Farewell...(Sort of)

As some of you may know, GravyBoat has a rabidly casual readership that, at its peak, reached well into the ones. However, despite ambitious plans to the contrary, I took most of the summer and fall off from blogging to give the other writers on the site a chance to grow. Turns out there AREN’T any other writers on the site, so here I am coming back to you all a little ashamed at having abandoned you so abruptly.

To make up for it, I’m moving the blog to a new, easier-to-remember address. No longer do you need to type in the long and unwieldy “gravyboatstayinthenow” if you’re looking for armchair musings on politics, art, religion, and pop culture. Instead, just visit GravyBoat.WordPress.com.

Most of the classic GravyBoat posts from yesteryear have made their way over to the new place (although some of the videos are going to take a little while longer to get up and running), so you can peruse them at your leisure.

I’m still working on the site, putting together sub-pages, finding the right layout and the right shade of orange to really capture that badly home-made gravy we all remember from horrible, horrible Thanksgivings past. However, you won't find any new content here at blogspot. Bear with me as I put the finishing touches on the new place, enjoy yourself, leave a comment, and above all, “Stay in the now!”

Presidential Candidates and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea

I snapped awake sometime before four o’clock this morning, and my first thought was that I was going to have to vote for a write-in candidate come November.

Sen. Barack Obama has said that he wants to expand federal funding for faith-based social initiatives. Under Obama’s plan, which was announced this summer, funding for such projects would be increased to over $500 million per year, delivered in the form of grants to churches, and on-the-ground religious institutions. The money (and accompanying training) is meant to expand the neighborhood organizations’ ability to provide social services to their communities. Groups receiving grants would be precluded from proselytizing in any program funded with federal money, and from hiring with discrimination in regards to religious affiliation.

Putting aside the question of where the funding will come from (his position paper offers ideas but no hard numbers on the subject), from a Christian perspective, this is a horrible idea. Too many churches and para-church community ministries already run impersonal “outreach programs” rather than sincerely and humbly serving their neighbors.

During the 2006 primaries, I was working for a gubernatorial candidate and often campaigned for him at various central-Brooklyn events. One Saturday, I was visiting a series of block parties to make announcements, distribute literature, and talk with local residents. Several of the block parties I visited that day were sponsored by churches, and at one of them the church was giving away bags of staple foods to people in the neighborhood who couldn’t afford it for themselves.

I was sitting at the food distribution table and speaking with the pastor of the church when an anxious-looking man walked up and muttered something inaudible over the music and the shouts of the children.

“What?” the pastor asked. Again, the man muttered. “Do you want the food?” He nodded. “Have a seat, show me your ID.”

While the pastor took the man’s ID, recorded some information, and picked out a bag for him, I watched the man quietly. Looking at his face, his feelings were painfully plain: shame, guilt, failure, and helplessness. I’m tempted to say “emasculation.” This man was broken, and utterly ashamed to be himself.

Not once did the pastor look him in the eyes.

I’m very young, but I really can’t imagine that I will be forgetting the look on that man’s face or the bizarre mix of disgust and indignation and pity and love that swelled up in me when I saw the way the pastor dismissed him. Just feeding people or giving them job training or giving kids classwork over the summer isn’t enough. That man didn’t just need food, he needed to know that he was worth that food. He needed to know that he was loved. He needed to be told that he had inherent dignity as one made in God’s image.

Too few of our churches are active in showing real mercy to the downtrodden around them. Out of those that do, too many do it out of duty rather than love. Churches accepting money and a muzzle not only tells the church community that the government is going to relieve them of the biblical injunction to pour out their blessings for the sake of others, it prevents them from serving living water and the bread of life to those who need it most, those for whom it was given in the first place.

John McCain offers a similar plan, but without preventing the recipient organizations from hiring with discrimination toward religious affiliation, but that still doesn’t address the most flawed part of this proposal: churches that become dependent on the government cease to be a prophetic counter-culture. They stop being churches, and start becoming institutions of the civic religion.

I make no secret of my distaste for the pandering, Darwinian policies and deceptive general election campaign that Sen. John McCain, who throughout my teens and twenties has been an intelligent and usually-principled political figure, is now advocating and running. It’s a betrayal of everything I expected from him: honest, independent thought.

That said, if Sen. Obama is going to move forward with the plan he has said would be the “moral center of his administration,” I can not support his vision of government.

Cressbeckler it is, then:


Old, Grizzled Third-Party Candidate May Steal Support From McCain

From The Desk Of Gotham City Mayor Anthony Garcia...

Hey folks!

