True Artists

 A little bit ago, I wrote a post that contrasted the films The Imitation Game and Mr. Turner because I was interested in the genius behind their subjects.  Once again, I am compelled to do so, although this time the films are in documentary form.   I recently saw Seymour: an Introduction, an Ethan Hawke film about Seymour Bernstein, a piano teacher who abandoned his ascending playing career to teach piano.  I also saw Finding Vivian Maier (now on rental) about a photographer whose brilliant work was not discovered until after her death.

I was compelled to contrast these two individuals, and both gave me much to contemplate.  These artists had much to say about work, art, and life.  In Bernstein's case, we get to know him first hand through Hawke's interviews and filming of him.  Since Ms. Maier is gone, we get to know her (to the extent we can) through interviews with some of the people that touched her life, mostly the families for whom she worked as a nanny.

Maier was a complete eccentric and I couldn't help but wonder if she suffered from some neurosis that bordered on mental illness.  She apparently never married, did not appear to have any intimate relationships with any man or woman, and lived her life from job to job as a nanny.  She was intensely private, bordering on reclusive and was a hoarder (which got her fired at least once).  And there were hints she was sometimes abusive to her charges.  But she had this gift.   With her Rolleiflex camera, she took street photos, and had this marvelous ability to capture the essence of people.  Holding it at chest high, she captured ordinary individuals close up without the Hawthorne Effect (the phenomenon that subjects change their behavior when they know that they are being observed).   She never exhibited her work and she died alone and largely in obscurity.  While her work is deemed brilliant by many, she appeared to be a very lonely and tortured soul and never quite fitting in.  She seemed to have a passion for this art...and only this art, and worked only to support herself in this endeavor.

Bernstein, a man equally dedicated to his art, presents quite a different picture.  He is a man that seems at peace with himself and his life decisions to eschew performing to teach piano and live a simple life alone in a small apartment in Manhattan.  Seymour: an Introduction is an intimate portrayal of this man dedicated to his craft.  Hawke's film permits us to spend an afternoon with this wonderful human being.  He is easy and gentle and relates well to his students, who clearly revere him.  He is good humored and gentle with his students and at one point jokes with a student that it is against the rules to play better than him.  This film is about mentoring as much as it is the art.  and the message that accomplishment takes talent and enormous amounts of painstaking practice.  

The core of his philosophy was captured in a single, poignant quote: "When I was around the age of 15, I remember that I became aware that when my practicing went well, everything else in life seemed to be harmonized by that. When my practicing didn't go well, I was out of sorts with people, with my parents.  So I concluded that the real essence of who we are resides in our talent, in whatever talent that there is."

The difference between the two subjects is stark.  Spending an afternoon with Bernstein would be a joy, a dinner with Ms. Maier would likely to be awkward and difficult.  Bernstein forsake his career to help young people find their talent.  Maier used caretaking of children to focus on her own art, and indeed, was sometimes abusive to them.

But the two shared a striking similarity in one key respect---the need for solitude.  Vivian Maier's was more of a misanthropic, almost reclusive type.  Bernstein's came more naturally, I think.  But Hawke's film does not delve into Bernstein's relationships at all, so we don't know whether Bernstein was ever married or lived with anyone.  We just know (and he says this explicitly) that solitude was important to him.

Bernstein himself says that "monsters" are capable of having extraordinary talent and ability.   There nasty and incorrigible people that are unbelievably talented and creative.  (See, e.g. Mr. Turner) Clearly, Maier had a dark side.  But Bernstein evidences no such darkness.

But that leaves me with the question of whether true artists need to be solitary, of whether the art takes over so much of their soul that it leaves little room for someone else.   Or whether that time alone is needed for creativity or to synthesize and process the hours of practice and devotion.

In any event, these are both fabulous documentaries with interesting subjects and best seen back-to-back.

Bibi and the Iranian Bomb

When he campaigned for the presidency, Barack Obama promised that he would (a) talk to any dictator without precondition, and (b) take a more multilateral approach to foreign policy than his predecessor.  Faced with the most important foreign policy issue of our time- the Iranian nuclear program- president Obama has shown that he is willing to talk to dictators, but will shut down the voices of our key allies, especially the one ally that has real skin in the game.

