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Winnebago Man

August 16, 2010

The Internet continues to change our culture in various ways. In recent years we have seen the phenomenon of the YouTube celebrity (one website uses the term, “viral video superstar”.) One such person is Jack Rebney. He did an industrial film for the Winnebago company in 1989. The out takes, in which Rebney repeatedly loses his temper, were circulated on videotape among collectors. When YouTube was created, the video was immediately uploaded, and it has been viewed by millions of people since.

The documentary filmmaker, Ben Steinbauer, was curious about Rebney and wanted to know what happened to him. With the help of a private detective, he tracked down Rebney and found him living in a cabin in the mountains of Northern California. At first, Rebney tells Steinbauer that he doesn’t mind his notoriety. However, Rebney finally admits that he finds the video humiliating. He hates the Internet and he despises the people who watch the video. (He refers to them as having “room temperature IQ’s”.) With great difficulty, Steinbauer manages to persuade Rebney to attend a found video show in San Francisco. Rebney is pleased by the reception he gets there, and he finds that the people in the audience are intelligent and very appeciative of what he’s done.

I greatly enjoyed Winnebago Man. However, as I watched it, I kept getting the feeling that Rebney is perhaps a more interesting person than the filmmakers were willing to document. When they first approach Rebney, he wants to talk about his political views. They try to get him to talk about his childhood and his marriage instead. He refuses to discuss these things. At one point they try to film Rebney standing in front of a Wal-Mart, but the store manager chases them away. We never learn what it is that Rebney wanted to say about Wal-Mart. We do hear Rebney make some snarcky comments about Dick Cheney, but that is almost all we get about his politics. (In the out takes shown with the end credits, we see Rebney making fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger.) My suspicion is that the filmmakers were intent on trying to make Rebney come across as likable. I think the film might have been more interesting if they had let the old man rant.

Posted in Cinema, Popular Culture | 3 Comments »

Harvey Pekar (1939-2010)

July 17, 2010

I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Harvey Pekar, one of my personal heroes. I knew he had been having health problems for a long time, but still the news of his death came as a bit of a shock. I was hoping that he would still be with us for quite a while.

Pekar’s American Splendor comics broadened the art of storytelling. He had a remarkable ability to find humor and poignance in every-day situations. His comics make “minimalist” short story writers look pathetic. One of the things I like about him is his willingness to talk about what it’s like to work in a mind-numbing, dead end job and about what it feels like to be poor. These are things that usually aren’t talked about in our culture.

I can’t quite recall how I first learned about Harvey Pekar. I dimly remember being aware of who he was back in the 1980’s, though I’m not sure exactly how. (I didn’t see any of his appearances on the Letterman show until years later.) When I lived in New York in the 1990’s, I would read jazz commentaries of his in the Village Voice. However, I didn’t really become deeply interested in his work until I saw the film, American Splendor, several years ago. I then plowed through a chunk of his comics as well as the books, Unsung Hero and Ego & Hubris. I realized in retrospect that the film had somewhat depoliticized him. It also glossed over some of the darker aspects of his writing.

I just finished reading The Quitter, and I was struck by Pekar’s unwillingness to romanticize or justify himself in any way. In one anecdote, for example, he admits he deserved to be fired from a job. He also recounts a humiliating incident that led to his being discharged from the Navy. There is something bracing about this kind of honesty.

Pekar will be missed.

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The White Ribbon

March 16, 2010

I recently went to see The White Ribbon, a film by the Austrian director, Michael Haneke. It is set in a small town in northern Germany, Eichwald, just before the outbreak of the First World War. The story, which is told in a series of vignettes, takes place over the course of one year. During this time, a number of violent crimes are committed. The local school teacher (Christian Friedel) gradually comes to the conclusion that a group of children are behind them.

Life in Eichwald is suffused with brutality, mostly psychological, but sometimes physical. This brutality stems from two things: the feudal social relations in the town, and the severe Lutheranism preached by the pastor (Burghart Klaußner). Most of the people in the town are peasants, and half of them work for the local baron (Ulrich Tukur). The tensions this creates are illustrated by, among other things, the fact that the residents of the town are servile towards the baron, while the baron’s pampered son, Sigi, becomes a target of violence by the local children. (The town doctor (Rainer Bock) is the only character who doesn’t seem to fit into the class dynamics of this situation. Unlike the others, he seems to be motivated by pure selfishness. Perhaps this is Haneke’s view of the middle class.) It’s not hard to see that we’re meant to view the events of this film in the context of Germany’s history in the twentieth century.

