Nov 17, 2023

unloading and disappearing

 A locator.  The end of 2023. Drought in the westies, parched streams, iron earth. The woman still planting, demanding the ground respond...  The collie still panting, still chasing long balls.  Otherwise, "no news" as we say, circling up at the beginning of rock steady boxing class, if nothings happened since last we gathered, two days ago. Or in this context, the last 2 years and some.

Actually, there was something...  A few weeks ago Doug Clark died, of natural causes.   He'd tried to reach me for months but the phone connection broke each time. He had told me last spring that he'd been ill.  Covid for one. And then the other day a call from Q, a gruff voice I didn't recognize. "Doug died last night, he told me to call and let you know." Who that man was I don't know.

So the mystery will remain unsolved. I had imagined I would have had a last chance to get the truth, that Carol and Jack did the murders, but not Doug.  He always, always insisted on his innocence, which a criminal psychologist told me once was highly unusual. In the end, I don't think he did the killings.  All the best evidence suggested he wasn't the one, his abuse of Shannon, the 12 year old girl in the drama, notwithstanding, and of course his outrageous personality.... The problem is I gave up on it finally. I lost the drive to solve it and I wonder about that.  And what about the murder of Marina H.  Also, never solved.  Something forever too cold to touch.  

I need to straighten out these narratives, close the pantry of horrors. I know that.


May 16, 2022

Four years later,  Another beginning but how long this time?  We're running out of scene changes.  Same old but the dog is new.  Rorschach-colored, Holsteinish. 90 percet border collie. 10 percent crowd funded.  Chuck a ball into deep space, sometimes he'll catch it, otherwise, on the bounce and a then a long high jump, land, look around, as if to say, "did you see that? Am I awesome or what?" You are, roars the crowd. Meanwhile, I poop up the shit and we go on. The dog motors on, we exchange places, i sniff, he shuffles, he looks badly old all of a sudden, not PD but like it. He doesn't look good, everybody says that, thinks that.  And all the while i'm thinking where's Barbara. Will anybody throw the fucking ball!

Mar 10, 2018

Once more we're down to last things. It's been a while.  But the metaphors are always notable...  Last visit to this museum or that restaurant or the other park.  The one we haven't been to in ages.  Or dozens of other places.  Or people not to be seen again.  Most likely. The odds are highly unlikely.  Last things and so discard, the game is ending.  The next place?  We have it mapped out.  Sketches are in the making.  The paper work is under way.  The possibilities of work are under discussion.   In the meantime, I'm having to take up the spots.  Do the unmemorizing that's required.  Put all that in the cloud.  As it were.  Above all, delete! Everything, and then imagine it's like trying to get the little blue digits off the inside of our arm.  That voodo you do so well.  Smoke gets in your eyes, that kind of thing. 

Oct 25, 2017

An obituary

Eloise Hardt, a long-time, largely television actress, died on June 25th.  She may have been 99, although there is some question as to her date of birth.  She is known for her work on The Dennis O'Keefe Show (1959); as well as performances in Incubus (1966); and Save the Tiger (1973).  She also won praise for her performance as the debauched but ever sympathetic character Rita Beacon in The Days of Our Lives in 1970.  Ms. Hardt got her start in Hollywood through her mentor, patron, and for a time, her lover, director John Huston.

Ms. Hardt, often known in Hollywood by her nickname, Cherokee, was the daughter of a Cherokee Indian and a German electrical engineer. The family, which included her six brothers and one younger sister, lived in Lawton, Oklahoma. During the Great Depression, after an attempted suicide, the father left the family and moved to Texas.  In the spirit of Steinbeck’s Joad family, Cherokee, her mother, sister and younger brothers made their way to California in the back of a flatbed truck hired for the trip. The story, however improbable it sounds, was that this little party of Okies, out of money and resources, stopped at a filling station just across the Arizona-California border only to find that the station attendant was the eldest brother, "Indian Joe.”

Cherokee started off in Hollywood as a model, under the tutelage of photographer Tom Kelly, and then got a one-year contact with Howard Hawkes.  During World War II she worked at the Hollywood Canteen, where she met a young flyer, the “true love of my life”, who was later killed in the Pacific theater.  She was married three times: including a marriage to the prominent Austrian writer and journalist, Hans Habe, with whom she had a daughter Marina, born in 1951. 