The White House threw an absolute hissy fit over Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's address before Congress last week and acted as a six year old that sticks his fingers in his ears and hums to drown out every single word.

That Prime Minister Netanyahu isn't in a full fledged panic is a testament to his self restraint.  He is faced with a regime that has vowed on several occasions to "wipe his country off the map," and has repeatedly defied international pressure to halt the means to do so.  Most troubling for him, he has been repeatedly snubbed by this Administration, told he must roll back his borders to the pre-1967 borders, all while asking nothing of substance from the Palestinians.  And now he is being told by President Obama, "Trust me.  I guarantee if it's a deal I've signed off on, it's the best way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb."

Right.

What does Bibi have to go on to convince him that Obama's assessments are correct and that his negotiating tactics produce satisfactory results?

•  Pushed the "reset button" after Russia's invasion of Georgia and promised "more flexibility" after the 2012 election on nuclear matters. Putin responded by ramping up military modernization and invaded the Ukraine.  Next, the White House dismissed Russia as a "regional power acting out of weakness" in its incursion of the Ukraine.  Today, Russia threatens the Baltics and is carrying out simulated attacks on NATO ships.
  
• Dismissed ISIS as the JV team and declared them not to be Islamic (see link to Atlantic article to the contrary) (http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980) .  Today, ISIS controls huges swaths of land in the Middle East and is now linking up with Boco Haram in North Africa.   It continues unabated on its orgy of murder and mayhem and is now on a campaign to destroy irreplaceable historical artifacts that are part of the birth of human civilization.

• Labeled Assad a "reformer" before he used chemical weapons on his own people, and did nothing after that self declared red line was crossed. 

• Without asking anything from the Castros, reversed unilaterally and without debate, moved to restore diplomatic ties with Cuba and declared that ""What I know deep in my bones is that when you have done the same thing for 50 years and nothing has changed, you should try something different if you want a different outcome."  Cuba immediately responded by delivering a list of its demands on us.

Worse, in an unstable country (which instability the US facilitated), we demonstrated that we could not even provide adequate security FOR OUR OWN PEOPLE.   Can we blame Bibi for wondering whether an Obama deal with Iran will be adequate to protect HIS people if we will not do what is necessary to protect our own?

Netanyahu raised substantive legitimate issues - leaving infrastructure in place, inadequacy of monitoring and a sunset provision.   Obama, in his response, dismissed the entire speech out of hand and addressed none of these issues.

In yesterday's New York Times, we learned that even the French don't like the terms of this deal.  The French?  The French are advocating a tougher stand?

Yet Obama continues to run after the mullahs like a lovestruck teenage girl.  

In each case---Russia, Cuba, and now Iran, Obama's opening move was a huge concession with no quid pro quo.  With Russia, he scuttled missile defense in Eastern Europe.  With Cuba, he opened diplomatic ties.  With Iran, he loosened sanctions.  All in the hopes that these tyrants would be nice and reasonable.

The results have been predictable....and frightening.

Bibi and the Israeli people should be scared out of their wits.

Choking Freedom

President Obama has had a great couple of weeks.  With his pen and his phone and without any debate or any input from the representatives of the people, his minions continued to push and bully, take away our freedoms and affirm his commitment to "fundamentally transform America."  Using the administrative apparatus of the State, Obama did another end around, attacking business and the Second Amendment.

• Congress has effectively blocked gun control legislation, so Obama turned to the ATF which decreed that a popular form of ammunition used in hunting (5.56mm steel tipped bullets) are deemed to be armor piercing and therefore banned.  This, despite not a single fatality suffered by a law enforcement agent from this type of ammunition in more than 10 years.
• HHS and the Department of Agriculture put out statements urging people to eat less beef, due to environmental sustainability issues.  Of course, other environmentalists have been urging us to eat less fish because of overfishing.  Enjoy your alfalfa sprouts, folks.
• And the biggie--- the FCC declared that it had jurisdiction over the internet and adopted "net neutrality" rules contained within a document that is in excess of 300 pages (which the FCC has not even released yet).  Except for a few George Soros sycophants, there has been no outcry over mismanagement or unfairness over the internet.  The internet, not Obama, has fundamentally transformed America and many business and technological innovations have arisen from it----remarkably with no government assistance or interference whatsoever.  No longer.

