While working on my play this morning, I’m overhearing the rhythm in the voice of a neighbor, independent of the meaning of his words as he describes (as if communicating valuable information to a genie inside the red cell phone he holds against his ear as he parades back and forth across the driveway outside my window). I recognize him by this voice I often hear in late morning after the noise of commuters dissipates, leaving our suburban street in restful peace, interrupted only by the efforts of the odd landscaper or two, home repairers, song birds and a migrating flock of parrots that troops regularly between Balboa Park and Del Mar.  My neighbor’s stories are steeped in syntax of an era that I feel hasn’t had the luxury of retrospect to define itself, a work in progress, like my play.

Unfortunately, this morning his tale reminds me that the fate of people I love is forecast by current events (notwithstanding that an obsession with knowing how things began could obscure an interest in how they may end). If by understanding how events today are consequences of previous events, I might be able to alter the course of history for the next step of time, this knowledge could be important, albeit action is essential and for me this is in the domain of defining in media the era for itself and in that respect, at least, I am self-defined as an artist, regardless of the medium I employ.

An artist isn’t defined by the medium. I found the following paragraphs in Arnold Schoenberg’s book, Structural Functions of Harmony: 

“The composers of the Romantic period believed that music should “express” something. As so often in preceding periods, extra musical tendencies, such as poetic and dramatic subjects, emotions, actions and even philosophical problems of Weltanschauung (philosophy of life) had become influential. These tendencies caused changes in every feature of the musical substance. Alterations in the constitutions of chords decisively changed the intervals of the melodies and also resulted in richer modulations; the rhythms and dynamics of the accompaniment, and even of the melody, symbolized their extramusical objects instead of deriving from purely musical stimuli. The origin of these new features may be debatable aesthetically, if not psychologically; however, whatever the source of the musical inspiration may have been, it resulted in great developments.”

(He’s looking at the forms of musical innovation as a logical expression of philosophic intention.)

“In descriptive music, the background, the action, the mood, and the other features of the drama, poem or story become incorporated as constituent and formative factors in the musical structure. The union thereafter is inseparable. Neither the text nor the music conveys its full significance if detached from its companion. Their union is an amalgamation comparable to an alloy whose components can be separated only by complicated processes.”

(He means, you may tease out the way parts interact for analysis but the piece is more than the sum of the parts and there are features that make no sense at all out of context, yet they are the essential content in the communication. (A nose evokes a face.)

“Drama and poetry are greatly inspiring to a composer. But much of what they evoke on the one hand, they revoke on the other. A melody, if it followed the dictates of its musical structure alone, might develop in a direction different from that in which a text forces it. It might become shorter or longer, produce its climax earlier or later—or dispense with it entirely—require less striking contrasts, much less emphasis or much less accentuation. Besides, the text is frequently so overwhelming in itself as to conceal the absence of value in a melody.”

(The composer cleaves to the direction of the story in much the same way as lovers respond to each other.)

“These extramusical influences produced the concept of extended tonality. Remote transformations and successions of harmonies were understood as remaining within the tonality. Such progressions might not bring about modulations or the establishment of [tonal] regions. They function chiefly as enrichments of the harmony and, accordingly, often appear in a very small space, even in a single measure. Though, referring them to [tonal] regions may sometimes facilitate analysis, their functional effect is, in many cases, only passing, and temporary.”

(“Tonality” in this sense is analogous to the listener’s musical expectation. Extended tonality is a relationship with this expectation; extending it depends on it by using it in a way that doesn’t limit it.  “Region” is a term of art in Schoenberg’s lexicon; it refers to the dominion of a central tone around which all other tones relate according to their harmonic interaction with the central tone.)

Schoenberg continues this discussion by providing illustrations of his proposition from Wagner’s Tristan, Brahms’ C-Minor String Quartet and Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy (D Minor). Three years ago, I wouldn’t have understood what Schoenberg wrote, nor why his classes at UCLA, like those of Lubitsch were crowded with visitors. He’s explained in this way the evolution of music in our culture over the last two centuries and it applies not only to the realm of Beethoven, Schubert, Stravinsky, Cage and Ives but also, oddly enough, Kanye West, Madonna and Metallica and more understandably, Miles, Monk, Mingus and less relevantly, Springsteen, Cash and Burl Ives.

In describing this relationship between musical expression and the uses to which music is put, a subtext of Schoenberg’s discussion relates to the genetic memory of all survivors of the holocaust and their descendants (a circumstance I share with Schoenberg). We are sensitive to bigotry, we know intuitively that the holocaust was the symptom of an economic problem. We know the governmental changes adopted here in my country to protect the rights of individuals in the 1930s were economic strategies and we know that expansions of the voting franchise and civil liberties are meaningless if these economic measures are subverted or abandoned and that the expansion of populations globally compound this problem and we know that bigotry and xenophobia motivate and channel economic inequity through mob behavior and this is why it is scary to me that yesterday, the Director of the World Bank publicly acknowledge the obvious: that global warming leads to battles over food. That frankly states the stark reality behind changing the name of the defense department to “homeland security”.

Schoenberg was writing about autonomous music, not commercial music, however, commercial music in media, like that of John Williams, for instance uses forms, phrases and musical expressions “borrowed” from descriptive music of earlier autonomous music. Autonomous means literally that it is not intended to sell cars or induce hypnotic suggestions in dark theaters. That it can be used for this purpose is amply illustrated by Lily Reifenstahl’s use of Richard Wagner’s music in Triumph of The Will and that it is used for this purpose is easily gleaned from a text book on conventional harmony.