Don't ask me how, but I recently got my hands on a staff-only memo from the mayor of Gotham City to his senior staff. Given how much national attention Gotham has been garnering this summer, I figured it would provide some interesting insight into the political life of one of our country's most dire cities.

###

FROM THE DESK OF GOTHAM CITY MAYOR ANTHONY GARCIA

Memorandum: For Senior Staff Only

It has been two months since the murder of District Attorney Harvey Dent.

We’ll excuse for a moment the fact that this is the second District Attorney to have been murdered in a year (though, believe me, we’ll be taking that up with Commissioner Gordon in short order) and instead focus on simple steps that must be taken to refocus our priorities and political strategy in light of what the departed has left undone.

As I’m sure you’ve read in the papers, philanthropist Bruce Wayne was recently called into city hall for questioning. Wayne threw a “fundraiser” for District Attorney Dent on the evening of Commissioner Loeb and Judge Surrillo’s murder, and the questioning was regarding any correlation said political event, which was reportedly interrupted by the Joker and accompanied by the death of a police officer, may have had with the deaths of District Attorney Dent and Assistant District Attorney Rachel Dawes.

According to Mr. Wayne’s own testimony, and the testimony of a Russian ballet dancer whose passport is being frozen until all suspicion is cleared, Wayned persuaded Dent to accept the fundraiser even three years out from re-election by telling him, “One fundraiser with my friends, and you’ll never need another cent.”

This exposes a massive liability in Gotham City’s electoral process: namely, the complete lack of oversight of campaign finance laws and donation limits. The late Mr. Dent managed to give us an 18-month window of reduced crime in which we can pursue other policy initiatives. I am calling a three-day strategy session for this weekend in order to discuss how to best push forth an aggressive campaign oversight package.

I know that this has been a stressful few months, and I know that introducing the concept of campaign oversight to Gotham’s political life may be unpopular with our colleagues, but I feel that if we start flirting with the idea of not allowing Sal Maroni and Carmine Falcone to funnel unlimited amounts of cash into the pockets of any campaign they please, maybe there would be fewer public officials in this state (which, to be honest—this is embarrassing—I still haven’t been able to identify) who seem to legislate with the mob’s best interest at heart.

However, one of the primary difficulties we will face in terms of public opinion is how to keep the importance of a campaign oversight package in the forefront of people’s minds in the wake of the significant across-the-board increase in corporate and personal tax liability necessary to cover incidental budget expenses that have arisen since the emergence of the Bat-man:

- $79 billion in public property damage
- $100 billion in partial public compensation for landmark private property damage
- 100% increase in SWAT team salaries
- 50% increase in MCU officer salaries
- 30% increase in all other law enforcement salaries
- 25% increase in across-the-board hiring for all police precincts
- 30% increase in hiring for precincts 7, 35, 61, 77, and 78 in the Narrows
- 135% increase in expenses related to clearing of traffic accidents
- The still-delayed estimate on the repair of monorail and utility centers

Please start brainstorming ideas for communication strategy and come prepared with a short list of key members of the city council we can safely approach to be political cover. I think Councilmember Cobblepot may be willing.

Amy Hempel

I ran into Amy Hempel this evening.  As usual, she radiated graciousness.  Also as usual, and maybe this is just her talent influencing my perception, she was absolutely stunning.  We made small talk for a few minutes about various topics before continuing on our ways, but the encounter got me thinking about perspective in fiction.

Hempel makes no secret that for her, composing fiction begins with voice (and a good last line).  After spending so much time reading her work, along with that of Lydia Davis, George Saunders, and Sam Lipsyte I'm convinced that one of the reasons I find so much other contemporary fiction hard to engage is that there is so little voice.  Yes, it's true that many of the authors I just listed write primarily in the first person.  Maybe that has something to do with the degree of intimacy they seek with their characters, maybe it's more about the fact that they are just in love with the way their characters sound.  Either way, though, writers like Jane Avrich prove that third-person reportorial fiction can be just as engaging, whether it openly features opinion and personality (as many of Fitzgerald's better stories did) or not. 

A few months ago, I started reading Adam Haslett's You Are Not A Stranger Here, but I had to toss it aside after two or three stories.  Nothing about the language drew me in, leaving to the characters and the plot the work of engaging me.  Sadly, they weren't up to the task.  Compare it to a band with serviceable lead and percussion sections, but whose rhythm section has decided to sit one song out: the song is going to sound off-kilter, feel less catchy, be less powerful.  

The elements of a fiction (indeed of any piece of art) need to work in concert with one another if the piece is to be successful.  While Amy Hempel says that plot is the last thing she thinks about, there are clearly definite plots to all of her stories.  What she is adept at doing is giving us a snippet of that plot and bringing up the volume on all the details--ensuring that we hear the way that every note in the snippet interacts with every other note--so that we can hear the whole plot playing out in just those few moments.