The White Ribbon is a haunting and disturbing film, all the more so because the issues are left unresolved at the end. It’s the type of movie that you keep thinking about for days after you see it.

As I was watching this film, I couldn’t help thinking of the picture books of Wilhelm Busch, which were hugely popular in Second Empire Germany. These often told stories of children who play cruel tricks. The most famous of these is Max und Moritz, which inspired the first American comic strip, The Katzenjammer Kids. The book is funny, but at the same time there is something kind of awful about it, because of the sheer nastiness of the children’s pranks. In one episode, they put gunpowder in a man’s pipe. When he smokes it, it explodes, blackening his face and burning all his hair away. (Needless to say, Busch graphically illustrates this.) Elsewhere, we see Max and Moritz laughing and cheering while a man falls into a rushing river and nearly drowns. It could be argued that that Max and Moritz are the literary forebears of Bart Simpson. I would be interested to know if Matt Groening has read Busch’s books.

The reason I bring all this up is that I suspect that Haneke may have had Busch in the back of his mind when he was writing the script. However, there is nothing humorous about the children’s crimes in this film. I must say, though, this movie might have benefited from a bit of comedy. The scenes in which the schoolteacher awkwardly tries to woo a painfully shy girl, Eva (Leonie Benesch), are vaguely humorous and provide a much needed respite from the brutality in much of the rest of this film.

As I said before, though, The White Ribbon is worth seeing. It is one of the more memorable movies that I have watched recently.

Posted in Cinema, Germany, Literature, Popular Culture | Leave a Comment »

Pernell Roberts 1928-2010

February 15, 2010

I know it’s a little late to bring it up, but Pernell Roberts died last month. He was a respected stage actor, but he was best known for playing the eldest son, Adam Cartwright, on Bonanza, a Western TV show that was hugely popular during the 1960’s. The show told the story of Ben Cartwright, who owns a huge ranch, the Ponderosa, next to Lake Tahoe. Cartwright has three sons by three different wives. The latter all met with untimely deaths. (This sounds suspicious to me. In the days of the Wild West, there weren’t any police around to ask questions.) I watched this show when I was a kid. I don’t remember much about it, except that every character seemed to wear the same clothes every day. I found this vaguely disturbing.

What I find interesting about Roberts is that he quit the show after six seasons. He complained about the bad writing and called the show “junk TV”. This was a gutsy thing to do, considering what an uncertain profession acting is. He also criticized NBC for not hiring minority actors. He took part in Civil Rights marches in 1965.

In the 1980’s, he did a TV medical drama series called Trapper John, M.D.. (The title character is supposedly the same Trapper John character in MASH.) I never saw this show, but I can’t imagine it could have been very good, considering that the writers were apparently unaware that the name, “Trapper John” is actually an off-color joke.

I guess there’s a limit to how principled and uncompromising an actor can be. He’s still got to pay his bills after all.

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Avatar

January 31, 2010

I initially did not intend to see James Cameron’s latest film. I am not a James Cameron fan; I’m still traumatized by the dialogue in Titanic. (I have occasional flashbacks, but they’re becoming less frequent.) However, this film has become a subject for debate on the left. While some, such as Louis Proyect, have praised this film for its anti-imperialist message, others have complained that it follows the “White Man Saves the Natives” formula of such movies as Dances with Wolves. I felt obligated to investigate a film that has provoked so much serious debate. (Okay, the real reason I went to see this is because I’m a sucker for anything that’s in 3-D.)

The film does follow the “White Man Saves the Natives” paradigm, and it does so in a way that’s painfully predictable. Although the dialogue is better than in Titanic, it still has some clunky moments. (When Sigourney Weaver is shot in the stomach, she jokingly says, “My whole day has been ruined.” Does Cameron really believe that if he were shot in the stomach, he would say this?) Nevertheless, the most striking thing about this movie is how anti-military it is. It’s perhaps the most anti-military film I’ve seen since Dr. Strangelove. (The scene in which the army destroys the Naa’vi’s home is horrifying.) It signals a complete rejection of the militarism that has increasingly dominated American society in recent years, a militarism that is often reflected in Hollywood blockbuster films. I sometimes felt a sense of disbelief as the audience rooted for the killing of U.S. soldiers by the denizens of Pandora.

Avatar is anti-military and anti-capitalist. The fact that this is the most popular movie in America is significant. The refusal of some ultra-left blockheads to recognize this just shows how useless they are.

Oh, and the film is visually brilliant. Pandora is depicted in a thoroughly convincing manner without being a carbon copy of Earth. As for the 3-D effect, it’s pretty good. Some of the aerial scenes gave me a slight feeling of vertigo. However, a few scenes look like pop-up greeting cards.