Schoenberg, who I feel is the most highly respected genius of music of all those who emigrated to my country to escape Nazism in central Europe, refused all invitations to write music for movies and there is no doubt in my mind that this was a composer with the talent to move the mountain to Mohammed, musically, equivalent in some ways to Debussy, although he might blush at this comparison. That he refused to do movie music is important and relevant.

What is the responsibility of the media that shapes the core values of our civilization, if not to re-invigorate the population with a will to demand that democratic government take responsibility for protecting the needs of those with least power? Was this not what Reifenstahl imagined was her purpose in creating the dramatic myth of the 3rd Reich? She was effective, too; the problem was that she promoted values that were exploited by men and institutions like Goebbels and Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan. And why should Schoenberg trust the government of my country? Had we not allowed Henry Ford to operate factories that built tanks for Hitler? Had we not put our Japanese citizens into concentration camps? Had we not dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima? Should he trust democracy with a gullible electorate of cupidic people vulnerable to propaganda? Under the circumstances, it would have been foolish and after witnessing the assassination of John Kennedy and the war in Viet Nam myself, I feel Schoenberg should be respected as much for his political foresight as for his comprehension of music.

And now? Otherwise respectable people speak about democracy as if its a choice over other forms of government. It’s not. Human beings are by definition responsible for their own fates and the only kind of government that recognizes the possibility of this is one in which the individual’s voice is relevant. Extrapolating from this, regardless of the size of the global population, a governmental structure in which each individual has a relevant voice is one in which the governing institution is democratic, local and relatively small. Large central governments of great power are enabled by information technology but this doesn’t make them effective in terms of economic equity and in fact, they are not only more prone to abuse but also, size means abuses are on a horrendous scale. A large centrally governed democracy is an oxymoron.

But there’s another issue because large populations are dependent on media and the virtual relationships that media empowers and when media is owned and operated by commercial enterprise, those relationships are shaped by priorities of the commercial sponsor.

It’s obvious that, for media to be true to its purpose of invigorating political will for governmental responsibility, the core values promulgated in media can’t be those defined by the needs of advertisers nor by public sector agencies, especially of national governments with no real connection with people and especially not governments that are themselves owned by commercial interests and industries that have priorities in conflict with the will for both individual welfare and governmental responsibility. Moreover, the values promulgated in responsible media must be somehow coherent with local accountability. And this is notwithstanding that, as Schoenberg points out, the content and the delivery must be aesthetically consistent, interesting and appealing to the audience.

If this is what we will require of media going forward, that is, if promulgating core values that help ensure human life is to survive on this planet and my grandchildren are to have grandchildren, then my role as a student and a teacher includes this concern.

It appears that the future of life on this planet would improve, could we remove commercial media, were such a thing possible. We must acknowledge this, if it is true. Because thought precedes invention,  we must think it. Prescience is simply weighing possibilities given what is known and what is suspected. For instance, we know that commercial media has effectively harnessed the power of mob psychology to promote the consumption of goods and activities that results in the world as we have it. There’s no way to change this focus of media that is consistent with commercial priorities, however, as battles for food occur everyday in communities in my country, it’s easy to see that the symptoms of economic deprivation are exasperated by media that is focused on conditioning viewers to equate their self esteem with ownership of consumable status symbols and coincidentally, also fosters dissatisfaction with life in many and hostility toward those who appear to be doing better and have reason to fear those who are less fortunate.

Because the task of responsible media requires the consideration of who is adversely affected, there is the question: whom among my country’s population are economically deprived? Who are the individuals that are defeated in their attempt to be responsible for their lives and those of their loved ones and/or who are resigned to the idea that they can’t be so responsible because they can’t afford to? It’s a growing number that includes members of a previous working class that are now unemployed due to labor market globalization, age disqualification and the extinction of industries that depended on finite natural resources, such as, fish, coal, steel, and lumber and the mechanization of agricultural and other processes. Increasingly enlarging this group are the aging population, who are now out of synch with archaic policies of employment and “retirement” and whose circumstances are often further debilitated by the encouragement of mobility that weakens the anchoring of relationships in communities and all of this together creates a permanent and growing marginalized under-class of unemployed and largely unemployable people over 50 that are costly to support. They are most of us. They are the audience.

You can thus understand why I can watch an interview with David Simon, who knows all this and quite frankly confesses, “hey, look, I’m ok, I sold a show to HBO, my checks come in the mail regularly” with some amusement, as well the conversations of other beneficiaries of a successful career performing and producing media that of course, haven’t crossed the line in any meaningful way and I struggle to deter myself from thinking, “so f—g what?” I was shocked when I first heard Groucho Marx sing, Show Me A Rose, now I sing it myself now as my neighbor has retired to his stucco semi-fortress and I can work again.

“These objects are important for science … they’re potential resources for raw materials in space that we may wish to take advantage of some day,” The New York Times reported last month on proposed fuel stations in space “that one study says could put astronauts on an asteroid by 2024“.

PREMISE

Space exploration is a holy grail and technological byproducts of the crusade lead us into directions that aren’t rocket science. Another byproduct is that an adult generation is aware this planet has been subject to periodic annihilations due to collisions with large objects. A troublesome enough thing to worry about. However,

The space program product is artificial life support outside the global ecosystem (mobile so far–like space caravans). A commercial byproduct is technology, re-education, engineered food stuff and stuff that makes communities in extreme climatic conditions appear habitable, which motivates investment capital to accommodate growing populations in marginal and vulnerable areas.

If human civilization hasn’t become extinct within 2000 years, either people on this  planet will be looking at shiny remnants orbiting the earth and sun and wonder how life on the planet survived human organization possessed by such an obsession or people elsewhere in the universe will navigate around such things on pilgrimages here.

Yes, I would volunteer with the right woman, to take a fifty year trip alone with her to Mars, which is off this planet, or Venus.

