Endowment for the Arts a few years ago--but everyone knew
what she was getting at.
The use of foodstuffs
distinguishes McCarthy's art from that of the so-called Vienna
Actionists of the 1960s--Hermann Nitsch and Otto Mühl are
perhaps the best known, though the actor Rudolf Schwarzkogler
attained a happily unmerited notoriety through the rumor that he cut
bits of his penis off in successive performances of Penis
Action. The Actionists made use of real blood and excrement, and
excited at least the illusion of humiliation through such happenings
as that in which a broken egg was dripped into Mühl's mouth from
the vagina of a menstruating woman. They were heavily into
desecration. McCarthy is pretty cheery alongside these predecessors.
His work refers to nursery rhymes and children's stories, and he
makes use of stuffed animals and dolls, often secondhand, and
costumes as well as rubber masks from the joke shop. Some writers
have described McCarthy as a shaman, but he rightly sees that as
something of a stretch: "My work is more about being a clown than a
shaman," he has said. As a clown, he fits into the soiled toy lands
of his mise en scènes, which kick squalor up a couple
of notches, as Emeril Lagasse likes to say when he gives the pepper
mill a few extra turns.
The clown persona is central to
what within the constraints of McCarthy's corpus might be regarded as
his chef-d'oeuvre, Bossy Burger (1991). But he worked
his way up to the creation of this role through a sequence of
performances. In these, he stuffed food in his pants, covered his
head with ketchup, mimicked childbirth using ketchup-covered dolls as
props. In one, or so I have read, he placed his penis inside a
mustard-covered hot dog bun and then proceeded to fill his mouth to
the point of gagging with ketchup-slathered franks. Throughout, food
was placed in proximity to parts of the body with which food has no
customary contact. But many human beings are reluctant to touch food
that has merely been left untouched on the plates of strangers.
Disgust is a defensive reflex, connected with fear, even if we know
the food that evokes it is perfectly safe and edible. That is why
there is so strong a contrast between beauty and disgust: Beauty
McCarthy got the idea of using food as the medium
of his performances in the course of searching for a very basic kind
of activity. Inevitably, he had to deal with disgust, which is
inseparable from eating as symbolically charged conduct. It is
understandable that he would stop performing for live audiences (as
he did in 1983) and begin to devise a form of theater to put a
distance between himself and his viewers. I would not care to perform
Bossy Burger a second time, even if I had the stomach to
perform it once. It is perhaps part of the magic of theater that
disgust survives as an affect, even through the video screen. It
doesn't help to know it is only ketchup.
The action of
Bossy Burger transpires in what in fact was a studio set for a
children's television program, and the set--a hamburger stand--is
exhibited as an installation. It shows the damage inflicted on it by
the performance, and looking in through the open wall--or the
windows--we see an utterly nauseating interior, with dried splotches
and piles of food pretty much everywhere. It has the look of
California Grunge, as we encountered it in the work of Ed Kienholz. A
double monitor outside the set shows, over and over, McCarthy's
character, togged out in chef's uniform and toque--and wearing the
Alfred E. Neuman mask that connotes imbecility--grinning his way
through fifty-nine minutes of clownishly inept food preparation. Thus
he pours far more ketchup into a sort of tortilla than it can
possibly hold, folds it over with the ketchup squishing out and moves
on to the next demonstrations. These involve milk and some pretty
ripe turkey parts. The character is undaunted as his face, garments
and hands quickly get covered with what we know is ketchup but looks
like blood, so he quickly takes on the lookof a mad butcher. He piles
the seat of a chair with food. He makes cheerful noises as he bumbles
about the kitchen or moves to other parts of the set, singing, "I
love my work, I love my work." Everything bears the mark of his
cheerful ineptitude. At one point he uses the swinging door to spank
himself, but it is difficult to believe this constitutes
self-administered punishment. He looks through an opening at the
world outside. McCarthy says he envisioned this chef as a trapped
person, but whether that is an external judgment or actually felt by
the character is impossible to decide from the work itself. Viewers
may find themselves wanting to laugh, but a certain kind of
compassion takes over. Perhaps it is a test for tenderness. Whatever
the case, even writing about Bossy Burger makes me feel
You won't get much relief by looking at Family
Tyranny, in which the character uses mayonnaise and sings, "Daddy
came home from work" as he prepares to do unspeakable things to his
children. "They're only dolls" helps about as much as "It's only art"
does, which underscores Kant's point about disgust. Painter
mercifully turns to other substances in its slapstick comedy about
the art world. McCarthy plays the role of art star, wearing a sort of
hospital gown, a blond wig and huge rubber hands, and he has a kind
of balloon by way of a nose. Everyone else in the action--his dealer
and his collectors--wears the same kind of nose, which perhaps
caricatures the hypertrophied sensitivity that exposure to art might
be thought to bring. At one point, the Painter climbs onto a sort of
pedestal as an art-lover kneels to smell his ass. In another action,
he chops away at one of his fingers with a cleaver, and crows OK!
when it comes off. This belongs to the iconography of self-mutilation
that has, since van Gogh--and perhaps Schwarzkogler--become an
ingredient in our myth of the true artist. The Painter's studio is
filled with huge tubes of paint (one of them labeled shit), and he
parodies the Abstract Expressionist address to painting by slapping
pigment wildly here and there, rolling it onto a table and then
pressing his canvas down onto the paint while pushing it back and
forth, all the while singing some version of "Pop Goes the Weasel."
Paint, food and blood serve throughout McCarthy's work as symbolic
equivalents. I could not suppress the thought that Painter is
a kind of self-portrait--there are photographs elsewhere in the show
of an early performance in which McCarthy frantically whipped a
paint-laden blanket against a wall and window until they were covered
with pigment.
It will be apparent that I am a squeamish
person, an occupational impediment for an art critic if Jean Clair is
right about the new aesthetic (for my response to that contention,
see www.toutfait.com/issues/ issue_3/News/Danto/danto.html). I am
not, however, disposed to prudery, though I have a strong memory of a
certain visceral discomfort when I was first writing on Robert
Mapplethorpe's photographs. McCarthy's Spaghetti Man I thought
was pretty funny. It is a sculpture, 100 inches tall, of a kind of
bunny, wearing a plastic grin of self-approval. It could easily be on
sale at F.A.O. Schwarz were it not that the bunny has a fifty-foot
penis, which coils like a plastic hose on the floor beneath him. It
is a kind of comment, but from an unusual direction, on Dr. Ruth's
reassuring mantra for insecure males that Size Doesn't Matter. It
really does matter from the perspective of masculine vanity, even if
Spaghetti Man's organ would put too great a distance between himself
and a partner for any show of tenderness during coitus. So its
message may well be that we should be grateful for what we've
I don't have anything very good to say about The
Garden, an installation of McCarthy's on view at Deitch Projects,
18 Wooster Street. The garden consists of fake trees and plants--it
was a movie set--in which one sees--Eek!--two animatronic male
figures, one doing the old in-and-out with a knothole in one of the
trees, the other with a hole in the ground. Some ill-advised writers
have compared the work to Duchamp's strangely magical last work,
Étant Donnés, where one sees a pink female nude,
legs spread, sharing a landscape with a waterfall and a gas lamp. The
masturbations in The Garden are too robotic for mystery, and
the meaning of all that effort too jejune to justify the artistic
effort. Cultural Gothic, a pendant to The Garden, is in
the main body of the show at the New Museum. It is a life-size
sculpture of a neatly dressed father and son engaged in a rite de
passage in which the son is enjoying sex with a compliant goat.
Whether the motor was in its dormant phase or the electricity not
working--or the museum inhibited by some failure of nerve--there was
no motion when I saw it. I thought that an improvement, but purists
might think otherwise.
OK, no Lifelines, no 50-50s, no Audience Participation if you want to be a millionaire: Name the first great African-American sitcom of the New Millennium... Correct! The 2000 presidential election, as perpetrated in Palm Beach and Duval counties.
Imagine, black people actually thinking they could vote. Cue the laugh track. Go to commercial.
If you're already nostalgic for the kind of pure entertainment value offered by the perversely fascinating Florida (bamboozled, indeed), don't fret. There's always the WB (as opposed to the GWB) or the United Plantation Network, to sustain your sense of cultural (dis)equilibrium--as well as a Lester Maddoxian sense of race separation. Ever watch The Steve Harvey Show? Yes? Well, don't be shocked but you may be black: The number-one rated show among African-Americans, it's been all but unknown among the rest of the population.
If the accession of George W. Bush illustrated anything--other than the awesome power of television to stand by and do nothing--it was the cyclical nature of black access to power in this country, on TV or off. In 1876--as we all know now--a rigged election signaled the end of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, the establishment of the hangman's noose as symbol of Southern recreation and, until the Scottsboro Boys case in 1931, a national coma as regards racial mending.
