Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I'm anguished about Kossovo becasue IO think there is a sensible war that
ought to be fought there, and when Clinton and Blair say they have no
intention of doing so, I think that for once in their lives they are
telling the truth. 

Europe (if not the USA) has a legitimate interest in getting stable
frontiers for Serbia and should have been prepared to fight the Serbs over
this since 1991. But we weren't. And we seem now committed to a policy of
ethnicly cleansing Kossovo of its serbs when we go back in, which is bad,
or doing nothing, which is just as bad. 

Simply bombing and hoping for a coup to replace Milosevic with someone
with whom Clinton can do business is grossly immoral, asit was in Iraq.
It's not going to work, either.
  

    
Unless by "work" you mean that it will get all of the Balkans to unite in
loathing of the US...

wg
  

    
Yep.  And to instantly have something deeply in common with most of the
people of Iraq..
  

    
Iraq? How about the entire world? We can't even get Canada to say
anything nice about us.

Reminds me of doing a summer semester in London in the 80s, and being
accosted by hostile strangers every day. These people were delusional
enough to think I would stand there and defend REAGAN, of all people.
Like my votes counted in THOSE elections. An otherwise normal-looking
woman threatened me with death, as I walked across the Waterloo Bridge
on an otherwise glorious day. Hello? Needless to say, I don't make much
of an effort at international travel anymore.

I guess the U.S. is the "outcast" of the world's high school. Perhaps
we should start shooting people...wait, we always are. Hmm.
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 16:48>
  

    
This is from Michael Moore (of TV Nation and Roger & Me fame). I don't
know if you're all on his mailing list, but I suspect that you'd enjoy
it as much as I do. Excuse the formatting probs and length.

There he was, The Great Consoler, standing at the podium, biting his
lip, and speaking to a nation in shock.

"We must teach our children to settle their differences through words
and not weapons."

Meanwhile, this same President, continues a daily slaughter of human
beings.  He says it's because the people he is bombing are
doing their own slaughter. He has chosen to respond to their actions
not with "words" but with death.

Is it any wonder some of our children -- especially those in most
pain, the "outcasts," the "uncool" -- decide to turn to murder and
strike out against what they perceive to be a world against them?
We live in a culture in America where violence is The Way We Get
Things Done.  If it works for their elders, why shouldn't the kids give
it a try?

As the kids at the high school near Denver huddled in locked
classrooms in the hopes that they would not be the next one with a
bullet in the face, they turned on the classroom TVs to watch the
carnage and their own potential execution on CNN.  One student,
"Bob," got on his cell phone and called the local Channel 9 to give
the on-air anchors a live play-by-play of events inside the school.

"Bob," the anchors said after getting their precious, Emmy-winning
sound bytes, "maybe you should hang up now and call 911."

"Uh, oh, yeah," responded Bob, sounding a bit disappointed.  His
connection to the virtual world of television and cellular
communication was more a part of his instinct to survive than his
need to call the cops.  Or maybe he trusted the people on TV more to
get him out of there than the full-time armed officer who patrolled the
halls of the high school.  Not one gun of a well-armed
force of police that showed up was able to prevent one death.

A world away, kids just a few years older than Bob are dropping bombs
that are killing kids just a few years younger than Bob.  We know
this because we watch it on TV.  We learn why we're dropping these
bombs also on TV.  A man from the Pentagon shows us cool video
game images of point-and-click targets that go "BOOM!"  Cool.

Another man in an important uniform shows us photographs from one of
the Mother-of-All-Cameras, those satellites that sit thousands
of miles up in space and have, I guess, REALLY long lenses.

He shows us Photo #1.  Here, he says, is "unbroken, untouched ground"
from a week ago. Then he shows us Photo #2 where he points to
the ground being "freshly turned-over, dug up, and replaced."  This,
he says, is evidence of "a mass grave."

The reporters sit there like anxious pet dogs, lapping up the
"revelations" and eagerly reporting them to us as "truth."

But these journalists failed to ask the man in the important uniform
one very important and obvious question:   "Where's the middle photo?"

