Hitchens

By all accounts (or most accounts), he was a bastard. An intellectual assailant; a pompous, backstabbing, turncoat with a tremendous vocabulary and a dogged allegiance to writing. That last aspect, the commitment to language and the written word, redeems him partly, in some eyes.

Listening to him read his memoir, Hitch-22, is a pleasure. Listening to his various debates with fundamentalist Christians and other religious charlatans is always amusing, even if he's taken to task by Chris Hedges for his louche behavior when the two met to debate religion. Hedges' critiques and grudging praise seem worthy and apt.

There is no love lost, nor respect either, between Alexander Cockburn and Hitchens. Once fellow columnists at The Nation during the 1980s, Cockburn's  piece at Counterpunch  rings with disdain. Even the title of the piece is dismissive, failing, as it does, to accord the man his name:  Farewell to H.C. No grudging praise to be found there.

Yet still. Hitchens was a lion of sorts, a public intellectual who was often brazenly and refreshingly candid. Even when misguided or, as with his support of George H. Bush and the invasion of Iraq, inexcusable. Mavericks are rarely likable through and through.

Occupy America

Could this be the beginning of real resistance to the Corporate State? Can the Occupy Wall Street movement which, by now, has spread to other cities across the country, be the spark that sets in motion real mass resistance? Could it possibly re-configure the Red/Blue, Dem/Rep divisions and coalesce into a movement that unites the 99% of the population who are being ongoingly fucked by the moneyed class and their courtiers in government?

It's too soon to consider this incipient movement in terms of the Arab Spring or the collapse of Communism. To do so would be to underestimate the remorseless and unchecked State Security apparatus that has been assembled in this country since 9/11. When drones can target and assassinate an American-born citizen abroad, how big of a jump would it be for something analogous to occur here, in America?

Nevertheless, the Occupy movement, at least in this chilly moment in the wasteland of autumn 2011, stands out as some glimmering flicker of idealism and possibility.

Chris Hedges certainly thinks so.

As does James Howard Kunstler.

Further commentary and updates to follow, including links to sites that support the movement, screeds that elucidate the principles, goals, and tactics of the protests, and various other comments and reflections.

Mailer on the Corporation

Chris Hedges, in books like Empire of Illusion and The Death of the Liberal Class, and in articles on truthdig.com, warns of the tyranny of the corporation. In his view, we have undergone "a coup d'etat in slow motion" and we are now, as a nation, in the grip of the soulless and merciless claw of the Corporate State.

Chris Hedges' Feet, March 19, 2011

One would be excused for thinking this idea of the corporation as tyrannical entity was a recent development, an analysis and perception emerging in the last ten years or so on the Left. But that would be a mistake. Allen Ginsberg, for one, in The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971, raised the alarm by merely pointing out, in any number of poems within, the omnipresence of the corporation in American culture and daily life. Ralph Nader has raised righteous hew and cry against corporations for decades.

Another longstanding and prescient anti-corporatist was none other than Norman Mailer. Mailer, too often derided by those with limited knowledge or familiarity with his work, was a principled intellectual, a ferocious defender of the art of writing ("the spooky art"), and an acutely insightful observer of America. Consider these comments from an interview on the Charlie Rose show in 1996.

The topic of the conversation was Bill Clinton and his second term. Mailer took exception with Clinton's avowal to move the country to a "vital dynamic center", complaining that he (Clinton) hijacked the Democratic party ("My party is now the party of Nelson Rockefeller!") and that "... he does not have a vision that will move out of the center."

Norman Mailer circa 1996

Rose: You don't think leadership can be found in the center, you have to have some kind of vision of where you want to take the country and it's not to the center if you'e gonna' change things?

Mailer: I know it can't be found in the center and for a very simple reason - the center is the U.S. corporation and the U.S. corporation is in my modest opinion wrecking America. They're wrecking America aesthetically. They're putting up the ugliest buildings in the history of Christendom. The ugliest buildings in the last 2,000 years have been put up in America since the 1950s and now it's all over the world."