It may have spoiled me for anything else, but I love her for it.

For No Good Reason

Five Things to Love About LOST, Day One

Well, today I kick off a (hopefully) week-long series, Five Things to Love About LOST.

Before we start, let's get a few things straightened out:

First, there will likely be a few groups of people I refer to. "The Survivors" are a group of 40-odd characters who survived the crash of a commercial flight from Sydney to Los Angeles and are now awaiting rescue on an as-yet-unnamed island somewhere in the Pacific. I might also call them "The Castaways," because "The Survivors" is probably going to get boring. "The Natives" are a mysterious group of people who were already on the island and who the survivors understand to be malevolent kidnappers. On the show, they are called "The Others," which has obvious sociological implications. There are other characters that may come up, but I can explain them as they come up, and with one exception, they are only significant in their relationship to the survivors and the natives.

I'm warning you up front: every entry in this series will contain spoilers. If you aren't caught up with the show and plan on watching it eventually, skip this. Seriously. I don't want to ruin the fun. We're on the honor system here.

Today's topic: The Fact That We're Four Seasons In And Still Don't Really Know What The Show Is About.

Whenever I talk with someone who isn't familiar with the show, the first question they always ask is something along the lines of, "How long can a show about people stuck on an island be interesting?" That's a hard question to answer, because LOST stopped being about people stuck on an island and whether or not they are going to get rescued less than halfway through the first season.

The scene: The camp's resident hunter (the mysterious, miraculous John Locke) and his inept acolyte (island prettyboy Boone) are walking through the jungle, looking for a survivor who has been kidnapped by a native. Locke tosses Boone a flashlight. Boone fumbles the catch, and the flashlight hits the ground with a loud, metallic clang that changes the premise of the show.

The two freeze, look at one another incredulously for a moment ("What was that?" Boone asks. "Steel," Locke replies.) and then start sweeping away the dirt and vines on the ground to reveal a hatch door, sealed and locked from the inside, with no handle. For the rest of the season, the two secretly work to excavate the hatch, and after they find that it is immense and must lead to some kind of underground facility, they begin to try to open it. While the rest of the survivors are hiding from the natives, building rafts, and overcoming their deep-set guilt, shame, fears, and neuroses as each hang-up is conveniently personified in events happening around them, the question the audience really has is no longer, "Will they get off the island?" but rather, "What's in the hatch?"

Over the course of the next three seasons, the show evolves (organically!) from a weekly morality play dressed up as a psychological thriller about surviving against the unknown into a domestic drama into a military story into a Grecian-style epic about industrial espionage and quantum physics in the face of the gods.

By the time we learn that some of the survivors do, in fact, get off the island, and start seeing what their off-island lives are like, not only do we not even care that they got off, but we are beginning to realize that our main characters aren't even significant to the real story driving the plot. In fact, the showrunners have said that while they have always known how the series would begin and how the series would end, they've given themselves leeway in the route the story will take to get there. This flexibility comes naturally from your audience not realizing how irrelevant the characters they are most invested in actually are.

The fact that the writers waited until the start of the third season to introduce the real central character, and then waited another year before beginning to reveal the important role he plays in the "real story" of the show, speaks incredibly well of their patience and of their trust in the audience's attention span. I know that there are people who will say that they were making it up as they went along, but it's easy to see that the seeds for everything--I mean everything--that has developed during seasons two, three, and four were planted during season one.

And it all started with a dropped flashlight.

And Now, A Taste Of Things To Come.

Well, now that we’re more than a month into the summer, I figure it’s time to roll out an ambitious slate of topics for summertime posts.

I’ve set a(n arbitrary) goal of thirty posts for the summer, assuming that the summer ends with the beginning of October:

First up is the hard-hitting five-part series Five Things to Love About LOST. Like all great journalism, this series is going to contain spoilers—Upton Sinclair spoiled the meat industry, I’m just following in his footsteps. I swear, if this hastily-written, poorly-thought-out series of posts on a blog with a weekly readership that literally reaches into the ones and sometimes even beyond doesn’t win me a Pulitzer, I don’t know what will. (Sadly, ABC is considerably touchier about posting covert LOST clips on YouTube than they are about Sports Night, so I won’t be able to provide A/V aids.)

Next up is an idea that occurred to me as I was preparing to leave work this evening but that seems decent enough: a ten-part series re-visiting the movies that I most consistently list as my “top ten” and deciding if each one still deserves to be there or if it should be kicked to the curb, forced never to come ‘round here no more.

