From Chronicles.com:
America’s Has-Been Economy
By Paul Craig Roberts
A country cannot be a superpower without a high-tech economy, and America’s high-tech economy is eroding as I write.
The erosion began when U.S. corporations outsourced manufacturing. Today, many U.S. companies are little more than a brand name selling goods made in Asia.
Corporate outsourcers and their apologists presented the loss of manufacturing capability as a positive development. Manufacturing, they said, was the “old economy,” whose loss to Asia ensured Americans lower consumer prices and greater shareholder returns. The American future was in the “new economy” of high-tech knowledge jobs.
This assertion became an article of faith. Few considered how a country could maintain a technological lead when it did not manufacture.
So far in the 21st century, there is scant sign of the American “new economy.” The promised knowledge-based jobs have not appeared. To the contrary, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a net loss of 221,000 jobs in six major engineering job classifications.
Today, many computer, electrical and electronics engineers, who were well paid at the end of the 20th century, are unemployed and cannot find work. A country that doesn’t manufacture doesn’t need as many engineers, and much of the work that remains is being outsourced or filled with cheaper foreigners brought into the country on H-lb and L-1 work visas.
Confronted with inconvenient facts, outsourcing’s apologists moved to the next level of fantasy. Many technical and engineering jobs, they said, have become “commodity jobs,” routine work that can be performed cheaper offshore. America will stay in the lead, they promised, because it will keep the research and development work, and be responsible for design and innovation.
Alas, now it is design and innovation that are being outsourced. Business Week reports (“Outsourcing Innovation,” March 21) that the pledge of First World corporations to keep research and development in-house “is now passe.”
Corporations such as Dell, Motorola and Philips, which are regarded as manufacturers based in proprietary design and core intellectual property originating in R&D departments, now put their brand names on complete products that are designed, engineered and manufactured in Asia by “original-design manufacturers” (ODM).
Business Week reports that practically overnight large percentages of cell phones, notebook PCs, digital cameras, MP3 players and personal digital assistants are produced by original-design manufacturers. Business Week quotes an executive of a Taiwanese ODM: “Customers used to participate in design two or three years back. But starting last year, many just take our product.”
Another offshore ODM executive says: “What has changed is that more customers need us to design the whole product. It’s now difficult to get good ideas from our customers. We have to innovate ourselves.” Another says: “We know this kind of product category a lot better than our customers do. We have the capability to integrate all the latest technologies.” The customers are America’s premier high-tech names.
The design and engineering teams of Asian ODMs are expanding rapidly, while those of major U.S. corporations are shrinking. Business Week reports that R&D budgets at such technology companies as Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, Ericsson and Nokia are being scaled back.
Outsourcing is rapidly converting U.S. corporations into a brand name with a sales force selling foreign designed, engineered and manufactured goods. Whether or not they realize it, U.S. corporations have written off the U.S. consumer market. People who do not participate in the innovation, design, engineering and manufacture of the products that they consume lack the incomes to support the sales infrastructure of the job diverse “old economy.”
“Free market” economists and U.S. politicians are blind to the rapid transformation of America into a third world economy, but college-bound American students and heads of engineering schools are acutely aware of declining career opportunities and enrollments. While “free trade” economists and corporate publicists prattle on about America’s glorious future, heads of prestigious engineering schools ponder the future of engineering education in America.
Once U.S. firms complete their loss of proprietary architecture, how much intrinsic value resides in a brand name? What is to keep the all-powerful ODMs from undercutting the American brand names?
The outsourcing of manufacturing, design and innovation has dire consequences for U.S. higher education. The advantages of a college degree are erased when the only source of employment is domestic nontradable services.
According to the March 11 Los Angeles Times, the percentage of college graduates among the long-term chronically unemployed has risen sharply in the 21st century. The U.S. Department of Labor reported in March that 373,000 discouraged college graduates dropped out of the labor force in February—a far higher number than the number of new jobs created.
The disappearing U.S. economy can also be seen in the exploding trade deficit. As more employment is shifted offshore, goods and services formerly produced domestically become imports. No-think economists and Bush administration officials claim that America’s increasing dependence on imported goods and services is evidence of the strength of the U.S. economy and its role as engine of global growth.
This claim ignores that the United States is paying for its outsourced goods and services by transferring its wealth and future income streams to foreigners. Foreigners have acquired $3.6 trillion of U.S. assets since 1990 as a result of U.S. trade deficits.
Foreigners have a surfeit of dollar assets. For the past three years, their increasing unwillingness to acquire more dollars has resulted in a marked decline in the dollar’s value in relation to gold and tradable currencies.
Recently, the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans have expressed their concerns. According to a March 10 Bloomberg report, Japan’s unrealized losses on its dollar reserve holdings have reached $109.6 billion.
The Asia Times reported on March 12 that Asian central banks have been reducing their dollar holdings in favor of regional currencies for the past three years. A study by the Bank of International Settlements concluded that the ratio of dollar reserves held in Asia declined from 81 percent in the third quarter of 2001 to 67 percent in September 2004. India reduced its dollar holdings from 68 percent of total reserves to 43 percent. China reduced its dollar holdings from 83 percent to 68 percent.
The U.S. dollar will not be able to maintain its role as world reserve currency when it is being abandoned by that area of the world that is rapidly becoming the manufacturing, engineering and innovation powerhouse.
Misled by propagandistic “free trade” claims, Americans will be at a loss to understand the increasing career frustrations of the college educated. Falling pay and rising prices of foreign made goods will squeeze U.S. living standards as the declining dollar heralds America’s descent into a has-been economy.
Meanwhile, the Grand Old Party has passed a bankruptcy “reform” that is certain to turn unemployed Americans living on debt and beset with unpayable medical bills into the indentured servants of credit card companies. The steely-faced Bush administration is making certain that Americans will experience to the full their country’s fall
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Friday, March 18, 2005
From washingtonpost.com:
Players of Stature, Feats of Clay
By Thomas Boswell
Just to get a sense of proportion concerning what happened in a hearing room on Capitol Hill yesterday, imagine that we could turn back time 70 years. Concoct a scene in the 1930s in which Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx and Mel Ott are subpoenaed to testify before Congress because all of them are suspected of or had admitted to massive cheating throughout their careers, which would call all their records and heroics into question.
To add diabolical spice, imagine that Ruth had confessed his sins and was accusing Gehrig of doing the fraud -- with the Babe as a witness. Or vice versa, that the Iron Horse was calling all the Babe's achievements a sham. After all, they were the Bash Brothers of the Roaring Twenties, winning pennants, greeting each other at home plate but barely maintaining civil relations.
Why, if such a thing had happened, especially if one of the four men had almost broken down, taken the equivalent of the Fifth Amendment more than a dozen times and left the hearing room with his reputation in tatters, we'd still be discussing it, churning out books and, probably, revising the history -- recasting the villains and heroes and scapegoats -- to this day.
When the indelible days and torturous portraits from baseball history are described and retold, the saga of Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa and the man who accused them all, Jose Canseco, will grow in significance, depth, sadness and moral complexity. Our first impressions will almost certainly be revised by time. It is even possible that, within a few years, depending upon how many revelations from the Steroid Age finally become public, we could even see one of these men charged with perjury or contempt of Congress.
The first image of this day will always be McGwire, the popular Big Mac who carried himself with perfect grace and generosity when he hit 70 home runs in '98, as he stammered, composed himself, then plowed forward, through a brief but tortuous prepared testimony. How could anyone avoid the thought that, perhaps, he behaved so deferentially toward Roger Maris's family because he knew that a darker truth lay behind his ability to erase Maris from the record book.