Now, if Cameron could just learn how to write…

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Oral Roberts (1918-2009)

December 16, 2009

Oral Roberts has died. He was a famous television evangelist and the founder of Oral Roberts University. He was an advocate of “prosperity theology”, which claims that if you’re faithful, God will reward you with material wealth. Roberts also claimed to be able to heal people through prayer. Strange to say, none of the obituaries that I’ve read mention what, to me, is the most interesting thing about him: he saw a 900-foot tall Jesus (or at least that’s what he said.) And he saw Him more than once. The second time, Roberts was having trouble raising money for a medical center he wanted to build. (If he could cure people by praying, what did he need a medical center for?) According to the Tulsa World, when Roberts talked about his problems, the 900-foot Jesus said, “I told you that I would speak to your partners and, through them, I would build it!” (The wording here suggests to me that Jesus felt that Oral was starting to nag him.) I don’t know about you, but if a 900-foot tall Jesus showed up at my door and told me to give money to Oral Roberts, I don’t think I would be in a position to say “No”.

To me, there is something quintessentially American about all this. I doubt that it ever occurred to Bernadette Soubirous that her accounts of meeting Mary would have sounded more impressive if she said that the Holy Virgin was 900 feet tall. A predilection for gigantism seems characteristic of Roberts. In the 1980’s he built the City of Faith Medical Center, which included a 60-story building, in Tulsa, Oklahoma; even though the local medical community said it wasn’t needed. It went out of business in 1989. (When he was raising funds for the place in 1987, Roberts told people God would kill him if he didn’t raise the necessary money. It seems that God doesn’t mess around.)

Out of curiosity, I went to the website of Oral Roberts University. What do they teach at a Pentecostal Christian university? I found that they have colleges of Art and Cultural Studies, Business, Nursing, and Theology. I’m pleased to find that they also have a college of Science, though it is unclear whether they teach evolution – or geology, for that matter. Discussing the accomplishments of the school’s graduates, the website notes: “One of our recent French language students was hired by the CIA.” That’s not something I would brag about.

In 2007, ORU was the scene of a scandal involving Roberts’s son, Richard Roberts, who was then president of the university, as well as Richard’s wife, Lindsay. According to the Associated Press:

    Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors’ expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter’s senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.

    Lindsay Roberts is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as “underage males.”

Maybe they thought that God was rewarding them for being faithful. Just a suggestion.

Posted in Capitalism, Popular Culture, Religion, Republicans | Leave a Comment »

So Long, Oprah

November 23, 2009

Oprah Winfrey has announced that she is bringing her long-running TV show to an end. One of the factors that apparently led to this decision was her discovery that her own father is writing a tell-all book about her. (Ah, the life of a celebrity!)

If you ask me, Winfrey’s decision doesn’t come a moment too soon. In recent years I’ve come to the conclusion that Winfrey is an evil influence on our society. Among other things, she started the media hysteria over the absurd New Age book, The Secret. This learned tome claims, among other things, that thinking positive thoughts will cause good things to happen to you. Conversely, bad things will happen to you if you have negative thoughts. I suppose Winfrey believes that all the people in Hiroshima were having negative thoughts just before the atom bomb was dropped on them.

Newsweek has documented Winfrey’s practice of featuring dubious “alternative” medical ideas on her show – including the unproven claim that vaccines can cause autism. I know, people will argue that she isn’t as bad as Montel Williams or Maury Povich, who have had all sorts of quacks and frauds on their shows. I would argue that Winfrey is worse than these two precisely because she has a patina of respectability. People are more likely to believe nonsense when it’s on her show.

Late night talk shows don’t pretend to be anything more than entertainment. (Dick Cavett was accused of taking himself too seriously when he began having writers and intellectuals on his show.) Yet there is a widespread assumption that daytime talk shows can’t be just about celebrity chitchat, they have to be in some way educational. (I have no idea why people think this.) The problem is that, for the producers of these shows, “educational” usually means self-help books, fad diets, “alternative” medicine, New Age sophistry, and, of course, “psychics”. Sylvia Browne is a popular guest on these shows. In earlier days, it was Jeanne Dixon. The claims of these people are always treated uncritically.

Mike Douglas, who was sort of the Oprah Winfrey of his time, would bring Criswell on his show. (Yes, that’s the same Criswell who will be forever remembered for his deliriously bombastic speech at the beginning of Plan 9 from Outer Space. “Some day we will all live in the future!”) Douglas enthusiastically promoted the book, Criswell Predicts, which, among other things, prophecied that the world would come to an end in 1999. I seem to recall that Criswell also predicted that World War Three would be fought using insects that drill through people’s skulls, and that the first human on the moon would be a pregnant woman. Truly, this man was uncanny.