But only eight years after Scottsboro broke, Ethel Waters was asked to develop a show for a medium that was itself still in development. By the late 1960s, The Brady Bunch had taken the one institutionalized black figure on mainstream TV--the maid--and made her white. By 2001, Jerry Springer was refereeing an on-air fiasco that could only be described as a racist's dream, showcasing, as it does, the dregs of the population, black and white.
That so much of television's black content is currently in syndication--good or bad--is telling. Plenty could argue that Jim Crow is still alive and well on network TV, but it is hard to say that matters aren't better than they were: Many major programs have a major black character; Oprah Winfrey rules the waves. But it's also better than arguable that ever since lynch mobs became more or less unfashionable (except in Texas), television has exercised the kind of social/racial control over our culture that race laws once maintained, and via the same mechanism: Create an artificial universe, with artificial rules; give people little enough to keep them near-starved, but make enough noise about every crumb you do toss their way that the public will think you're a bomb-lobbing revolutionary.
The culture critic Donald Bogle doesn't ascribe so much power, or so much intelligence, to the medium he critiques in Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television. But he's certainly cognizant of the power of entertainment to skew one's perception. And oneself. Growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, Bogle writes, he seldom saw black people he recognized on TV. Or situations, comedic or otherwise, that weren't filtered through a white consciousness. But he watched. And watched.
Early on, it was Beulah, with Waters--and Louise Beavers and Hattie McDaniel--refashioning for an all-new medium the near-mythic character of the wise and/or sardonic black servant. He watched the minstrelized antics of Amos 'n' Andy--which, to its credit, barely acknowledged the white world--as well as the caustic modernism of Eddie "Rochester" Anderson. Later, there were the "events" of Roots and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, programs reeking of network noblesse oblige. But it wasn't until The Cosby Show, he says, that he realized two things: a previously unknown familiarity with people he was watching, via a seemingly benign, but hugely influential--and successful--NBC sitcom. And an accompanying epiphany about the magnitude of network TV's failure to its black audience.
To no one's surprise, Bill Cosby emerges in Bogle's book as one of the three or four most influential black performers/entrepreneurs in the history of black television (along with Waters, the comedian Flip Wilson and the Wayans brothers, because In Living Color helped put Fox TV "on the map"). But Cosby also ties Bogle up. As a performer, Cosby has been averse to playing the race card for either laughs or points, and his silence has been eloquent. Bogle recognizes this, just as he recognizes that Amos 'n' Andy assumed an existential grandeur by existing in its own black world.
But in Primetime Blues--a companion to Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks (Continuum), his study of blacks in film--Bogle is torn: There's the sense that every opportunity given, majestically, African-Americans on TV (itself a repugnantly patriarchal concept) should be used to promote a positive image or political message. Conversely, there's the Realpolitik of mass entertainment. It's rather unclear whether he thinks Julia, the landmark series that debuted in turbulent 1968, starring Diahann Carroll as a widowed mother and nurse (working for the crusty-but-benevolent Lloyd Nolan), was rightfully criticized for not having more truthfully represented black people, whatever that means, or was a landmark nonetheless. When he says that the characters in a show like Sanford & Son might have portrayed real anger about their status and thus taken the show in a different and provocative direction, he doesn't say whether he thinks very many viewers would have bothered to follow along.
In this, Bogle skirts the two basic aspects of television's nature: First, that it is craven, soulless and bottom-line fixated. And second, that it is aimed at morons. Sure, Bogle can cite hundreds of examples of African-Americans being portrayed in a patronizing or demeaning fashion, but how many real white people ever show up on the tube? Shows like The Jeffersons and Good Times were cartoons, the latter perpetrating what Bogle dubs neo-"coonery" via comedian Jimmie Walker. But between The Honeymooners and Roseanne, how many regular series represented white America as other than upper-middle-class, Wonder Bread-eating humanoids? Television, in its democratic largesse, has smeared us all.
Some worse than others. If the only place you saw white people was on the evening news--the one slot where blacks were always assured better-than-equal representation--you'd have a pretty warped idea of white people, too. Which is why, Bogle makes plain, it's always been so important to get respectable blacks on network TV.
The history itself is fascinating. Waters, who acquires a quasi-Zelig-like presence in Bogle's account of TV's early age, personified the medium's ability to diminish whatever talent it sucked into its orbit. The original Ethel Waters Show included scenes from Waters's hit play Mamba's Daughters; eleven years later, she'd be back as Beulah. By 1957, she was destitute, dunned by the IRS and had offered herself up as poignant fodder for Edward R. Murrow's Person to Person, talking about Christian faith and a need for money. Finally, television, never sated, asked one more sacrifice and got it, when Waters tried to quiz-show her way out of debt via a show called Break the $250,000 Bank.
Waters remains a towering figure in twentieth-century American culture; after the fanfares of both Bogle and jazz critic Gary Giddins (whose Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams ranks her alongside Crosby and Louis Armstrong in her importance to American pop singing), she may be due for a full-fledged resurrection, replete with boxed sets and beatification by Ken Burns. But she isn't the only one the author resuscitates. In trying to achieve as complete as possible a history of the medium-in-black, Bogle also tells the unsung stories of other pioneering African-American performers--such people as Tim Moore, Ernestine Wade, Juano Hernandez, James Edwards--who more often than not had one hit show then went on hiatus, and from there to oblivion.
Among the encores given by Bogle (author of a first-rate biography of the actress Dorothy Dandridge) are Bob Howard, star of The Bob Howard Show, a fifteen-minute weeknight program of songs that went on the air in 1948 and was the first to feature a black man as host. It lasted only thirteen months. Howard doesn't seem to have stretched his material beyond renditions of "As Time Goes By" or "The Darktown Strutters' Ball." But the most interesting thing, besides his race, was that the network didn't seem to notice it--didn't seem to have a problem with bringing an African-American into white homes. Of course, the networks had yet to hear the five little words that have echoed down through the annals of black TV (and any other progressive programming, for that matter):
What about the Southern affiliates?
Hazel Scott was hardly the 1950s version of Lil' Kim: The elegant, educated and worldly host of the DuMont Network's Hazel Scott Show had already come under fire from both James Agee and Amiri Baraka for allegedly putting phony white airs on earthy black music--so, if anything, she should have been the darling of the powers of early television. But no. Allegations in the communist-watchdog publication Red Channels dried up sponsorship for her show. And even though Scott demanded and got a chance to plead her patriotism before the House Un-American Activities Committee, her show was canceled after just three months. Scott's fate indicated even at this early stage that television would flee from any sign of controversy, especially political controversy, writes Bogle, who is correct--except when money is involved.
Primetime Blues stands as a history of African-American television, but there's more than enough subject matter to fill two books--a sequel could deal solely with the current ghettoization of the evening airwaves--so Bogle steers mostly clear of analyzing white television (you wish he'd at least dug deeper into the influence of black TV on white TV). But he can't ignore All in the Family. Not only did it spin off one of the most successful black sitcoms ever--The Jeffersons--it had a stronger kinship, albeit an ironic one, to black sitcoms than it did to white. It might even have been a black sitcom, sort of the way Bill Clinton was a black President, by the nature and limits of its experience.
Bogle places himself in the rather illustrious camp (Laura Hobson, author of Gentleman's Agreement, was one critic of the show's "dishonesty") contending that Carroll O'Connor's bigoted Archie Bunker, who brought "hebe," "coon" and "spade" into prime time--and ended up one of TV Guide's Fifty Greatest Characters Ever--did nothing to break down racial barriers but in fact reinforced the very racist attitudes the buffoonish Bunker was supposed to make look ridiculous. Cosby hated it; Lucille Ball (who, it is left unsaid, had one of the top-rated Nielsen shows before AITF premiered) weighed in too, comparing Norman Lear's groundbreaking comedy to the days when "the Romans let human beings be eaten by lions, while they laughed and drank."
CBS pooh-bah William Paley, who originally thought the show offensive, became a big supporter once it became a smash--to the point of ordering that a study he'd commissioned, one that confirmed what critics of the show were saying, be destroyed: What can we do with it? Paley asked. If we release it, we'll have to cancel the show.
Bogle is good at comparing Amos 'n' Andy to In Living Color--shows whose humor would never be viewed the same way by black and white audiences. And he appreciates that while early performers like the Randolph sisters--Lillian (It's a Wonderful Life, Amos 'n' Andy, The Great Gildersleeve) and Amanda (The Laytons, Amos 'n' Andy, Make Room for Daddy)--could add nuance and dimension to otherwise cardboard domestic characters, their roles were mostly nonexistent outside the sphere of their white employers. But he misses what I think is the lasting point of All in the Family: Archie Bunker, a furious, frustrated vessel of negative energy, was defined solely by his hate, solely by his proximity to the people he considered inferior or worse. He existed in a parallel zone to the one that had been created as a ghetto for black performers for decades past--a zone that defined him not by what he was, but what he wasn't. America didn't get it, of course, and CBS didn't intend it, but what All in the Family turned out to be was a perverted version of Amos 'n' Andy.