Welcome. If you have met or heard of Michael Winn or of Michael Myrow or their progeny, Winn Myrow, and have professional interest, be advised that you may find this website disturbingly disordered, similar in this way to an ordinary human’s mind, and you have only to look at your own mind to see the truth of this.

For the vast majority of us humans, the only mind we know directly is our own. (Exceptions to this, please, get in touch with me.)

Euripides, Homer, Cervantes, Sterne, Stendahl, Dostoevsky, McCullers, West, Faulkner, Flaubert, Marquez, Mann (dropping names like a trail of diamonds to illustrate a point), danced with the notion of  seeing and feeling through the imagined minds of others. In doing this, they drew a distinction called, human life. If we human beings are conscious of ourselves we would each be but a closed loop. Literature is where we have archived these other views.

This website is a personal workshop, like a sculpture studio where words are the only tools and imagination the only material. A story is analogous to a sculpture. The novelist carves his sculpture from the entropy of imagination. Reading The Gambler, for instance, Dostoevsky evokes experience of protagonists in their world.

As you read some of the stories on this website, especially those in daily evolution, you may see what compels anyone to write. Why they prefer to not sit quietly and serenely smile at things, drink green tea and recycle. (The truth is I’ve tried that. A sexy woman can talk me into doing practically anything. It’s miraculous I’m here to tell about it.) It is because I’m grateful to God for women and survival, that not only do I feel compelled to write, but also, I am sworn to tell the truth, regardless of how it may make me look.

As succinctly described by C.S. Lewis in Screwtape Letters, my principle as a writer, in other words, why I write is to act in the present consistent with principles that Christians attribute to the words of Christ. (If you are not a Christian, you will find similar principles in Judaism, Islam, Shamanism, Buddhism and so on.) I write to experience our connection. Yours and mine. You may be a captain of the police department, the madame of a brothel, a parish priest, undertaker, gangster, precocious teenager, whatever, but in that we are in each other’s worlds, I include you. Namaste.

I played chicken with a Coast Guard Cutter and then raced a 36-foot racing sloop close to the wind on a starboard tack, flying an ample genoa on its head, we raced a half mile in a stiff breeze against the ebb to a photo finish at the police dock after which, the channel turns north allowing the sailboat a broad reach. But I caught her, full sail, close to the wind, fair and square.

I had a thought that I should ask you

If you agreed that Facebook is a cyber life,

Unreality realified.

Let’s say I wanted some unknown

no doubt, unknowable

other being out there to get me and my world,

I’d not be running a serial motion picture on Facebook.

But if l did, it must include Bob, Dale,

Large objects

and my idiot son-in-law as well as the

Transgender woman/man I made out with

At Ichiban in PB last month.

She is a bitch.

But it feels like giving my time, self, soul, heart

for the apathetic use or absorption

by cyber friends, who though lovely,

are no substitute for a good blow job

I might not feel as acknowledged

Blow jobs are affordable

There’s always Nicaragua.

Would I do it though?

Have I considered everything? No.

When I connect, will they be human beings?

In the meantime, I often feel as I do feel now,

like an orphan child of a planet

in a different universe,

left here by mistake.

The aforementioned son, in-law?

What happened to due process?

Asked me recently, Are you suffering?

In that moment, I was a little buzzed

And it threw me that he should ask.

Out of the blue like that

I have suffered, that much I know

I’ve been here for a long long time

So much of my life happened here

Whoever left me is never coming back

I’m not content with that.

I’m on my own but I abandon no one.

That isn’t suffering.

Suffering is being present to what is past

What is lost, grieving, giving your soul to God.

Have a heart.

Jeopardy Answer: What is a happy ending?

Based on the written works of a formidable tradition of writers like James Agee, Shakespiere, Moliere, Flaubert, Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift, J.R.R. Tolkein and Miguel Cervantes, what would you say distinguishes men from Rowling’s muggles or Tolkein’s hobbits?

I’ve felt that the most damaging event in American cultural development was the censure of Al Capp related to the popularity of his character, the shmoo, which caricatured the cupidity of a culture of people who derive their core values from mass media, a description that fits the psychological conditioning of nearly all Americans since the 1940s.

Because Capp’s caricature so perfectly revealed the imbecility of the compliant creatures we become as consumers and willing participants in the infantile military orientation of our society, rendering us hilarious in our absurd willingness to be ourselves consumed, living to be consumed by dint of our worship of consuming products, Capp was considered “bad for business”. He was told by his publishers to cut the shmoo or lose his contract, this despite that the shmoo made Capp’s comic strip the most successful cartoon in history.

Nathaniel West’s Day of The Locust, Woody Guthrie‘s and Bob Dylan’s songs, like those of Patty Smith and Pete Sieger, and the monologues of Lenny Bruce and Richard Lord Buckley attacked the tattered fabric of our cupidic values and resonated with something deeper in our souls: our aspiration to feel and express life, no less than the does the flower of the field aspire to bloom. This was the message of William Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and all the romantic poets and composers.

As a culture, what we have become in our worship of cupidic values might at first glance appear to be a race of idiots but at birth, we are no different now than in Whitman‘s time, with the exception that the muggles of the 19th century at least were made aware, ironically by their religious institutions, that they are muggles and so they knew and supported Whitman, Blake and Poe and their spirit surmounted ignorance. We live in a culture that disdains the enterprise of art like Blake’s because its not good for business.

Read. By all means, read. Read the subversives of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Russians, French and Italians; read Dinesen, McCullers, Garcia Marquez, Mann, Faulkner,  West, Ionesco, Stendahl, Cummings… Alternatively, shut up and eat your Disney.