"Like any sport where there is pressure to perform at the highest level and there has been no testing to control performance-enhancing drugs, problems develop," McGwire said.
Let's deconstruct. Did McGwire feel pressure to perform at the highest level in a sport that did not test for steroids, virtually winked at the practice and, in particular, longed for McGwire to hit more than 61 home runs? After all, in the late 1990s baseball desperately hoped the long ball would reclaim fans alienated by the strike that erased the 1994 World Series.
"I will use whatever influence and popularity I have," said McGwire, his words slowing, "to discourage young athletes from taking any drug that is not recommended by a doctor. What I will not do, however, is participate in naming names and implicating my friends and teammates. . . . Nor do I intend to dignify Mr. Canseco's book. It should be enough to consider the source . . .
"Asking me, or any other player, to answer questions about who took steroids in front of television cameras will not solve this problem," said McGwire, the committee's thumbscrews all but showing. "If a player answers, 'No,' he simply will not be believed. If he answers, 'Yes,' he risks public scorn and endless government investigations."
If, somehow, McGwire's testimony is narrowly and literally true, then he is one of the most wronged men in the history of American sport and the House Government Reform Committee has indeed hunted for an innocent witch and burned her. The far more likely case is that the verdict in the bleachers from coast to coast will be the correct one: that McGwire gave a veiled confession in the tradition of Jason Giambi's endless apologies for doing something he never named.
While McGwire's day was pure theater, the drama between Canseco and Palmeiro lay just below the surface but will remain a debate for many a long night. Canseco wrote in his tell-all book that he had introduced Palmeiro to steroids, and during a "60 Minutes" interview Canseco said that he had injected Palmeiro when they were with the Rangers. No accusation can be more direct. And no denial could be more categorical than Palmeiro's repeated assertions that he had never taken steroids in any form anywhere at any time. "Period."
Either Canseco is the most vicious and deliberate slanderer in baseball history (name anything that would even come close) or Palmeiro has lied under oath to a congressional committee. There's no third choice. One is a villain. That's why it helps to have an excellent reputation and hurts to have an atrocious one. The committee, by its tone, clearly accepted Palmeiro's word and treated him as though he had conclusively cleared his name when, in fact, he'd merely pleaded innocence.
For the next two or three years, at the least, we can expect that the cockroaches of these steroid days will continue to scurry around baseball's kitchen, just as the criminal misdeeds of Wall Street and corporate America still fill our headlines years after the bankruptcies of Enron and WorldCom.
And what of Sosa? He spoke in a soft voice. He brought an interpreter and a lawyer who read his statement for him despite the fact that those of us who know him from the baseball beat realize that he is perfectly fluent in English. That Sosa statement was a 99.9 percent total denial of any use of steroids. However, cynics may parse his words in search of legal loopholes.
"To be clear, I have never taken illegal performance-enhancing drugs. I have never injected myself or had anyone inject me with anything. I've not broken the laws of the Unites States or the laws of the Dominican Republic," Sosa's statement read. "I have been tested as recently as 2004 and I am clean."
It is an awful world we live in. Within minutes of the statement's dissemination a veteran baseball writer said, "So, I guess that doesn't quite cover taking steroids orally if they were prescribed legally by a Dominican doctor."
Thanks to the devious tales from the world of BALCO, we've all learned to look for the weasel word, the phrase that doesn't quite mean what it says. Endemic bad behavior has this contaminating effect on the whole culture that it infects. Trust dies. Doubt flourishes. Lies grow strong legs.
And someone as discredited as Canseco can completely change his views on steroids in a blink. In his book, he champions steroids for 200 pages, even saying that they could help people live to be 120. Before Congress, he denounced them. Grilled on this preposterous flip-flop, Canseco meekly said, "I'm completely turned around." How convenient.
This day and all its twist of plot and character will not be forgotten in baseball for decades.
In fact, the cautionary scene of four of the game's greatest sluggers, all sitting at the same table with their legacy and their honor laid out before them, has barely begun to be digested.
Players of Stature, Feats of Clay
By Thomas Boswell
Just to get a sense of proportion concerning what happened in a hearing room on Capitol Hill yesterday, imagine that we could turn back time 70 years. Concoct a scene in the 1930s in which Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx and Mel Ott are subpoenaed to testify before Congress because all of them are suspected of or had admitted to massive cheating throughout their careers, which would call all their records and heroics into question.
To add diabolical spice, imagine that Ruth had confessed his sins and was accusing Gehrig of doing the fraud -- with the Babe as a witness. Or vice versa, that the Iron Horse was calling all the Babe's achievements a sham. After all, they were the Bash Brothers of the Roaring Twenties, winning pennants, greeting each other at home plate but barely maintaining civil relations.
Why, if such a thing had happened, especially if one of the four men had almost broken down, taken the equivalent of the Fifth Amendment more than a dozen times and left the hearing room with his reputation in tatters, we'd still be discussing it, churning out books and, probably, revising the history -- recasting the villains and heroes and scapegoats -- to this day.
When the indelible days and torturous portraits from baseball history are described and retold, the saga of Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa and the man who accused them all, Jose Canseco, will grow in significance, depth, sadness and moral complexity. Our first impressions will almost certainly be revised by time. It is even possible that, within a few years, depending upon how many revelations from the Steroid Age finally become public, we could even see one of these men charged with perjury or contempt of Congress.
The first image of this day will always be McGwire, the popular Big Mac who carried himself with perfect grace and generosity when he hit 70 home runs in '98, as he stammered, composed himself, then plowed forward, through a brief but tortuous prepared testimony. How could anyone avoid the thought that, perhaps, he behaved so deferentially toward Roger Maris's family because he knew that a darker truth lay behind his ability to erase Maris from the record book.
"Like any sport where there is pressure to perform at the highest level and there has been no testing to control performance-enhancing drugs, problems develop," McGwire said.
Let's deconstruct. Did McGwire feel pressure to perform at the highest level in a sport that did not test for steroids, virtually winked at the practice and, in particular, longed for McGwire to hit more than 61 home runs? After all, in the late 1990s baseball desperately hoped the long ball would reclaim fans alienated by the strike that erased the 1994 World Series.
"I will use whatever influence and popularity I have," said McGwire, his words slowing, "to discourage young athletes from taking any drug that is not recommended by a doctor. What I will not do, however, is participate in naming names and implicating my friends and teammates. . . . Nor do I intend to dignify Mr. Canseco's book. It should be enough to consider the source . . .
"Asking me, or any other player, to answer questions about who took steroids in front of television cameras will not solve this problem," said McGwire, the committee's thumbscrews all but showing. "If a player answers, 'No,' he simply will not be believed. If he answers, 'Yes,' he risks public scorn and endless government investigations."
If, somehow, McGwire's testimony is narrowly and literally true, then he is one of the most wronged men in the history of American sport and the House Government Reform Committee has indeed hunted for an innocent witch and burned her. The far more likely case is that the verdict in the bleachers from coast to coast will be the correct one: that McGwire gave a veiled confession in the tradition of Jason Giambi's endless apologies for doing something he never named.
While McGwire's day was pure theater, the drama between Canseco and Palmeiro lay just below the surface but will remain a debate for many a long night. Canseco wrote in his tell-all book that he had introduced Palmeiro to steroids, and during a "60 Minutes" interview Canseco said that he had injected Palmeiro when they were with the Rangers. No accusation can be more direct. And no denial could be more categorical than Palmeiro's repeated assertions that he had never taken steroids in any form anywhere at any time. "Period."
