Serial Capote

Posted on November 23, 2005 by ubu507
I’ve been reading Lawrence Grobel’s CONVERSATIONS WITH CAPOTE and it’s as entertaining as anything Capote wrote. It made me realize that one of the reasons the movie CAPOTE is so good is that it features the two greatest characters Capote ever created — himself and Perry Smith. (I’ll pass on Holly Golightly who I’ve always seen as a coded male hustler). One of the tests of a good character is that it can be played differently by two different actors with success — Robert Blake (cast as a murderer? No!) playing Smith in the film of IN COLD BLOOD and Clifton Collins, Jr. doing the gentle slaughterer in CAPOTE. Philip Seymour Hoffman, of course, does the titular character, while Truman Steckfus Persons played him in real life, and I have to say, given the latter’s precipitous decline, Hoffman probably does Capote better than Capote did at the end.  That’s the problem — characters are good fictional approximations of humans in culture, but a real person who makes a character out of himself runs the risk of becoming a caricature. That was the triumph and the downfall of Truman — he killed on television and popular culture because he was so easily recognizable in a few simple strokes, an early master of the sound bite. In today’s world where resolution and depth are becoming smaller and slighter only the overblown translates to all the T.V., phone, computer screens and emerges over all the other noise constantly thrown at us. Look at Pam Anderson (another "author") — she’s the reigning sex bomb because  she’s so completely over determined, with silicon pumped breasts, collagen laden lips, tattooed eyes and peroxided hair — so over the top she’s a female female impersonator, able to be understood to represent "sexy" in any language, on any kind of grainy media. Truman’s wit, candor and spirit are admirable, and IN COLD BLOOD is a hell of a book, but you have to find him responsible, or at least a harbinger of, that kind of devolution in our world. If, as he says in CONVERSATIONS literature is gossip, then gossip can pose as literature. If writers become celebrities, then celebrities can become writers leading to such abominations as Nicole Richie’s novel or Madonna’s children’s books.  His fascination with criminals and his elevation of them to modern celebrity has led us to garbage like GROWING UP GOTTI (Victoria Gotti yet another "writer"), and a society that makes no differentiation between talent and notoriety. His blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction, the "non-fiction" novel, is echoed in the horror of "reality" T.V. Even a contemporary literary figure like Dave Eggers can write a best-selling memoir and then set himself up as the literary light of the world, castigating honest novelists like Updike and Roth, men who have spent their lives writing novels and not just transcribing their life. In my own neck of the woods there’s a  local cover boy named Davey Rothbart who had the high concept of starting a magazine called FOUND containing "found" notes, etc. (though some of them do seem quite made up) and achieved success and national talk show fame and on the strength of that published a book of short stories with a major publisher, though how printing found notes translates into an ability to write an exacting art form is unclear to me, as it would be to anyone who read said book. I just finished an alleged piece of journalism he wrote containing such brilliant, erudite observations as "It was fucking amazing." In short in a culture so jammed with entertainment there seems to be a crucial lack of imagination. Even 9/11 can be seen as a result of this lack — Bush and his cronies just couldn’t imagine that something like that would happen, the same way they were so totally unable to picture what would happen in Iraq beside their own fantasies. They tell you in grade school how important imagination is, but out in the real world it’s considered highly suspect and dangerous, unless, of course, it’s something the boss’s boss has thought up. I guess UBU’s out of luck then — I just can’t turn my darn imagination off!
 
 
YR PAL,
UBU
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First Chapter of my Novel

Posted on November 22, 2005 by ubu507
Here it is — the first chapter of my novel called SNAKES IN CAVES — rights and representation still available!!!!
 
 

1.

 

You have to bow your head when you enter Pittsburgh. It’s surrounded on almost every side by mountains, so in order to get in you must first pass through a tunnel — a long, low, ceramic tiled tube, narrow and teeming with rushing cars. Enter and there’s the sudden cut off of sunlight, and then the moment when there’s nothing but tunnel, no outside light or sound, even the radio shushed to static, just a diffuse aquatic glow and a rushing babble and buoyancy; but you’re not underwater, you’re under earth, with green, chipped guard rail pipes flashing by on one side and the front half of a grey car and grim driver on the other. You’ve left your former straight highway overworld for this timeless, dark purgatory beneath the ground, slouching slowly toward something that’s not at all apparent, like being in a cave.