Which Booker Prize-winner could give Hollywood the boot in the arse it needs and secretly craves? Roddy Doyle, that's who. His Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van) is somewhat more consistent than the Godfather Trilogy and less dependent on film tradition. His flicks don't exactly blow Coppola's away, but they're at least as good at sparking a family to rampageous life. It's not images that render Doyle's Dublin Rabbitte clan--it's the talk. Doyle's characters are comets of conversation, a bit like Preston Sturges heroes, daredevilishly suspended in thin plots by sheer velocity and nerve.
Doyle was a Dublin schoolteacher who poured his students' joie de vivre into a novel, The Commitments (1991), about scrappy Irish dole kids who become a soul band. When publishers returned it unopened, Doyle published it himself; then Alan Parker's posse buffed it into one of the best music movies ever, realer-seeming than the current exquisite memory film Almost Famous. It succeeds because it celebrates failure with integrity. As they say about soul music in the film, "It grabs you by the balls and lifts you above the shite."
The Commitments is the best Doyle film because it has Hollywood polish and story shape, but what makes it great is Doyle's untutored talent for dialogue in a medium dominated by words overprocessed and extruded by studios in terror of an original syllable. The Snapper (1993), made for BBC peanuts by Stephen Frears, a London genius who flops whenever he tries to go Hollywood, is a haphazard tale of unwed Dublin motherhood. Lost from the novel it's based on is the inside tour of the mother's thoughts, but still, it's a pure jolt of Doyle dialogue, uncut by movie pros.
What a rush! Who cares if the story has no sense of direction when you've got an intense sense of place and a vital ensemble engaged in the verbal equivalent of a food fight? Even the girl's loathsome impregnator Georgie Burgess (sag-eyed Pat Laffan) is so real, so rooted, you could kiss his puff-pastry face. Doyle captures the fractious loyalty and contained chaos that inspired the comic Martin Mull to say that having a family is "like having a bowling alley installed in your brain." While the eloquently exasperated expectant grandpa (Colm Meaney) tries to pry Burgess's identity out of his "up the pole" daughter, his younger girl high-steps past wearing baton-twirler's duds and a shaving-foam beard; a soused son vomits in the kitchen sink; grandpa-to-be says, "You'll do those dishes!" and gets back to interrogating without missing a beat.
The film The Van (1996), about the Dublin dad's fish-and-chip truck venture, was a bigger comedown from Doyle's Booker-shortlisted book--not enough family feeling. Even so, his cult flicks got him a crack at writing a screenplay not derived from a novel; unhappily, it is derived from all too many movies. The trouble starts with the title: When Brendan Met Trudy. If you're going to quote a famous movie title, why pick one whose title is the worst thing about it?
While there's nothing wrong with stealing, Doyle and director Kieron Walsh are thieving magpies who can't weave bits into a nest for new life. The worst thing about When Brendan Met Trudy is its incessant, inconsequential movie references, no substitute for sturdy characters and witty chaff. In their opening-scene reprise of Sunset Boulevard, virginal 28-year-old schoolteacher Brendan (Peter McDonald) lies face-down on a rain-swept Dublin street as his voiceover suggests that we back up a few weeks to find out how he got there.
The original fulfills that promise with a clockwork plot. This scene is just a one-shot gag: We later find that Brendan tripped in the street, fell and took comfort in mumbling lines from an old movie. He's not dead, just dull, there for no reason besides the filmmaker's wish to quote Sunset Boulevard. Random events happen to Brendan. He sings Panis Angelicus with his church choir (a no-soul band). He absently teaches students whose names he can't keep straight (how can Doyle get nothing from this milieu?). He gets picked up in a pub by Trudy (Flora Montgomery), a determinedly spunky Ellen DeGeneres lookalike; takes her to "an important Polish movie" by "Tomaszewski"; has cute sex with her; suspects her of being the castrator who's (cutely) terrorizing Dublin; and helps her bungle a cutesy burglary of his school. The whimsy is wheezy.
We see clips from Once Upon a Time in the West, The Producers and The African Queen, and Brendan and Trudy re-enact scenes from movies. Brendan gets limp in flagrante in a hayloft. Trudy observes, "What's wrong? You were big a minute ago." He replies, "I am big; it's the pictures that got small." Putting Jean Seberg's New York Herald Tribune T-shirt on Trudy fails to make her Seberg in Breathless. When Belmondo apes Bogey in Breathless, he's his own man. Aping Belmondo, Brendan isn't anybody, just a dead cliché walking. He's very good at mimicking John Wayne's walk at the end of The Searchers--but he ain't goin' nowhere, pilgrim. This movie could be called Airless. Or Something Mild.
Doyle's talent glimmers here and there in the hokey-jokey dialogue; you may find bits charming and me grumpy. Maybe I wouldn't be so disappointed if it didn't come off like a tone-deaf imitation of a real Roddy Doyle movie--one with bighearted characters firmly planted in a real place, whipping up a world out of irreverently poetical words, making me feel like family, banishing the real world by sweeping me up in theirs. Doyle's excruciatingly self-conscious and lumbering farce is not quite shite, it's just the usual, when what we expect from him is a kick in the arse.
Looking Back: First-time director/writer Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count On Me won Best Screenplay and Best Actress from the National Society of Film Critics instead of the Oscars it also deserved, but how can you expect a bunch of Hollywood types to grasp fully an articulately understated, utterly honest work of art? In Lonergan's tale of an orphaned brother and sister's troubled love, every stammer, rant, skittish glance and awkward silence is precisely in character and scored like music.
Anyone could film an opening scene of a car crash that claims a young couple, but look how sensitively Lonergan handles the next: A cop's face materializes in the obscured glass of a front door. Sheriff Darryl (Adam LeFevre) tells the babysitter of the dead couple's kids, "Would you step outside and close the door?" Darryl's cop-speak must work on drunk drivers, but words fail him now and he's struck dumb with grief. The mute moment is searing, it evokes the closeness of their upstate New York town and it introduces two symbols of disconnection Lonergan loves: the door and the glass.
We flash forward to the orphaned girl Sammy (hummingbird-alert Laura Linney) in middle age, still living in her parents' manse with a wraparound porch like a comforting arm, baking plate-sized cookies for the return of her slouching jailbird hobo brother, Terry (Mark Ruffalo, a real find). On the bus home, Terry smokes joints as if they were his sole source of oxygen--the same way wild-child-turned-churchgoer Sammy smokes cigarettes when her 9-year-old son, Rudy (Rory Culkin, very like his brother Macaulay), is safely tucked in bed.
The town still cramps Terry. Sheriff Darryl is still in his face, confiningly benign. Terry literally can't breathe around the guy, because he'll exhale THC. And when Terry and Sammy meet, Lonergan economically conveys how they've coped with orphanhood in opposite ways. Terry became a Five Easy Pieces-style wandering wastrel. Single-mom Sammy stayed put, raising Rudy and working at a bank run by Brian (artfully blank-eyed Matthew Broderick). Brian is a preposterous martinet, ineptly tyrannical (he asks people to use "a more quote unquote normal range of colors" on their PCs), yet with a nonmean streak. So Sammy feels sorry for him and impulsively takes him to bed. She's always trying to save people.
The story's surface simplicity is deceptive. The relationships between Terry, Rudy, Sammy and her lovers grow together slowly, like frost tendrils in a windowpane. Subtext runs deep, and though he's not the world's most bravura visual director, Lonergan composes a tight symbolic structure connecting apparently desultory events. The climactic punchout scene is not contrived; it closes the circle of the lost-parent theme, and squares with Terry's belief in facing bad facts, not fleeing to faith and tradition. Watching him, you'd never know the 1960s myth of self-actualization was all self-deluded jive. (It sure beats the smug, pothead-bashing moralizing of the otherwise superb Wonder Boys.) Listening to him and Sammy and Rudy and a doleful minister (played well by Lonergan) talk about life, you'd think cinema was an art open to ideas. Plus, it's funny.
I was born by a Kerouac stream under Eisenhower skies
--John Gorka
The New Folk Movement is now about twenty years old, and John Gorka is one of its leading voices, along with peers like Nanci Griffith and newer arrivals like Ani DiFranco. Over nearly two decades, Gorka has honed his warm baritone and offbeat songwriting skills with 200-days-a-year touring. His fine new album, The Company You Keep (Red House), is a characteristically bittersweet disc, understated but sharpened by deft word usage and a grasp of life's conundrums and paradoxes.
Gorka fits contemporary notions of a folk musician. He was a history and philosophy major in college, and got his performing start at coffeehouses in the late 1970s. His tunes are self-reflective, wry, pungent, pessimistic but unwilling to despair; they have titles like "Joint of No Return" and "Wisheries." In "What Was That," he sings, "Guess I'd better get back up/Get up off the ground again/Guess I'm really not so tough/Up is farther than it's ever been." And up he goes, discarding regret and clearing a space for whatever future he faces.