The Obama administration has created mechanisms to wield a club in three critical areas:  finance (Dodd Frank), health care (Obamacare) and communications (Net Neutrality).  Big Brother, through the apparatus of untouchable and unaccountable bureaucracies now hold tremendous sway over key areas of our lives.   Most pernicious are provisions that grant enormous power to create rules that we didn't even get to vote on or debate.  They are handed down by fiat.  

This is truly a frightening time for the Republic. We now have the president that the founders feared-- a Latin American type dictator that has contempt for the representatives of the people and for us.  

Not surprisingly, Rand Paul won the straw pole at CPAC.  That gives us some hope.  Paul's ascension tells me that the libertarian wing of the Republican party is gaining strength at the expense of the religious right and that, I think, is a positive development.   While I do not think Paul could carry the general election (and I think he is wrong in his isolationism in foreign affairs.), his showing tells me that there is a strong current that values individual liberty over the Big Brother nanny state in America.

I am happy I can still blog without an FCC license.  That may not be the case in the future if the Obama crowd prevails.

Narratives of the Left

The Left does not have a monopoly on distortion by any means, but it seems to be willing to play that game with a brazenness that would destroy the careers of most any conservative.  The false claims that Brian Williams served up reminded me of the barrage of falsehoods presented as fact to fit the story they want to tell.   And it's not a single incident-- it's a whole litany.   As a conservative writer and thinker, I am more that happy to argue with any progressive on fact and evidence.  But when narratives are simply MADE UP,  we conservatives end up spending more time refuting simple facts instead of having a substantive debate on issues.   When you string these incidents together, you see a disturbing pattern of many on the left that recount incidents as they would HAVE WANTED THEM TO OCCUR, not as they actually did occur.  Or, worse, as Barack Obama continues to do, put forth claims with absolutely no evidence to support them, and often with the knowledge that those claims are simply false.

• Hillary Clinton is the master at this.  She asserted that she came under fire on a tarmac in Bosnia and that was simply untrue.   Similarly, she asserted that she knew what it was to be flat broke, that the former first couple was deeply in debt and almost in penury when they left the White House.  While their balance sheet may not have been in great shape, Bill was capable of garnering a hefty income from his speaking engagements and Hillary received an $8 million advance from her book.  The Clintons have never missed a meal and probably never left the top 1% that is so reviled by the Left.
• "Hands up.  Don't Shoot."  This became the bumper sticker for the supposed epidemic of deaths of black youths at the hands of overzealous, racist white cops.  The trouble is, the Ferguson incident never happened that way.  It was pretty clear from the evidence that officer Darren Wilson was assaulted by Michael Brown and Wilson was duly acquitted by a grand jury.  Still the myth lived on in the media with the St. Louis Rams and other entertainers using that to make a statement.  There has been some research that shows some patterns of persistent racism (see, e.g. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhal Mullainathan on hiring), but that's where the debate should take place--on facts and defensible research--not on incidents that simply did not happen.
• Benghazi.  Susan Rice knowingly perpetrated a falsehood in the days after the Benghazi attack, putting forth the story that the attack was a reaction to a film, "Innocence of Muslims." We know that this simply  was not true, and that it was an attack planned and executed by Al Qaeda terrorists.  It was not spontaneous Muslim rage at this film.  Rice got it completely wrong (intentionally, I believe), yet holds the position of National Security Advisor.
• "Islam is woven into the fabric of our country since its founding."   That is the latest claim by President Obama in his over the top effort to detach Islam from the orgy of burning, beheading, raping and killing that is being perpetrated by some members of Islam in the Middle East and in Europe.   I must have missed that chapter in US history.   This is patently untrue.  Whether Barack Obama likes it or not, this is, and has been, principally a Judeo-Christian nation.  What makes this country special is that other faiths are tolerated and permitted to practice without any discrimination to speak of.   Yet to say Islam is woven into the fabric of this country is a patent falsehood.

In each case, we can have a discussion about the issue at hand--whether Hillary can empathize with the poor, whether and to what extend residual racism exists, whether Al Qaeda was truly on the run, and how extensive and pervasive is radical Islam in the Islamic faith.