Either Canseco is the most vicious and deliberate slanderer in baseball history (name anything that would even come close) or Palmeiro has lied under oath to a congressional committee. There's no third choice. One is a villain. That's why it helps to have an excellent reputation and hurts to have an atrocious one. The committee, by its tone, clearly accepted Palmeiro's word and treated him as though he had conclusively cleared his name when, in fact, he'd merely pleaded innocence.
For the next two or three years, at the least, we can expect that the cockroaches of these steroid days will continue to scurry around baseball's kitchen, just as the criminal misdeeds of Wall Street and corporate America still fill our headlines years after the bankruptcies of Enron and WorldCom.
And what of Sosa? He spoke in a soft voice. He brought an interpreter and a lawyer who read his statement for him despite the fact that those of us who know him from the baseball beat realize that he is perfectly fluent in English. That Sosa statement was a 99.9 percent total denial of any use of steroids. However, cynics may parse his words in search of legal loopholes.
"To be clear, I have never taken illegal performance-enhancing drugs. I have never injected myself or had anyone inject me with anything. I've not broken the laws of the Unites States or the laws of the Dominican Republic," Sosa's statement read. "I have been tested as recently as 2004 and I am clean."
It is an awful world we live in. Within minutes of the statement's dissemination a veteran baseball writer said, "So, I guess that doesn't quite cover taking steroids orally if they were prescribed legally by a Dominican doctor."
Thanks to the devious tales from the world of BALCO, we've all learned to look for the weasel word, the phrase that doesn't quite mean what it says. Endemic bad behavior has this contaminating effect on the whole culture that it infects. Trust dies. Doubt flourishes. Lies grow strong legs.
And someone as discredited as Canseco can completely change his views on steroids in a blink. In his book, he champions steroids for 200 pages, even saying that they could help people live to be 120. Before Congress, he denounced them. Grilled on this preposterous flip-flop, Canseco meekly said, "I'm completely turned around." How convenient.
This day and all its twist of plot and character will not be forgotten in baseball for decades.
In fact, the cautionary scene of four of the game's greatest sluggers, all sitting at the same table with their legacy and their honor laid out before them, has barely begun to be digested.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
From Backstreets.com:
"THROUGH THE DOOR WITH FISTS AND HEARTS FIRST"
Bruce Springsteen's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech of U2
March 14, 2005
Uno, dos, tres, catorce. That translates as one, two, three, fourteen. That is the correct math for a rock and roll band. For in art and love and rock and roll, the whole had better equal much more than the sum of its parts, or else you're just rubbing two sticks together searching for fire. A great rock band searches for the same kind of combustible force that fueled the expansion of the universe after the big bang. You want the earth to shake and spit fire, you want the sky to split apart and for God to pour out. It’s embarrassing to want so much and to expect so much from music, except sometimes it happens: the Sun Sessions, Highway 61, Sgt. Peppers, the Band, Robert Johnson, Exile on Main Street, Born to Run... whoops, I meant to leave that one out... uh... the Sex Pistols, Aretha Franklin, the Clash, James Brown; the proud and public enemies it takes a nation of millions to hold back. This is music meant to take on not only the powers that be but on a good day, the universe and God himself, if he was listening. It's man's accountability, and U2 belongs on this list.
It was the early '80s. I went with Pete Townshend, who always wanted to catch the first whiff of those about to unseat us, to a club in London. There they were: a young Bono (single-handedly pioneering the Irish mullet), the Edge (what kind of name was that?), Adam and Larry -- I was listening to the last band of whom I would be able to name all of its members. They had an exciting show and a big, beautiful sound. They lifted the roof. We met afterwards and they were nice young men. They were Irish. Irish. Now, this would play an enormous part in their success in the States. For what the English occasionally have the refined sensibilities to overcome, we Irish and Italians have no such problem. We come through the door fists and hearts first. U2, with the dark, chiming sound of heaven at their command which, of course, is the sound of unrequited love and longing -- their greatest theme. Their search for God intact, this was a band that wanted to lay claim to not only this world but had their eyes on the next one, too. Now, they’re a real band; each member plays a vital part. I believe they actually practice some form of democracy -- toxic poison in a bands head. In Iraq, maybe. In rock, no. Yet, they survive. They have harnessed the time bomb that exists in the heart of every great rock and roll band that usually explodes, as we see regularly from this stage. But they seemed to have innately understood the primary rule of rock band job security: “Hey, asshole, the other guy is more important than you think he is!” They are both a step forward and direct descendants of the great bands who believed rock music could shake things up in the world, dared to have faith in their audience, who believed if they played their best it would bring out the best in you. They believed in pop stardom and the big time. Now this requires foolishness and a calculating mind. It also requires a deeply held faith in the work you're doing and in its powers to transform. U2 hungered for it all and built a sound, and they wrote the songs that demanded it. They’re keepers of some of the most beautiful sonic architecture in rock and roll.
The Edge, the Edge, the Edge, the Edge. He is a rare and true guitar original and one of the subtlest guitar heroes of all time. He's dedicated to ensemble playing and he subsumes his guitar ego in the group. But do not be fooled. Take Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Neil Young, Pete Townshend -- guitarists who defined the sound of their band and their times. If you play like them, you sound like them. If you are playing those rhythmic two-note sustained fourths, drenched in echo, you are going to sound like the Edge, my son. Go back to the drawing board and chances are you won’t have much luck. There are only a handful of guitar stylists who can create a world with their instruments, and he's one of them. The Edge's guitar playing creates enormous space and vast landscapes. It is a thrilling and a heartbreaking sound that hangs over you like the unsettled sky. In the turf it stakes out, it is inherently spiritual, it is grace and it is a gift.
Now, all of this has to be held down by something. The deep sureness of Adam Clayton's bass and the rhythms of Larry Mullen's elegant drumming hold the band down while propelling it forward. It's in U2's great rhythm section that the band finds its sexuality and its dangerousness. Listen to "Desire," she moves in "Mysterious Ways," the pulse of "With or Without You." Together Larry and Adam create the element that suggests the ecstatic possibilities of that other kingdom -- the one below the earth and below the belt -- that no great rock band can lay claim to the title without. Now, Adam always strikes me as the professorial one, the sophisticated member. He creates not only the musical but physical stability on his side of the stage. The tone and depth of his bass playing has allowed the band to move from rock to dance music and beyond. One of the first things I noticed about U2 was that underneath the guitar and the bass, they have these very modern rhythms going on. Rather than a straight 2 and 4, Larry often plays with a lot of syncopation, and that connects the band to modern dance textures. The drums often sounded high and tight and he was swinging down there, and this gave the band a unique profile and allowed their rock textures to soar above on a bed of his rhythm. Now Larry, of course, besides being an incredible drummer, bears the burden of being the band's requisite "good-looking member," something we somehow overlooked in the E Street Band. We have to settle for "charismatic." Girls love on Larry Mullen. I have a female assistant that would like to sit on Larry’s drum stool. A male one, too. We all have our crosses to bear.
