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Sunday, July 31, 2005
Jim Jarmusch and his new film
July 31, 2005
The Last of the Indies
By LYNN HIRSCHBERG
Although he bristles at the title -- his expression hardens, and his face starts to resemble a cloudy day with thunder threatening -- Jim Jarmusch is the last major truly independent film director in America. This is not a statement about his sensibility, although it is true that his minimalist cinematic style and his ability to deftly cross-pollinate pop culture, Eastern philosophy and classic movie genres have made him a unique presence in film for the past 20 years. While other directors may be hailed for their originality and independent point of view, Jarmusch, unlike Quentin Tarantino or pretty much any other auteur, has never made a film under a studio's watch. Ever since his debut feature, ''Stranger Than Paradise,'' in 1984, which cost $150,000, grossed $2.5 million in North America, won the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and permanently upended the idea of independent film as an intrinsically inaccessible avant-garde form, he has owned and controlled all of his movies.
Nearly always, if a filmmaker's first, independent effort meets with either box-office or critical success (or both), he will be seduced into the studio system, where financing is provided in exchange for some measure of creative freedom. But despite Jarmusch's early star-is-born success and many offers from Hollywood, he has remained stubbornly distanced from the studios and their deep pockets.
His films, with their immediately recognizable idiosyncracies, testify to his independence. In 1986, he followed ''Stranger Than Paradise'' with ''Down by Law,'' the story of two deadbeats in New Orleans who are joined in jail by an eccentric Italian, played by Roberto Benigni, who plans their escape. Like all Jarmusch films, ''Down by Law'' combined cool, apathetic hipsters with flashes of poetry and wisdom. (For instance, Benigni's character quotes Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, but in Italian.) In 1989, Jarmusch set his protagonists in a seedy hotel in Memphis for ''Mystery Train,'' a film with three related stories, all influenced by Elvis Presley. In what has become his custom, Jarmusch cast musicians in key roles -- Joe Strummer, the lead singer of the Clash, starred in ''Mystery Train,'' just as Tom Waits and John Lurie did in ''Down by Law.'' Benigni resurfaced in 1992 in ''Night on Earth,'' which featured five separate narratives, each set in a different city, all centering on the relationship between cabdrivers and their passengers. ''Dead Man,'' a psychedelic western, was released in 1996, and ''Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,'' which starred Forest Whitaker as a conflicted hit man who lives by an ancient Japanese-warrior code, came out in 2000, with music by RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan. ''Ghost Dog'' was chiefly about the blurring of belief systems, cultural lines and ethnicities -- a common theme in Jarmusch's films. Like the bebop music he loves, his movies begin with a familiar melody and then adapt that tune into something else, something new.
''Broken Flowers,'' which opens later this week, represents something of a departure. The movie stars Bill Murray as a man on a road trip, searching for the mother of a son he may have fathered. Like the rest of Jarmusch's work, ''Broken Flowers'' is a kind of foreign film set in America. It seems less concerned with results than with the in-between moments of life: the journey rather than the destination. Throughout his career, Jarmusch, like Jean-Luc Godard, has had a sentimental attachment to a certain American male archetype. He has updated the iconic loner movie guys -- the gangster, the cowboy, the gambler -- by making them modern and deadpan and curious. ''Broken Flowers'' expands that focus, moving beyond hipster cool to something more like maturity, but the film still maintains Jarmusch's outsider stance: it is stripped down, closely observed, with an almost dreamlike aura.
''I know,'' Jarmusch moaned during a recent meeting with me in Manhattan. ''It's all so . . . independent. I'm so sick of that word. I reach for my revolver when I hear the word 'quirky.' Or 'edgy.' Those words are now becoming labels that are slapped on products to sell them. Anyone who makes a film that is the film they want to make, and it is not defined by marketing analysis or a commercial enterprise, is independent. My movies are kind of made by hand. They're not polished -- they're sort of built in the garage. It's more like being an artisan in some way.''