Mailer adds, after some interim comments: But let me go back to the point. I'm saying the "vital center" cannot solve anything in America because that's the corporation and the corporation is the root of our evils at this point. You know we have, eh... the discrepancy between the wealthy and the poor in America is now the greatest of the 15 major nations in the world. That's something to be ashamed of.

Lessons from Nader

Ralph Nader was one of the key speakers at the anti-war rally on March 19, 2011 in Lafayette Park in front of the White House. Dressed in a dark overcoat, collared shirt and tie, he waited like a burdened prophet behind the stage for his chance to speak. Ever serious, ever the heavy-browed activist, Nader, though a political candidate for president in the last election cycle, is not a politician. He's too candid to be a politician. He is a grim realist, a man who for decades has been the messenger with the upsetting news and dire pronouncements.

Ralph Nader (r) waiting to address the rally

Mainstream Democratic politicians and their courtiers (to borrow the term used by Chris Hedges to describe sycophants like network TV anchors and White House press beat journalists who dutifully and unquestioningly disseminate the party line) long ago cast Nader out of the club. Many people with political views left of the centrist Democrats demonize Nader for, in their interpretation, helping ensure Bush's 2004 re-election by siphoning off votes from the feckless corporate Democratic candidate, John Kerry. For a strong rebuttal of this analysis, see Hedges' Death of the Liberal Class (pages 173-182), wherein he begins:

"The descent of Ralph Nader, from being one of the most respected and powerful figures in the country to being an outcast illustrates perhaps better than any other narrative the totality of our corporate coup and the complicity of the liberal class in our disempowerment."

Nader's address to the rally covered some of the usual anti-war and anti-corporate criticisms but also included practical instructions and considerations for the progressive Left.

Lesson #1. Because funding of the wars must go through "... those 535 men and women in Congress who put their shoes on everyday like we do ..." as a Movement we must focus our attention on them. But how do we get them to pay attention, to listen to the demands of the progressive anti-war Left?

Lesson #2. We must learn from other successful citizen action groups, in particular the most successful such organization out there today, AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee), an organization now so successful that they "get over 95% of the members of Congress" to support their causes and issues. "That is the kind of citizen action to learn from!"

And this is where Nader's address got a little personal and duly critical of those to whom he was imparting these thoughts:

"How do they do it? First of all, they don't blow off steam unless it's focused, laser-like, on every member of Congress ... I can't emphasize enough that we can have massive rallies - there was one of 200,000 that some of you were at in 2003 - but if we do not take that energy and zero it in on each member of Congress ..." and relentlessly bombard them with our demands and our message then we won't succeed.

Lesson #3. Organize and fund raise and "connect with that general public sentiment" that is overwhelmingly against the wars and focus that sentiment on the members of Congress. The task must be to get Congress to shut off funding of the wars.

"Cutting off funding is what Congress can do. You see, the Executive Branch, the Imperial Presidency, has a momentum of its own and it can do whatever it wants - until the money runs out."

Finally, Lesson #4. Find some rich people sympathetic to the public sentiment because "it takes money" to hire organizers, pay for transportation, etc. "You've got to go back and assume that at least 1% of the really rich people where you live, some of them veterans, are gonna' put some money in - but they're never asked! Because they're just written off with the stereotype of 'rich people' ..."

Watch and listen to Nader's address:

Hedges, Hope, and Spectacle

Chris Hedges has often stated that hope, real hope and not the packaged hope of political sloganeering, can only come now in individual and collective acts of direct resistance. In his article No Other Way Out from truthdig.com, he indicated that the March 19, 2011 protest at the White House would be just such an act.

Partially on his passionate and reasoned words, and partially out of a sense of personal shame for having done essentially nothing to voice my opposition to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan since taking part in the huge protests that lead up to the Iraq invasion in 2003, I went to the action at the White House. I carried a homemade sign that read "Another Citizen Against the Wars." And I met Chris Hedges there.