Also, starting this month, I’ll be introducing a new monthly series called Just As I Thought! Each month, I’ll be featuring a book, album, movie, or TV show that is exactly as bad as I thought it would be. (I wanted to kick this off with the latest movie from the director who inspired it, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, but I think I’ve missed my chance to catch it in theaters.)

Those of you who paid attention in pre-calc may be able to see that I’ve only accounted for eighteen of the thirty posts. Well, my count is retro-active, so those two other posts I did in June count (though this one does not). That brings us to twenty, leaving plenty of space for me to deliver all of the lightweight political and theological commentary you’ve long-since given up hope that I’d be producing. (In fact, in one of those rare instances in which I don’t have to inject my faith into a political story, I’ll be back within 24 hours with my thoughts on Mr. Obama's terrible idea.)

I’d also like to commit one of those posts to the first draft of a new short story in order to get feedback, but I don’t know if I have the discipline necessary to get a draft out in the middle of what promises to be a busy couple months. Until next time, vote Edwards/Huckabee in 2008!

In Defense of Plot

Last weekend, I had a conversation with someone about Flannery O'Connor. I said that I had read A Good Man is Hard to Find a couple years ago, and while I appreciated her insight in a general way, I didn't find her way with words particularly stirring.

The person I was talking to seemed disappointed, and the conversation moved on. However, the conversation was enough for me to bump Everything That Rises Must Converge to the top of my "To Read Next" stack.

I'm blown away.

It took one sentence on the second page of the first story--"He decided it was less comical than jaunty and pathetic."--for me to realize that I had had no idea what I was talking about. Who could possibly have thought to rub "jaunty" and "pathetic" against one another like that? I've spent the last few years worshiping at the altar of Amy Hempel.  It's hard not to marvel at the subtle, delicate flavor of her sentences, which comes from so many words, clauses, and thoughts being patiently boiled off like excess sherry.  A sentence by Amy Hempel leaves you with the essence of each thought on your palate, wanting more but having more than enough to know what a great meal you're having. However, "less comical than jaunty and pathetic" is a marriage of words that I would never have expected--a truly surprising moment of language that, in context, feels inevitable.  What other pair or trio of words could possibly evoke what the active words in that sentence evoke? 

I don't know exactly where or when it happened, but somewhere over the last few years I came to believe that good short fiction with elegant, powerful language and true depth of insight did not deal with plot.  I felt that in the 21st century, short fiction had moved beyond plot.  Maybe it was Amy Hempel and Jane Avrich's statements that they start with voice (and Hempel's confession that plot is the least element she thinks about).  Certainly Gary Lutz's declaration that film was the perfect story-telling medium and so short stories should now be about psychology and syntax contributed to the prejudice. Plot was now the stuff of low-brow short fiction. If you wanted a gripping plot, read a novel or go to a movie. (Because he is a satirist, George Saunders was allowed to use plot in his short stories and still be taken seriously. But no one else. Just him.) And, to be honest, some of the contemporary short stories I had been reading lately reinforced that opinion--they were plot-driven and bad.   

O'Connor, though, has washed away my ability to hold that prejudice. Her stories are rich, full-bodied, and intricately textured.  True, they were written some seventy years ago, in the same half-century that yielded the work of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but reading these pieces, it's impossible for me to delude myself into considering the possibility that short fiction has lost its claim to plot as a central story-telling element.  In true O'Connor fashion, it was a prejudice I wasn't even fully conscious of possessing.  

It's been said that when we read something that excites us, it doesn't feel like we are being moved with a new idea or insight so much as it feels like an idea or insight we never realized was in us was being dislodged and brought into sight.  O'Connor's collection, though, does something entirely different: it dislodges and drags into sight the things in us we had hoped to keep safely locked up and hidden. Petty bitterness, hypocrisy, dehumanizing prejudice, deluded superiority--this is a fearless collection of fiction. Fitzgerald may have lamented what he saw the generation around him doing, but O'Connor lamented what the people around her were on a fundamental level.  And not just the people around her, but herself, as well.

It has to be debilitating to look not only at the inner failings of those around you but of yourself as unflinchingly as these stories indicate O'Connor had.  To be able to accept that we are all that vile, that wretched--more wretched than we could ever admit or imagine--you would need some kind of external assurance that you were more loved and accepted than you ever dared hope.

I wonder where O'Connor got that affirmation from?

Bloodless

No, this isn't a blog about that "Twilight" movie.  Rather, it's a post about the fact that everything I've written for the past month or so feels bloodless and inelegant.  I have a week to finish my projects at my current job, because I start a new one a week from today, and I'm going into it with dull, blunt, clumsy writing.  