Fmod is actually a supercool if somewhat clunky, probably very early version of a Graphic User Interface (GUI) for software called, middleware, in the process of inserting sound into game programs.

What fools these software engineers be! Or maybe they know and its the marketing people, as usual, who have their heads in the past or some other dark place.

Maybe the engineers realize that, what they have on their hands with Fmod, a creative tool for modifying, merging and remixing tracks on the fly, is a new kind of music/sound sequencer that automates the scoring of media. I wouldn’t bet on it.

From the perspective of the engineers that make it, Fmod is an app running on a Mac or PC that game developers can use to program sounds and music into a game so they will be triggered by input from players and adapt to changes in the “game state” caused by the progress of the game or if a player goes up or down a level, wins or loses, goes from one scene to another, fires a weapon, misses or hits the target,  and so on.

Fmod is an off-the-shelf sound programming GUI that saves you the laborious trouble of writing code that triggers sound into the game by writing the code for you. You lay in audio tracks using the graphic user interface by dragging and dropping audio files and by setting automation for the audio files is triggered by game states and player input.

If your mind can contain the concept and try looking at Fmod as a purely musical tool, a  sequencer that uses audio files instead of midi controlled samples and with a modest range of DSP plugins. Instead of just having a single timeline as in a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), which is a one-dimensional view, Fmod has a vertical axis as well, call it the y axis. Music occurs sequentially, one note or arrangement of notes after another. With Fmod, you can also program notes or changes to notes on a perpendicular coordinate, which isn’t time based. For lack of a better simile, call it world-based.

You may imagine it in a colorful way somewhat like this: you are making love to a woman (or man), doing this, doing that and things are moving along in the direction of orgasm and suddenly, you change partners or reverse roles or change genders, maybe flip back and forth in a tempo. The sensual example isn’t just for humor or venal interest but to be honest about the sensual qualities and purposes of music and the part that music plays in our lives and especially in manipulating viewers in advertising, promotion and propaganda. I speculate that in the near future, since scoring for media has been reduced to cliche musical solutions, a program like Fmod will be programmed by engineers to score TV melodramas, ads and YouTube videos automatically, programmed by machines.

However, the hidden value of Fmod, which is of little interest to the marketing department of Fmod, whether or not the engineers understand it, is that this GUI is an interesting tool for other kinds of users than game developers, people who are artists for whom the facility Fmod provides for real-time adaptation, interactivity provides an ability to eventually take Messaien to the stars.

The moral of this story is that all marketers live in the past, worshipping success rather than the source of the success. They revere Mickey Mouse, Forest Gump and Lady Gaguh as if the human circumstances that gave these invention life. Check out Fmod.

On the ground floor of a turn of the century commercial building in Hoquiam, Washington (a cultural landmark, ignored today but with a possible great future), in what was originally a plush lobby of a major bank, replete with Italian marble floor and polished redwood coamings, there is today an ad hoc museum of vintage curiosities for sale, a business operated by the owner of the building, a congenial man of about 50, who in his own better times, before the most recent economic crash, was an important  professional before his budding IT company failed. An educated man, he is one of three sons of a dentist, who with his wife, a scientist, came to America from Hungary during the brief interval of freedom before Stalin sent the tanks. His son, now also out of work, is a Harvard MBA. He bought the building with his personal bonus after the IPO for the failed enterprise with the intention of restoring it to prominence. After the collapse of the real estate market, unable to sell the building because of an environmental issue he wasn’t aware of when he bought it, he began to use the former bank lobby to sell furnishings he’d imported from Hungary for his home, which is 30 miles away in the state capital. Through his many contacts with others trying to survive similar defaults, he branched out to help them liquify their wealth.

Ken is a good man, frank in his politely spoken, slightly midwestern accent. I liked him immediately when we met because he is curious about people in a way that only those who withhold judgment are able to be. There’s a comfortable steadiness in his composure and movements on which a film director could rely and he has a quietly witty, dry sense of humor, suggesting possibilities for the imagination of a writer.

About him and this building and this small town at the mouth of the Hoquiam river, at the base of the Olympic Peninsula, a rich panoply of stories may be imagined and during the 30 days I visited Hoquiam, I imagined a few that are suggested in images like the one above that I captured with my Canon digital camera.

So, here is this image, or scene, if you will, and in the story, we are, so far, introduced to a character, this man, whose name is Ken Myroslav, and his environment, and a few aspects of his history, his family, the town, including its geographic, political and cultural location, in fact a significant amount of detail, each of which is a pathway leading to a myriad possibilities. The story could go anywhere. But it doesn’t. Music could shape that.

My considerations regarding the music in this case might be: 1) to evoke a compassionate sense of this character and how he views his life in the fractal edge of time when this image was made, which could include his relationship to a person taking the picture that frames him; 2) the word spoken, action or image that immediately precedes this one and 3) the next thing that happens.

An economic recession is what happens when people are not rewarded for fitting in. A person who doesn’t fit in feels alienated, like they don’t belong.

Experience of community is conjured as a myth held by those who fit in and those who want to fit in. People that believe in the myth and don’t fit in are depressed.

This is the link between economic and clinical depression.

The San Diego Union Tribune editorial staff, no longer having Bob Filner’s neck around to stretch, ran an editorial by a Sacramento neocon columnist, Steven Greenhut, in which he confuses the motivation behind a faux secessionist movement in Northern California.

North state secession vote is not just a ‘stunt’

Aside from Mr. Greenhut’s neocon political indoctrination, his comments on Norcal secessionitis misconstrues the irony as well as the weight of the idea that bigger, at least, when it comes to government, isn’t usually better. Neocon ideology must constantly run a-foul of such inconsistencies, having to worship Jefferson, a man who was as ruthless a selfish hypocrite as they come albeit no better or worse than most other politicians in recent political history. (The farce of the politician who promotes ideals that are not his own is an exhaustible comedic subject. Chaplin and Moliere merely touched the issue.)