In the early hours of December 29th 1968, Ms. Habe was kidnapped as she entered her driveway on Cynthia Street in West Hollywood — she was home for Christmas vacation from the University of Hawaii and staying with her mother. Two days later her body was found at the bottom of a ravine off Mulholland Drive. The murder has never been solved, but has attracted much speculation over the years.  According to police, the most likely suspect, a biker who may have seen Marina by bizarre coincidence earlier in the evening, died some years ago.

Ms. Hardt married publicist and producer Paul MacNamara in 1971; the marriage lasted until he died in 1991.  She died after a long illness at an assisted living facility in Palos Verdes.

She will be remembered as a no-holds-barred woman, a sometime comedienne, alternately sweet and difficult, always willing to risk, and at the most critical moments in a life fearless and compassionate.  Her one regret was that she wasn’t more focused on her career. In the end, she was less an actress than a Hollywood character whose life should have been made into a film in which she could star.

In the years afterward, she went through a religious conversion, away from Catholicism to ‘Born Again’.  “I’ve committed every crime in the book,” she once said.  “But Jesus has forgiven me and now all I want is to be with my daughter.”





Feb 8, 2017



Next

It was the last time we would see each other.  But which of us was more aware of that and what did that mean?

I hadn't seen her in years.  Hadn't talked to her in a year.  I found her in the lunch room, in 'the facility'.  The dying facility as she once called it. She was sitting at a table with another woman.  I had hoped to meet her in some other less abrupt way.  There was no empty chair.  I finally approached her, sliding into her field of vision.  She recognized me.  "You were in an accident," she said.  I shook my head.  "Well, you will be."   I shook my head and pulled up a chair.

"You must learn to be less arrogant," she said following up just where we'd left off. I could hardly hear her.  I made her repeat it. "Less arrogant and listen to the Lord.  Don't talk so much."  All true, I thought, although it applied to both of us.  And that brought to mind those nights at the backgammon table, hour after hour, year after year, throwing down the dice from the leather shakers and sometimes in the frenzy, the martinis, on and on, turning the cube on the bar regardless of the consequences.  Did we learn nothing from the metaphors?

"You should leave," she said finally, although i'd only been there for a couple of hours.  I had imagined spending the whole afternoon.   But of course it was too much.  I stood up.  "Send in the next person," she said, with the authority of the autocratic priestess.  I moved toward her, to kiss her on the forehead.  "Don't touch me," she said.  Was that to make the most of a dramatic moment, which was her nature, although now, I don't know, I don't know if in that moment it was some reflex action.  Create one last vaccum. Or was it simply to prevent the dam from washing away?  And to allow the flood to include every last bit of sadness and horror.

"You must let Jesus into your life," she said still again and once more, as it always happens between us, the words seemed canned. The truth of the moment was suddenly disingenuous.  I told her I loved her and repeated that three times, but it was too late.  Any good director would have shaken his head, waved his hands, and cut the take.  "Tell the next person to come in," she said again. "Next," she said, and this time I left.  Even then I could hear her repeat it.  "Next!"  

As always, I was never able to establish equality.  Not since a day on the beach at Zuma.  On a dead calm afternoon.  "I couldn't resist," she began.

On the one hand, so what?  Why one earth would you think of something like that at such a moment.  I tried.  It worked or it didn't.  There was closure or there wasn't.  No one could ever say.  But still now, even now when it's still not too late, I'm thinking if we just had a few more minutes to make things right....

Nov 15, 2016

For the right wing media, the bloody chum is already in the water.  Not least for Marc Levin and then Michael Savage, who on Monday declared his "bromance" over with Trump.  His argument: Too many kind remarks to Obama.  Already too much ambiguity about how "alt.right" Trump will be.  Savage is the fellow, a little toy poodle of a man, who has licked and yapped at Trump for months and went to any end to have him on his show once a week, where he could faun to his heart’s content, but now it seems the savage is being discarded.  Not even an invitation to the inauguration.

And so the right wing media is beginning to feed on itself. Glenn Beck's attack on Bannon is also noteworthy. Of course, Savage and his ilk have always needed hatred to survive, no matter how manufactured, no matter the source, and now, we see the chemical proof....