Think — weren’t the mysteries at Eleusis sort of like this, the most famous ritual of the ancient Greeks, a subterranean procession toward a suddenly growing light, like Persephone, say, stepping out of hell into spring…but maybe that was just me, starting to lose it a little, overintellectualising over the claustrophobic panic when what I really needed to do was to keep my overloaded car within the restricting lane, to try and fight the feeling that the floor tile was as slippery and endless as it looked with the reflection of the murky ceiling florescents rising from it in an icy sheen.

No, but wait, really, wasn’t it even more ancient than the Greeks, our universal tunnel journey, suspended in a suffocating length, pushed out, pushed out into what? A flicker less dim, then BOOM — born into the world, bright and beyond human imagination — who could imagine or even correctly remember that — coming out of the tunnel and onto the bridge in the streaming sunlight, like it or not, water jetting up from the fountain, colors refracting over the looming glass rectangles of downtown, Three Rivers Stadium, for crying out loud, and below three real rivers, two joining into one, right there the green pubes of the city, the legs winding into a trunk. After all isn’t this the birthplace of Pittsburgh? The reason? (Literally) The Point? George Washington himself stood astride the sharp mouth of it, the father of our country, casting his seed in the water.

And I drove like I was tearing into it all, out of a somnolent womb and into this glaring, startling buzz, off the bridge and curving beside the river, lanes merging from all sides with brief glimpses of downtown popping up between long streams of traffic — and, believe me, I knew as well as anyone how dangerous it all could be. After all, wasn’t this the place that Eleanora Duse, on her deathbed in the Schenley hotel, called Pittsboorg – la plus hideuse ville du monde, Sir Henry Irving’s Hell, with the lid off, the city Frank Lloyd Wright advised abandoning? The place where I’d not only been born but had also almost died?

Things were veering in a dangerous direction, and for a moment of wild sunlight and traffic I couldn’t tell where I was going, glancing down at the book on the seat beside me as if for reassurance, a copy of my book, the black cover warped and moldy, all but illegible with water damage. A few months ago Virginia had sent it to me, or rather returned it, in that condition, an insubstantial enough gesture, certainly, but one which still, as much as any of Pittsburgh’s responsibilities or opportunities, summoned me here.

But then — the old dodge, I turned up and off and everything went back to regular speed, people trudging with grocery bags in front of the common wall tenements that arched up the hills, stop signs but no cars, the radio back to playing the same rock it’s always played. I crept around the corner until, there it was, my favorite intersection, the occult spot where Hamlet meets Ophelia. I turned here and back into traffic on the Boulevard of the Allies and on my left was Magee Women’s Hospital, the place where I was born, exactly two hundred years after Pittsburgh, and then I floored it because the city that’s always talking about renaissance is the place where I had to be reborn, like those Pilgrims at Eleusis, or like Dante, Incipit Vita Nuova, begin the new life, because I knew all too well what the alternative to that was.

 
 
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Sax and Tend

Posted on November 21, 2005 by ubu507
One of the things you notice when you go out in your daily life in the US is that people are always asking you for money. I don’t mean just the homeless and the Salvation Army, but now it’s kids asking for their band or swimming programs, their teachers for  school supplies, people at your door for the environment, your various schools for the endowment, churches for their various socio-religious programs, all kinds of people for all kinds of disaster survivors and a million other things — today at the drugstore they wanted me to give a "penny and up" for diabetes research. And why is this — simple — THE GOVERNMENT IS NO LONGER DOING ITS JOB! It’s so easy and politically expedient to be against taxes but — hello! — they pay for services that people need. Sorry, but taxes are the fairest and most efficient way to raise money for the public good, and handouts — the charities so beloved of Bush types — are probably the worst. Me giving five dollars for whatever isn’t the same as Bush giving five dollars, because he’s got a million times more to give but the handout system makes that seem fair. It’s also so much easier to shaft unpopular people — prisoners and the poor — who don’t have economic or political clout (pretty much the same thing these days). Nobody’s going to donate to make prison conditions less obscenely overcrowded, but when tax cuts make for budget cuts the weak and powerless are the first thrown over the side of the yacht the rich can now afford. We’re no longer funding our schools adequately, we’re letting the infrastructure rot, and the health care system bankrupts both individuals and corporations (but thank god one of Bush’s great triumphs is to make those bankrupts suffer more). It’s the usual total materialism and short sighted need for instant gratification that characterizes contemporary life. With the "please donate" system the good people, the people with consciences end up paying more while the jerks can hoard more money. Let’s own up to it — the "ownership" society is a crock and taxes, as every government has known for all of history are not inherently evil. Making the other guy take care of your fellow man is.
 