In this case, the agenda of loggers and other marijuana growers in Northern California, which Greenhut cites as fueling the current argument for secession, is using the name of the 1941 movement to take advantage of name recognition. Jefferson’s face was printed on $2 bills and this Southern slave-holder is lionized to cupidic grade school children, just as Mao’s name was in China and Lenin’s in the USSR.

Today’s secessionists oppose dam removal and restrictions on timber clear-cutting in the Sierras. Dams in the north are being removed to restore water levels for watersheds and streams that are critical for salmon and steelhead populations (and the ecological systems of northern forests that includes thousands of indigenous species of flora and fauna, many near extinction because of the dams that have benefited few people, while the water levels downstream of dams adversely affects many more.

Today’s secessionists, Mr. Greenhut points out, want freedom from federal regulations of timber cutting. The forests protected by these regulations belong to the entire nation, not only those who want to exploit their timber value. If not for federal protection of forested watersheds and parklands that were protected by Franklin Roosevelt’s administration in 1938, the Olympic Peninsula would now be barren hills, like much of Oregon, a state that not only still permits clear-cutting, but also, finances education by selling state forests to clear-cutters. Mid 19th century, San Francisco and the bay area was redwood forests.

Greenhut’s neocon idealism views environmental and economic concerns as the proper concern of responsible local self-government but the interests Mr. Greenhut cites as backing this particular secession movement include those who would control local politics in order to clear-cut the Sierras.

Better known to people who live in rural areas north of Sacramento than here in Southern California, is the public subsidy of timber interests that began when, under Ronald Reagan’s reign as governor, the Department of Forestry was merged into the California Fire Department (now known as CalFire). State forest management since that merger has served the interests of timber production and attempted to deprive our forests of periodic natural burns that make a redwood forest possible, while transferring the cost of forest fire prevention and the risk to timber assets from those who invest in timberland securities sold on Wall Street to the taxpayers of the state.

Now, however, CalFire’s subsidy of timber interests has been subjected to cuts in the state budget. (Money is needed for pension funds and the burgeoning prison population.)

State forest management remains under the thumb of state fire department bureaucrats that know nothing about watershed ecology and less about forestry, while marijuana enterprises throughout the woodlands, which now produce the bulk of annual income in Norcal, pulls enough water from small streams to significantly lower river water levels, endangering previous investment in fish repopulation and dam removal. Secession is a smokescreen or in Greenhut’s own words, a ‘stunt’.

Matt Damon’s motion picture, Promised Land, is effectively, promoting fracking, while pretending to be critical. It washes the burden of guilt from the hands of the perpetrators, making the viewers accomplices, as if people living in suburban communities with no public transportation and a 20 mile commute have a choice about putting fuel in their cars or about where the fuel comes from.

Promised Land promotes the idea that you are responsible, as if as a voter in a democratic process, you had a say, as if government in the U.S, is responsible to the needs of the many, while in fact, the “Pigs At The Trough” as Ariana Huffington calls them in the eponymous book, those who fund expensive election campaigns, control your government’s mineral development policy and you know it.

Damon’s movie suggests that fracking technology is the problem, when it doesn’t matter how destructive a technology is for the ecosystem—the problem is that, due to other policies, people have no other way to feed their families and even though they must pull up stakes, abandon communities, they head for the fracking fields, presently the Dakotas, but the plan is to continue to exploit buried petrochemicals across the continent.

The argument made by those who benefit from fracking is economic independence from oil fields in the middle east but economic independence is but a myth in a global economy, in which international corporations and giants of government enterprise in China operate without regard for local or national political or geographic boundaries.

Economic recessions that eliminate employment opportunities are described as arcane fluctuations in the market place but in hindsight, recession has been exploited to make people more accepting of risks and ecological damage of development that led to disastrous engineering decisions, from the Salton Sea to Katrina and Fukushima.

Nuclear fission power plants are under construction with no acceptable plan for risks associated with storing nuclear waste. Hoover dam in Nevada and similar constructions in China, Egypt and Europe, have in common that they are publicly funded and built by workers who had no other opportunities. Those now employed in North Dakota know they are destroying the future habitability of the planet but they have no other choice if they are to enjoy the lifestyles promoted in the media and public education.

Examine your own values. Are you thrilled about living in a modest rustic home or would you rather have an SUV in the garage and a Seadoo in the driveway? Self esteem of children that watch TV depends on living the vision of their lives they see in sitcoms and social media, since birth and there’s nothing legal they can do to obtain the funds to support the lifestyle they’re conditioned to desire and they gladly go to North Dakota.

Some don’t because of family ties or affinity for homes in small towns but young people leave every small town as soon as they are able in hopes of finding a foothold, with a prayer things will improve, while politicians tell them that affordable gasoline will solve their problems. Those, who oppose fracking near their homes are characterized in the media as a lunatic fringe. Concerns about poisoning the Mississippi, the Delta and the Gulf of Mexico are paranoid.

Promise Land ultimately convinces viewers they are powerless to change the course of history, exonerating them from taking action, while comforted with the illusion that someone is paying useful attention, so they can feel better about being powerless. “It is hopeless and we are doomed.”  (Emoticon)

“Environmental issues” are semantic manipulations for thinking people but only those who have nothing better to do with their time are thinking and for most people, something better to do amounts to washing the car, smoking a joint, screwing a stranger, riding a bike or personal watercraft, generally narcissistic endeavors.