But here's the point. The strategy to deal with Hate Radio, among traditional news outlets, has always been to ignore it, to undignify it, to block it with silence... Unless there was something particularly outrageous. But I would argue that's no longer effective. The obligation now is to call these people on their lies and misinformation relentlessly, and down to the smallest detail. Because this is what lead so many people to live in an alternate universe of opinion. Hate Radio has never really been seen as the threat that it is.... 

Of course, what’s remarkable is that Limbaugh would have his audience believe — with some success clearly — that his own doubts about global warming outweigh the analysis and judgment of  97 percent of climate scientists, above all, NASA’s Goddard Institute, whose scientists, have eliminated the other possibilities…..


So catch them on everything, and spread the news everywhere, attack their advertisers and their sponsors... Focus on their collusions and manipulations.... On the Internet and in everyday conversation.. Of course, Politifact does much of this; and there are some others, but that cannot be the whole effort.... The information war needs to begin in earnest.

Nov 10, 2016

A note in a bottle thrown overboard...  

To record the moment that seems of such extraordinary importance just now. But maybe I have it all wrong.  Could it be nothing? — just a trompe l'oeil, a trump l'oeil, merely a software bug.

A note for Claire and Finn, at least.  And others unknown or born: I am struck dead by the definition and weight of this moment in American history.  The immediate effect of this, the day after, is not slight or pretend.  It's real and physical.  As though there's been some kind of an explosion.  A precursor of dirty bombs? Never felt before.

(On that note, is it possible that this atavistic warrior will frighten the North Koreans, ISIS, and the like into submission, just because he is so rash and unpredictable....  Could that be a good to come out of this?  Or the reverse....)

No matter. Right now the sensation is a sense of personal failure, and failure in the aggregate — of my generation, my race, my country....

Others have summed up the social and political explanations much better than I.  Nevertheless, for me the horror is tied tight to the low quality of opinion. It's not just that people have learned how not to think critically, helped by the demonstration of uncritical thinking in the media every day, day in and day out; it's that everything is working together against thought, much less noble thought.

The 140-character speed with which we live inevitably ends in reaction not reflection.  The misperception of things is ubiquitous; and of course the inability to filter truth from fiction.  The two are entwined everywhere in the culture and no one teaches you how to recognize one from the other. Once upon a time people knew the difference between a novel and a report...

Add a readiness to dismiss people for no good reason, to kill them off metaphorically most times, and for the slightest reason; and then the murky and deceptive notion of entitlement, for high and low; and an impatience with taking things apart and putting them back together.

In sum, a low quality of opinion, which leads people to lack of discernment and finally blindness.

Add to that a sense there's been real progress in the last 8 years and now with the flick of a broom handle, it's all swept out the back door.  How can that be?

And so right now, the day after, I am seething at the stupidity of my fellow citizens, seething at their careless and selfishness, all the worst qualities, which I share, but am able to control and repair.   That's my solace. I've been thrown overboard but I can see land; and I have a plan.  That's my conceit.  Even if I have forsaken 'we'.

A Syrian was quoted in a New York Times Sunday Magazine piece in August called, "Fractured lands", to say, roughly, that the fighting will not stop until all the people who have fought in these civil wars are dead.  "It will take a decade", the man guessed.

How long for this civil war to end....



Nov 9, 2016

Julia Whitty, the environmental writer for Mother Jones Magazine, was recently interviewed once more about the catastrophe caused by the destruction of Deepwater Horizon, the BP oil rig that exploded in April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. The hook for the interview was the new film, which apparently gives short shrift to the ecological damage caused by the explosion.

Whitty noted that among the lingering effects are large bubbles filled with chemicals used to seal the well heads. These bubbles are huge and drift endlessly through the gulf and beyond, blocking the path of certain fish who every day migrate from the ocean depths to the surface, in some places beyond the gulf, a distance of some 25 miles.

I heard the interview while driving from San Francisco to Santa Barbara and so adopted the metaphor to my trip.  I was on my way to watch my younger son in his last college soccer game. He is a fifth year, redshirt senior at UC Davis playing the last game of the season against UC Santa Barbara. UCSB is the perennial soccer power in the Big West Conference and had won seven league games, tied 2 and lost none. At one point in the season they were ranked in the top 15 nationally. For its part, UC Davis was playing just below 500, a very talented if unpredictable team that had lost three straight, each by a single goal.  One of the losses had been just a week earlier to Santa Barbara.