YR PAL,
UBU
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Truth From Fiction

Posted on November 19, 2005 by ubu507
Lee Child is a writer I avoided for a while — his books look like what I call "airport" books, you know the ones they sell in airports and drug stores, big and squat, tending to have things like bloody hand prints on the covers. But I had enough people rave about him that I decided to take a chance and was very pleasantly surprised. Child’s books are thrillers, but they have the elements that used to be associated with fiction before the academics took it over, elements like plot, character, pacing and provocative ideas. Jack Reacher is the protagonist, an existential hero who has no possessions, few human ties and the ability to beat up anybody in the room, all of which give him the opportunity to always speak his mind and travel the country righting wrongs. The best book in the series so far is THE ENEMY, a sort of prequel to the rest where it is revealed how Jack came to leave his beloved position as an Army MP and become the rootless loner he is today. The mainspring of the plot is activated by a faction of the army who are displeased with the prospect of their status being lowered because there is no more USSR for them to oppose.
 
 
Instantly, of course, I thought of another evil, nefarious faction who are constantly trying to take over the country — the Republican party. Anti-Communism has been the main club the Republican used to belabor their enemies since Joe McCarthy, and the essence of their modern identity. The "us vs. them" world view is necessary for the smug, hubristic country club self-image and when they lost the USSR, they lost some of themselves as well. No longer could they reflexively brand their enemies communists, no more could they justify war crimes and support for dictators as fighting communism, and no more could the red menace be used as a way to shovel the public’s tax money into the pockets of that old military-industrial complex. A certain ennui crept in, as evidenced by Bush I’s relatively aimless administration and his tepid re-election campaign, leading to (sigh) the Clinton administration (and shame on all of you who nit-picked him  — who doesn’t wish he was president today). Now, it’s a stretch to say Bush II was elected president, but he did get quite a few votes, mostly on the American whim to switch from Coke to Pepsi for a change, little knowing the poisonous brew they were imbibing. Bush didn’t really have much direction at first — people don’t remember that his big defense priority at the start was to get that Start Wars missile defense system finally built. Then came 9/11 and suddenly the Republicans had found their lever with which to move the world. Quickly they dragged out all Reagan’s old speeches, crossed out Communism and crayoned in Terrorism. Terrorism — what a boon! Finally a name for what we’re fighting and what to say those who oppose us are soft on. Never mind that Terrorism is a tactic and not an ideology — a tactic used by us during the American revolution as well as any other force who didn’t have overwhelming material advantage. But it sure sounds like a good thing to fight — I mean who isn’t against Terrorism? And using the argument that Saddam was a terrorist — not really connected to the terrorists who were responsible for 9/11, but if people were under that misapprehension Bush sure wasn’t going to correct it — and we had to fight him because of it. In the same way that the Viet Cong must be destroyed because they were communists, even though they weren’t really planning to nuke or invade us, Iraq must be defeated because of this evil taint, even though they (before the invasion) weren’t really that friendly with Osama. But the Bush crowd didn’t really learn their Nam lessons, and certainly failed to pick up on more contemporary history like Yugoslavia. That lesson was that if there is a artificially constructed country held together only by a repressive regime when that regime is removed, the pieces will fly apart and the ancient enmities resurface. Sure, some of the factions in Iraq use terrorist tactics, but to say, as Bush continues to do in his "sober judgement" that we are fighting a terrorism that somehow threatens American freedom is only marginally effective as rhetoric and absolutely absurd as an assessment of fact. It seems like people are ever so slowly tumbling on to the reality of it, but, in our hyper-masculine, hyper-nationalist land they’re still quite nervous about being called weak on terrorism, of not "staying in the fight." Because there’s no draft, the college students, safe in their beer soaked MTV cocoon can’t be bothered to tear their eyes from Paris Hilton. The people who are actually being killed come from the underclass, the dream lumpen carefully shaped over decades to be the perfect consumers who can be sold anything with a sound bite and a slogan, who hold manliness next to godliness and confuse patriotism with NASCAR racing. In classic terror theory we’ve done far more damage to our liberty by our reaction to the terrorist attack than the attack itself accomplished. But what do I know — I’m just a commun — I mean terror — oh, heck –just brand me with the next -ism the Republicans use to blacken the Republic.
 