Jarmusch took a sip of hot green tea. It was a humid summer day, and he sat outside under an umbrella at B Bar, down the street from the office of his company, Exoskeleton, on the Bowery. Jarmusch was dressed completely in black, and a pin on his shirt pocket read ''Indian Country,'' a nod to his fondness for Native American culture. At 52, he has a face that is soft and unlined, which contrasts with his trademark, a sweeping pompadour of startling gray hair. ''The key, I think, to Jim, is that he went gray when he was 15,'' Waits, Jarmusch's close friend, would later say to me. ''As a result, he always felt like an immigrant in the teenage world. He's been an immigrant -- a benign, fascinated foreigner -- ever since. And all his films are about that.''
More than anything, Jarmusch is a sort of focused amateur enthusiast. ''I consider myself a dilettante in a positive way, and I always have,'' he said. ''That affects my sense of filmmaking.'' His passions, which reflect his resolute disinterest in the conventional, include the study of mushrooms (''I almost died after eating wild mushrooms''); bird-watching (''In 12 years, I've identified about 80 birds in my yard in my home in the Catskills''); the authorship of Shakespeare's plays (''I think it was Christopher Marlowe''); the history of cinema (''Some mornings I'll wake up and say, 'There's an Ophuls film I haven't seen, and I need to see it today'''); and, most of all, music. He wrote ''Broken Flowers'' while listening to recordings from the early 70's by Mulatu Astatke, an Ethiopian jazz-funk artist (whose music ended up in the film), and is currently enthralled by a duo called Coco Rosie, who, as he described them, ''sound like two little Billie Holidays an octave higher if you were on acid in Tokyo in 1926.'' ''I think I was supposed to be a musician,'' he said. To him, movies should aspire to the immediate sway of music. ''I want to capture the temperature, the texture, the atmosphere you can inhale just by listening to a three-and-a-half-minute song.''
After Jarmusch moved to New York in the 70's to attend Columbia, he formed a band called the Del-Byzanteens, and he lived in the East Village, the same neighborhood he lives in now. The punk and new-wave scene in Lower Manhattan at the time not only introduced bands like the Ramones and the Talking Heads but also gave rise to a group of enterprising filmmakers, like Amos Poe, whose 1978 movie ''The Foreigner'' (in which Debbie Harry played a prostitute) influenced Jarmusch. ''I feel so lucky,'' Jarmusch said. ''During the late 70's in New York, anything seemed possible. You could make a movie or a record and work part time, and you could find an apartment for 160 bucks a month. And the conversations were about ideas. No one was talking about money. It was pretty amazing. But looking back is dangerous. I don't like nostalgia.'' He smiled. ''But, still, damn, it was fun. I'm glad I was there.''
In most of the important ways, he is still there. In the last 30 years, New York may have changed, but Jarmusch has stuck to his original ethos. ''I prefer to be subcultural rather than mass-cultural,'' he explained. ''I'm not interested in hitting the vein of the mainstream.''
And yet ''Broken Flowers'' is, by far, his most mainstream film. By casting Murray, who is in virtually every scene of the movie, Jarmusch has given audiences a more traditional leading man rather than his usual downtown habitue. Immediately, the movie seems adult, grown-up. The subtleties of Murray's beautiful performance -- his ability to move seamlessly from comedy to drama, his sense of stillness when faced with an absurd situation, his distinct out-of-time Americanness -- fit perfectly into Jarmusch's playfully moody world. But the story line of ''Broken Flowers'' -- a man visits his ex-girlfriends (who are played by Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy and Tilda Swinton) to discover which, if any, gave birth to his son -- is more conventional, and more emotionally direct, than Jarmusch's plots have ever been. '''Broken Flowers' is completely accessible,'' Bill Murray told me when I phoned him not long ago. ''A lot of people are going to see this film that have never seen one of Jim's films. It's going to touch all kinds of people. And I think that frightens Jim a little bit. When you're really independent, the fear is as much about losing your independence as having success.''
As we got ready to leave, Jarmusch shrugged off any talk of box-office popularity. ''Bill called and said, 'I'm glad I'm responsible for your crossing over,''' he recalled as he finished a cigarette. ''I called back and said: 'Yeah, I'm crossing over. So if you want to reach me, call my people, and maybe I'll get back to you.''' Jarmusch laughed, but the anxiety in his statement was clear: it may be difficult to remain an outsider -- an independent -- if the paying public applauds your efforts.