The drive down 101 is about 5 and a half hours, along a two-lane great wall of cement winding down through the Salinas Valley,  past Paso Robles and the turn off to the Hearst Castle, past San Luis Obispo, that debutante of a town now with it's own Sephora and Apple stores.  Down through Pismo Beach, with its faux Monaco visage, past Santa Maria and finally down to the Los Caneros exit to Harder Field.

It was raining much of the way, and so perfect for an introspection. For some water boarding as it were....  And so you've spent all these years going to soccer games, I said to myself, and before that with the older boy, football games (he was a two-time all NESCAC wideout).  What is it about that need to watch your children perform.  What is it about that excitement of watching these games.  God knows I haven't missed many.  What a distraction.  What lunacy.  What a diversion from the real work to be done.... Or not....  (an idea to be continued ...   or not)

Jan 26, 2016

Vilmos Zsigmond's Last Film


(This is the eulogy offered during a memorial service for Vilmos Zsigmond on January 23rd, 2016 in "Little Chapel by the Sea" in Pacific Grove, California. Vilmos was 85 when he died shortly before midnight on January 1st, 2016)

I
met him 22 years ago through my wife, Barbara, who is one of Susan’s six sisters. (Susan was Vilmos' second wife)  But I did not know him closely until he became ill last July. It was then I began to visit him each day, and you could say, I fell in love.
            Here is something of the man I knew.

 (Vilmos's World; Tata, Hungary; 1955. Copyright@2015)

H
e was named after his father, a 6’5” soccer goalie who played with one of the great Hungarian club teams in the late 1930s and later coached a professional Moroccan team. The game that Vilmos never forgot was one his father played against Milan.  Late in the first half his father got kicked in the face.  His nose broken, bleeding badly, the manager suggested he come out. “No, just give me a towel,” Vilmos sr. said, then wiped off the blood and played the second half. 
          “He was so pissed off; he was like a tiger,” Vilmos would remember.
            The Hungarian team won; ‘Villy’, as his father was called, was taken to the hospital where hundreds of fans came to visit him.
            Vilmos, the son, never forgot that moment watching the tiger and desperately wanted to play soccer himself, but his father told him he was too small and weak and suggested he play table tennis instead.  It turned out to be good advice.  Vilmos became an excellent player which lead to a job in a rope factory and then to educational opportunities, apprenticeships, and authority. 
            And then one day while taking pictures in a field on the out-skirts of Szeged, he met a gypsy fortuneteller who told him, “you will sail on a ship across a great ocean to a big city, where you will become an important artist.”  
           
H
is father offered just two bits of advice: whatever you choose as a career be the best at it and always trust your intuition. Incidentally, his father followed a family tradition and created several leather-bound scrapbooks, meticulously filled with family photos, including Vilmos’s sister and every last cousin. But not a single photo of Vilmos’s mother.  Which is its own story.  

A
s for his career, Vilmos became a cinematographer by chance, by choice, and by obsessively hard work.  He was a lighter and regarded among his peers as a poet-magician who believed in the power of shadows, who believed that realism should trump the artistic. Yet at the same time Vilmos was most gratified to capture the abstract nature of a scene. Or a moment.
            “I’m not that good at making things up!” He told me several times.
            He was an artist with the gift of cinematic sight, but he was also oddly geeky. His small studio in Big Sur was more like a Radio Shack outlet than a dark room.  He loved devices, apps, updates, and computer shortcuts, and yet in his thrall often became the fisherman caught in his nets.

H
e was drawn, so he said, solely to the look of something and had little interest in the plot. Sometimes at the end of watching a movie he had only the barest sense of what went on, but was acutely aware of angles and colors.
            When the shooting had finished for Brian de Palma’s Blow Out, the ending was still a muddle; de Palma asked Vilmos what he thought the ending should be.  The choice was between tragedy and a happy ending.  “I’m a cinematographer,” replied Vilmos. “and it doesn’t make any difference to me who lives and who dies. it’s your choice. I’m merely another spectator in the theater.”
            That was not quite true but he could see both sides: the artistic value of the sad ending and the commercial value of the happy ending.  He could see both sides but could never decide for himself.
            His interest in photography began with an uncle who gave him a book written by Eugene Dulovits, a prominent Hungarian photographer and camera inventor. This he read while spending three months in bed recovering from a kidney infection when he was 17.
             That infection forecast his last illness.
           