YR PAL,
UBU  
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Non Capote Mentis

Posted on November 18, 2005 by ubu507
Well, I’ll tell you what set me off today — some moron on AOL gave the movie CAPOTE a one star review that claimed it was boring and a great opportunity to grab an nap. BORING! Yeah, I guess if you call great acting, writing and fairly profound ideas boring he was right, but otherwise that’s the opinion of a total IDIOT! Have we become so stupefied by special effects and gratuitous sex and violence, so used to be manipulated as to what to think and feel that we can’t even recognize a good movie when appears before our eyes? Is this nation so populated by hypno-zombie undead that we need to be hit over the head with an obvious hammer before we can feel anything? Critics like CAPOTE, but it’s not setting any box office records. I guess the last election provided that the gap between intelligent people and the programmed hoi polloi is growing daily. Although CAPOTE is no masterpiece along the lines of, say, Godard’s CONTEMPT — I thought it dragged a bit three quarters of the way through (UBU believes most movies should be ninety minutes long) — but it has a killer ending (so to speak) and engages some deep themes. I liked that it was a movie for grown ups by grown ups. It was able to keep its consistent period authenticity because there were no teen starlettes or aging leading men in it who refused to give up their contemporary haircuts or clothes. There were no matinee idols who were afraid of appearing unsympathetic or unglamorous. What is more, like most good art, it is AMBIGUOUS and doesn’t lead you by the hand to some trite conclusion about life and the characters. Like the STONES say it’s all about MIXED EMOTIONS, and CAPOTE captures a lot of what it means to be an artist — how one is a subjective part of life and yet an objective observer of it, how the writer, even with loved ones (or maybe especially with them) is engaged on a human level, yet almost inhumanly using them for material. At some point the WORK ITSELF becomes paramount and EVERYTHING else is sacrificed to it — sometimes at grave cost to both artist and subject. I also liked the way it illuminated the fact that EROS is so often the midwife to creation — that the SEXUAL becomes the TEXTUAL. But the whole movie is worth the way the veins on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s head pop up in the scene where he bids the boys a final good-bye.
 
YR PAL,
UBU 
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Pattern Non recognition

Posted on November 17, 2005 by ubu507
One of the few living writers that interests me is William Gibson. His latest book is called PATTERN RECONITION, and except for the lame ending, it isn’t a bad book. It’s not as speculative as most of his work but the basic premise — that a few snippets of an obscure art film made by an unknown person and hidden on the internet are discovered and become a cultural sensation — is as believable to me as GODZILLA vs THE SMOG MONSTER. I mean let’s face it people, there are plenty of great art films by geniuses like Godard or Bergman readily available in plain sight at the video store and people aren’t exactly stampeding to grab them. If anything profound ever happened to appear in cyberspace it wouldn’t even be recognized, obscured by all the noise and pop ups that are the lingua franca. I firmly believe that if there is to be a great leap forward in culture, it will be (as it has in the past) because of new technology but so far the net has proven itself to be mainly good for pornography, home shopping and GOP funded right wing bloggers. Check out the other blogs on this site — it’s all me, me, me. Everyone is writing them and noone is reading them. Culture today is like any other consumer item in the overstuffed consumer supermarket — with four billion brands of toothpaste people buy not because of what’s in the tube but because of packaging, the commercial on television, the IMAGE and not the CONTENT. How else do you explain the fact that Ashlee Simpson has the #1 CD when it’s a well known fact that SHE CAN’T EVEN SING? When I graduated from college in the eighties I decided to stop trying to personally promote myself (as I had done with great success) and to concentrate on the WORK. Although I stand by that, in the cultural context of the time it was a disastrous tactical move. The twin avatars of the time were Ronald Reagan and Madonna — both triumphs of image over substance. Madonna appeared to be a cutting edge, avant garde rebel, but she was in fact an attention starved, firmly conventional fame grubber much more interested in publicity than creating anything memorable — and indeed has any other music celebrity with such a long career produced so little of merit? Kurt Cobain created more in a few years than she has in decades. If anyone is responsible for the pathetic state of contemporary popular music it’s Madonna, and she’s openly idolized by all the talentless bimbettes she’s spawned. (I could go on — perhaps one day I’ll devote an entire rant to her). Reagan was also a smokescreen — appearing the firm, knowing elder cowboy when in fact he was a prematurely senile fool long out of touch with reality. He remained an actor and spokesman for corporations even when he was President, and anyone who thinks he was responsible for the fall of the USSR is welcome to give me credit for the sun coming up tomorrow morning. The cry of Punk rock was the last real howl of protest against the total hegemony of the corporate. We’ve got it all now — corporate music, corporate movies, corporate bookstores selling corporate books, even a corporate president dedicated to serving the interests of the body corporate. Even if a real artist manages to rise momentarily on the strength of phenominal work there’s no way for them to endure in this poisoned climate — just ask Kurt Cobain why he blew his brains out. But don’t worry about old UBU — I’ll just keep pissing into the wind in tetchy obscurity until they have to wheel me out.
 