It was a rainy Wednesday night around 9 p.m., and Jarmusch, his hair glowing in the semidarkness, was staring intently at a naked girl on a video monitor. ''You don't want her skin too warm,'' Jarmusch said to John Dowdell, a post-production colorist who was sitting next to him in a studio on Leroy Street in Manhattan. Jarmusch was overseeing a transfer of ''Broken Flowers'' from film to video, tweaking the tones and shades in nearly every scene. ''It's so delicate,'' Jarmusch said, as the naked girl's skin was turned slightly pinker. ''If you go one way or the other, it has a different emotional effect on you.'' He stared a second. ''Now she's kind of glowing,'' he said. He tilted his head. ''Very Helmut Newton or Guy Bourdin.''
They moved on to the next frame. ''This is extremely time-consuming,'' Jarmusch said. ''We're getting close to giving the baby away, and I'm exhausted. I'm happiest when I'm shooting the movie. Filming is like sex. Writing the script is like seduction, then shooting is like sex because you're doing the movie with other people. Editing is like being pregnant, and then you give birth and they take your baby away.'' He took a swig of cranberry juice. ''After this process is done, I will watch the movie one more time with a paying audience that doesn't know I'm there, and then I will never see it again. I'm so sick of it.''
As Jarmusch's films go, ''Broken Flowers'' came together quickly. Although he likes to set his films in slightly mythic cities that he never visited (Memphis in ''Mystery Train,'' New Orleans in ''Down by Law''), he prefers to create characters with an actor he knows in mind. He wrote ''Down by Law'' thinking of Tom Waits, ''Dead Man'' was for Johnny Depp and John Lurie inspired ''Stranger Than Paradise.'' Four years ago, Jarmusch spoke with Murray when both were guests on a television show. ''Jim thought and talked about movies the way I think and talk about them,'' Murray recalls. ''It was like meeting a cousin I didn't know I had.''
That kind of empathetic connection with Jarmusch is common. From a distance, Jarmusch is taciturn and can seem forbidding, but he is actually a sort of muscular romantic. He is defined by oppositions: he loves pulp action films from Asia but dedicated ''Broken Flowers'' to the relatively obscure French film director Jean Eustache; he rides old English motorcycles and owns two El Caminos but is a devotee of pearls and sonnets. He is keenly aware of history, especially as it concerns certain actors. A few years ago, Jarmusch created the Sons of Lee Marvin, a secret society that counts as its members Jarmusch, Waits and Lurie. Waits designed fancy business cards for the group, whose members are united in having some physical resemblance to the late actor. ''I can't tell you too much about the Sons of Lee Marvin,'' Waits whispered to me when I asked about the group. ''But we all speak the same language.''
Jarmusch was similarly attuned to Murray. After meeting him, Jarmusch wrote a script called ''Three Moons in the Sky'' with a lead role for Murray. It was the story of a man with three separate wives and families. Murray loved the premise, and Jarmusch went to Cannes in 2002 to raise money for the production of the film.
Setting up a Jarmusch movie is a complicated process. Because he doesn't work within the studio system, each film has to be sold individually. He and his agent, Bart Walker of Creative Artists Agency (who also represents, among others, Sofia Coppola), meet with foreign distributors who have worked with Jarmusch before. Jarmusch has one especially difficult and costly requirement: unlike many other American directors, he strongly resists his films' being dubbed into other languages. ''Jim feels that an actor's voice is a part of who they are in the film,'' Walker explained to me. ''The integrity of his film changes when the actor's voice is changed.'' Jarmusch is also known to shoot his movies in black and white, which also alienates investors; television networks and movie-rental outlets like Blockbuster are chiefly interested in color films.
It helps that Jarmusch is a major star internationally. His movies are acclaimed overseas, and foreign distributors are always interested in hearing about his latest project. In Europe and Asia, filmgoers generally do not differentiate between independent and studio films, and the international film community does not view Jarmusch as some kind of alternative cult director. ''In America, independent film is treated like the minor leagues,'' Jarmusch said. ''And then you're supposed to try and try to get into the majors, which are the studios. That's never been my goal. And in Europe they understand that.''