T
he man was an academy award winner, but also an escape artist — although his bushy brow would furrow at the idea.  Still, he was always escaping to or from. In 1956, from Hungry to New York. A couple of years later, from New York to Hollywood.  Years after that, from Hollywood to Big Sur and then San Francisco. He was forever just leaving for the next city. The next movie, the next honor, the next class to teach.
            Always loyal to his commitments, no matter how ill he was or ill-conceived the project. 
            A year ago he went to China for a week just so that someone could put his name on their film.  And then back to Los Angeles to teach a class, which cost him more to go to than he made, and back to Budapest for his gallery opening and back to Monterey for another film class. 
            He could never say no, especially to students and apprentices. To nearly anybody. He fed off being wanted, which is perhaps partly a reflection of the lonely childhood he described to me. Without one parent or another.  Serving as a waiter at the age of 10 in his stepmother’s tavern.
            Always between poverty and the bourgeoisie.

I
n the hospital, even to the end, he was always talking about escape.  From the place, from his condition. “How did this happen to me?” he would say and shake his head and roll his eyes, and then he would demand that I push down the bed rails and pull him up. “You have to get me out of here,” he would say, and there was no delirium. But when I got him sitting up he couldn’t stand, and all we could do was shake our heads.
            He was so much tougher than his father imagined.
            And yet through these last months he was forever apologizing or thanking.  “Don’t worry about it,” he said one night in his apartment when he fell out of bed and needed help to get back. “I’m fine. I can stay here on the floor. It’s okay.”

H
e could be wickedly stubborn.  A year ago he had an auto accident driving from Big Sur to Los Angeles.  He fell asleep.  The car crossed the road, went down a ravine near San Luis Obispo and was totaled.  He got out, made his way up to the highway, and still found his way to a dinner engagement that night in Los Angeles.
            And when was it, not long before that, when he tried to outrun the highway patrol on the road into Big Sur. Realizing he’d been clocked at 80 miles an hour he ducked on to a side road but the police found him. 
            As the officer leaned in the window, Vilmos, with the utmost charm, responded, “Is there anything wrong officer?”
            Vilmos was ever gracious, always full of compliments.  He was both naïve and savvy; simple and sophisticated. He sometimes gave the sense of being distracted even when he wasn’t.  Sometimes, I thought it was a cover.
            In the years I knew him, I don’t think I ever saw him get truly angry.  He could be cutting but he didn’t keep his knifes. 
            He loathed controversy.
            He was endlessly contradictory.
            Once he said, “Hungary is part of my heritage, but I feel more American than Hungarian because I spent the best time of my life in America.”  
            Another time he said, “the best part of my life was coming out of the school in Hungary where I learned the art and craft of cinematography.”
            Incidentally, he was a democrat and loved President Obama — for his eloquence and sense of fairness. One of Vilmos's greatest hopes was that he might convince his friend Prime Minister Orban that Obama was a great president.
          
H
is favorite movies included, among so many others, The Cranes Are Flying and Ballad of a Soldier.  As for style he felt Bunuel was too artistic, too impressionistic. At the opposite end, he felt Sven Nykvist was painfully stark, painfully realistic. 
            And what about your own films? I asked. Which is your favorites?
            We began going down the list and after a while it became clear that every movie beginning with Deliverance was his favorite.  But perhaps the Deer Hunter above all.  And Heaven’s Gate, which he always believed was a masterpiece and finally, all these years later, critics are beginning to agree.
            Other cinematographers he revered included G.R. Aldo who shot Vittorio de Sica’s Umberto D, the classic post war black and white film about a man and his dog.  Vilmos was particularly drawn to the ending when the old man decides to commit suicide and lies down on the railroad tracks with his dog.  At the last minute the dog jumps away and the old man follows. 
            “The dog was saying, ‘you can kill yourself but you’re not killing me.’ And so the old man chooses life, they get back to their routines and become friends again.  It is a very life-affirming moment.”
            If Vilmos was ambivalent about ’the happy ending’ he was always looking for the life-affirming moment — in a film or in life.
            