Yr pal,
UBU 
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Metaphor for BUSH

Posted on November 16, 2005 by ubu507
So what is it in the news today, you may ask, gentle reader, that has got UBU’s bile flowing, his spleen expanding, his gorge rising? How about the start of the sign-up for the new Medicare “benefits?” What, you say, don’t tell me UBU is some kind of policy wonk, or, worse yet, a depends wearing senior muttering about his pennies — no, dear friend, UBU is a POET and sees in this “plan” a compelling metaphor for all the misbegotten “plans” of the just plain awful BUSH administration. Look at it — the new Medicare is a confusing, ill-concieved, badly working mess designed for rigid ideological reasons and, oh yeah, to line the pockets of Bush’s fat cat friends. It was crammed down the American public’s throat by a combination of suppression of information, spin and outright lies and happily midwifed by a spineless Congress. Remind you of anything? The comparison to the disaster in Iraq is just too obvious, but if you look at it this administration HAS NEVER DONE ANYTHING RIGHT! Some people claim their tax cuts for the wealthy have got the economy running well, but if GM and Ford are going broke how can anyone say the outlook is rosy? Their incompetence and dishonesty on every level is stupefying. It seems like the American public is finally tumbling on to that but UBU is wondering WHAT TOOK THEM SO LONG? Isn’t one look at Bush’s simpleton smirk or Cheney’s evil leer enough to convince anyone? And all you teens out here in the blogverse had better remember this and not repeat the stupidities of “Generation X” — the REPUBLICANS are the party of the RICH, WHITE and OLD — the latest weapon of the dreaded baby boomers to continue their stranglehold on this country. A lot of you fall for the spin of believing that you’ll one day be rich and famous yourselves and therefore join the elect in feasting on the common man, so screw everybody else, but wise UBU is here to tell you that you have only the slightest chance to belly up to that table (unless your father is a millionare and/or a former president) — these people only want your vote so they can continue ripping you off, abusing you and using you for cannon fodder. How dare Bush lecture China about human rights when he tortures and imprisons people around the world? Why doesn’t the word “freedom” sear his mouth each of the million times he uses it when the “Patriot” act and his “Homeland” secret police have done so much to limit freedom in the U.S. As Jim Morrison used to say WAKE UP! The corporate world had got you hypnotized in a cocoon of MTV and consumer garbage worse than any Matrix while they pick your pocket and push you off the ledge!
 
Yr pal,
UBU
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Why is there a Nicole Richie?

Posted on November 15, 2005 by ubu507
I’ll tell you the "news" story that made me want to rant today — It was about Nicole Richie’s book signing for her new "novel." NICOLE RICHIE’S NOVEL! That’s all you really have to say. How can a talentless, ignorant dunderhead like her get her "novel" published when there are talents (such as the great UBU) who have studied, worked and meditated for YEARS to write novels (and UBU has written a great one) only to find that the heroic struggle of creating an earth shattering work is only prelude to a humiliating struggle to get ANYONE to read it, much less publish it! It’s considered quite kind of agents to deign to read a page and then make ignorant comments, and the fact is that they most often merely toss the mastepiece into the trash, return, stamped envelope or no. But NICOLE RICHIE who has often been used by this writer as the perfect example of a nonentity famous for being famous has a novel published merely by signing off on the work of a ghost writer. On her T.V. show she displayed only an appalling ignorance and a total lack of eloquence. She’s not even as pretty as any young woman you could find wandering your local mall, has no talent or skill of any kind  and even more is quite obviously anorexic. Well, my friend by lionizing such vapid spirits we have taken our culture straight to the crapper — as evidenced by the total lack of quality in contemporary literature and art — even the popular arts like movies and pop music are utter garbage these days. I must go back out into the rain now, but you can be sure that this is one spirit this benighted age will never conquer. And if you really want to check out Nicole’s book just wait a few months — you’ll be able to get it off the remainder table for 99 cents — that is if you don’t find one flung in the garbage can or floating in the toilet!
 
Your pal,
UBU   
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