In hindsight, it’s as difficult to believe human beings are capable of the stupidity of the holocaust, engineering Fukushima, Salton Sea, Mono Lake, developing in the Mississippi delta that led to the destructive effect of Katrina as it is to imagine the hundreds of years and lives that went into building the great pyramids of Egypt and Aztec sacrifice. Yet at this moment, a dozen nuclear fission plants are under construction in India and China, an army is using munitions supplied by factories in Europe, China, Russia and the U.S. to destroy every city in Syria, tens of thousands of new homes are proposed in areas with no transportation infrastructure or water to support them.

The myth of modern media is just as strange. Those who produce and distribute media are no different from the legions that work in fracking fields. In both cases, it’s the only paid work they are offered. The proliferation of media on the internet serves ignorance and misinformation by promoting a multiplicity of partial truths without the benefit of a philosophic orientation. What leadership benefits from public ignorance?

Stupidity in leadership has been falsely attributed to technological advancement without the balance of a moral or ethical compass provided by a spiritual tradition, however, it is simply due to information technology designed to enable centralized management of huge populations. The combination of surging population growth and centralized control exaggerates effects of perverse stupidity, which on a local level, might be laughable. The problem is actually related to the elemental nature of human beings, who since they are social creatures, are guided by identification with shared core values if a community.

People decide what they like and who they are based on close relationships, which is why politics is local and when development policies are made by a distant central authority over which the individual has no direct say involving policies that affect them. Activities, like fracking, are employing engineers and laborers to carry out destructive development with no regard for risks or the ecological damage. This kind of thinking destroyed 95% of the forests of California and the Pacific Northwest and even though clear-cutting has been condemned for destroying a critical part of an ecosystem, the managers of Sierra Pacific, are clear-cutting in the Sierras today as if there were no tomorrow.

We see such things in hindsight but media of all types barrages the populace with ideas and values that overwhelm the senses and meanwhile, instill core values that are essentially a promotion of the narcissism common among youthful people. Older people, who are usually and traditionally regarded in small communities as possessors of wisdom of experience are portrayed in entertainments as incompetent and incapable, discrediting those who have the longest memories. This conditioning has convinced most people in America to anticipate incapacitation after the age of 55 or 60 and since young people accept this view of their elders, they naturally accept their own incompetence with relief and do their best to live up to this image since it removes their accountability.

In earlier times, communities respected the wisdom of age. Traditions determined the core values of the culture. Today, when the culture derives these values from media, in which incompetence is erroneously portrayed as an effect of aging, rather than application, just as people have enough experience to begin to understand how things work, they are not only encouraged to retire, but also, respected for giving up their dreams and denying their own values. Younger people, with little experience and less knowledge, who haven’t figured out the economic connections between climate change and unemployment lines are hired to shape the way their peers perceive the world.

Matt Damon, like the young lions and lionesses of Wall Street, Yale, Harvard, Hollywood, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, UCLA and so on, don’t have the experience to see the big picture but huge salaries suggests to them that they should, while the result of their work provides leadership in a culture to support fracking and whatever else.

Is this too simplistic? Do you think a tanking global economy is a naturally occurring disaster over which no one ever had control? Are billions invested in fracking now for some other reason than because nothing else pencils out?

Sinking the global economy only coincidentally drives responsible people to employment that does the worst damage to the ecosystem, reducing the capacity of the planet to sustain the life of most species, rather than just human beings but fracking is a symptom, the disease is that capitalism nurtures policies of development, the priorities of which are based on profiting from population growth rather than development to accommodate human needs within locally sustainable boundaries.

Generally, it’s bad to make fun of the deformed and to speak ill of the dead but exceptions are made for dead freaks like Mussolini, so where exactly is the line drawn?

For instance, when people seem more piggish than humanish, this does a disservice to the porcine species. Their faces stand out in my memory: a schizophrenic lawyer and a similarly afflicted professor of justice studies. Otherwise, alike in many ways. The lawyer, for instance, is an incorrigible thief, while the professor wouldn’t steal a pencil as a policy. If he  steps on your foot, he’d probably not notice it, while the lawyer would, and make an  insincere apology in her thing, cigarette stained voice.

And, while schizophrenia isn’t the element of their personalities that reminds me of pigs, it must be mentioned because their propensity for schizophrenia led them to lie. Many liars are talented people. It is the piggish quality that, when added to schizophrenia, creates a sort of malignancy, exemplified in both lawyer and professor, whose similarities of outlook, style, intellect, morality, ethics and  avarice made for an unusual story if their egos weren’t both so large, I can’t fit them together into the same story. Thankfully, their genetic trails are regressive and will die out. The relevant part of this story begins, not when I met them but when they met each other, which as you might expect, happened at a feeding trough.

The flowering dream

Carson McCullers


WHEN I WAS A CHILD of about four, I was walking with my nurse past a convent. For once, the convent doors were open. And I saw the children eating ice-cream cones, playing on iron swings, and I watched, fascinated. I wanted to go in, but my nurse said no, I was not Catholic. The next day, the gate was shut. But, year by year, I thought of what was going on, of this wonderful parry, where I was shut out. I wanted to climb the wall, but I was too little. I beat on the wall once, and I knew all the time that there was a marvelous party going on, but I couldn’t get in.

Spiritual isolation is the basis of most of my themes. My first book was concerned with this, almost entirely, and all of my books since, in one way or another. Love, and especially love of a person who is incapable of returning or receiving it, is at the heart of my selection of grotesque figures to write about — people whose physical incapacity is a symbol of their spiritual incapacity to love or receive love — their spiritual isolation.

To understand a work, it is important for the artist to be emotionally right on dead center; to see, to know, to experience the things he is writing about. Long before Harold Clurman, who, bless his heart, directed The Member of the Wedding, I think I had directed every fly and gnat in that room years ago.
The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.