After hearing Jarmusch describe the plot and cast of his new film (or reading the script if it's ready), foreign movie companies decide how much they are willing to pay for the distribution rights. This negotiation is a laborious process. But if all goes well, agreements are forged, and the contract is then taken to a bank, where a loan is secured, and the movie production can begin. This can take months. After Jarmusch finishes the film, he and Walker will then sell it to an American distributor. (For ''Broken Flowers,'' an American company, Focus Features, provided the financing and is handling worldwide distribution. This is a one-off relationship designed to accommodate Bill Murray's schedule, rather than a long-term creative marriage.)
With ''Three Moons,'' Jarmusch had already raised the money when he began to have qualms about his script. He decided he wanted to write another one instead. The new script, which became ''Broken Flowers,'' was completed in a speedy two and a half weeks. Jarmusch wrote as he always does: at his house in the Catskills, in longhand in unlined sketchbooks, with the scenes composed out of order. He lives upstate (and in the city) with his longtime girlfriend, the filmmaker Sara Driver, who has worked with him since the beginning of his career. His writing desk is in a small room and is surrounded by photographs of Joe Louis, Robert Mitchum, Geronimo, Buster Keaton and Jean Eustache, all tacked to the wall for inspiration. ''Jim's scripts are really like haikus,'' Waits says. ''The script is like a rough map that someone gives you to get to the store. He figures that since he wrote the part with you in mind, you're already the guy, so everything you do in the movie just seems to make sense.''
Murray may have first read the finished script for ''Broken Flowers'' only when filming began -- or he may have never read it at all. ''I can't recall him ever telling me what he thought of the script,'' Jarmusch told me matter-of-factly. At one point in pre-production, Jarmusch and Murray were having dinner, and halfway through the meal Murray left the table, presumably to make a phone call or have a cigarette. He never came back. ''That didn't bother me,'' Jarmusch recalled. ''All my friends are like that. They may disappear, but they always return.''
The first real film that Jarmusch remembers seeing was ''Thunder Road,'' starring Robert Mitchum. Jarmusch was about 6, and he watched it at a drive-in with his mother and older sister. Jarmusch has never seen the whole film again, but something about it stuck in his mind. ''I liked being there,'' he said over yet another cup of hot green tea, at a restaurant in TriBeCa. Although Jarmusch's most recent movie, in 2004, was a collection of 11 short films titled ''Coffee and Cigarettes,'' he has not drunk coffee in years. ''In 1986,'' he explained, ''I decided to stop all kinds of chemicals and drugs at once. I think it had to do with William Burroughs treating his body like an experiment. So, no alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, sugar, beef, coffee. I went insane. I don't remember what I did, but I was insane. When I came back, I never took drugs in the form of powders or pills again. I still don't drink coffee. I never ate meat again. I still smoke. It was an experiment -- it wasn't really for health. And it was interesting.''
When Jarmusch spoke about his past, it was often in the measured manner of a cultural anthropologist. Throughout his life, he has courted and cultivated influences and mentors, and though many of his mentors have now died, they seem to float around his brain like wise, stubborn, pontificating ghosts. ''I really miss Joe Strummer,'' he said. ''Even though he's dead, I still get advice from him. He's very good at telling you to stick to your guns. I have Nick Ray, Sam Fuller and Joe -- I have some great spirits when I need guidance. I hear William Burroughs a lot, too, but I don't really want to listen to his advice.''
Jarmusch grew up in Akron, Ohio, the middle of three children. ''Jim is from Ohio,'' Waits told me, as if it were more an explanation than a fact. ''It's very flat. You dream in very flat places. You learn to solve problems. Six presidents were born there. And Jim.'' Jarmusch's father worked for BF Goodrich, and his mother, before marrying and becoming a housewife, reviewed films for The Akron Beacon Journal. ''My maternal grandmother was amazingly inspiring to me,'' Jarmusch said. ''On my 16th birthday, my grandmother gave me the Moncrieff translation of Proust. She had a lot of activities: she traded Oriental rugs, she knew gypsies and got me interested in Native American culture. By the time I was 14, I discovered the Beats and rock 'n' roll, and I knew I wanted to get out of Akron. By 17, I was gone.''