His country-tinged group has tasty yet simple arrangements, augmented with guest vocals by DiFranco and Lucy Kaplansky and Mary Chapin Carpenter. He's got real range, from on-point satire ("People My Age," which mocks baby-boomer elective plastic surgery) to playful ("Around the House"). And like older generations of folk musicians, he uses found material. The lyrics for "Let Them In" come from an unknown soldier in a World War II military hospital; God tells St. Peter to "Give them things they like/Let them make some noise/Give roadhouse bands, not golden harps/To these our boys."
The Eisenhower years saw the beginnings of the postwar folk revival; it gathered strength and followers in the 1960s. Maria Muldaur was part of it; her funky Greenwich Village apartment at the time often hosted other scene-makers, like John Sebastian. (Check out The Lovin' Spoonful Greatest Hits [BMG/Buddha], a wonderful CD of Sebastian's mid-1960s folk-blues-pop quartet issued last year; its only flaw is incompleteness.) This was the first generation of white kids exploring the folk blues, the language invented by dispossessed rural black America that underpins this country's music. Many went on Kerouac-like journeys in search of the originals, turned some up and then recorded them, resuscitating their careers. Their new audience of white college kids on campuses and in coffeehouses was a far cry from the plantations and street corners and juke joints where the music was created.
The rediscovery of rural blues roughly paralleled the rise of the mass civil rights movement, and reflected it. Blues seemed a true folk music, in the original German sense of the word: a manifestation of something fundamental and authentic about a people. Inevitably, some revivalists had a few misguided notions about authenticity, putting acoustic guitars in the hands of electric-blues masters like Muddy Waters. And yet they also knew what they wanted. Blues material certainly couldn't have been less like Tin Pan Alley's: Love may be a central theme for both, but the blues' gritty realism, with its raw sex and violence and irony and humor, exposed the superficiality of 1950s American pop. It let listeners step outside America's conformity. Not coincidentally, it also let them see black people as cultural heroes--a dramatic reversal of racist stereotypes.
Muldaur has always admired Memphis Minnie, one of the few folk-blues musicians who happened to be a woman. Minnie played mean guitar and wrote lustily double-entendre songs about the life she led. Her "Me and My Chauffeur Blues," with the signature lick that Chuck Berry swiped decades later for "You Can't Catch Me," is among the best moments on Muldaur's twenty-fifth album, Richland Woman Blues (Stony Plain). Age has deepened and coarsened the lilting flutters that shaped Muldaur's girlish voice, but to compensate she's developed heft and power. Maybe it's the spirit she's found in the largely African-American church she attends. Whatever the cause, she both evokes her idols and makes their music her own; her emotional identification with them enriches nearly all of these fourteen songs.
Like Gorka's, this disc gathers like-minded souls, a community joined by music and history. Sebastian's nimble John Hurt-inspired fingerpicking backs Muldaur on the opening cut, and the list spins on from there: Taj Mahal, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Tracy Nelson (whose duet with Muldaur, "Far Away Blues," is riveting and heartbreaking) and Bonnie Raitt. With Angela Strehli, Muldaur reprises the Bessie and Clara Smith classic, "My Man Blues," where two women, discovering they're sharing a man unwittingly, agree to continue the triad "on the cooperation plan," since they like how things are. The fluent piano behind them is courtesy of Dave Matthews.
History has been kind to the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. The original jubilee-style quintet met in 1939, at the Talladega Institute for the Blind, which they snuck out of to sing at a nearby military base. By the 1950s, the peak years of the "gospel highway," the church-based circuit that produced stars like Sam Cooke, they were shouters recording hits for Art Rupe's prestigious Specialty label. These top-tier, soul-rending performances are collected on Oh Lord--Stand by Me (Specialty).
In 1983 they were "rediscovered" in the electrifying remake of Sophocles called The Gospel at Colonnus; the musical hit Broadway in 1988. Now they've opened for rock superstars like Tom Petty and have headlined at the House of Blues chain. It sure ain't church, but in the wondrous way of art, the Blind Boys transform everything they perform into a forum for testifying. Clarence Fountain's massive voice is a monument in motion; few other than bluesmen like Howlin' Wolf match his raw timbre and full-lunged forcefulness.
Spirit of the Century (Real World) deliberately crosses gospel with blues, sacred with profane. It joins the three remaining Blind Boys with 1960s-vintage roots diggers like veteran guitarist David Lindley and blues harp great Charlie Musselwhite, who led one of the earliest and best 1960s electric-blues revival bands. They infuse Tom Waits's off-kilter "Jesus Gonna Be Here" with fearsome fervor, and deepen the resonances of Ben Harper's "Give a Man a Home." And they set "Amazing Grace" to the music of that whorehouse anthem popularized in the 1960s, "House of the Rising Sun." Though he's reimagined himself into something sui generis, Tom Waits has self-evident blues roots. In the early 1970s, he opened for an undersung hero of the 1960s folk-blues revival. Back then, John Hammond was known as John Hammond Jr.; his famous father, the leftist Vanderbilt scion who'd made his name "discovering" and recording black musical talents from Bessie Smith to Charlie Christian, the man who signed Bob Dylan to a major label, was still alive and looming.
The younger Hammond has never reached mass audiences, but some of his students, like an ex-sideman named Jimi Hendrix who worked with him at the seminal Cafe Wha? in the Village, did. Hammond mastered a dizzying variety of folk-blues styles and performed hundreds of old blues, back when the stuff was hard to impossible to find on disc. White kids were scrounging through attics and flea markets and the like searching for old blues records, trying to piece together biographies, compiling oral history and field recordings--work that, along with the Lomax field recordings for the Smithsonian, unearthed most of what we know about blues today.
Long underrated or simply overlooked, Hammond serves up Wicked Grin (Pointblank), and it's a marvelous treat: In a way, it's this year's second Tom Waits disc. That's not a putdown. Old friend Waits produced this edgy album; he also penned and plays on twelve of its thirteen songs. Backed by other roots veterans like keyboardist Augie Meyers, Hammond makes Waits's surreal, character-driven tunes more emphatically bluesy, and Waits endows each song with a sound that evokes different original blues recordings. It's a more creative use of the blues than most have come up with in years. And dig Waits's open-lunged gravel voice dueting with Hammond on the spiritual "I Know I've Been Changed."
Since he joined the Yardbirds, then John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and became the Godhead of the 1960s British blues revival, which paralleled the folk and blues revivals in America, Eric Clapton has changed fairly constantly, yet remained recognizably the same. That, after all, is how superstardom works. One of the biggest shifts came thirty years ago, when he was touring with Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, and they taught him to sing for real. His next album, with Derek and the Dominos (PolyGram), showcased his heartbreak, his suddenly raunchy vocals and his slash-and-burn band featuring slide guitarist Duane Allman.
In the decades since, Clapton has made a few good, even great albums and a pile of slush. Last year's much-heralded outing with B.B. King sounded haphazard and undercooked--a shame, really, given what it could have been. By contrast, Reptile (Reprise) is a keeper, reminiscent in style and pacing to the classic album he made as Derek. During recording, his uncle died. Raised by his grandmother, Clapton had grown up thinking his uncle was his brother. His uncle's favorite term of endearment gave this disc its name. On it, Clapton tours his past with consistent conviction, and his guitar is spry and sharp and ready to slice almost everywhere. He taps oldies like "Got You on My Mind," which gets a nice Jimmy Reed-ish blues treatment, and covers Stevie Wonder and Isley Brothers hits. "Travelin' Light," the latest installment in his ongoing J.J. Cale tributes, is stuffed with rheumy guitars snarling. But "Come Back Baby," his Ray Charles tribute, is the show-stopper. Clapton's overdriven guitar blazes and curdles the clichés of his millions of imitators, and his voice exposes just how rich and craggy it has grown to be. Brother Ray could still outchurch him without too much pain, but Clapton makes us believe he's got us gathered, swaying, in Charles's pews, to the music compounded of the sinful blues and heavenly gospel, the music called soul.
Over a decade ago, Clapton covered Robert Cray's "Bad Influence" and gave the now-multiple Grammy winner an early boost. Cray started mixing blues and soul with touches of jazz in 1974, working the circuit relentlessly; older bluesmen like Albert Collins and Muddy Waters championed his updated sound and lyrics. As time went on, he pumped up his soul-music aspect, deliberately extending the tradition of singer-guitarists like Little Milton and the B.B. King of "The Thrill Is Gone."
On Shoulda Been Home (Rykodisc), Cray's limber voice and spiky guitar once again merge blues and r&b with Memphis soul, with profitable results. Cray is well-known for tackling topics he sees as contemporary versions of the blues. "The 12 Year Old Boy" may even attract the unholy mob of politically correct leftists and Lynne Cheney followers who've climbed on Eminem's back, much as they would have onto Elvis Presley's. In this hard blues, Cray suggests ways to avoid having a preteen rival steal your lover: "If a young boy hangs around you/You should do what I shoulda did/Send him over to your neighbor's/And hope your neighbor likes kids."