If our satellite camera is always up there and running, capturing the
before and after of a 300 foot piece of dirt, where's the "during"
photo?  The satellite cameras were snapping pictures the whole time,
so where's the photos of the massacre itself?  Where are the photos
of the Serbs transporting the bodies to the "mass grave?"   Where are
the photos of the bodies being placed in the "mass grave" and covered
with dirt?  Where's just ONE photo of any of this?

Was the satellite camera on the blink during all this activity?  Was
it only working before the ground was dug and then only after it was
covered back up?

Where are those photos, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Blair?

Members of our so-called free press:  Where is your courage to ask the
obvious questions? Why won't you?  Why are we being lied to?

On the night of the Denver shootings, NATO (us) bombed the building
containing the three Serbian TV entertainment networks.  They
didn't bomb the news station putting out the nightly propaganda until
two nights later. They chose to bomb the entertainment
networks first, one of which was showing "Wag the Dog" with its fake
Albanian atrocity scenes, on a continuous loop.

Yes!  Bomb the entertainment networks, 'cause it's all just one big
show for a violence-deprived public forced to sit through
a year of mostly-unconsummated oral sex in oval offices.  We'd much
prefer the gore to Gore and Bill.  "The Matrix," a film about a
young hero in a trenchcoat who is able to blows away everything in
sight,  is the number one film this week in the country.

And as the children of Denver ran from the trenchcoated killers, they
were not met outside by nurturing adults who might take them into their
arms to console and soothe them.

No, the students were ordered to run out with their hands above their
heads into the gun sights of the local S.W.A.T team who herded
them up against a wall -- "KEEP YOUR HANDS WHERE WE CAN SEE THEM!" --
and frisked them with their other hand, the one not holding a gun to
their backs.

You see, the killer or killers might have been amongst them, so all
the children were suspects, all potential murders in the eyes
of the state.  Yes, it's our children who are at fault, we are told --
They watch violent movies!  They listen to violent misogynist music! 
They play violent video games!

Soon, they may be asked to die a violent death on the
fresh-but-recently-disturbed soil of the Balkans.

They will be well prepared.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
http://www.theawfultruth.com
  

    
Bleh.  Personally, I think the bombing of Serbia probably
has had little connection with the disturbed
Colorado teenagers freaking out on a shooting spree.

One could argue that a blunted affect in regard
to the value of human life links the two, but one
would be ignoring a hell of a lot of complex
causative issues.  (Assuming one would like
to support preventive measures to impede the recurrence
of either event.)
  

    
Maybe it really is true that,"War is good business, invest your son."
We certainly seem to be having our fillof it as the century grinds to a
close. 

As for the "settling" of the Balkan situation which we didn't do in
1919, or 1893, either we "liberate the hell" out of them (whoever
'they' happen to be) or we sit on the sidelines and cheer---we could
bet on the outcome, we could have box scores like on the sports page
for the number of civillians and troops killed, we could turn it all
into one huge electronic game---and at this point I ask where is Bill
Gates vaunted technologicalknowhow is he can't make some electronic
equivalent for war?

But don't you all see? it gets right down to the fact that man LIKES
war, and likes fighting and carnage and cluster bombs and rape and and
pillage, and to stop wars we have to change human nature. Because we
are human beings in a human universe do things like Kosovo and high
school shootings occupy the same space in time. The only reason we all
seem to excised about this is because we are more aware than ever
before, just like those spy in the sky kinds of cameras which take time
lapse photography.

Human beings are just pretty flawed. Oh we try not to be, we have
religion, we have sports, we had Joe Dimaggio and it doesn't do us any
good. Maybe we need a theme park for violence, like Disney land. Or
maybe better, we need a war zone, you know, some country which nobody
wants which can be turned into a theme park where people can go and
fight like in a lethal capture the flag contesdt. You have guys who
don't want to play paintball to play war just like they did when they
were kids. And people bet on the outcome? you have nations send in
their a-teams against other a-teams and whoever wins gets the money and
gets laid, for isn't that what war is really all about? getting the
money and getting laid?