Those are the real issues that need to be debated.  But it's hard to have an open and honest debate when you simply make stuff up.

Weekend Extravaganza

I spent a chunk of the weekend listening to actors speaking in heavy British accents (and of course, I will finish the weekend with the newest episode of Downton Abbey) in two terrific films: Mr. Turner and The Imitation Game.  If you can, see them both and it is even better to see them over the same weekend like I did, to contrast them.

Their similarities vastly outweighed their differences.  The subject matter of both are men of genius, whose genius enables them to do their work, and yet sets them far out of the mainstream.  Mr. Turner is about the eccentric 19th century painter JMW Turner.  The Imitation Game's subject is Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who led a team that cracked the Nazi enigma code and changed the course of the war.

Both films were very well acted and in each case, a principal character was teamed with a woman that loved him, and he did not or could not love her back with the same completeness and intensity.  Tim Spall did a masterful job of playing Turner and Dorothy Atkinson played his loyal housekeeper that loved him deeply.  In The Imitation Game, Benedict Cumberbatch played Alan Turing and Kiera Knightly played the woman who loved him. Without spoiling the plot, Turing is a much more sympathetic character who is able to display empathy (and actually works at it) despite his eccentricities. Turner, while able to see the world differently than most, can inexplicable turn completely cold to people (like his own daughters) that would ordinarily matter most.  Turing, on the other hand, is able to attach very intensely, which becomes his undoing.

I am fascinated by people of true genius, those who are separate and apart from us and can see the world in different ways.   I have been fortunate to meet a few during my lifetime.  They are eccentric, unusual, and sometimes difficult.  Often, they have a difficult time managing relationships and their day-to-day affairs but you can often detect an intellectual vibrancy when they walk into a room.

Both of these films do a great job of capturing very different types of genius.  But one could not help but note the similarities between them.

2014 Year End Review

2014 was the year of the polar vortex, ISIS, Ebola, planes in Asia vanishing, do-it-yourself immigration reform, plunging oil prices,  a roaring stock market and an economy that finally seemed to get its legs back after a six year swoon.  As I do every year, I will write a year end review of a year that started in the deep freeze (both weather wise and economically speaking) and ended up quite nicely.

Photograph of the Year.
This year, I decided to add a new category, limiting it to photos I actually take myself with my own camera or cell phone.  I loved this one that I took one morning on the way to work because it captured the headaches caused by the severe winter.   It was an interesting photo because it was taken in the morning and so it is not likely that alcohol was involved in this little mishap.  No one was hurt and I couldn't help but smirk a little as I imagined the conversation that would inevitably take place with her husband later in the day as she explained exactly how this happened.

Book of the Year (Fiction)
I am going to run against the crowd on this one.  Many "Best of" lists picked All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, the story of the intersecting lives of a young German soldier and a blind French girl during the closing days of WWII.  It certainly was worthy of its accolades, but my pick for the most enjoyable read of 2014 was The Unwitting by Ellen Feldman.   Set during the Cold War, it explores the separate lives we lead and secrets we keep even from our spouses.  The most overhyped and disappointing book of the year was The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell which I thought to be hard to follow, dull, and just plain weird.

Book of the Year (Nonfiction)
I may be criticized for picking a "chick book" but I liked This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett.  The title is a bit misleading because it is only partially about her marriage (and her failed one), but in large part a her memoir of her writing career and her struggles and the indignities she suffered with dignity:

And I kept on doing the impossible.  I moved home and became a waitress at a T.G.I. Friday's, where I received a special pin for being the first person at that particular branch of the restaurant to receive a perfect score on her waitress exam.  I was told I would be a shift leader in no time.  I was required to wear a funny hat.  I served fajitas to people I had gone to high school with, and I smiled. 
I did not die.

Ms.  Patchett throughout was mostly able to look at her own predilections and idiosyncrasies and accept them at a level most of us struggle with.

The other nonfiction work I liked was The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison.  This is a collection of essays written by a medical actor that assists students in their diagnosis in medical school.  It explores how we are able to (or should) feel another person's pain and asks interesting questions around that and the limits to it.