Cray writes lyrics that tell stories, and storytelling is one reason I, like Charlie Parker, dig country music as well as blues. Which brings me to Charley Pride. Pride was a black star in country music in the 1960s, at the height of the whitebread "Nashville Sound," and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame last year.
It's often been said that country music is white folks' blues, but that's what Pride always sang. In the midst of sharecropped Mississippi fields, he hugged his radio to listen to the Grand Ole Opry. Not good enough for the ballplayer career he wanted, he went into the Army, became a smelter and moved his family to Montana, where he sang part time and caught the attention of touring Nashville stars. Chet Atkins signed him, released his first album without a picture, and started the hits rolling.
Country Legends (BMG/Buddha) collects them. Some, like "Snakes Crawl at Night," are period curiosities. There are solid genre efforts: the wistful look home ("Wonder Could I Live There Anymore"), infidelity ("Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger"). There's a tribute, a nice version of Hank Williams's classic "Honky Tonk Blues." There's his biggest hit, "Kiss an Angel Good Morning," a tune whose hooky bounce always makes me grin as it offers advice to "kiss an angel good morning/and love her like the devil when you get back home." And there's "I'm Just Me," to which you can add racial inferences, if you like: "Some want more and more's a-getting less/I just want what I got/Some wanna live up on a hill and others down by the sea/Some wanna live behind high walls/I just wanna live free."
The panorama that is American folk music opens in all directions on guitarist Bill Frisell's latest, most far-reaching album, Blues Dream (Nonesuch). For years now, Frisell has been integrating elements of jazz, folk, blues, new music, rock, pop, parlor tunes, you name it, into his musical quest. Unlike too many of his contemporaries, though, he's been trying to distill them into something of his own; he's not trying to slap together yet another postmodern slag heap of influences. With Blues Dream, he's succeeded incredibly.
The album charts many paths across the American landscape. The tremolo-shimmery title track is a brief minor-mode intro, an evocation of post-Kind of Blue Miles Davis. Track two, "Ron Carter," named for the great 1960s Davis bassist, opens with metallic horn squiggles that wind over a brief bass ostinato and off-kilter guitar licks, then builds with horns and overdriven guitar solos. It evokes and updates 1960s experimentalism--no mean feat--as do the rest of the album's tracks.
Music has one big advantage over the real world: Resolution is always possible, if you want it. Take "The Tractor." It kicks off as backporch bluegrass, drummer Kenny Wolleson and bassist David Piltch laying down a shuffle behind Frisell's arpeggiated rhythms, sometimes doubling Greg Leisz's mandolin. Suddenly a snaky, slightly dissonant horn section slices across it. With each chorus, the fine section--trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, saxist Billy Drewes and trumpeter Ron Miles--connects the riffs, filling in until they're almost continuous, a Monkish counterpoint to hillbilly jazz heaven. It's a brilliant work, a wondrous musical portrait of a melting pot or tossed salad or whatever metaphor you prefer for the multiracial, multicultural place America has never, in sad reality, managed to become.
THIS IS THE THIRD of what now threatens to become The Nation's annual Hollywood issue. Following in the footsteps of the catholic Mr. Soderbergh, whose Y2K output ran the gamut from Erin Brockovich to Traffic, this time around there is not even the shadow of a theme. But a little eclecticism never hurt anyone. In the forum, GENE SEYMOUR engages black filmmakers, who, as a group, appear to be enjoying unprecedented success, although he finds clouds within the silver lining. ELLEN WILLIS puts The Sopranos on her couch with a dazzling appreciation-slash-deconstruction of the East Coast's favorite soap (interestingly, the West Coast appears to be more taken with Gladiator), while MARC COOPER does the same for Hollywood's version of the labor movement, giving us an eye-opening glimpse into the internal politics of the guilds on the eve of what at this point seems to be an inevitable strike.
GEOFFREY GILMORE, who has run the Sundance Film Festival for eleven years, takes on "purists" and "ideologues" in a spirited assessment of the current state of independent film. Also in the not-so-pure department, AMY WALLACE reports that Jodie Foster is looking to make a feature out of the life of infamous filmmaker-cum-Hitler- groupie Leni Riefenstahl. The byzantine Oscar documentary process gets put under the microscope by CARL BROMLEY, who notes that the academy's snub of Wim Wenders's Buena Vista Social Club last year was only the most recent in a long history of mind-boggling misjudgments. We've tossed some candy throughout the issue in the form of reflections--both visual and verbal, from some names you'll recognize--on the allure of certain matinee idols. Finally, there is a real treat: an excerpt of newly published letters that present RAYMOND CHANDLER in a wholly unexpected light.
With negotiations between the Writers Guild and some of Hollywood's major film studios and TV networks at an impasse as the May 1 deadline nears, putting the panic of a strike in the usually gilded air, we're reminded of the often uneasy relationships between writers and the film industry--which Raymond Chandler amply described in writings outside his famous novels. The following are portions excerpted from The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Non-Fiction, 1909-1959, edited by Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane and published in April by Atlantic Monthly Press.
Letter to Erle Stanley Gardner, January 29, 1946. Chandler was working steadily on a fifth Marlowe novel. The cheap editions of all four earlier Marlowes were now selling in the hundreds of thousands, and Newsweek had reported in 1945 that "Chandlerism, a select cult a year ago, is about to engulf the nation."
Most of what you write is a complete surprise to me--including the idea that you are a lousy writer.... As I speak I have two solid rows of Gardners in front of me, and am still trying to shop around to complete the collection. I probably know as much about the essential qualities of good writing as anybody now discussing it. I do not discuss these things professionally for the simple reason that I do not consider it worthwhile. I am not interested in pleasing the intellectuals by writing literary criticism, because literary criticism as an art has in these days too narrow a scope and too limited a public, just as has poetry. I do not believe it is a writer's function to talk to a dead generation of leisured people who once had time to relish the niceties of critical thought. The critics of today are tired Bostonians like Van Wyck Brooks or smart-alecks like Fadiman or honest men confused by the futility of their job, like Edmund Wilson. The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called "significant literature" will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles. It is equally obvious that since this public has been taught to read by brute force it will, in between its bouts with the latest "significant" bestseller, want to read books that are fun and excitement. So like all half-educated publics in all ages it turns with relief to the man who tells a story and nothing else. To say that what this man writes is not literature is just like saying that a book can't be any good if it makes you want to read it. When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball. That is to me what you have more than anything else and more than anyone else. Dumas Père had it. Dickens, allowing for his Victorian muddle, had it; begging your pardon I don't think Edgar Wallace approached it. His stories died all along the line and had to be revived. Yours don't. Every page throws the hook for the next. I call this a kind of genius. I regard myself as a pretty exacting reader; detective stories as such don't mean a thing to me. But it must be obvious that if I have half a dozen unread books beside my chair and one of them is a Perry Mason, and I reach for the Perry Mason and let the others wait, that book must have a quality.
As to me, I am not busy and I am not successful in any important way. I don't get written what I want to write and I get balled up in what I write. I made a lot of money last year, but the government took half of it and expenses took half of the rest. I'm not poor, but neither am I in anything like your condition, or ever will be. My wife has been under the weather with the flu for ten days, but she wants to come down to your place as much as I do. I'm working at home because I refused to report to Paramount and took a suspension. They refused to tear up my contract. A writer has no real chance in pictures unless he is willing to become a producer, and that is too tough for me. The last picture I worked on was just one long row.
Letter to Alfred Knopf, January 12, 1946. Though Knopf was no longer Chandler's publisher, he and Chandler had buried the hatchet and were to remain in touch for the rest of Chandler's life. Knopf had written in response to reading Chandler's article in The Atlantic Monthly about screenwriting.
One of the troubles is that it seems quite impossible in Hollywood to convince anyone that a man would turn his back on a whopping salary--whopping by the standards of normal living--for any reason but a tactical manoeuvre through which he hopes to acquire a still more whopping salary. What I want is something quite different: a freedom from datelines and unnatural pressures, and a right to find and work with those few people in Hollywood whose purpose is to make the best pictures possible within the limitations of a popular art, not merely to repeat the old and vulgar formulae. And only a little of that.
The ethics of this industry may be judged by the fact that late last night a very important independent producer called me up and asked me to do a screenplay of one of the most advertised projects of the year, do it on the quiet, secretly, with full knowledge that it would be a violation of my contract. That meant nothing to him; it never occurred to him that he was insulting me. Perhaps, in spite of my faults, I still have a sense of honor. I may quarrel, but at least I put the point at issue down on the table in front of me. I am perfectly willing to let them examine my sleeves for hidden cards. But I don't think they really want to. They would be horrified to find them empty. They do not like to deal with honest men.