He studied journalism briefly at Northwestern University and then transferred to Columbia, where he majored in literature. In 1977, he enrolled at N.Y.U.'s film school. In the third year of the program, he became a teaching assistant for Nicholas Ray, the director of ''Rebel Without a Cause.'' Ray, who was dying of cancer at the time, became hugely important to Jarmusch. ''Ray said, 'If you want to make a film, you can make a film,''' Jarmusch said. ''And that sense of possibility made all the difference. It also mirrored the feeling in New York then. Technical expertise was not as crucial as spirit: the punk scene was about expression over virtuosity. It was more important to be open to all influences.''
Ray died in 1979, and afterward the director Wim Wenders, who met Jarmusch while filming a documentary about Ray's last years, gave Jarmusch about 40 minutes' worth of unused black-and-white film stock he had left over from another movie -- a precious gift for a young filmmaker. Seizing the opportunity, Jarmusch used the film to make a 30-minute short, which eventually became the first third of ''Stranger Than Paradise.'' The final, complete film, which the critic Pauline Kael aptly titled a ''punk picaresque,'' has a cool, absurdist sensibility. There is no real plot -- just snippets of conversation between two buddies and a teenage girl from Budapest and a road trip to Cleveland -- but ''Stranger Than Paradise,'' with its irresistible evocation of the downtown spirit of the time, was one of those rare movies that change the culture. The film had a big-city release in the United States, played for one solid year in a theater in Paris and established a new breed of do-it-yourself filmmaking. '''Stranger Than Paradise' made me feel that films could be made in a different way in America,'' Tilda Swinton, who met Jarmusch backstage at a concert by the rock band the Darkness, told me. ''Jim has a way of explaining America. He says, 'I'm an alien, but I'm also an American, and we'll experience this world together.' That's why he's become such a force in international film -- he explains America to aliens, while remaining an alien himself.''
After ''Stranger Than Paradise,'' Hollywood came calling. Eager to absorb his cinematic sensibility, the industry offered Jarmusch action movies, teen movies, movies about hipsters in New York clubs, movies with cocaine-dealing plot lines. He turned everything down. When it became clear that Jarmusch was not interested in signing a deal with any studio, Hollywood stopped offering him projects. He had cemented his reputation as a staunch outsider. ''My place is in the margins,'' he said. ''If I made a film that a lot of people liked, I might wonder what I did wrong.''
Truly independent filmmaking is risky, and the failures can be tremendously frustrating. When ''Dead Man,'' Jarmusch's most ambitious film, finished playing in competition at Cannes in 1995, the audience was virtually silent. The movie, which stars Johnny Depp as an accountant named William Blake (as an homage to the visionary, romantic poet of the same name), is a modernist twist on a classic film genre. Jarmusch loves to take his characters on a journey, and ''Dead Man'' is the western as road trip, with Depp gaining enlightenment through his exposure to Native American culture. Jarmusch persuaded Robert Mitchum, one of his heroes -- ''The only actor I ever found intimidating'' -- to play one of the film's villains. Jarmusch flew out to Mitchum's home in Santa Barbara, Calif., to woo him. They had lunch, and Mitchum said, ''I'll do your damn movie.'' This is typical Jarmusch: by casting Mitchum, he pushed the past into the present and aligned his western with Mitchum's classic persona. Although the film has oddball, comic moments, it is the only Jarmusch movie to directly ponder the subject of mortality. ''Life is very fragile,'' Jarmusch told reporters at the time, ''and 'Dead Man' is about that -- that life is fragile and cruel and that it's also beautiful and funny and emotional.''
Nearly all of Jarmusch's films had been warmly received in competition at Cannes, and ''Dead Man'' had momentum; there had been talk that it was going to be the best movie at the festival. But after the film was shown on the huge screen at the Palais, only a few people applauded. And then, in the vast, mostly quiet auditorium, a voice boomed down from the balcony. ''Jeem,'' a man yelled in a heavy French accent, ''it's [expletive].''
''Jim must have told me that story five times,'' Murray says. ''It's a good story, but it's also upsetting to hear and tells you a lot about how complicated this international film world can be.''
''Dead Man'' had been sold to Miramax before it was shown in Cannes. Excited by the marketing possibilities of Depp and Jarmusch and a new kind of western, Harvey Weinstein, the co-head of Miramax, bought the movie without even seeing it. But after Cannes, Miramax barely released the film. Jarmusch had struggled to make the movie for a budget of only $9 million (astonishingly small for a period film set on location in the American West), and he admits today that it was the most difficult film he has ever directed, but he will not break his Zen-like code and show any disappointment that ''Dead Man'' played in theaters for just a few weeks.