R
everend Erickson, please don’t be offended if I tell you that Vilmos never believed in Lutheranism, much less the Catholicism forced on him by his stepmother. Just a few weeks ago, with death sipping soda in the corner, he told me that he believed in a divine intelligence; how else to explain such a wondrous and unfathomable world. 
            His skepticism for organized religion grew out of his distrust of functionaries, whether from political parties or the church.  What he believed in, and what he trusted, had nothing to do with Man, only Man’s creator. 
            His greatest regret was not spending more time with his children.

A
nd what else did he believe in?  He believed in his ability to make the right choice. Looking back on his life he said once, “I always make the right choice to do something useful. That’s why I went to meet my father in Salzburg in 1955.” Vilmos was at a crossroads just then and took an opportunity to ask his father for guidance. 
            “The decision was made by accident. I sought his advice because he was finally available. I had all the choices: to go to Paris, London, or Australia. But then my father said,’ go to America’; so I get a hold of Laszlo (Kovacs), and I said, ‘let’s go to Hollywood.’ “
            Vilmos added, “I don’t believe you can make your own luck. You’re either lucky or not.”

I
n a book written in French and published in 1955,  Vilmos’ father gathered together 100 anecdotes from his career.  In one he wrote, “At the end of the first half, In the locker room, feeling very discouraged, I told myself that it was over, that I was too old of a soccer player and I had nothing to offer. Even that acclaimed intuition that had served me so faithfully throughout my career had abandoned me. But no – during the second half, our luck turned and soon the score was 2-2 and that lead to a third goal giving us the victory. My intuition was still good; I was not yet ‘finished.’ “

I
n a conversation not long ago, Vilmos commented that when you look at a Rembrandt there’s always a story, and your eye, in the hands of a master,  knows just where to find it.  Of course, the same is true of photography. 
            “If you take a picture of a storm,” he told me one night and then paused, his face tilted up to the light, eyes closed, for a very long time laying out his words. “If you take a picture of a storm, it would not make any sense unless there is a boat, just the sea is not enough. And so you use the boat to explain the ocean. You must always have a human element.”

A
week before he died, Vilmos and I sat in the empty lounge of the dialysis unit in a San Francisco hospital.  We were watching a basketball game and the nurse was trying to persuade Vilmos to take his medicine; he was in and out of his delirium.          
            It was at times like these that sometimes we made movies, often with just one scene.  Short subjects as it were. One movie was about a wall-sized armoire, each drawer jammed with exotic liqueurs and secrets from his life. Another movie was about the nurses handling an emergency: his own. This time it was about Kobe Bryant, the great Laker’s star, now playing his last season.
            "Can't you see I'm working!" Vilmos said to the nurse, whose patient Filipina smile could not be undone.  She apologized, slipped her spoon with applesauce and pills into his mouth, and fled to her station.
            He spent several minutes assembling his imaginary crew and then asked, “Who’s missing?”.
            “The starlets,” I said on the fly, thinking of Susan (his wife), and Julia (his daughter from a previous marriage). They’d gone down to the cafeteria.
            “Yes, we need the starlets,” he said. “Ok, then we will wait for them.”
            “Set your F stops at 248,” he went on, and then thinking of the cameras behind him he added, “How many meters do they have left?”
             “They have enough,” I said. 
             “Both cameras?”
             “Both cameras,” I said.
             “There must be 50 meters in each camera. Tell everyone to take their spots.”
             “Take your spots,” I said, feeling like the first officer in an old submarine movie.
             “Where’s Kobe?” he said, then turned to me, suddenly playful, clear-eyed and sure. “We’re recording this, right?” he said, with the wink of a man who had suddenly escaped his delirium.
            Just then the starlets walked off the elevator.  As they came into his view he looked at me with mock exasperation, as though to say ‘starlets never respect the clock.’ 
            But there was another look as well, a look of such fondness and relief at their presence you could hardly imagine.
            Vilmos waved his hands and clapped. Everyone, real and imagined, found their marks.  He was following his intuition just as he always did.

            “Action, action, action,” he shouted, and off we went.