I understand only particles. I understand the characters, but the novel itself is not in focus. The focus comes at random moments which no one can understand, least of all the author. For me, they usually follow great effort. To me, these illuminations are the grace of labor. All of my work has happened this way. It is at once the hazard and the beauty that a writer has to depend on such illuminations. After months of confusion and labor, when the idea has flowered, the collusion is Divine. It always comes from the subconscious and cannot be controlled. For a whole year I worked on The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter without understanding it at all. Each character was talking to a central character, but why, I didn’t know. I’d almost decided that the book was no novel, that I should chop it up into short stories. But I could feel the mutilation in my body when I had that idea, and I was in despair. I had been working for five hours and I went outside. Suddenly) as I walked across a road, it occurred to me that Harry Minowitz, the character all the other characters were talking to, was a different man, a deaf mute, and immediately the name was changed to John Singer. The whole focus of the novel was fixed and I was for the first time committed with my whole soul to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

What to know and what not to know? John Brown, from the American Embassy, was here to visit, and he pointed his long forefinger and said, “I admire you, Carson, for your ignorance.” I said, “Why?” He asked, “When was the Battle of Hastings, and what was it about? When was the Battle of Waterloo, and what was that about?” I said, “John, I don’t think I care much.” He said, “That’s what I mean. You don’t clutter your mind with the facts of life.”

When I was nearly finished with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, my husband mentioned that there was a convention of deaf mutes in a town near-by and he assumed that I would want to go and observe them. I told him that it was the last thing I wanted to do because I already had made my conception of deaf mutes and didn’t want it to be disturbed. I presume James Joyce had the same attitude when he lived abroad and never visited his home again, feeling his Dublin was fixed forever — which it is.

A writer’s main asset is intuition; too many facts impede intuition. A writer needs to know so many things, but there are so many things he doesn’t need to know — he needs to know human things even if they aren’t “wholesome,” as they call it.

Every day, I read the New York Daily News, and very soberly. It is interesting to know the name of the lover’s lane where the stabbing took place, and the circumstances which the New York Times never reports. In that unsolved murder in Staten Island, it is interesting to know that the doctor and his wife, when they were stabbed, were wearing Mormon nightgowns, three-quarter length. Lizzie Borden’s breakfast, on the sweltering summer day she killed her father, was mutton soup. Always details provoke more ideas than any generality could furnish. When Christ was pierced in His left side, it is more moving and evocative than if He were just pierced.

One cannot explain accusations of morbidity. A writer can only say he writes from the seed which flowers later in the subconscious. Nature is not abnormal, only lifelessness is abnormal. Anything that pulses and moves and walks around the room, no matter what thing it is doing, is natural and human to a writer. The fact that John Singer, in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, is a deaf-and-dumb man is a symbol, and the fact that Captain Penderton, in Reflections in a Golden Eye, is homosexual, is also a symbol, of handicap and impotence. The deaf mute, Singer, is a symbol of infirmity, and he loves a person who is incapable of receiving his love. Symbols suggest the story and theme and incident, and they are so interwoven that one cannot understand consciously where the suggestion begins. I become the characters I write about. I am so immersed in them that their motives are my own. When I write about a thief, I become one; when I write about Captain Penderton, I become a homosexual man; when I write about a deaf mute, I become dumb during the time of the story. I become the characters I write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said, “Nothing human is alien to me.”

When I wrote the stage version of The Member of the Wedding, I was at the time paralyzed, and my outward situation was miserable indeed; but when I finished that script, I wrote to a friend of mine, “Oh, how wonderful it is to be a writer, I have never been so happy.

When work does not go well, no life is more miserable than that of a writer. But when it does go well, when the illumination has focused a work so that it goes limpidly and flows, there is no gladness like it.
Why does one write? Truly it is financially the most ill-rewarded occupation in the world. My lawyer has figured out how much I made from the book The Member of the Wedding, and it is, over the five years I worked on it, twenty-eight cents a day. Then the irony is, the play The Member of the Wedding had made so much money that I’ve had to give eighty per cent to the government — which I’m happy, or at least have to be happy, to do.

It must be that one writes from some subconscious need for communication, for self-expression. Writing is a wandering, dreaming occupation. The intellect is submerged beneath the unconscious the thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination. Yet writing is not utterly amorphous and unintellectual. Some of the best novels and prose are as exact as a telephone number, but few prose writers can achieve this because of the refinement of passion and poetry that is necessary. I don’t like the word prose; it’s too prosaic. Good prose should be fused with the light of poetry; prose should be like poetry, poetry should make sense like prose.
I like to think of Anne Frank and her immense communication, which was the communication not only of a twelve-year-old child, but a communication of conscience and courage.

Here truly there was isolation, but physical rather than spiritual isolation. Several years ago, Anne Frank’s father made an appointment to see me at the Hotel Continental in Paris. We talked together and he asked me if I would dramatize the diary of his daughter. He also gave me the book, which I had not yet read But as I was reading the book, I was so upset that I broke out in a rash on my hands and feet, and I had to tell him that under the circumstances I could not do the play.
Paradox is a clue to communication, for what is not often leads to the awareness of what is. Nietzsche once wrote to Cosima Wagner, “If only three people could understand me.” Cosima understood him and years later a man called Adolf Hitler built a whole philosophical system around a misunderstanding of Nietzsche. It is paradoxical that a great philosopher like Nietzsche and a great musician like Richard Wagner could have contributed so much to the world’s suffering in this century. Partial understanding for an ignorant person is a warped and subjective understanding, and it was with this type of understanding that the philosophy of Nietzsche and the creations of Richard Wagner were the mainstay of Hitler’s emotional appeal to the German people. He was able to juggle great ideas into the despair of his time, which we must remember was a real despair.