If anyone is wondering what to get me for my birthday, a more disciplined and consistent relationship to my talent would be a fantastic gift idea.

Stacked

I have a big stack of books that I "want to read next." Typically, I never get around to reading anything from this stack--maybe it's because the stack seems like an assignment and high school and college got me in the habit of always forsaking my assigned work for the benefit of extra-curricular work. Instead of reading the books that are piled up next to my bed, I often find myself re-reading Tumble Home or taking up my roommate's advice when he urges me to read whatever the latest quirky book about words he read is.

However, as I was heading to bed tonight, I realized that I'm more excited about my stack right now than I have been in a long time.

As well as Bauckham's academic apologetic tome (which I've been swearing I will return for six months now) and a classic theological hardcover by John Stott, I'll also soon be reading a "classic of modern Jewish theology." I should be polishing off collections of short fiction by Fitzgerald, Julian Barnes, and Miranda July soon, plus a new translation of the complete fictions of Borges. Round that out with a roommate-recommended novel and some surely-eloquent letters and speeches by our most articulate president (those were the days, right?), and it's finally becoming clear to my inner slacker that my stack is not an assignment, it's a wish list. And I get to read it. How awesome is that?

First, There Was Darkness...

About a month ago, I spent Friday and Saturday on the couch watching seven or eight movies. (It's not as sad as it sounds--I was sick.) The highlight of the weekend was getting to re-visit a movie that has actually had a discernible impact on my life, Dark City.

The movie, for those of you who haven't seen it, follows amnesiac John Murdoch, who can't remember whether or not he's a serial killer. In pursuit of a mysterious doctor who offers answers about his identity, Murdoch flees from the police (who think he's guilty) and a group of long-coated strangers (who want him killed). The movie begins in the visual and story-telling traditions of classic film noir, but as the plot weaves its way toward resolutions, the story becomes a fusion of German expressionism and classic early science-fiction.

Revisiting the movie was a fantastic experience, and I was going to write a blog entry about it, but I was lazy.

Two years ago, Roger Ebert mentioned in the boilerplate of a review on his website that he had just recorded a new audio commentary for the director's cut of Dark City, but there has been no mention of it anywhere since, including in the studio's annual Upcoming Releases schedules. I had honestly given up hope that it would ever actually be seen, envisioning it sitting on a shelf somewhere between the master print of Chimes at Midnight and the original ending to Kubrick's The Shining.

Well, I'm glad that I didn't write that blog entry a month ago, because this morning I got an e-mail from a good friend letting me know that the Dark City director's cut will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray on July 28 (and I am now saved from needing to do two entries on Dark City in a month)!

It's long been rumored that the director's cut will not just restore a scene or two but will actually present the story with an entirely different pace and editing style (and, mercifully, without that blasted voice-over that kicks the movie off by revealing everything the viewer is supposed to learn at the end). As released, the film's editing was frenetic and left the viewer as de-centered as Murdoch, so I'm interested in seeing it at a more contemplative pace, having the opportunity to let my eyes linger over locations and environments that I only got to see in brief flashes before.

I know this may not be too exciting to the five of you who know that this blog exists, but the day this thing comes out is actually going to be pretty exciting for me. I just thought I'd share.

You can read the original news at dvdactive.com.

Go, Recession, Go!

Let’s be honest—our economy never really recovered from the last recession. Remember that one? It started around 2000 when pets.com shut down and suddenly every broker in the Financial District realized what every teenager on Geocities already knew: having a website didn’t mean you were about to receive piles of money.

However, a little article buried on the front page of nytimes.com this evening officially announced the beginning of a new recession.

Though most of us have probably already been working under the assumption that the recession started months ago, President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary is among the first and highest-profile public figures to go from saying, “A recession is possible” to saying, “Oops! We’re in a recession.”

I find interesting the up-front acknowledgment that there is a difference betwixt the “economic growth” that America has been experiencing for the last five years and the “real economy,” which is measured by the financial health of the majority of American families. Near the end of the article, they call President Bush’s tax cuts “regressive,” which they are.

I’m just starting out in my life and in my career, and I’m sure that our economy will eventually find its way back to stable health, but I don’t think that on this side of the resurrection I’m ever going to see the same buying power per dollar that my parents saw while I was growing up. More manufacturing and technology jobs are being shipped overseas for less money, but any benefit that would have for people in unrelated industries is more than offset by the fact that many foreign currencies are gaining on the U.S. dollar. (Even the Canadian dollar has surpassed the U.S. dollar lately. Seriously? The Canadian dollar?)