Bono, where do I begin? Jeans designer, soon-to-be World Bank operator, just plain operator, seller of the Brooklyn Bridge -- oh hold up, he played under the Brooklyn Bridge, that's right. Soon-to-be mastermind operator of the Bono Burger franchise, where more than one million stories will be told by a crazy Irishman. Now I realize that it’s a dirty job and somebody has to do it. But don't quit your day job yet, my friend, you're pretty good at it. And a sound this big needs somebody to ride herd over it, and ride herd over it he does. His voice, big-hearted and open, thoroughly decent no matter how hard he tries. Now he's a great frontman. Against the odds, he is not your mom's standard skinny, ex-junkie archetype. He has the physique of a rugby player... well, an ex-rugby player. Shamen, shyster, one of the greatest and most endearingly naked messianic complexes in rock and roll. God bless you, man! It takes one to know one, of course. You see, every good Irish and Italian-Irish front-man knows that before James Brown there was Jesus. So hold the McDonald arches on the stage set, boys, we are not ironists. We are creations of the heart and of the earth and of the stations of the cross. There's no getting out of it. He is gifted with an operatic voice and a beautiful falsetto rare among strong rock singers. But most important, his is a voice shot through with self-doubt. That's what makes that big sound work. It is this element of Bono's talent, along with his beautiful lyric writing, that gives the often-celestial music of U2 its fragility and its realness. It is the questioning, the constant questioning in Bono's voice, where the band stakes its claim to its humanity and declares its commonality with us. Now Bono’s voice often sounds like it's shouting not over top of the band but from deep within it: "Here we are, Lord, this mess, in your image." He delivers all of this with great drama and an occasional smirk that says, “Kiss me, I’m Irish.” He’s one of the great front-men of the past 20 years. He is also one of the only musicians to devote his personal faith and the ideals of his band into the real world in a way that remains true to rock's earliest implications of freedom and connection and the possibility of something better.
Now the band's beautiful songwriting -- "Pride (In The Name of Love)," "Sunday Bloody Sunday," "I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For," "One," "Where the Streets Have No Name," "Beautiful Day" -- reminds us of the stakes that the band always plays for. It's an incredible songbook. In their music, you hear the spirituality as home and as quest. How do you find God unless he's in your heart, in your desire, in your feet? I believe this is a big part of what's kept their band together all of these years. See, bands get formed by accident, but they don’t survive by accident. It takes will, intent, a sense of shared purpose and a tolerance for your friends' fallibilities and they of yours. And that only evens the odds. U2 has not only evened the odds but they've beaten them by continuing to do their finest work and remaining at the top of their game and the charts for 25 years. I feel a great affinity for these guys as people as well as musicians.
Well, there I was sitting down on the couch in my pajamas with my eldest son. He was watching TV. I was doing one of my favorite things: I was tallying up all the money I passed up in endorsements over the years and thinking of all the fun I could have had with it. Suddenly I hear "Uno, dos, tres, catorce!" I look up. But instead of the silhouettes of the hippie-wannabes bouncing around in the iPod commercial, I see my boys! Oh my God! They sold out! Now, what I know about the iPod is this: it is a device that plays music. Of course, their new song sounded great, my guys are doing great, but methinks I hear the footsteps of my old tape operator of Jimmy Iovine somewhere. Wily, smart. Now, personally, I live an insanely expensive lifestyle that my wife barely tolerates. I burn money, and that calls for huge amounts of cash flow. But, I also have a ludicrous image of myself that keeps me from truly cashing in. You can see my problem. Woe is me. So the next morning, I call up Jon Landau (or as I refer to him, "the American Paul McGuinness"), and I say, "Did you see that iPod thing?" and he says, "Yes." And he says, "And I hear they didn’t take any money." And I said, "They didn’t take any money?" and he says, "No." I said, "Smart, wily Irish guys. Anybody – anybody – can do an ad and take the money. But to do the ad and not take the money... that’s smart. That’s wily." I say, "Jon, I want you to call up Bill Gates or whoever is behind this thing and float this: a red, white and blue iPod signed by Bruce 'The Boss' Springsteen. Now remember, no matter how much money he offers, don’t take it!" At any rate, after that evening for the next month or so, I hear emanating from my lovely 14-year-old son's room, day after day, down the hall calling out in a voice that has recently dropped very low: uno, dos, tres, catorce. The correct math for rock and roll. Thank you, boys.
"THROUGH THE DOOR WITH FISTS AND HEARTS FIRST"
Bruce Springsteen's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech of U2
March 14, 2005
Uno, dos, tres, catorce. That translates as one, two, three, fourteen. That is the correct math for a rock and roll band. For in art and love and rock and roll, the whole had better equal much more than the sum of its parts, or else you're just rubbing two sticks together searching for fire. A great rock band searches for the same kind of combustible force that fueled the expansion of the universe after the big bang. You want the earth to shake and spit fire, you want the sky to split apart and for God to pour out. It’s embarrassing to want so much and to expect so much from music, except sometimes it happens: the Sun Sessions, Highway 61, Sgt. Peppers, the Band, Robert Johnson, Exile on Main Street, Born to Run... whoops, I meant to leave that one out... uh... the Sex Pistols, Aretha Franklin, the Clash, James Brown; the proud and public enemies it takes a nation of millions to hold back. This is music meant to take on not only the powers that be but on a good day, the universe and God himself, if he was listening. It's man's accountability, and U2 belongs on this list.
It was the early '80s. I went with Pete Townshend, who always wanted to catch the first whiff of those about to unseat us, to a club in London. There they were: a young Bono (single-handedly pioneering the Irish mullet), the Edge (what kind of name was that?), Adam and Larry -- I was listening to the last band of whom I would be able to name all of its members. They had an exciting show and a big, beautiful sound. They lifted the roof. We met afterwards and they were nice young men. They were Irish. Irish. Now, this would play an enormous part in their success in the States. For what the English occasionally have the refined sensibilities to overcome, we Irish and Italians have no such problem. We come through the door fists and hearts first. U2, with the dark, chiming sound of heaven at their command which, of course, is the sound of unrequited love and longing -- their greatest theme. Their search for God intact, this was a band that wanted to lay claim to not only this world but had their eyes on the next one, too. Now, they’re a real band; each member plays a vital part. I believe they actually practice some form of democracy -- toxic poison in a bands head. In Iraq, maybe. In rock, no. Yet, they survive. They have harnessed the time bomb that exists in the heart of every great rock and roll band that usually explodes, as we see regularly from this stage. But they seemed to have innately understood the primary rule of rock band job security: “Hey, asshole, the other guy is more important than you think he is!” They are both a step forward and direct descendants of the great bands who believed rock music could shake things up in the world, dared to have faith in their audience, who believed if they played their best it would bring out the best in you. They believed in pop stardom and the big time. Now this requires foolishness and a calculating mind. It also requires a deeply held faith in the work you're doing and in its powers to transform. U2 hungered for it all and built a sound, and they wrote the songs that demanded it. They’re keepers of some of the most beautiful sonic architecture in rock and roll.
The Edge, the Edge, the Edge, the Edge. He is a rare and true guitar original and one of the subtlest guitar heroes of all time. He's dedicated to ensemble playing and he subsumes his guitar ego in the group. But do not be fooled. Take Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Neil Young, Pete Townshend -- guitarists who defined the sound of their band and their times. If you play like them, you sound like them. If you are playing those rhythmic two-note sustained fourths, drenched in echo, you are going to sound like the Edge, my son. Go back to the drawing board and chances are you won’t have much luck. There are only a handful of guitar stylists who can create a world with their instruments, and he's one of them. The Edge's guitar playing creates enormous space and vast landscapes. It is a thrilling and a heartbreaking sound that hangs over you like the unsettled sky. In the turf it stakes out, it is inherently spiritual, it is grace and it is a gift.