''I never expected Harvey to cross me over to a new audience,'' Jarmusch said. ''I just wanted a classy release, and Miramax kind of washed their hands of the movie.'' Jarmusch paused. ''But it was a great relief to not have another urban film in theaters. At least the press couldn't hang all that on me again. No more aging-punk-rock-indie-downtown-urban. Oh, please -- I'm going to make a western in black and white.''
Jarmusch laughed. If he was ever enraged over ''Dead Man,'' his anger had dissipated. He listens to his mentor-ghosts, who tell him not to dwell on the past but to concentrate, instead, on the work. ''Blake said, 'The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow,''' Jarmusch recited, as if this explained the heartache of a good movie going unseen. He stared a second. ''I'd like to own a crow,'' he said. ''I think that would be an excellent pet.''
At Cannes in May, before the screening of ''Broken Flowers,'' Jarmusch expected the worst. As he later told me, ''It's easier that way.'' Murray, who was also there, attending Cannes for the first time with a film in competition, said, ''Unlike Jim, I always prefer that people actually see the movie.'' Jarmusch praised Murray's performance: ''Nick Ray said: 'Acting is like piano playing. The dialogue is just the left hand; the melody is in the eyes.' And that would apply to Bill in this movie.'' Before the screening, Murray zipped around La Croisette on a moped, picking up passengers, and gave interviews about searching for his own ex-girlfriends, as his character does in the movie. ''I usually decide to try in the middle of the night in a strange town, and I don't recommend it,'' he said.
It rained on the night of the premiere at the Palais, and the weather nicely underscored the comic melancholy of ''Broken Flowers.'' By all accounts, the Cannes audiences loved the movie, which of course made Jarmusch uncomfortable. ''If something gets too good a response, I want to head for the hills,'' he said later. ''And not Beverly Hills. Popular success is not my area of expertise.''
Before he left the festival, Murray, who claims to be ''semi-psychic,'' turned to Jarmusch and said, enigmatically, ''I think second place is O.K.'' He was referring to the coming announcement of the Palme d'Or, the top prize at Cannes. Jarmusch doesn't really remember the moment, but two days later, ''Broken Flowers'' won the Grand Prix, the runner-up prize at the festival, just as Murray predicted. ''That was better for Jim,'' Murray said. ''He could win and not feel awkward. His victory was a bit off to the side. And he's happier there.''
Lynn Hirschberg, editor at large for the magazine, writes frequently about the movies.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The Last of the Indies
By LYNN HIRSCHBERG
Although he bristles at the title -- his expression hardens, and his face starts to resemble a cloudy day with thunder threatening -- Jim Jarmusch is the last major truly independent film director in America. This is not a statement about his sensibility, although it is true that his minimalist cinematic style and his ability to deftly cross-pollinate pop culture, Eastern philosophy and classic movie genres have made him a unique presence in film for the past 20 years. While other directors may be hailed for their originality and independent point of view, Jarmusch, unlike Quentin Tarantino or pretty much any other auteur, has never made a film under a studio's watch. Ever since his debut feature, ''Stranger Than Paradise,'' in 1984, which cost $150,000, grossed $2.5 million in North America, won the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and permanently upended the idea of independent film as an intrinsically inaccessible avant-garde form, he has owned and controlled all of his movies.
Nearly always, if a filmmaker's first, independent effort meets with either box-office or critical success (or both), he will be seduced into the studio system, where financing is provided in exchange for some measure of creative freedom. But despite Jarmusch's early star-is-born success and many offers from Hollywood, he has remained stubbornly distanced from the studios and their deep pockets.