Conventional wisdom would tell you that now is the time to buy some real estate or invest in some stocks that you know are going to rebound, but my portfolio is pretty much tied up in food, shelter, and the new R.E.M. CD.

I hope this recession ends soon, because I don’t want to have to sell my food.

Clinton Tax Returns

An interesting commentary on the "revelation" that Hillary and Bill Clinton have made a lot of money in the last few years.

Have a good weekend!

I'm Watching Sports Night on CSC, So Stick Around!

Maybe it's because I recently had to write four different reviews of Aaron Sorkin's latest play, or maybe it's because I recently encountered someone who reminds me of the whole Josh Charles/Teri Polo storyline and makes me hear that blasted Neil Finn song, but I revisited Sports Night this evening. As expected, I laughed (okay, more than expected), but I was not prepared for how raw, honest, and complex some of the key exchanges were.

A few years ago, there was a book printed called 100 Things to Love and Hate About Television. The West Wing was in there, but another entry in the book called Sports Night "Aaron Sorkin's real gift" to popular culture. After hundreds of hours of The West Wing, the entire run of Studio 60, and a month dwelling on The Farnsworth Invention, I have to say that I agree with the book. For as witty, inspiring, incisive, or just flat-out entertaining as his later projects have been, none of it has made me think and feel as much as Sports Night did tonight.

This is not just because of the writing, although it is probably the most emotionally honest and self-consciously stylish Sorkin has ever produced. It is because here, the actors bring a painful humanity to their roles. Most scenes seem haunted by the specter of the fact that every character participating has been pursuing their careers at the expense of their real lives. That the actors can underline even superfluous control-room chatter with a stifled desire for a balanced human life makes the witty banter something more--an attempt to hide their unstable selves.

"I've done enough rotten things to women in my life--there's no question I'm going straight to hell," Josh Charles' character quips to a female correspondent who has repeatedly accused him of having slept with her and then not calling. "I really don't need you padding the ballot box." This is indicative of the attitude most of these characters take to their flaws and to their dis-satisfactions--they can't deny them, but they can't face them. So, they hide behind their "superior wit and guile." Whether that's all on the page or not, the cast plays it well.

So, when Felicity Huffman's character confronts Brenda Strong's and the two let loose with a flurry of cutting verbal attacks and vulnerable confessions with no attempt to use wit to hide themselves or soften the blows, it's not only interesting and gripping, it's unsettling. We've seen these characters say things that are true, but this is the first time any of them allow themselves to be honest.

I didn't think I could still be surprised by Sorkin, and was sure that I couldn't ever be surprised by Sports Night again.

Thankfully, I was wrong. This is why I'm lucky to be able to write.

Farnsworth Redux

This is the second of two reviews I've written of The Farnsworth Invention. Both were written for the same publication (The Redeemer Arts Greenhouse Newsletter) and I don't know which they're going to run; I'd prefer that they run the first, because I think it's better and I'd rather have the better one in my portfolio lookin' all pretty and printed.

The Farnsworth Invention
Directed by Des McAnuff, Written by Aaron Sorkin

“Do you know who Philo Farnsworth was? He invented television. I don’t mean he invented television like Uncle Miltie—I mean he invented the television! In a little house in Provo, Utah, at a time when transmitting moving pictures through the air would be like me saying I’ve figured out a way to beam us aboard the Starship Enterprise. He was a visionary, and he died broke and without fanfare.”

At least, that’s the angle of the historically-debated story that Aaron Sorkin wrote nine years ago on an episode of his much-acclaimed, little-seen Sports Night. It’s also the perspective on history he ultimately espoused in his recent historical fiction The Farnsworth Invention, which played at The Music Box Theatre through March 2. 

The play follows Farnsworth (Jimmi Simpson) and RCA head David Sarnoff (Hank Azaria) as they race to develop the invention that would end up dominating mass communication in the 20th century.  Sorkin’s drama plays fast and loose with historical facts, but that doesn’t matter. What matters to Sorkin, who has made a career out of not-so-subtly voicing his opinions on politics, the media, and social values through the mouths of his characters, is what the invention represents to each man. Sarnoff expects it to “end ignorance, end illiteracy, end war.” Farnsworth, drowning in alcohol and hiding in his research to avoid coming to terms with his son’s death, declares, “One day, a man will walk on the moon. And everybody will get to see it on television.”

These aspirations are far less partisan than Sorkin’s usual fare—in a show about sportscasters, for example, he wrote an episode about one character’s views on legalizing marijuana; a series about sketch comedy actors featured a three-episode arc about premature troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and a series-long sub-plot about the social impact of the religious right.