Now, all of this has to be held down by something. The deep sureness of Adam Clayton's bass and the rhythms of Larry Mullen's elegant drumming hold the band down while propelling it forward. It's in U2's great rhythm section that the band finds its sexuality and its dangerousness. Listen to "Desire," she moves in "Mysterious Ways," the pulse of "With or Without You." Together Larry and Adam create the element that suggests the ecstatic possibilities of that other kingdom -- the one below the earth and below the belt -- that no great rock band can lay claim to the title without. Now, Adam always strikes me as the professorial one, the sophisticated member. He creates not only the musical but physical stability on his side of the stage. The tone and depth of his bass playing has allowed the band to move from rock to dance music and beyond. One of the first things I noticed about U2 was that underneath the guitar and the bass, they have these very modern rhythms going on. Rather than a straight 2 and 4, Larry often plays with a lot of syncopation, and that connects the band to modern dance textures. The drums often sounded high and tight and he was swinging down there, and this gave the band a unique profile and allowed their rock textures to soar above on a bed of his rhythm. Now Larry, of course, besides being an incredible drummer, bears the burden of being the band's requisite "good-looking member," something we somehow overlooked in the E Street Band. We have to settle for "charismatic." Girls love on Larry Mullen. I have a female assistant that would like to sit on Larry’s drum stool. A male one, too. We all have our crosses to bear.
Bono, where do I begin? Jeans designer, soon-to-be World Bank operator, just plain operator, seller of the Brooklyn Bridge -- oh hold up, he played under the Brooklyn Bridge, that's right. Soon-to-be mastermind operator of the Bono Burger franchise, where more than one million stories will be told by a crazy Irishman. Now I realize that it’s a dirty job and somebody has to do it. But don't quit your day job yet, my friend, you're pretty good at it. And a sound this big needs somebody to ride herd over it, and ride herd over it he does. His voice, big-hearted and open, thoroughly decent no matter how hard he tries. Now he's a great frontman. Against the odds, he is not your mom's standard skinny, ex-junkie archetype. He has the physique of a rugby player... well, an ex-rugby player. Shamen, shyster, one of the greatest and most endearingly naked messianic complexes in rock and roll. God bless you, man! It takes one to know one, of course. You see, every good Irish and Italian-Irish front-man knows that before James Brown there was Jesus. So hold the McDonald arches on the stage set, boys, we are not ironists. We are creations of the heart and of the earth and of the stations of the cross. There's no getting out of it. He is gifted with an operatic voice and a beautiful falsetto rare among strong rock singers. But most important, his is a voice shot through with self-doubt. That's what makes that big sound work. It is this element of Bono's talent, along with his beautiful lyric writing, that gives the often-celestial music of U2 its fragility and its realness. It is the questioning, the constant questioning in Bono's voice, where the band stakes its claim to its humanity and declares its commonality with us. Now Bono’s voice often sounds like it's shouting not over top of the band but from deep within it: "Here we are, Lord, this mess, in your image." He delivers all of this with great drama and an occasional smirk that says, “Kiss me, I’m Irish.” He’s one of the great front-men of the past 20 years. He is also one of the only musicians to devote his personal faith and the ideals of his band into the real world in a way that remains true to rock's earliest implications of freedom and connection and the possibility of something better.
Now the band's beautiful songwriting -- "Pride (In The Name of Love)," "Sunday Bloody Sunday," "I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For," "One," "Where the Streets Have No Name," "Beautiful Day" -- reminds us of the stakes that the band always plays for. It's an incredible songbook. In their music, you hear the spirituality as home and as quest. How do you find God unless he's in your heart, in your desire, in your feet? I believe this is a big part of what's kept their band together all of these years. See, bands get formed by accident, but they don’t survive by accident. It takes will, intent, a sense of shared purpose and a tolerance for your friends' fallibilities and they of yours. And that only evens the odds. U2 has not only evened the odds but they've beaten them by continuing to do their finest work and remaining at the top of their game and the charts for 25 years. I feel a great affinity for these guys as people as well as musicians.
Well, there I was sitting down on the couch in my pajamas with my eldest son. He was watching TV. I was doing one of my favorite things: I was tallying up all the money I passed up in endorsements over the years and thinking of all the fun I could have had with it. Suddenly I hear "Uno, dos, tres, catorce!" I look up. But instead of the silhouettes of the hippie-wannabes bouncing around in the iPod commercial, I see my boys! Oh my God! They sold out! Now, what I know about the iPod is this: it is a device that plays music. Of course, their new song sounded great, my guys are doing great, but methinks I hear the footsteps of my old tape operator of Jimmy Iovine somewhere. Wily, smart. Now, personally, I live an insanely expensive lifestyle that my wife barely tolerates. I burn money, and that calls for huge amounts of cash flow. But, I also have a ludicrous image of myself that keeps me from truly cashing in. You can see my problem. Woe is me. So the next morning, I call up Jon Landau (or as I refer to him, "the American Paul McGuinness"), and I say, "Did you see that iPod thing?" and he says, "Yes." And he says, "And I hear they didn’t take any money." And I said, "They didn’t take any money?" and he says, "No." I said, "Smart, wily Irish guys. Anybody – anybody – can do an ad and take the money. But to do the ad and not take the money... that’s smart. That’s wily." I say, "Jon, I want you to call up Bill Gates or whoever is behind this thing and float this: a red, white and blue iPod signed by Bruce 'The Boss' Springsteen. Now remember, no matter how much money he offers, don’t take it!" At any rate, after that evening for the next month or so, I hear emanating from my lovely 14-year-old son's room, day after day, down the hall calling out in a voice that has recently dropped very low: uno, dos, tres, catorce. The correct math for rock and roll. Thank you, boys.
From National Review Online:
NARAL HAIKU CONTEST [Jack Fowler]
Wanted to share these before I submitted them. Do you think I have a chance of winning?
Doctor: “Lay down. Spread
Legs.” Wields curette. Kills son.
“Have a nice day. Next!”
I don’t care if it’s
A life. I’m “terminating” –
Spring break’s in two weeks!
Please someone destroy
The sonogram machines! They’re
Revealing the truth!
NARAL HAIKU CONTEST [Jack Fowler]
Wanted to share these before I submitted them. Do you think I have a chance of winning?
Doctor: “Lay down. Spread
Legs.” Wields curette. Kills son.
“Have a nice day. Next!”
I don’t care if it’s
A life. I’m “terminating” –
Spring break’s in two weeks!
Please someone destroy
The sonogram machines! They’re
Revealing the truth!
From washingtonpost.com:
When Steroids Are All The Rage
By Mike Wise
Before stopping at Chipotle for lunch, Mackenzie Hooton telephoned her mother at home to ask what kind of burrito her brother, Taylor, wanted. Gwen Hooton yelled upstairs to her son, but there was no answer. She entered his room to find Taylor hanging from his bedroom door.
"He used his belts to fashion a noose," said Don Hooton, Taylor's father, adding that those were the same belts his son wore to school.
The Hootons looked long and hard at themselves to understand how Taylor -- a bright, popular kid a month past his 17th birthday -- could take his life two summers ago in Plano, Tex. They and doctors who have examined the case came to believe Taylor's death was directly related to depression after he discontinued the use of anabolic steroids.
Don Hooton is coming to Capitol Hill tomorrow to testify during a hearing on performance-enhancing drugs. He is not coming to out Barry Bonds or Sammy Sosa. Don Hooton is coming for his son, a former high school pitcher, a kid enraptured by the thought of becoming as big and strong as the seven major leaguers subpoenaed to testify.