When someone asks me who has influenced my work, I point to O’Neill, the Russians, Faulkner, Flaubert. Madame Bovary seems to be written with divine economy. It is one of the most painfully written novels, and one of the most painfully considered, of any age. Madame Bovary is a composite of the realistic voice of Flaubert’s century, of the realism versus the romantic mind of his times. In its lucidity and faultless grace, it seems to have flown straight from Flaubert’s pen without an interruption in thought. For the first time, he was dealing with his truth as a writer.

It is only with imagination and reality that you get to know the things a novel requires. Reality alone has never been that important to me. A teacher once said that one should write about one’s own back yard; and by this, I suppose, she meant one should write about the things that one knows most intimately. But what is more intimate than one’s own imagination? The imagination combines memory with insight, combines reality with the dream.

People ask me why I don’t go back to the South more often. But the South is a very emotional experience for me, fraught with all the memories of my childhood. When I go back South I always get into arguments, so that a visit to Columbus in Georgia is a stirring up of love and antagonism. The locale of my books might always be Southern, and the South always my homeland. I love the voices of Negroes — like brown rivers. I feel that in the short trips when I do go to the South, in my own memory and in the newspaper articles, I still have my own reality.

Many authors find it hard to write about new environments that they did not know in childhood. The voices reheard from childhood have a truer pitch. And the foliage — the trees of childhood — are remembered more exactly. When I work from within a different locale from the South, I have to wonder what time the flowers are in bloom — and what flowers? I hardly let characters speak unless they are Southern. Wolfe wrote brilliantly of Brooklyn, but more brilliantly of the Southern cadence and ways of speech. This is particularly true of Southern writers because it is not only their speech and the foliage, but their entire culture — which makes it a homeland within a homeland. No matter what the politics, the degree or non-degree of liberalism in a Southern writer, he is still bound to this peculiar regionalism of language and voices and foliage and memory. Few Southern writers are truly cosmopolitan. When Faulkner writes about the R.A.F. and France, he is somehow not convincing — while I’m convinced in almost every line about Yoknapatawpha County. In-deed, to me The Sound and the Fury is probably the greatest American novel. It has an authenticity, a grandeur and, most of all, a tenderness that stems from the combination of reality and the dream that is the divine collusion. Hemingway, on the contrary, is the most cosmopolitan of all the American writers. He is at home in Paris, in Spain, in America, the Indian stories of his childhood. Perhaps it is his style, which is a delivery, a beautifully worked out form of expression. As expert as Hemingway is at producing and convincing the reader of his various outlooks, emotionally he is a wanderer. In Hemingway’s style some things are masked in the emotional content of his work. If I prefer Faulkner to Hemingway, it’s because I am more touched by the familiar — the writing that reminds me of my own childhood and sets a standard for a remembering of the language. Hemingway seems to me to use language as a style of writing.

The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. How, without love and the intuition that comes from love, can a human being place himself in the situation of another human being? He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love, and great courage. How can you create a character without love and the struggle that goes with love?

For many years I have been working on a novel called Clock Without Hands, and will probably finish it in about two more years. My books take a long time. This novel is in process day by day of being focused. As a writer, I’ve always worked very hard. But as a writer, I’ve also known that hard work is not enough. In the process of hard work, there must come an illumination, a divine spark that puts the work into focus and balance.

When I asked Tennessee Williams how he first thought of The Glass Menagerie, he said it was suggested by a glass curtain he saw at the house of one of his grandfather’s parishioners. From then on it became what he called a memory play. How the recollection of that glass curtain fitted into the memories of his boyhood, neither he nor I could understand, but then the unconscious is not easily understood.

How does creation begin in any art? As Tennessee wrote The Glass Menagerie as a memory play, I wrote “Wunderkind” when I was seventeen years old, and it was a memory, although not the reality of the memory — it was a foreshortening of that memory. It was about a young music student. I didn’t write about my real music teacher — I wrote about the music we studied together because I thought it was truer. The imagination is truer than the reality.

The passionate, individual love — the old Tristan-Isolde love, the Eros love — is inferior to the love of God, to fellowship, to the love of Agape — the Greek god of the feast, the God of brotherly love — and of man. This is what I tried to show in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe’ in the strange love of Miss Amelia for the little hunchback, Cousin Lymon.

The writer’s work is predicated not only on his personality but by the region in which he was born. I wonder sometimes if what they call the “Gothic” school of Southern writing, in which the grotesque is paralleled with the sublime, is not due largely to the cheapness of human life in the South. The Russians are like the Southern writers in that respect. In my childhood, the South was almost a feudal society. But the South is complicated by the racial problem more severely than the Russian society. To many a poor Southerner, the only pride that he has is the fact that he is white, and when one’s self-pride is so pitiably debased, how can one learn to love? Above all, love is the main generator of all good writing. Love, passion, compassion are all welded together.

In any communication, a thing says to one person quite a different thing from what it says to another, but writing, in essence, is communication; and communication is the only access to love — to love, to conscience, to nature, to God, and to the dream. For myself, the further I go into my own work and the more I read of those I love, the more aware I am of the dream and the logic of God, which indeed is a Divine collusion.

Esquire, December 1959

“To put the influence of Jews in context keep in mind that the current population of the United States is 301 million, and although the estimated Jewish population in the USA varies considerably by source, 5.5 million is mid-range.

So Jews make up 1.8% of the United States population.

The current worldwide Jewish population is approximately 13 million, and the total world population is estimated to be over 6.5 billion, so that makes Jews 0.2% of the world population.

http://www.holology.com/who.html