I know, I'm supposed to be srous because this is a serious problem
we're trying to speak to, but I can't, because if I don't have a sense
of humor, albeit it black humor, I'll be lost. We can all type
ourselves blue in cyberspace debating these issues to war and peace,
but it's not productive as change,and change starts with individuals,
not movements, small changes make for big changes. As for what goes on
in high school, eveyrone knows what the game is but no one wants to
change it. How do you change it, stop making high school divorced form
life, stop making it its own spearate universe? Only problem is that
high school life is omnipresent.

In the words in Kurt Vonnegut," When you get to be our age, all of a
sudden you realize that you (are) being ruled by the people you went to
high school with...You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing
but high school. You make a fool of y9urself in high school, then you
go in to college to learn how you should have actedin high school, and
then you get out into real life, and that turns out to be high school
all over again-class officers, cheerleaders, and all."

Want to stop war? show those who make it that there's more money to be
made in peace? Want to change high school, change the soceity which
the adolescent is trying to fit into.

is there a chance that any of this will work?

What do you think?

Does all this help sell Teenage nervous Breakdown? If I wasn't seeing
this, do you think I would have written it? If you out there hadn;'t
resonated to it, do you think that some of you would be so mad? I
didn't write TNB to make a fast buck ( there's no such thing in
writing), I wrote TNB because I HAD to, because what I was weeing in
American culture had been eating away at me since the Seventies,
actually the late Soixties when I stumbled onto the mechanism. I wrote
TNB so that people would think and maybe do something in whatever small
way they could to change how American culture works and effects the
rest of the world at large. I wanted to sitrr up the pot (maybe smoke a
little too). I think I've succeeded in that way. Because it's not just
high school, it's all about Bosnia and kids with guns, and rap music
and the glorification of violence and the objectification of women by
men and by women with a grudge. Thinking is not fun, and in this age
it's painful, and it befdause we've avoided the pain of thoght that we
seem to keep getting ourselves ihto such situations both herein our
schools and abroad on the vaorus kiling fields which world politics
provides us with.
  

    


Tell us about Ernie Kovacs.
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 16:48>
  

    
Ernie Kovacs? David G.? that comes out of the blue. What exactly do
you want to know? I don't know whether he fits into this discussion(??)
he was a Hungarian and was very incised by the Hungarian uprising of
1956 (as were many other people). I don't think he would have reacted
well to Vietnam or the other wars that came aferwrds though I don't
think he was particular politcal, save for being a Hungarian and all.

I can't commment on Neal Gabler's column because I don't really read
the LA Times (do people really do that in LA)---forget I said thqat, I
was just being East coast and no one needs that here.
  

    
Didn't you write a book about Ernie Kovacs?
  

    
The Caboosta Kid was an expert at freeing political prisoners.
  

    
I think it's Kapusta Kid, and Kapusta is a kind of sausage (but what
the hell do I know, I'm not Hungarian, I"m Russian-Jewish). The berst
part about writing a book about EK was that it seemed at least to me
that he approved. I always had the feeling that he was benignly
involved in The Ernie Kovacs Phile, that he was dumping cigar ashes
over my typewriter, for in reality his spirit seemed to consume me and
my style, so the book (if you can find it) is very Kovacsian in its
intent.
  

    
Thanks for the spelling correction.  The way I remember the Kid
is as a master of jailbreaks.  He was always being captured,
sentenced to a million years of imprisonment, and busting
out again.  I think he might have come in handy in Kosovo as 
an impromptu underground railroad manager.
  

    
Say, that's a clever way of tying together two disperate subjects? I
only remember the name of the show but    either I don't think I was
old enough when listening or it was after I went to school. He used to
have a radio show in the mid fifties and strange televison shows
thereafter. I know that he ws definitely ahead of the curve of the
normal tv mentality though it would be interesting to see whether
someone with his kind of sensibility would make it on network tv today.
I think he would make a big splash on HBO, something like a cross
between Mnty Python and Saturday Night Dead.