Baseball and many of the people too close to the sport to know better are calling this a witch hunt, the McCarthyism of Mark McGwire and all his power-hitting brethren. They say baseball is cleaning up the sport on its own. Leave the owners and players alone. Let them take care of it.
In their myopia and denial, they don't understand; this is not about baseball and steroids.
It is about kids who hang themselves in their bedrooms and put guns to their heads after putting syringes and pills into their bodies. It is, sadly, about how we culturally value young males in American society, by their size and strength and success -- not by their courage to build their bodies naturally.
"This is not about collective bargaining and this is not about rights to privacy," Don Hooton said in a telephone interview from his home yesterday. "This is about public health. It's about parents expecting a group of admired adults to set an example that does not constitute cheating, felonious behavior and does not endanger the public health. How does anybody argue with that?"
Don Hooton said he did not know his son the last year of his life. On steroids, Taylor Hooton didn't live; he ticked. He developed hand-grenade moods and an aggressive personality that put Taylor at ease in the musclehead subculture of his Plano gym. He beat up his girlfriend's former boyfriend. He threw telephones through the wall. The new ripples in Taylor's veins -- going from a sinewy, 170-pound kid to a 205-pound rock -- made the girls in the hall coo.
"When he started using them, he just wanted to be the number one pitcher," Don Hooton remembered. "Once Taylor started bulking up, then girls became involved. His look changed. It started as an athletic thing and then it became a vanity thing."
Hooton is on the same five-person panel tomorrow as Gary Wadler, a professor of medicine at New York University who has been involved in the World Anti-Doping Agency since its inception. In 1989, he wrote a seminal book titled "Drugs and the Athlete." In a frighteningly prophetic passage, Wadler writes that people have to be mindful of the dependency syndrome associated with anabolic steroids, including depression.
"My wife told me last night that all these things are playing out years later," Wadler said in a telephone interview yesterday.
Never mind the national pastime. More than 500,000 American boys are using anabolic steroids today. Across the prep-football-hungry South, the estimates are as high as 11 percent to 12 percent among high school juniors and seniors. In a recent national survey, 3.4 percent of high school seniors admitted they have used in the past year. As many as 2.5 percent said they had used within a month of the survey. About 2 percent of eighth-graders have used muscle-building drugs.
Eighth-graders, kids who can read about Jason Giambi admitting in federal grand jury testimony he had injected himself with, among other things, fertility drugs. Unless we're missing something, Jason Giambi cannot have twins.
"Taylor was doing the same thing after he used that Deca Durabolin," Don Hooton said, referring to the popular anabolic steroid. "He was using the same stuff Giambi 'allegedly' took. The steroids cause impotence. So they self-medicated themselves with female hormones to counteract it so they can have an erection. Pretty darn sad."
A recent Web search of Deca Durabolin brings up numerous hits. Seven of the first eight give instructions on how to purchase the steroid. It takes a while to scroll down and come upon "health risks." In the viewing room at Taylor's funeral, Don Hooton remembered how a classmate walked up to a family member and calmly explained how kids would make bi-monthly runs to Mexico to acquire steroids.
"I've since found out much of this stuff is veterinary grade," Don Hooton said. "This is what they use on cows, pigs and dogs."
"If you cut to the chase, this hearing is about drug dealing more than anything," Wadler said. "It's an enormous deception because kids on steroids don't look disheveled like other teenage drug abusers. They're healthy, strong. Bottom line, they see how their idols break records and they take a message from that."
Taylor was a cousin of former major league pitcher Burt Hooton. His brother pitched in college. Don Hooton had always wondered if he and his wife had put too much pressure on their children to succeed in athletics. "You always look back," he said. "Did we push him too hard? When you lose your kid, a whole bunch more than just steroids comes up. But I have no doubt -- and many credible doctors have no doubt -- that steroids contributed mightily to his severe depression."
Beneath every young, well-muscled exterior is a mind and a heart that may have to decide one day between the spoils of fame and the risks of health. There are weight rooms full of kids today facing that choice, pressing 250 pounds or more on the bench, trying to get bigger and stronger like their athletic heroes.
McGwire and others need to remember that when they take the oath to testify tomorrow. They need to remember Don Hooton and his family sitting at their kitchen table in Plano, trying to overcome the grief of a bright, young kid hanging himself.
When Steroids Are All The Rage
By Mike Wise
Before stopping at Chipotle for lunch, Mackenzie Hooton telephoned her mother at home to ask what kind of burrito her brother, Taylor, wanted. Gwen Hooton yelled upstairs to her son, but there was no answer. She entered his room to find Taylor hanging from his bedroom door.
"He used his belts to fashion a noose," said Don Hooton, Taylor's father, adding that those were the same belts his son wore to school.
The Hootons looked long and hard at themselves to understand how Taylor -- a bright, popular kid a month past his 17th birthday -- could take his life two summers ago in Plano, Tex. They and doctors who have examined the case came to believe Taylor's death was directly related to depression after he discontinued the use of anabolic steroids.
Don Hooton is coming to Capitol Hill tomorrow to testify during a hearing on performance-enhancing drugs. He is not coming to out Barry Bonds or Sammy Sosa. Don Hooton is coming for his son, a former high school pitcher, a kid enraptured by the thought of becoming as big and strong as the seven major leaguers subpoenaed to testify.
Baseball and many of the people too close to the sport to know better are calling this a witch hunt, the McCarthyism of Mark McGwire and all his power-hitting brethren. They say baseball is cleaning up the sport on its own. Leave the owners and players alone. Let them take care of it.
In their myopia and denial, they don't understand; this is not about baseball and steroids.
It is about kids who hang themselves in their bedrooms and put guns to their heads after putting syringes and pills into their bodies. It is, sadly, about how we culturally value young males in American society, by their size and strength and success -- not by their courage to build their bodies naturally.
"This is not about collective bargaining and this is not about rights to privacy," Don Hooton said in a telephone interview from his home yesterday. "This is about public health. It's about parents expecting a group of admired adults to set an example that does not constitute cheating, felonious behavior and does not endanger the public health. How does anybody argue with that?"
Don Hooton said he did not know his son the last year of his life. On steroids, Taylor Hooton didn't live; he ticked. He developed hand-grenade moods and an aggressive personality that put Taylor at ease in the musclehead subculture of his Plano gym. He beat up his girlfriend's former boyfriend. He threw telephones through the wall. The new ripples in Taylor's veins -- going from a sinewy, 170-pound kid to a 205-pound rock -- made the girls in the hall coo.
"When he started using them, he just wanted to be the number one pitcher," Don Hooton remembered. "Once Taylor started bulking up, then girls became involved. His look changed. It started as an athletic thing and then it became a vanity thing."
Hooton is on the same five-person panel tomorrow as Gary Wadler, a professor of medicine at New York University who has been involved in the World Anti-Doping Agency since its inception. In 1989, he wrote a seminal book titled "Drugs and the Athlete." In a frighteningly prophetic passage, Wadler writes that people have to be mindful of the dependency syndrome associated with anabolic steroids, including depression.
"My wife told me last night that all these things are playing out years later," Wadler said in a telephone interview yesterday.
Never mind the national pastime. More than 500,000 American boys are using anabolic steroids today. Across the prep-football-hungry South, the estimates are as high as 11 percent to 12 percent among high school juniors and seniors. In a recent national survey, 3.4 percent of high school seniors admitted they have used in the past year. As many as 2.5 percent said they had used within a month of the survey. About 2 percent of eighth-graders have used muscle-building drugs.