From the beginning, from the first pulp story, it was always with me a question (first of course of how to write a story at all) of putting into the stuff something they would not shy off from, perhaps even not know was there as a conscious realization, but which would somehow distill through their minds and leave an afterglow. A man with a realistic habit of thought can no longer write for intellectuals. There are too few of them and they are too specious. Neither can he deliberately write for people he despises, or for the slick magazines (Hollywood is less degrading than that), or for money alone. There must be idealism but there must also be contempt. This kind of talk may seem a little ridiculous coming from me. It is possibly that like Max Beerbohm I was born half a century too late, and that I too belong to an age of grace. I could so easily have become everything our world has no use for. So I wrote for the Black Mask. What a wry joke.
No doubt I have learned a lot from Hollywood. Please do not think I completely despise it, because I don't. The best proof of that may be that every producer I have worked for I would work for again, and every one of them, in spite of my tantrums, would be glad to have me. But the overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking and drabbing, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have really never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world. It is a great subject for a novel--probably the greatest still untouched. But how to do it with a level mind, that's the thing that baffles me. It is like one of these South American palace revolutions conducted by officers in comic opera uniforms--only when the thing is over the ragged dead men lie in rows against the wall, and you suddenly know that this is not funny, this is the Roman circus, and damn near the end of civilization.
Chandler having decided to stop studio work and move permanently to La Jolla, The Atlantic Monthly persuaded him to report on the 1946 Oscar ceremony for them.
If you think most motion pictures are bad, which they are (including the foreign), find out from some initiate how they are made, and you will be astonished that any of them could be good. Making a fine motion picture is like painting "The Laughing Cavalier" in Macy's basement, with a floorwalker to mix your colours for you. Of course most motion pictures are bad. Why wouldn't they be? Apart from its own intrinsic handicaps of excessive cost, hypercritical bluenosed censorship, and the lack of any single-minded controlling force in the making, the motion picture is bad because 90 per cent of its source material is tripe, and the other 10 per cent is a little too virile and plain-spoken for the petty-minded clerics, the elderly ingénues of the women's clubs, and the tender guardians of that godawful mixture of boredom and bad manners known more eloquently as the Impressionable Age.
The point is not whether there are bad motion pictures or even whether the average motion picture is bad, but whether the motion picture is an artistic medium of sufficient dignity and accomplishment to be treated with respect by the people who control its destinies. Those who deride the motion picture usually are satisfied that they have thrown the book at it by declaring it to be a form of mass entertainment. As if that meant anything. Greek drama, which is still considered quite respectable by most intellectuals, was mass entertainment to the Athenian freeman. So, within its economic and topographical limits, was the Elizabethan drama. The great cathedrals of Europe, although not exactly built to while away an afternoon, certainly had an aesthetic and spiritual effect on the ordinary man. Today, if not always, the fugues and chorales of Bach, the symphonies of Mozart, Borodin, and Brahms, the violin concertos of Vivaldi, the piano sonatas of Scarlatti, and a great deal of what was once rather recondite music are mass entertainment by virtue of radio. Not all fools love it, but not all fools love anything more literate than a comic strip. It might reasonably be said that all art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.
The motion picture admittedly is faced with too large a mass; it must please too many people and offend too few, the second of these restrictions being infinitely more damaging to it artistically than the first. The people who sneer at the motion picture as an art form are furthermore seldom willing to consider it at its best. They insist upon judging it by the picture they saw last week or yesterday; which is even more absurd (in view of the sheer quantity or production) than to judge literature by last week's ten bestsellers, or the dramatic art by even the best of the current Broadway hits. In a novel you can still say what you like, and the stage is free almost to the point of obscenity, but the motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom. If it were merely a transplanted literary or dramatic art, it certainly would not. The hucksters and the bluenoses would between them see to that.
But the motion picture is not a transplanted literary or dramatic art, any more than it is a plastic art. It has elements of all these, but in its essential structure it is much closer to music, the sense that its finest effects can be independent of precise meaning, that its transitions can be more eloquent than its high-lit scenes, and that its dissolves and camera movements, which cannot be censored, are often far more emotionally effective than its plots, which can. Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel.
In painting, music and architecture we are not even second-rate by comparison with the best work of the past. In sculpture we are just funny. In prose literature we not only lack style but we lack the educational and historical background to know what style is. Our fiction and drama are adept, empty, often intriguing, and so mechanical that in another fifty years at most they will be produced by machines with rows of push buttons. We have no popular poetry in the grand style, merely delicate or witty or bitter or obscure verses. Our novels are transient propaganda when they are what is called "significant," and bedtime reading when they are not.
But in the motion picture we possess an art medium whose glories are not all behind us. It has already produced great work, and if, comparatively and proportionately, far too little of that great work has been achieved in Hollywood, I think that is all the more reason why in its annual tribal dance of the stars and the big-shot producers Hollywood should contrive a little quiet awareness of the fact. Of course it won't. I'm just daydreaming.
Show business has always been a little overnoisy, overdressed, overbrash. Actors are threatened people. Before films came along to make them rich they often had need of a desperate gaiety. Some of these qualities prolonged beyond a strict necessity have passed into the Hollywood mores and produced that very exhausting thing, the Hollywood manner, which is a chronic case of spurious excitement over absolutely nothing. Nevertheless, and for once in a lifetime, I have to admit that Academy Awards night is a good show and quite funny in spots, although I'll admire you if you can laugh at all of it.
If you can go past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of the human intelligence; if you can stand the hailstorm of flash bulbs popping at the poor patient actors who, like kings and queens, have never the right to look bored; if you can glance out over this gathered assemblage of what is supposed to be the elite of Hollywood and say to yourself without a sinking feeling, "In these hands lie the destinies of the only original art the modern world has conceived"; if you can laugh, and you probably will, at the cast-off jokes from the comedians on the stage, stuff that wasn't good enough to use on their radio shows; if you can stand the fake sentimentality and the platitudes of the officials and the mincing elocution of the glamour queens (you ought to hear them with four martinis down the hatch); if you can do all these things with grace and pleasure, and not have a wild and forsaken horror at the thought that most of these people actually take this shoddy performance seriously; and if you can then go out into the night to see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the golden ones from the mob in the free seats but not from that awful moaning sound they give out, like destiny whistling through a hollow shell; if you can do all these things and still feel next morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong.
Letter to Charles Morton, November 22, 1950.
Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives. It took a certain amount of effort to go to the movies. Somebody had to stay with the kids. You had to get the car out of the garage. That was hard work. And you had to drive and park. Sometimes you had to walk as far as half a block to the theater. Then people with big fat heads would sit in front of you and make you nervous... Radio was a lot better, but there wasn't anything to look at. Your gaze wandered around the room and you might start thinking of other things--things you didn't want to think about. You had to use a little imagination to build yourself a picture of what was going on just by the sound. But television's perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in poor man's nirvana. And if some nasty-minded person comes along and says you look more like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind...just who should one be mad at anyway? Did you think the advertising agencies created vulgarity and the moronic mind that accepts it? To me television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our civilization that never had any standard but the soft buck.
Letter to Gene Levitt, who had been adapting Marlowe for the radio show, November 22, 1950.
I am only a very recent possessor of a television set. It is a very dangerous medium. And as for the commercials--well, I understand that the concoction of these is a business in itself, a business that makes prostitution or the drug traffic seem quite respectable. It was bad enough to have the sub-human hucksters controlling radio, but television does something to you which radio never did. It prevents you from forming any kind of a mental picture and forces you to look at a caricature instead.
Letter to Dale Warren, November 7, 1951.
You ask me how anybody can survive Hollywood? Well, I must say that I personally had a lot of fun there. But how long you can survive depends a great deal on what sort of people you have to work with. You meet a lot of bastards, but they usually have some saving grace. A writer who can get himself teamed up with a director or a producer who will give him a square deal, a really square deal, can get a lot of satisfaction out of his work. Unfortunately that doesn't happen often. If you go to Hollywood just to make money, you have to be pretty cynical about it and not care too much what you do. And if you really believe in the art of the film, it's a long job and you really should forget about any other kind of writing. A preoccupation with words for their own sake is fatal to good film making. It's not what films are for. It's not my cup of tea, but it could have been if I'd started it twenty years earlier. But twenty years earlier of course I could never have got there, and that is true of a great many people. They don't want you until you have made a name, and you have developed some kind of talent which they can't use. The best scenes I ever wrote were practically monosyllabic. And the best short scene I ever wrote, by my own judgement, was one in which a girl said "uh-huh" three times with three different intonations, and that's all there was to it. The hell of good film writing is that the most important part is what is left out. It's left out because the camera and the actors can do it better and quicker, above all quicker. But it had to be there in the beginning.
Letter to Carl Brandt, regarding television, November 15, 1951.
However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money. After all the public is entitled to what it wants. The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.
Reports of its demise are exaggerated.