One thing I will say for Douglas is that he didn’t take himself too seriously, at least not nearly as seriously as Winfrey takes herself. One thing that really always annoys me about Winfrey is the attitude of moral seriousness that she exudes. One of the silliest things I have ever seen was the contrived outrage that she showed when it was revealed that James Frey had embellished some incidents of his life in A Million Little Pieces. Of course, people often change details of their lives in their autobiographies. Yet Winfrey reacted almost as if Frey had committed rape. Interestingly, after Winfrey excoriated Frey on her show, sales of his book skyrocketed. Perhaps this shows that some people can recognize grandstanding when they see it.

To be fair, Winfrey did express reservations about the impending invasion of Iraq, which is more than can be said for the execrable Jay Leno. (I’m pleased to note that Leno’s new show is bombing. Heh-heh.) It’s unfortunate that Winfrey can’t show a similar skepticism towards pernicious trash like The Secret.

Update: on Counterpunch, Ishmael Reed has a revealing article about Winfrey’s association with the film, Precious. Worth reading.

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Wolf Blitzer Humiliated

September 21, 2009

Wolf Blitzer

According to the Huffington Post, Wolf Blitzer, host of CNN’s The Situation Room completely bombed in a recent episode of Celebrity Jeopardy. He ended up with a total of $-4,600, a rare feat in the history of Jeopardy (I suspect this may be a record in the history of game shows. You can find a video here). He lost out to Andy Richter and Dana Delaney. Does this surprise anyone? Any person who has ever suffered through an episode of Wolf’s program knows that he’s not the brightest bulb. His journalistic skills largely consist of being able to say “situation room” in a melodramatic voice. That’s pretty much it.

It’s interesting to note that Blitzer lost out to Andy Richter, a comedian. According to a recent poll, the most trusted “newsman” in the US is a comedian, Jon Stewart. This may have something to do with the fact that comedians have to figure out how to get people to laugh, which requires thinking. It doesn’t take a lot of thinking to be able to say “situation room”.

I remember when I was very young, watching a news program about the relationship between the US and Britain. A woman reporter started the show off by solemnly informing her audience that the US and Britain have been allies “since 1776”. I almost fell off my chair. This was my first inkling that most TV reporters are essentially dumb people. And I know that there are many people who have the same general perception that I have. From Ted Baxter on the old Mary Tyler Moore Show to Kent Brockmann on The Simpsons, the Dumb TV Reporter has become a stock character in American comedy.

I would argue that this is not an accident. Intelligent people who spend all day discussing the news are likely to develop opinions, which may possibly be displeasing to their corporate sponsors. So producers look for people who will swallow whatever nonsense is placed before them. Consider the fact that, during the build-up to the Iraq invasion, no TV reporters questioned the Bush Administration’s absurd claims about “weapons of mass destruction”. (The only exceptions I know of were Bill Moyers and Phil Donahue, both of them marginal figures in the news media.)

With these sorts of people providing us with information, is it any wonder that so many people can’t think clearly about issues such as health care reform?

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The Ambassador Hotel

September 17, 2009

As I was writing my recent post on the Kennedys, I was reminded of an experience I once had involving the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. This historic structure in Los Angeles was torn down in 2005, to make room for new schools. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I know that the schools in L.A. are badly overcrowded (and they will be even more so when Schwarzenegger’s budget cuts come into effect). On the other hand, the Ambassador was a striking example of a Spanish/Art Deco style of architecture that I have only ever seen in Southern California. (Union Station near downtown Los Angeles, is a good example of this type of building. If you’re ever planning to visit the Big Orange, I recommend checking this place out.)

The Ambassador was built in 1921. Over the years many famous people stayed there, including Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, Anna May Wong, and Frank Sinatra. (The wikipedia article gives a lengthy list of names.) You can find pictures of the place here.