Eighth-graders, kids who can read about Jason Giambi admitting in federal grand jury testimony he had injected himself with, among other things, fertility drugs. Unless we're missing something, Jason Giambi cannot have twins.
"Taylor was doing the same thing after he used that Deca Durabolin," Don Hooton said, referring to the popular anabolic steroid. "He was using the same stuff Giambi 'allegedly' took. The steroids cause impotence. So they self-medicated themselves with female hormones to counteract it so they can have an erection. Pretty darn sad."
A recent Web search of Deca Durabolin brings up numerous hits. Seven of the first eight give instructions on how to purchase the steroid. It takes a while to scroll down and come upon "health risks." In the viewing room at Taylor's funeral, Don Hooton remembered how a classmate walked up to a family member and calmly explained how kids would make bi-monthly runs to Mexico to acquire steroids.
"I've since found out much of this stuff is veterinary grade," Don Hooton said. "This is what they use on cows, pigs and dogs."
"If you cut to the chase, this hearing is about drug dealing more than anything," Wadler said. "It's an enormous deception because kids on steroids don't look disheveled like other teenage drug abusers. They're healthy, strong. Bottom line, they see how their idols break records and they take a message from that."
Taylor was a cousin of former major league pitcher Burt Hooton. His brother pitched in college. Don Hooton had always wondered if he and his wife had put too much pressure on their children to succeed in athletics. "You always look back," he said. "Did we push him too hard? When you lose your kid, a whole bunch more than just steroids comes up. But I have no doubt -- and many credible doctors have no doubt -- that steroids contributed mightily to his severe depression."
Beneath every young, well-muscled exterior is a mind and a heart that may have to decide one day between the spoils of fame and the risks of health. There are weight rooms full of kids today facing that choice, pressing 250 pounds or more on the bench, trying to get bigger and stronger like their athletic heroes.
McGwire and others need to remember that when they take the oath to testify tomorrow. They need to remember Don Hooton and his family sitting at their kitchen table in Plano, trying to overcome the grief of a bright, young kid hanging himself.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
From The New York Times:
Why We Won't Let Woody Allen Grow Up
By A. O. Scott
On Friday, Fox Searchlight will release "Melinda and Melinda," the 34th feature film written and directed by Woody Allen. These days, the opening of a new Woody Allen movie is hardly an earth-shattering event in the motion picture world; they come around every 15 months or so, with their familiar white-on-black opening titles presenting the cast in alphabetical order accompanied by the scratchy, lilting sounds of old-time jazz. The reactions are often as ritualized, as predictable, as those titles. A few die-hards proclaim that the new picture is, if not quite a return to form, then at least a sign that Mr. Allen - not that anyone ever calls him that outside the pages of this newspaper - still has some comic brio and intellectual fire left in him. Others grumble, once again, that he is not what he used to be, and wonder why he still bothers making movies or why they still bother going.
As of this writing, I have not yet seen "Melinda and Melinda," so I can't say which camp I will join. At least since "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989), I have found myself vacillating between encouragement and disappointment, settling more often, and more easily, into the latter. Like others in the dogged, dwindling corps of Woody Allen completists, I occasionally ask myself if the eternally renewed, all-too-frequently dashed hope that each new movie brings is worth all the angst. He has let us down before, and each new effort revives the anxiety that it will happen again.
But what if this is not an anxiety at all - not a well-founded fear that an admired artist has lost his touch - but rather an expectation? While it's hard to deny that Mr. Allen's output has been uneven of late, his failures and near-misses seem to provoke a disproportionate - even a neurotic - reaction precisely among those most disposed to admiration. What if we - and by "we" I mean the legions (or at least dozens) of young (or at least gracefully middle-aged) intellectuals (or at least newspaper readers) with battered used-bookstore copies of "Getting Even" and "Without Feathers" at their bedside and long passages of dialogue from "Sleeper" and "Love and Death" in their heads - go to the new Woody Allen movie because we want to feel let down, abandoned, betrayed? We are all aware that the man has problems of his own, but what if the dissatisfaction we feel with his work is, at bottom, our problem?
Consider the history. Mr. Allen, who will turn 70 at the end of this year, has been writing, directing and starring in movies for about 35 years. In 1978, after having made six comedies in less than a decade - starting with "Take the Money and Run" in 1969 and culminating in the Oscar-winning "Annie Hall" in 1977 - he released "Interiors," an abstract, ambitious psychological drama that, because it refused to provoke any laughter, provoked quite a bit of grumbling instead. And the disapproving, slightly scandalized response to that movie set the tone for much complaining to follow. Not long after, in "Stardust Memories," Mr. Allen took note of such discontent, portraying a tormented filmmaker at odds with his vulgar, uncomprehending audience, who either read too much into his pictures ("What do you think the Rolls-Royce symbolized?" "I think it symbolized his car") or don't want to be bothered to think about them at all. The line from "Stardust Memories" that everyone remembers is uttered by a loud-mouthed, vulgar movie patron who proclaims her preference for the hero's earlier movies, "the funny ones."
That judgment, meant as a rebuke to a public that wants its entertainers to stay put, has hovered over Mr. Allen's work ever since - or has at least recurred, implicitly and overtly, in reviews of it. Of course, quite a few of the movies that followed have been very funny indeed, and there have been several masterly fusions of humor and anguish. But even his most successful movies have been held up against, and have suffered in comparison to, the standard of his earlier work. Not an aesthetic standard - it is hard to deny that his skill and resourcefulness as a filmmaker have grown over the years - but one that is more invidious because it is impossible to live up to. His newer movies - 25 years' worth! - are found wanting because they don't live up to our memories of what the earlier ones meant to us.
Which was what, exactly? In the 1970's, Mr. Allen seemed to be a representative man, always a dangerous position for a popular artist. For one thing, he crystallized a distinct ethnic identity in the midst of a generational odyssey from lower-middle class provincialism to worldly success and cultural prestige - from that noisy shack under the Coney Island roller coaster in "Annie Hall" to the labyrinthine Upper East Side apartment where so many of his subsequent films were shot. But more than that, his high-strung, nebbishy, woman-crazy persona embodied a newly emergent urban male type, one prefigured in the comic strips of Jules Feiffer and the novels of Philip Roth. And Mr. Allen's particular blend of high culture and low, his autodidact's ardor for Dostoyevsky and Ingmar Bergman coupled with his roots in Borscht-belt standup, represented something new and potent on screen, a sensibility at once romantic and cynical, utterly silly and striving after some kind of intellectual seriousness.
Mr. Allen's influence can hardly be overestimated. Jon Stewart's frequent finger-to-the-lips impersonation is also a nightly reminder of where Mr. Stewart, along with Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David and a few dozen other comedians, not all of them Jewish, came from. And their refinements of Mr. Allen's style and persona are part of what has made the man himself seem obsolete.
There is also the intimation that the world he conjured up so brilliantly - of anxious, white, erudite New Yorkers falling in and out of love as they haunted revival houses, used book stores and the paths of Central Park - no longer quite exists, either as a social milieu or a cultural reference point. Perhaps it never did, but Mr. Allen's vistas of contemporary Manhattan are as deeply tinged with nostalgia as the city in his period dramas. The young, unhappy lovers played by Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci in "Anything Else" (2003) seem as quaint, with their talk of Dostoyevsky and Billie Holiday, as the hard-boiled dames and detectives of "Curse of the Jade Scorpion" (2001).