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The Basilica of Saint Mary
Star of the Sea
"Since it first shed its light in Key West, Saint Mary's Church has, like a star of the sea to the wandering mariner, been a star of hope and comfort in times of despair and sorrow, and a star of joy to those who have lived in its teachings."February 26, 1851 by Father Sylvanius Hunineq
Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - CHRISTMAS EVE
5:00 pm - Mass with Children Gospel Pageant
12:00 am - Midnight Mass preceded by Caroling at 11:30pm
Thursday, December 25, 2014 - CHRISTMAS DAY
7:30 a.m. - Mass in English
9:00 a.m. - Mass in English
10:30 a.m. - Mass in English
12:00 p.m - Mass in Spanish
Key Principles of Catholic Social Teaching
~ Dignity of the Human Person
~ Community and the Common Good
~Option for people who are Poor and Vulnerable
~ Rights and Responsibilities
~ Role of Government and Subsidiary
~ The Dignity of Work and Rights of Workers/Economic Justice
~ Care of God's Creation
~ Promotion of Peace and Disarmament
~ Participation
~ Global Solidarity
Promotion of Peace and Disarmament
There is no question that we live in uncertain and even frightening times. Many forms of violence threaten our security as individuals, communities, as a nation and a global community. Most recently, violence has surfaced nationally, in the issues surrounding the shooting in Ferguson, MO and globally, with the rise of "ISIS". How do we as people of faith respond in a world which seems to be increasingly dangerous and insecure?
Promotion of Peace and Disarmament
Catholic teaching promotes peace as a positive, action - oriented concept. In the words of Pope John Paul II, "Peace is not just the absence of war. It involves mutual respect and confidence between peoples and nations. It involves collaboration and binding agreements." There is a close relationship in Catholic teaching between peace and justice. Peace is the fruit of justice and is dependent upon right order among human beings. (Used with the permission of The Diocese of Minneapolis/St. Paul)
In the words of Pope John Paul II, as stated in the U.S. Bishop's pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace, we need a "moral about face." The whole world must summon the moral courage and technical means to say "no" to nuclear conflict; "no" to weapons of mass destruction; "no" to an arms race which robs the poor and the vulnerable; and "no" to the moral danger of a nuclear age which places before humankind indefensible choices of constant terror or surrender. Peacemaking is not an optional commitment. It is a requirement of our faith. We are called to be peacemakers, not by some movement of the moment, but by our Lord Jesus. The content and context of our peacemaking is set, not by some political agenda or ideological program, but by the teaching of his Church.
Learn More: Catholics are encouraged to learn more about this social teaching. With information we can explore this teaching's implications on the issues that are clearly defined as violence such as global conflict, gun violence, domestic violence and bullying. We can also apply this teaching to issues which may not, on the surface look like issues of violence, but upon deeper reflection have the marks of violence such as poverty, hunger and environmental degradation. Although there are no easy solutions to these complicated issues, the social teaching of the church gives us a lens and framework in which to expand our understanding, and develop decisions and actions to live our faith in the world.
Action Ideas: Peace begins with each one of us in our own heart. Consider the following ways to create peace: Slow down and practice mindfulness. Pause before speaking harshly or judging other people. Resolve disputes at home, work and school using non violent conflict resolution skills. Take time to analyze and reflect on how violence and conflict resolution is portrayed and modeled in popular TV shows, movies and video games. What movies, music and video games attract us and why? Be conscious of speech patterns, and words used that sound violent (hate, kill, despise, smash, knock down, etc.) Review and take the vow of nonviolence found on the Pax Christi USA website. http://paxchristiusa.org/resources/vow-of-nonviolence/ . Use your faith and Catholic social teaching principles as you reflect on current situations including the situation in Ferguson, MO, peace in the Middle East, the rising conflict in Syria and Iraq. To learn about these and other global issues visit the web sites of the following peace and justice organizations: Pax Christ U.S.A. (The Catholic Peace movement) at paxchristiusa.org/; Pax Christi Florida at http://paxchristiflorida.org/; The Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center www.ipjc.org . Finally, ask yourself how Catholic teaching on peace can help us address local issues. For example, consider the current controversy over the relocation of our overnight homeless shelter, KOTS. How do we create a peaceful community where all belong? Are we as a community open to finding a new location for the facility?
On January 1st we celebrate World Day of Peace. In his 2015 World Day of Peace message, Pope Francis urges us to recognize the "equal dignity" of our brothers and sisters who are enslaved and exploited and to work to end human trafficking, trade in migrants and prostitutes, slave labor, and the enslavement of women and children. The text of the 2015 message will be posted at the following link in mid-December.)2015 Message for the World Day of Peace (January 1)
For more information contact: Patrice Schwermer at email@example.com
Help us add names to our Book of Remembrance
Most physical books are only available to those connected to the church. Our virtual book is available to all whether they have had the chance to visit our church or not. Please feel free to enter the names of your departed loved ones.
The Basilica of Saint Mary Star of the Sea is the first to host a Friends and Relations Book of Remembrance in the United States. Donated by British founder Jonathan Haward, these books have memorialized some of England most honored dead.
The Solemn Mass with the Conferral of the Insignia of the Basilica of Saint Mary Star of the Sea
Homily preached by Archbishop Thomas Wenski May 31, 2012 at the dedication of the minor basilica of St. Mary Star of the Sea in Key West.We gather today, on this feast of the Visitation of Mary, to give thanks for the favor shown to this historic parish church dedicated to Mary, Star of the Sea, to the Key West community and to our archdiocese. We are all extremely grateful that Pope Benedict XVI has seen fit to raise this church to the status and dignity of a minor basilica.more...
The Basilica of Saint Mary Star of the Sea in Key West is talked about in Rome

subset: commoncrawl


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BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Diana Gabaldon's An Echo in the Bone.
Eagerly anticipated by her legions of fans, this sixth novel in Diana Gabaldon's bestselling Outlander saga is a masterpiece of historical fiction from one of the most popular authors of our time.
Since the initial publication of Outlander fifteen years ago, Diana Gabaldon's New York Times bestselling saga has won the hearts of readers the world over — and sold more than twelve… (more)
Publisher: Delacorte Press (September 27, 2005)
Format: EPUB
File size: 3.7 MB
Protection: DRM
Language: English


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Price: |
List Price: US$28.28
Shipping: | Free shippingTo UNITED STATES |
Dispatch: | Item is temporarily sold out. |
Brand | Shuaixian |
Model | SX-907 |
Quantity | 1 |
Color | Black |
Bluetooth Version | v2.0 |
Ear Coupling | Over the Ear |
Talk Time | 12 Hour |
Standby Time | 200 Hour |
Operating Range | 10 meter |
Compatibility | v1.2 |
Microphone | Yes |
Radio | N/A |
Supports Music Format | N/A |
Power Supply | Built-in Battery |
Built-in Battery Capacity | 450mAh |
Other Features | Supports A2DP mobile phone; Frequency range: 2.4026GHz~2.48GHz; Stereo sound performance. |
Packing List | 1 x Bluetooth headphones |
1 x USB cable (90cm) | |
1 x 2-Flat-Pin plug adapter (100~240V) | |
1 x English user manual |
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Last updated: September 10, 2014
Email Coach Spedden
Baseball Home
Baseball Schedule
Baseball Roster
Baseball Results
Baseball Alumni
Golf Home
Golf Schedule
Golf Roster
Golf Results
Email Asst. Coach Apple
Ocean Lakes High School Baseball
Announcements From The Coach:
Wed Sept 10 -------- AWAY at Oscar Smith HS 6:00 PM
Wed Sept 17 ------------- HOME vs. Hickory HS 5:00 PM
Wed Sept 24 --------- AWAY at Churchland HS 6:00 PM
Wed Oct 1 ----------- HOME vs. Atlantic Shores 5:00 PM
Wed Oct 8 ------------------ AWAY at Hickory HS 6:00 PM
Wed Oct 15 ----------- AWAY at Lake Taylor HS 6:00 PM
Wed Oct 22 -------- AWAY at Norfolk Collegiate 6:00 PM
(Azelea field)
Wed Oct 29 ----------- AWAY at Indian River HS 6:00 PM
Please be at ballpark one hour prior to game time.
Dolphin Club fees for varsity Fall Ball = $100
Make payable to: Dolphin Baseball Club
For more information regarding Dolphin Baseball Club visit www.dolphinbaseballclub.com
Farewell and Thank You!
On behalf of Ocean Lakes High School - we would like to wish Coach Spedden best of luck as he moves to Grassfield High School in Chesapeake to take over the Grizzly Baseball program and continue his career as a Social Studies Teacher. Thanks Coach Spedden for 20 fabulous years at Ocean Lakes - you will be missed!
Ocean Lakes High School is very pleased to announce that Coach Pete Zell will be taking over the Dolphins Golf and Baseball coaching positions. Coach Zell will remain as a teacher at Salem High School for this year while working with these programs. Coach Zell has taught for 22 years in Virginia Beach. He is a graduate of Old Dominion University where he majored in Health & Physical Education and was a two time All-Conference pitcher for the Monarchs. Ocean Lakes is looking forward to returning to aggressive, relentless, pressure filled baseball which has been a trademark of Coach Zell teams of the past! Ocean Lakes is excited to have Coach Zell with us and we look to a great season! Contact Coach Zell at firstname.lastname@example.com or 757-831-9322 with questions.