Whether he shares his character’s political leanings or not, he is a singular talent when it comes to writing dialogue. It is that panache which brought viewers of all stripes to The West Wing and which won his short-lived Sports Night a devoted following. (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, on the other hand, never gained a strong fanbase.)

To anyone who has watched a season of any of those shows, The Farnsworth Invention may have a familiar feel. To someone who has watched every season of those shows, multiple times, it feels like a low-rent cover band. The songs are the same—the characters are arguing with unrealistic fluency about artistic and journalistic integrity, addiction, workaholism, and social responsibility—but the rhythm section feels off-measure. The play only really excels when Simpson and Azaria (whose characters are also our dueling narrators) stop talking to the audience and start talking to each other. The two leads find a rhythm and naturalism in the dialogue that makes the scenes they share gripping. Sadly, too many members of the supporting team can’t quite keep up.

After the fictionalized argument between Sarnoff and Farnsworth that constitutes the play’s climax, Sarnoff soliloquizes about the importance of his work. Taking a monologue directly from a West Wing episode, he declares, “We came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill, and we saw fire! And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is on a timeline of explorations and this is what’s next.” If that seems a little awkward and grandiose, it should—the monologue was originally written about deep-space exploration.

But Azaria makes it work.

What's Your Story?

Hello, to the three or four people who have probably ever read this, and who have, by now, given up waiting for an update. I'm going to try to carve some time out of this busy week/weekend to give you some more to read, but first I'm giving you a chance to prime the pump.

Thoreau said that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. I don't think that's necessarily true. I'm loathe to admit it, but even if it's true, I put more stock in what Hollywood hack Richard Curtis said about the story most people live out: that everyone you see is playing some role in living out a love story. Maybe it's the gospel influence that makes me see love as more intrinsic to the human heart than desperation, even if desperation is the appropriate response to the condition in which we find ourselves.

Anyway, what's your story? I know, the topic is lame and a month late, but I'm desperately trying to avoid doing real work. Give me a few things to read, and I'll come back with stories about Ninja Nuns and how F. Scott Fitzgerald led me to Jesus.

The Farnsworth Invention

The Farnsworth Invention, playing at The Music Box Theatre through March 2, is about two men with obsessions. The first is David Sarnoff (Hank Azaria), president of RCA and a fledgling media mogul. At the start of the play, Sarnoff is incensed at one of RCA’s affiliates for selling blocks of advertising time during their “informational programming.” The broadcasters will lose credibility, he argues, if the weather man is also being paid to sell the audience umbrellas. Sarnoff sets off on a crusade to ensure that his company isn’t licensing its patents out to any affiliates who aren’t using the technology to promote good taste and the public good.

The other man is Philo Farnsworth (Jimmi Simpson), a boy genius raised on a potato farm. At fourteen, Farnsworth thinks up a way to transmit moving pictures through the air, and in his 20’s he finally gets the funding to build a lab and test his theory.

When Sarnoff learns that Farnsworth’s ragtag team of researchers is on the cusp of creating the first working television technology, he wages a furious campaign to gain control of the invention and all of its patents. He pours money into RCA’s own research and development department, but when they are hindered by some design flaw that the play tries to explain clearly but can’t, he resorts to the most congenial case of industrial espionage ever dramatized.

The story plays fast and loose with historical facts, but that doesn’t matter. What matters to playwright Aaron Sorkin, who likes writing about smart people arguing over high ideals (A Few Good Men, The West Wing), is what the invention represents to each man. Sarnoff expects it to “end ignorance, end illiteracy, end war.” Farnsworth, buried in his research as a way of avoiding coming to terms with the death of his son, declares, “One day, a man will walk on the moon. And everybody will get to see it on television.”

These aspirations are, of course, both funny and poignant. But the play spends too much time trying to get us to understand the technology that Farnsworth is inventing, and so the humor, hope, and humanity of the characters can get lost.

Ultimately, the play is just witty and entertaining enough to be worth your time, but only really excels whenever Simpson and Azaria—whose characters are also our dueling narrators—stop talking to the audience and start talking to each other. The two leads find a rhythm and naturalism in the dialogue that makes the scenes they share gripping. Sadly, too many members of the supporting cast can’t quite keep up.

In the climax, a fictionalized argument between Sarnoff and Farnsworth following a patent trial, Farnsworth recognizes that the invention they’ve been fighting over isn’t being used as the utopian tool they had both dreamed it would become, and takes Sarnoff to task for it.

“Once you’re good at delivering consumers to advertisers,” Sarnoff laments, “you’ll never be good at anything else.”