Chris Hedges, 3/19/11

But hope? I can't say that I came away with any or generated any. Maybe I did. It didn't feel hopeful. It was definitely moving, exhilarating, passionate.  But as I observed the scene even as I participated in it, I saw, outside the perimeter of "the event," people going about their business - tourists, clerks, service workers, teenagers, bureaucrats - and I could see that, in our circus-like costumes, our provocative banners and our shouting, we were hermetically sealed off from the world around us. We were a Spectacle.

It occurred to me then that spectacles don't communicate, they distract. Such a spectacle as ours delivered up stereotypes. We were predictable so no one had to pay us any serious attention. In that moment it seemed obvious that we (the opposition) need to rethink the use of this type of spectacle for resistance because it is clearly no longer effective (Ralph Nader said as much but more on that in a later post).

Yet I agree with Hedges when he writes:

"We will not stop the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we will not end this slaughter of innocents, unless we are willing to rise up as have state workers in Wisconsin and citizens on the streets of Arab capitals. Repeated and sustained acts of civil disobedience are the only weapons that remain to us. Our political system is as broken and dysfunctional as that once presided over in Egypt by Hosni Mubarak. We must be willing to accept personal discomfort, to put our bodies in the way of the machine, if we hope to expose the lies of war and blunt the abuse by corporate profiteers. To do nothing, to refuse to act, to be passive, is to be an agent of injustice and to be complicit in murder."

These are hard words and difficult assertions. I wanted to get arrested with the 113 other people who did but it was too inconvenient, I wasn't prepared despite imagining that I was. But it's alright. I was there, I did something. There will be many more opportunities for "personal discomfort" in the months and years ahead.

Lescaret in Bowler Hat, March 19, 2011, D.C.

Thoughts on Howl, the Film

Rob Epstein and Jeremy Friedman did the best they could, that much is evident. Howl, the film, shimmers with integrity. It resonates in deliberate homage, like a curator holding up a prized work of art undergoing restoration; as if to say "Look at this, it's EXQUISITE, it's an irreplaceable artifact of 20th century culture! it's a work of supreme art!"

Howl, the poem, certainly is that. Allen Ginsberg's debut reading of the work at the Six Gallery on October 7, 1955 gave voice to much that was to come - gay liberation, youth disillusionment with corporate hegemony, Cold War fear and paranoia, the meaning of "madness," the cost of honest friendship, the landscape of a twisted, contradictory America.

The poem has become larger than the words typeset on the pages of the diminutive but iconic City Lights Pocket Poet paperback,  volume #4 in the series. Howl has entered the cliched "fabric" of culture which in this case transcends cliche to arrive at foundation. Howl sketches the immediate past (1940s post-war America) and the immediate future (1950s Bomb Fear McCarthy red-baiting closeted despair) and juxtaposes it all against the concepts of True friendship, artistic integrity, and the inherently-posed question of "what is sanity in a time of insanity?" Howl, the poem, gave permission to question the zeitgeist. And when Accepted Culture came calling with arrest warrants and trial dates, Howl wailed its "eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxaphone cry" into the greater Universe of Free Expression. And prevailed. So much so that now there's a film about the poem.

II

Chris Hedges, in numerous articles and in his recent book Death of the Liberal Class (2010), decries the supplanting of print culture with that of the image, the moving picture. It almost seems a fait accompli, in light of the growing primacy of the visual in our cultural expression and memory, that Allen Ginsberg would come to the Big Screen too, just like John Reed (Reds, 1981) and Henry Miller and Anais Nin (Henry and June, 1990) before him.

And that's the essential conundrum. John Reed has become Warren Beatty in my mind's eye, Louise Bryant forever appears as Diane Keaton. Henry Miller? It's Fred Ward speaking Brooklynese and conjuring the starving literary iconoclast himself. Instead of the image of the writer pieced together from scraps of biography, reviews, memoirs, the texts themselves, we have a cinematic rendition, an actor playing the writer. In an age of visual communication where image is everything and where literary text is rapidly becoming secondary, the actor becomes the writer. And that is the shame of it all.