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Who do you think looks best today? (5 photos)
The best street style from London Fashion Week: http://ow.ly/p48HS via @StyleCaster
At the Paris premiere of this 2009 film, Roberts chose a flattering, head-to-toe Lanvin look. The black silk crepe cross-front gown is easygoing yet evening-appropriate, and the super-sparkly crystal-accented pumps add a dose of movie-star glamour.Read MoreLess


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Wisconsin Ag News Headlines
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Nomination Deadline for Export Achievement Awards is Friday
Conservation Stewardship Program Sign-up Begins
Nominations Being Accepted for Hunter Ethics Award
Cropp Looks Ahead to 2015 Milk Price Trends
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| Email | Full Article (TrendHunter.com/id/211762) |
Whether you're a fan of Japanese food or not, these sushi designs will definitely grab your attention. The amazing artwork was made by a talented chef in Tokyo named Tama-chan, who has creatively combined really impressive designs with his ability to make delicious sushi.
His pieces range from extremely artistic inspirations such as 'The Scream' by Edvard Munch to cute cats and pictures of food. To appeal to a younger audience, one of his yummy squares is pictured with a Facebook 'like' sign. The chef proves he can create anything, as he even designed a sushi with a picture of a fetus in a uterus.
As many people are so impressed with Tama-chan's work, he has set up classes to teach others how to channel their imaginations and create artistic pieces of sushi.


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Poll: Who Is The Bachelor Going To Choose?
By YourTango
Make your predictions for which lady will win Jason's heart.
Last season's Bachelorette, DeAnna Pappas, left single dad Jason Mesnick heartbroken after choosing snowboarder Jesse Csincsak when it came down to the final two contestants. Now, Jason is starring on The Bachelor and facing some tough choices himself. Will he listen to the remaining contestants and give lacrosse coach Megan and her bully reputation the boot? Will he fall for spunky 25-year-old former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader Melissa, or will DeAnna come back and steal his heart once again? Vote for the woman who you think will win Jason's heart.


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Dead Bears, the only good kind.
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Are you a firearms enthusiast? Then we hope you will join the community. You will gain access to post, create threads, private message, upload images, join groups and more. Firearms Talk is owned and operated by fellow firearms enthusiasts. We strive to offer a non-commercial community to learn and share information.
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I would just love to help someone clear some hogs off your property. I know people who have property, but won't allow hunting and most of the places that do hunting want a bushel of money just to shoot a couple of pigs. How about someone showing some good Texas hospitality and let me come shoot a couple? DFW area. IM me and I won't tell anyone else.
"The whole of the Bill (of Rights) is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals.... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of." (Albert Gallatin of the New York Historical Society, October 7, 1789) "A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government." - George Washington


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Phone: (718) 232-2500
School Type: Regular
School Level:
High School
School Status: Operational
School District: New York City Geographic District #20
County: Kings
Location: Large City (over 250,000)
Students: 2,937
Teachers: 139
Student-Teacher Ratio: 21.2 to 1
Lowest Grade in School: 09
Highest Grade in School: 12
Students by Grade
Grade 9: 887
Grade 10: 729
Grade 11: 484
Grade 12: 523
Ungraded Students: 314
Corrections to the school database are encouraged! School Edit Form.
New Utrecht High School, NY
(< 0.1 mile) Ps 204 Vince Lombardi, NY (0.2 miles WNW) Ps 112 Lefferts Park, NY (0.5 miles NNE) Ps 163 Bath Beach, NY (0.5 miles SSW) Ps 186 Dr Irving A Gladstone, NY (0.5 miles ESE) |
Ps 229 Dyker, NY
(0.5 miles WSW)
Jhs 201 the Dyker Heights, NY (0.6 miles NW) Ps 200 Benson, NY (0.7 miles S) Ps 128 Bensonhurst, NY (0.7 miles SE) Jhs 227 Edward B Shallow, NY (0.7 miles NE) |
Catherine Laboure Special Educat, NY
(0.3 miles SW)
Our Lady of Guadalupe School, NY (0.4 miles NNE) St. Bernadette School, NY (0.4 miles WNW) Sinai Academic Center, NY (0.7 miles ESE) Tiferes Miriam School for Girls, NY (0.7 miles NE) |
Yeshivah Ohel Moshe, NY
(0.9 miles SE)
Elite High School, NY (0.9 miles SSE) Hasc - Hebrew Academy for Specia, NY (0.9 miles NNE) Ahrc Middle/High School, NY (0.9 miles N) Leif Ericson Day School, NY (0.9 miles NNW) |
The Demographic Data for the 3,933 New York cities, towns, counties, ZIP Codes and Census Designated Places (CDPs) profiled in this gazetteer is updated annually. Last Update: July 1, 2014.
The ZIP Code maps and the data regarding the number of residential and business addresses in each ZIP Code are updated four times per year. Last Update: November 1, 2014.
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Tartan(s), Sabre, Pearson(s), C&C(s), Catalina(s) - "Chesapeake Draft"
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Consider More than the boat
There's the boat purchase price and the cost of ownership price. Going up every 3 ft roughly doubles your ownership costs. So a 33 ft boat is 2X more costly to own than a 30ft boat. Storage fees, taxes, bottom paint, sails, moorage/dock fees are more expensive and recurring costs.
So before you go out and buy a 34-37' boat because you can get it a "great price" and you envision needing all the room, gadgets, phrf performance, etc. , figure out what the annual cost of ownership will be. First question when looking for dockage for the night, winter storage, taxes, etc....."How Big is Your Boat?"
If you liked my advice/response, give me some rep points. If you didn't......well what do you expect, it was free.
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text: Home » Product Gallery » Housewares | Now, for Housewares | August 2014 Housewares | Now, for Housewares | August 2014 Items needed for home entertaining—from party prep to cooking and serving to saving the leftover wine—will be among the star attractions at NY Now this month. CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE The Reo Standing Basting Brush with silicone bristles has a built-in base to keep the bristles off countertops. reokitchen.com The double-walled stainless-steel Vinnebago by Corkcicle maintains the perfect temperature of beverages on the go, cold or hot. corkcicle.com The Corky Wine Saver has a cork-style button to remove air. fredandfriends.com The Slice&Sharpen is a cutting board with a built-in ceramic sharpener. josephjoseph.com Creo Smartglass bowls and bakers have tempered borosilicate glass interiors and ceramic exteriors, allowing them to be safely used from oven to table. creokitchen.com CapaBubbles is a reusable silicone cap that reseals a bottle of sparkling wine once it is opened. capabunga.com The All-in-One Picnic for 4 neatly folds into a handled carrying bag. builtny.com


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MSRP $ Sale Price $ You Save $ |
Score a victory for style in the Alexandria Cross Strap Tank. The top features a layered V-neck, wide supportive tank straps, built-in shelf bra, and a heat transfer 4 all by Jofit logo on front left hem.
- Fit: We find the tank is fitted throughout.
- Bust: Fitted
- Bra: Medium Support
- Torso: Fitted
- Length: Average
- Content: 92% Polyester, 8% Spandex.
- Colors: White w/Gingham, Navy & Cherry


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A revealing and heartfelt memoir of a Pulitzer Prize–winning artist finding joy and inspiration after tragedy.
In his critically acclaimed Rewrites, Neil Simon talked about his beginnings—his early years of working in television, his first real love, his first play, his first brush with failure, and, most moving of all, his first great loss. Simon's same willingness to open his heart to the reader permeates The Play Goes On.
This second act takes the reader from… (più)
Editore: Simon & Schuster (13 Dicembre 2011)
Format: EPUB
Numero di pagine: 352 pagine
Dimensioni del file: 3.8 MB
Protezione: DRM
Lingua: Inglese


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Second-round observations from the Children's Miracle
November 12, 2010
Bob Stevens, special to PGATOUR.COMPGA TOUR Network correspondent Bob Stevens will be offering observations this week from the Children's Miracle Network Classic. Listen to PGA TOUR Live coverage on XM 146/SIRIUS 209 or right here at PGATOUR.COM.
Unlike many of the players in this week's Children's Miracle Network Classic, Roland Thatcher and Chris Stroud didn't specifically ask to play with each other, even though they live fairly close to each other in the Houston area. But Stroud is hoping to play with Thatcher again before the weekend's over after they admitted to me they drafted off each other in the opening two rounds. Thatcher fed off Stroud's opening 62 and Chris told me after drafting off Thatcher's second round 63 that it was his nine-birdie Friday that "kept my momentum going" through a four-bogey 70 that was only saved with birdies at the final three holes.
• Rickie Fowler told me after his opening round that he hoped to have a little wave or gesture or something special to Troy Merritt back on the tee of the