The Ambassador Hotel was closed to guests in 1989. However, during the 1990’s, it was frequently used as a location for film shoots. This is where my story begins. I spent a brief period of my life working as a movie extra. (The politically correct term is “background artist”. This was a weird experience that I will have to write about in more detail in a future post.) My agent instructed me to go to the Ambassador Hotel in the late afternoon to work on a night-time shoot. Now, the building and its grounds occupied a sprawling expanse off Wilshire Boulevard. (I must have driven past there a hundred times previously, without even being aware of the place.) I wandered around for a while, not quite sure that I was even supposed to be there, since the property was surrounded by a chain-link fence with KEEP OUT signs on it. I eventually stumbled across a film crew shooting a movie. I thought this must be the place I was supposed to be. I stood around for a while, with people busily brushing past me, until I managed to get the attention of a production assistant. This woman was unusually polite for a PA. When I told her the instructions that my agent gave me, she told me I was at the wrong shoot, that the one I was supposed to be at was right around the corner of the building. I was a bit incredulous at this, but I followed her directions, walking a path lined by overgrown trellises. Sure enough, right around the corner there was a film crew shooting another movie. I think this experience gave me some idea of what Hollywood must have been like during the 1920’s, when film crews were shooting all over the place, sometimes side by side.

They were making a cop film starring Burt Reynolds. I can’t remember the name of it (I’m not sure anyone bothered to tell it to me), but it probably wasn’t very good if it had BR in it. We were shooting a scene right in front of the main entrance to the hotel, and it was possible to walk into the building when the PA’s weren’t looking. It was dark inside, but there was enough light coming in through the windows that one could make out details. There was an an enormous carpeted hallway that sloped upward. To the left, a large doorway led into what had clearly been a bar. I felt a strong urge to go exploring. However, the PA’s sternly warned me and the other extras – um, I mean background artists – not to go wandering around in the place. They said the structure was in disrepair and therefore possibly dangerous. I figured this was probably true. More importantly, I was afraid of getting fired. (I needed the money.) Nevertheless, I still sometimes feel a twinge of regret that I didn’t give in to my impulse for adventure. To explore the rooms of a huge, dark, abandoned building; what could be more fun? Who knows, I might have been in a room that Marlene Dietrich once stayed in. Oh, well.

One other thing I remember is that there were dozens of feral cats roaming around on the grounds. I wonder what happened to them.

This brings me to the Bobby Kennedy connection. There was a story going around among the extras – er, I mean background artists – that there was a pool of water on the exact spot where Kennedy was shot. I remember people saying this to one another in hushed tones, as if it had some profound significance to it. Since the kitchen where Kennedy was shot was off limits to us, it was impossible to confirm or deny this story. (And who the hell would have have known the exact spot where he was shot?) Supposing this story was true, wouldn’t it have just indicated that the place had leaky pipes?

Myths, legends, folktales, superstitions, etc. have always fascinated me. There seems to be some fundamental human impulse to make these things up. It’s not clear to me why. Perhaps it all starts with somebody bullshitting other people. Once I had a friend who liked to pull other people’s legs. One day he decided, just for the hell of it, that he was going to make people believe that he took part in the invasion of Grenada. He invented this elaborately detailed story. (“There was a body on the ground in front of me. I stepped over it and kept on moving forward…”) I remember hearing him telling this story at parties. Finally, he admitted to me that he had made the whole thing up. For years afterwards, whenever I mentioned his name to people, they would say, “You mean the guy who was in Grenada?”

Posted in Architecture, Cinema, Los Angeles, Movie Industry, Popular Culture | Leave a Comment »

The Racists Monkey Around

February 21, 2009

People are no doubt aware of the controversy over the New York Post cartoon. For my part, I find it impossible to believe that the editors weren’t aware of the racist associations the image would have. I grew up in a small town full of right-wing Republicans. I know how these people think. The notion that Black people are somehow similar to apes is near and dear to their hearts. Also, I used to read the New York Post when I lived in the Big Apple. (Not that I ever paid for it, mind you. I would find discarded copies on the subway or in the break room where I worked.) I know what a sleazy newspaper it is. The only thing I find surprising is that something like this didn’t happen before.

This reminds of something that once happened to me a long time ago. After I left that hellish small town, I moved to Boston, where I naively assumed that people would be more enlightened. One night I was having some drinks with a friend of mine. He was a comedy writer. He wrote jokes for some of the local comedians, and he sometimes did stand-up himself. At one point, he told me of a joke he had written for another comedian. It involved Roxbury, a predominately Black neighborhood of Boston. It went something like this: “Roxbury has announced its new plan for public transportation. They’re going to move the trees closer together.” This baffled me. What do trees have to do with public transportation? I repeatedly asked my friend to explain the joke to me, but he just looked blankly at me, as though he couldn’t conceive of the possibility that someone might not understand it. Finally, he explained it to me. The underlying assumption is that Black people swing from tree to tree, the way some apes supposedly do. My friend sold this joke to a white comedian, who told it to white audiences, who apparently didn’t need to have it explained to them.

By the way, my friend was Black.

Posted in Boston, Obama, Popular Culture, Racism, Republicans | Leave a Comment »

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