For No Good Reason

Good Fences...

There is a tradition in Judaism called “building a fence around the Torah.” The general concept is that the people of God, having been given His law, should follow a stricter set of rules in order to keep from breaking His law. These stricter rules, called gezeirah, are instituted and canonized by the rabbis.

An example: scripture says not to “boil a calf in its mother’s milk.” Anyone who knows someone who keeps Kosher knows what the fence is around this law: Orthodox Jews do not eat meat and dairy within several hours of one another.

The practice has been compared to building a fence around a garden so as to keep from trampling the flowers, and is seen as one of the key functions of the “Oral Law” (which, according to Jewish tradition, was passed down to Moses at Sinai in order to help Israel understand and keep the written law). This is seen in the beginning of Sayings of the Fathers:

They said three things: Be deliberate in judgement, stand up many students, and make a fence for the Torah.
Avos 1:1

Many Christians reject the very concept of the "oral traditions" or the "Oral Torah" outright, calling them extra-Biblical. This is plainly not the place for a deep theological discourse on the law and the Word, but while reading scripture the other night, I noticed something that got me thinking about the fence around the Torah.

I found that, while not expressly advocated, building a fence around the Torah is at least demonstrated in the Bible. In Genesis. Chapter 3.

And the LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
...
The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'"

Now, while there is plenty of debate about some of the specifics--did the serpent shake a piece of fruit from the tree and bite it so that the woman could see "that the fruit of the tree was good for food?" Was it simply his cunning argument that made her see that it was "desirable for gaining wisdom?"--we all know what happened next.

The fence metaphor given by the oral tradition assumes that Israel was capable of damaging God's law, of literally breaking it. They weren't. When they transgressed against God's law, they broke themselves. The law would not be damaged by our transgressions any more than a stone wall would be damaged by a child running into it.

Not only did the first "fence" chronicled in scripture not do the job of keeping God's rules from being broken, but it would actually have limited the ability of the man and woman to actually obey God: how can they tend to a tree they don't allow themselves to touch? The attempt to add to the law in order to preserve it is just an attempt to earn the unearnable, reach the unreachable, and put God into a position where He owes you something.

I'm not advocating hedonism. The law is important, as it teaches us how to relate to God and gives us a jumping-off point for understanding a few ways in which our values make us a distinct, counter-cultural community. But ultimately, the law is supposed to show us our sin--I don't think fences protect the law from people, they protect people from the law.

I really wanted to work a Robert Frost reference in here, but it's late, so here's a URL:
http://www.bartleby.com/118/2.html

Now, I'm off to bed. I'll try to write about Terminator 2's role in the post-Cold War American psyche this weekend.

...Gravy Boat?

Welcome to my undeveloped musings on the fields that constitute my career(s) and passions--politics, communications, writing, film, literature, and (oh, yeah!) my God and King. I can't promise that the things I write about will seem relevant or interesting to anyone other than myself, but I'll try.

I started this blog at the suggestion of a good friend named Joe and the encouragement of another friend named Kristen. If you get mildly frustrated with it, let me know--I'll pass your sentiments on to Kristen. If you think it's insipid and that the world would have been better off had the idea for it never been planted, let me know--I'll pass your sentiments on to Joe.

What better way to kick off a blog that will probably be mostly musings on politics, faith, art, and the intersection of any two or more of the above than a passage from a novel that's not really about politics or faith by a talented author who I don't like as much as my friends do? (Home Land by Sam Lipsyte, in case you were wondering.)

"Gravy boat! Stay in the now!"

I remembered my father barking those words one Thanksgiving years ago, my mind wandering as it was wandering now, making its maybe-not-so-beautiful-nor-extraordinary connections while a row of aunts and uncles waited for me to pass what wasn't technically a gravy boat but more on the order of a mason jar filled with pan-spooned turkey juice.

While at art school studying fiction writing and film criticism, I became a Christian. After I graduated, the Lord led me into political communications. None of those things happened very long ago, and I'm still working out the exact direction of my calling, finding the place where it intersects with my talents and my joys.

As I explore these paths, I have thoughts and make connections that are maybe-not-so-beautiful-nor-extraordinary. Those are what I'm using as fodder for this blog. I'm sorry that it's topically messy, that there will probably not always be a clear connection between any two posts, but I needed an excuse to keep writing recreationally and keep my expository writing and critical faculties sharp.

If it helps you to cope with the inevitably scattershot nature of some of the upcoming posts, think of the blog as what Hitchcock called "pure cinema"--that is, little strips of unrelated film juxtaposed against one another to create a different meaning or carry a greater message than they would denote on their own.

Or just blame Joe.