Might James Franco's earnest performance as the younger Ginsberg (who was 29 the night of the Six Gallery reading) become the enduring image of the young poet? Should it? If so, at what point do we begin believing the conjured image to be the real person? At what point do the actor's studied mannerisms and purposeful tics and gestures come to be accepted as the writer's own?

Take as example the film's extended interview sequences that depict Ginsberg discussing the poem, its genesis, his own role as poet. The words are all Ginsberg's (taken from an actual interview) but what of Franco's casual arrogance, the self-consciously casual way he smokes his cigarettes? Are these Ginbserg's nuances or Franco's interpretations of what Ginsberg might have been like?

Some would say it doesn't matter, that an actor's performance is simply that, an actor's performance. But in a film reaching for authenticity and homage, these things do matter. This film intrinsically attempts to reconstruct what cannot be reconstructed and asks that we accept the reconstruction as faithful and true. Yet because of film's obvious constraints - limited time frame (Howl clocks in at approximately 90 minutes), the need for ever-present motion and visuals aka "action," the difficulty in contextualizing the story beyond its immediate storytelling - the result is inevitably attenuated and lacking in the very depth and richness that, in this case, the film's subject, a poem, possesses.

Allen Ginsberg & Erik Drooker E 12th St, NYC
from allenginsberg.org

Then there is the consideration of the Erik Drooker animation sequences. Drooker knew Ginsberg and they collaborated together on a selection of Ginbserg's poems (Illuminated Poems, 1996). Drooker's imagery is powerful, dynamic, vivid, realized both on the printed page and in this film. At once classic (think Lynn Ward and Rockwell Kent) and hallucinogenic (nod to Harry Smith), the animation sequences are extraordinary - and completely distracting.

In an ironic and certainly unintended consequence, Drooker's animation is so extraordinary that it subsumes Ginsberg's equally extraordinary verse. One simply cannot see and hear at the same time, not in equal measure anyway, and given the power of the imagery the literate is displaced by the visual. This, of course, given that the film is about a POEM, is utterly contradictory and, ultimately, a real problem. Given the poem's hallucinatory, incantatory, revolutionary language, there is no NEED to craft images to illustrate it. Even, I would argue, in a motion picture.

Finally, to the trial scenes and the Six Gallery reading. A word comes to mind: stiff. The trial spectators might as well be wax figures, the attorneys seem like stage actors, the trial witnesses caricatures. The occasional flashing of newspaper headlines referencing the trial do little to convey the era's prevailing cultural rectitude or the undercurrents of atomic fear, anti-communist hysteria, or Molochian-obsession with money and products.

The depiction of the Six Gallery reading is equally flat, excepting perhaps its atmospheric tobacco smoke and black & white cinematography. Glancing close-ups of enthralled onlookers, none of them appearing the least bedraggled, drunk, dirty, or subterranean in any sense, come across as mere props. There is no ENERGY in the crowd, no shouting, no rustling, no talking, no glasses clinking, nothing to suggest an actual sweaty, crowded, nervy, 1950s breakout poetry event. The film never sets the stage, so to speak, doesn't even hint at the other participants that night (Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, emceed by Kenneth Rexroth), and so misses a chance to orchestrate a little buzz and hum. Instead, the film just gives us Ginsberg already at the microphone, all introductions apparently made.

III

Would Ginsberg have approved of this film? Probably. Though a Buddhist in philosophy and practice, Ginsberg could never completely subdue his considerable ego and vanity. He thrived on attention of all kinds, from youthful adulation to critical acclaim. Even denunciations of his work proved to him that his work mattered, that it resonated, that it irritated the people who needed irritating. He might have quibbled over a detail here or there or taken exception to one or another character's portrayal, but ultimately a film this infused with gracious reverence would have delighted him. By the end of his life, the younger poet's uncertainty had been replaced by a man of absolute conviction. He passed into the Bardo convinced of the essential worth of his literary production. That a film celebrating the importance of his most famous poem would be made and shown in movie houses across America would have pleased him enormously.