But really, I think that EK was more into cultural politics---his own
than anything we could put our brains around. He would not have had any
patience with the Soho art scene in NYC, the La Cienega gallery scene
in LA, he would have been a saint of the neo-beatniks and expresso
coffee drinkers, the poetry slammers if they managed to take their
language to the visual level---maybe. He was ahead of his time, 'the'
head of his time I'm thinking. After all these years, I still miss him,
I was hoping to grow old with him and his strange visions. Maybe some
other guy will do that, and maybe he'll be the manager to get everyone
out of Kosovo that going ashore.
  

    
David G.: I wrote the book on Ernie Kovacs. It was variously called
Nothing in Moderation and thereafter by two other publishers, The Ernie
Kovacs Phile. I wrote it three years after the Zappa book---you know,
guys with a mustache and the fadct that he was an influence on FZ and
many of my generation. It had a good run coming out three different
times under three different publishers. Somethng like I suppose, the
present day writer refuses to die." I had a great time, probably the
best time researching and meeting people. It was all good energy, and
Ernie's style rubbed off on the writing of the book as well. I think
that it can be had at better college andpublic libraries everywhere.
Best of all is that when it first came out in '75, it ws a big hit with
the showbiz community in Los Angeles, I got the lead review of the
first issue of the LA Times Book Review. The opening line was,"Despite
the fact that this book appears to have been written by an ehtuusiastic
illiterate and copy-edited by a near-sighted axe-murderer, this book
deserves your attention." (BTW, the book wasn't copy-edited and the
next job my editor had was teaching writing at Rollins College,
wouldn't ya know it.)
  

    <scribbled by silly Tue 27 Apr 99 14:11>
  

    
ok,<silly>. how am I supposed to read your scribble? Is this a
quesiton, an answer an observation? light me a cigar if you can tell me
  

    
Sometimes a typo is just a typo.
  

    
David G and all other interested partiese: in case anyone's interested
in Kovacs, the other day I was introduced to
http://www.users.interport.net/~manaben/kovacs.html
the onofficial Ernie Kovacs website put together by a sielnt film
maker, commedian and all-round Kovacs loonie. Very well done and with
much love.
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 16:48>
  

    
dunno about that, they were both pretty bright guys...Howard was a
math prodigy and now teaches communication courses at USC I believe. I
think by now he has his doctorate though he still goes on the road with
Mark---but what does this have to do with what we were talking about
<silly>, give me a reference somewhere and we can continue. I'd much
prefer to talk about FZ or Kovacs or TNB than Kosoco, teenage killers
running amuck in the halls with automatic rifles and bombs, or even the
Martix. We're living in curious end times, and I for one will be damn
glad when the millenium is behind us because all this perturbation of
the biosphere is pretty dangerous. If I weren't so personally involved,
I'd be amused. I'm not. I've got four kids and I have not a clue what
kind of a world they are going to inherit. I don't know whether they
can change what's about to happen. I don't know whether they can. But
on the other hand, it's been going along in its lurching way for
recorded history at least and probably longer. This is the way the
world is more or less I suppose. It doesn't mean I have to like it
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 16:48>
  

    
No doubt it's a moveable feast in terms of absuirdity. As for Mark and
Howard's profanities, I think it came naturally to them, no one was
twisting their arms to do Frank's stuff, Anyway the pay was good, the
got their groupies and had some fun. Which was what the Turtles as a
band were all about. At one time JIm Pons was playing with the Mothers
too, so it was anunofficial Turtles cover band.

As for Kovavcs, he didn't make it into the Sixties or the Seventies,
died January 18th, 1962 or so, car accident wrapped himself around a
pole on Santa Monica Boulevard, seems he hit a skid in the rain while
while driving a Corvair, the poor son of a bitch. Edie paid off his IRS
debts---it's in the book The Enrie Kovacs Phile, or if you're lucky
and fortunate, you can pick up the earlier version known as Nothing in
Moderaton.

I have no comment on Kosovo. It's way beyond beyond, nor do I have
anything to say about the LA Times save that it always struck me as a
vehicle for Buffy Chandler and her social-climbing friends.

Too bad Mort Sahl isn't around with his newspaper humor. I mean who
needs Saturday night Live when we have CNN?