Film of the Year
You can wholly discount my choice in this category since my filmgoing this year was grossly inadequate, but I liked Wild.  But as a devotee of Thoreau, I have an affinity for films or books in which people turn to nature and a basic survivalist lifestyle to gather themselves after the civilized world has overwhelmed them.  Conversely, I thought Interstellar was highly overrated, implausible, overintellectualized.....and way too long.   It badly needed the editing crew to go after it with shears.

Band of the Year
This category was the hardest to pick.  While I thought the film industry gave us slim pickings, the music business gave us a number of fresh new sounds and I don't remember a year with more good music to choose from.   The Black Keys, the Arctic Monkeys, Florence + the Machine, Arcade Fire, and Hozier all came out with some great innovative sounds.

But the group that I liked the most this year was Fitz and the Tantrums.  Their album More Than Just a Dream is one of the best albums I've heard in several years.  Out of My League and The Walker are great songs and the style borrows some from the 60's, 70's and 80's.  And the best song on the album is Moneygrabber (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3WRXYYBwRA&list=RDO3WRXYYBwRA#t=0).  It is hard to listen to that song and not hear the echo of the snappy beat of the old Jackson 5, especially if you listen to the background singers.

Concert of the Year
I didn't go to a lot of concerts this year, and missed quite a few that I would have liked, but I got at least two checked off my bucket list---Moody Blues and Earth, Wind & Fire.   But the one that I enjoyed the most was Jackson Browne.   Like the Bob Seger concert I attended last year, I found that Jackson Browne hasn't slipped at all since I first saw him in 1977,   He performed for nearly three hours and while he played some of his newer stuff, his versions of Running on Empty, The Pretender, and Doctor My Eyes resonated as much or more we me as those tunes did then.

Biggest Myth Buster of the Year
Fracking.   Predictions about peak oil, like Paul Ehrlich's predictions of the 70's that the planet would experience mass starvation because of overpopulation, the Chicken Little prognosticators have whiffed again with their predictions, vastly underestimating the power of markets and innovation to improve human existence.   While certainly the slowdown in demand for China accounted for some of the price slide, the advent of fracking and vertical drilling has had real impact on both making the US less energy dependent and the huge drop in energy prices.  Of course, these are developments that occurred without a Big Government department organized around them.  

All in all, 2014 was a good year for literature, a weak year for films, and a great year for music.  And it is a year I learned to be a little grateful for the positives---a strengthening economy and a fall in oil prices.  Moreover, I learned to be grateful for the things that DIDN'T happen.  Again, there was no terrorist attack on US soil.  There was no Ebola outbreak.   And despite the polar vortex, hell did not freeze over, although there were days it felt like it might.

Here's to a healthy, happy, prosperous 2015.

A Coherent Foreign Policy

Now that the Obama administration has, without precondition, opened diplomatic relationships with the brutal Castro dictatorship in Cuba, wouldn't the next logical step be to do the same with the DPRK?

Within days of the warm hug extended to Raul and Fidel, UN Ambassador Samantha Power called North Korea a "living nightmare," that it holds 120,000 people prisoners.  The Assistant Secretary General for Human Rights at the UN stated that North Korea is "a totalitarian system that is  brutally enforced denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, information and association." 

totalitarian system that is characterized by brutally enforced denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, information and association."

Hmmmmmm.  Maybe I'm missing something.   Can't much the same be said for Cuba?  It still holds 57,000 political prisoners, and denies all of the same rights, yet the United States is ready to roll out the red carpet, welcome the Castro boys to the family of nations and extend trade credits.

Maybe I just don't understand the nuances of modern diplomacy.  Is it just a matter of degree?  Is it a Western hemisphere thing?  An immigration policy thing?  An Asian thing?  A nuclear weapons thing?

It sure isn't a liberty thing.  I see no discernible difference between these two regimes on that score.  
If we follow the Obama logic for its unilateral movement on Cuba, then we should be opening up an embassy in Pyongyang  and loosening up trade restrictions because surely our policy toward North Korea "wasn't working."  This is the 3rd generation of North Korean dictators retaining their brutal grip on the north end of the Korean peninsula and nothing has changed, except North Korea now has nuclear weapons and it is still threatening, still proliferating, still brutalizing its own people.

I wish somebody would explain this all to me.