"Anything Else" also contains an implicit lesson to those who would insist that Mr. Allen owes them one. While Mr. Biggs's character, a young, uncertain comedy writer, is an obvious surrogate for the filmmaker, Mr. Allen himself plays David Dobel, a cantankerous older writer who serves both as the younger man's mentor and as a kind of walking antithesis to everything Mr. Allen has seemed to stand for in the past. He is physically fearless, confrontational, contemptuous of psychoanalysis and delighted by the prospect of moving to California. He is also no sane person's idea of a role model, which is part of the movie's point. Dobel is Mr. Allen's latest attempt to repel the identification that was conferred on him, most likely against his will, 30 years ago. Instead of making the movies we expect him to, he stubbornly makes the movies he wants to make, gathering his A-list casts for minor exercises in whimsy and bile that tend not to be appreciated when they arrive in theaters. How could they be? Mr. Allen will never again be his younger self, and his audience, as long as we refuse to acknowledge that fact, will never grow up, guaranteeing our further disappointment. Maybe what we have on our hands is a dead shark.
Why We Won't Let Woody Allen Grow Up
By A. O. Scott
On Friday, Fox Searchlight will release "Melinda and Melinda," the 34th feature film written and directed by Woody Allen. These days, the opening of a new Woody Allen movie is hardly an earth-shattering event in the motion picture world; they come around every 15 months or so, with their familiar white-on-black opening titles presenting the cast in alphabetical order accompanied by the scratchy, lilting sounds of old-time jazz. The reactions are often as ritualized, as predictable, as those titles. A few die-hards proclaim that the new picture is, if not quite a return to form, then at least a sign that Mr. Allen - not that anyone ever calls him that outside the pages of this newspaper - still has some comic brio and intellectual fire left in him. Others grumble, once again, that he is not what he used to be, and wonder why he still bothers making movies or why they still bother going.
As of this writing, I have not yet seen "Melinda and Melinda," so I can't say which camp I will join. At least since "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989), I have found myself vacillating between encouragement and disappointment, settling more often, and more easily, into the latter. Like others in the dogged, dwindling corps of Woody Allen completists, I occasionally ask myself if the eternally renewed, all-too-frequently dashed hope that each new movie brings is worth all the angst. He has let us down before, and each new effort revives the anxiety that it will happen again.
But what if this is not an anxiety at all - not a well-founded fear that an admired artist has lost his touch - but rather an expectation? While it's hard to deny that Mr. Allen's output has been uneven of late, his failures and near-misses seem to provoke a disproportionate - even a neurotic - reaction precisely among those most disposed to admiration. What if we - and by "we" I mean the legions (or at least dozens) of young (or at least gracefully middle-aged) intellectuals (or at least newspaper readers) with battered used-bookstore copies of "Getting Even" and "Without Feathers" at their bedside and long passages of dialogue from "Sleeper" and "Love and Death" in their heads - go to the new Woody Allen movie because we want to feel let down, abandoned, betrayed? We are all aware that the man has problems of his own, but what if the dissatisfaction we feel with his work is, at bottom, our problem?
Consider the history. Mr. Allen, who will turn 70 at the end of this year, has been writing, directing and starring in movies for about 35 years. In 1978, after having made six comedies in less than a decade - starting with "Take the Money and Run" in 1969 and culminating in the Oscar-winning "Annie Hall" in 1977 - he released "Interiors," an abstract, ambitious psychological drama that, because it refused to provoke any laughter, provoked quite a bit of grumbling instead. And the disapproving, slightly scandalized response to that movie set the tone for much complaining to follow. Not long after, in "Stardust Memories," Mr. Allen took note of such discontent, portraying a tormented filmmaker at odds with his vulgar, uncomprehending audience, who either read too much into his pictures ("What do you think the Rolls-Royce symbolized?" "I think it symbolized his car") or don't want to be bothered to think about them at all. The line from "Stardust Memories" that everyone remembers is uttered by a loud-mouthed, vulgar movie patron who proclaims her preference for the hero's earlier movies, "the funny ones."
That judgment, meant as a rebuke to a public that wants its entertainers to stay put, has hovered over Mr. Allen's work ever since - or has at least recurred, implicitly and overtly, in reviews of it. Of course, quite a few of the movies that followed have been very funny indeed, and there have been several masterly fusions of humor and anguish. But even his most successful movies have been held up against, and have suffered in comparison to, the standard of his earlier work. Not an aesthetic standard - it is hard to deny that his skill and resourcefulness as a filmmaker have grown over the years - but one that is more invidious because it is impossible to live up to. His newer movies - 25 years' worth! - are found wanting because they don't live up to our memories of what the earlier ones meant to us.
Which was what, exactly? In the 1970's, Mr. Allen seemed to be a representative man, always a dangerous position for a popular artist. For one thing, he crystallized a distinct ethnic identity in the midst of a generational odyssey from lower-middle class provincialism to worldly success and cultural prestige - from that noisy shack under the Coney Island roller coaster in "Annie Hall" to the labyrinthine Upper East Side apartment where so many of his subsequent films were shot. But more than that, his high-strung, nebbishy, woman-crazy persona embodied a newly emergent urban male type, one prefigured in the comic strips of Jules Feiffer and the novels of Philip Roth. And Mr. Allen's particular blend of high culture and low, his autodidact's ardor for Dostoyevsky and Ingmar Bergman coupled with his roots in Borscht-belt standup, represented something new and potent on screen, a sensibility at once romantic and cynical, utterly silly and striving after some kind of intellectual seriousness.
Mr. Allen's influence can hardly be overestimated. Jon Stewart's frequent finger-to-the-lips impersonation is also a nightly reminder of where Mr. Stewart, along with Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David and a few dozen other comedians, not all of them Jewish, came from. And their refinements of Mr. Allen's style and persona are part of what has made the man himself seem obsolete.
There is also the intimation that the world he conjured up so brilliantly - of anxious, white, erudite New Yorkers falling in and out of love as they haunted revival houses, used book stores and the paths of Central Park - no longer quite exists, either as a social milieu or a cultural reference point. Perhaps it never did, but Mr. Allen's vistas of contemporary Manhattan are as deeply tinged with nostalgia as the city in his period dramas. The young, unhappy lovers played by Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci in "Anything Else" (2003) seem as quaint, with their talk of Dostoyevsky and Billie Holiday, as the hard-boiled dames and detectives of "Curse of the Jade Scorpion" (2001).
"Anything Else" also contains an implicit lesson to those who would insist that Mr. Allen owes them one. While Mr. Biggs's character, a young, uncertain comedy writer, is an obvious surrogate for the filmmaker, Mr. Allen himself plays David Dobel, a cantankerous older writer who serves both as the younger man's mentor and as a kind of walking antithesis to everything Mr. Allen has seemed to stand for in the past. He is physically fearless, confrontational, contemptuous of psychoanalysis and delighted by the prospect of moving to California. He is also no sane person's idea of a role model, which is part of the movie's point. Dobel is Mr. Allen's latest attempt to repel the identification that was conferred on him, most likely against his will, 30 years ago. Instead of making the movies we expect him to, he stubbornly makes the movies he wants to make, gathering his A-list casts for minor exercises in whimsy and bile that tend not to be appreciated when they arrive in theaters. How could they be? Mr. Allen will never again be his younger self, and his audience, as long as we refuse to acknowledge that fact, will never grow up, guaranteeing our further disappointment. Maybe what we have on our hands is a dead shark.
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