His films, with their immediately recognizable idiosyncracies, testify to his independence. In 1986, he followed ''Stranger Than Paradise'' with ''Down by Law,'' the story of two deadbeats in New Orleans who are joined in jail by an eccentric Italian, played by Roberto Benigni, who plans their escape. Like all Jarmusch films, ''Down by Law'' combined cool, apathetic hipsters with flashes of poetry and wisdom. (For instance, Benigni's character quotes Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, but in Italian.) In 1989, Jarmusch set his protagonists in a seedy hotel in Memphis for ''Mystery Train,'' a film with three related stories, all influenced by Elvis Presley. In what has become his custom, Jarmusch cast musicians in key roles -- Joe Strummer, the lead singer of the Clash, starred in ''Mystery Train,'' just as Tom Waits and John Lurie did in ''Down by Law.'' Benigni resurfaced in 1992 in ''Night on Earth,'' which featured five separate narratives, each set in a different city, all centering on the relationship between cabdrivers and their passengers. ''Dead Man,'' a psychedelic western, was released in 1996, and ''Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,'' which starred Forest Whitaker as a conflicted hit man who lives by an ancient Japanese-warrior code, came out in 2000, with music by RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan. ''Ghost Dog'' was chiefly about the blurring of belief systems, cultural lines and ethnicities -- a common theme in Jarmusch's films. Like the bebop music he loves, his movies begin with a familiar melody and then adapt that tune into something else, something new.
''Broken Flowers,'' which opens later this week, represents something of a departure. The movie stars Bill Murray as a man on a road trip, searching for the mother of a son he may have fathered. Like the rest of Jarmusch's work, ''Broken Flowers'' is a kind of foreign film set in America. It seems less concerned with results than with the in-between moments of life: the journey rather than the destination. Throughout his career, Jarmusch, like Jean-Luc Godard, has had a sentimental attachment to a certain American male archetype. He has updated the iconic loner movie guys -- the gangster, the cowboy, the gambler -- by making them modern and deadpan and curious. ''Broken Flowers'' expands that focus, moving beyond hipster cool to something more like maturity, but the film still maintains Jarmusch's outsider stance: it is stripped down, closely observed, with an almost dreamlike aura.
''I know,'' Jarmusch moaned during a recent meeting with me in Manhattan. ''It's all so . . . independent. I'm so sick of that word. I reach for my revolver when I hear the word 'quirky.' Or 'edgy.' Those words are now becoming labels that are slapped on products to sell them. Anyone who makes a film that is the film they want to make, and it is not defined by marketing analysis or a commercial enterprise, is independent. My movies are kind of made by hand. They're not polished -- they're sort of built in the garage. It's more like being an artisan in some way.''
Jarmusch took a sip of hot green tea. It was a humid summer day, and he sat outside under an umbrella at B Bar, down the street from the office of his company, Exoskeleton, on the Bowery. Jarmusch was dressed completely in black, and a pin on his shirt pocket read ''Indian Country,'' a nod to his fondness for Native American culture. At 52, he has a face that is soft and unlined, which contrasts with his trademark, a sweeping pompadour of startling gray hair. ''The key, I think, to Jim, is that he went gray when he was 15,'' Waits, Jarmusch's close friend, would later say to me. ''As a result, he always felt like an immigrant in the teenage world. He's been an immigrant -- a benign, fascinated foreigner -- ever since. And all his films are about that.''
More than anything, Jarmusch is a sort of focused amateur enthusiast. ''I consider myself a dilettante in a positive way, and I always have,'' he said. ''That affects my sense of filmmaking.'' His passions, which reflect his resolute disinterest in the conventional, include the study of mushrooms (''I almost died after eating wild mushrooms''); bird-watching (''In 12 years, I've identified about 80 birds in my yard in my home in the Catskills''); the authorship of Shakespeare's plays (''I think it was Christopher Marlowe''); the history of cinema (''Some mornings I'll wake up and say, 'There's an Ophuls film I haven't seen, and I need to see it today'''); and, most of all, music. He wrote ''Broken Flowers'' while listening to recordings from the early 70's by Mulatu Astatke, an Ethiopian jazz-funk artist (whose music ended up in the film), and is currently enthralled by a duo called Coco Rosie, who, as he described them, ''sound like two little Billie Holidays an octave higher if you were on acid in Tokyo in 1926.'' ''I think I was supposed to be a musician,'' he said. To him, movies should aspire to the immediate sway of music. ''I want to capture the temperature, the texture, the atmosphere you can inhale just by listening to a three-and-a-half-minute song.''
After Jarmusch moved to New York in the 70's to attend Columbia, he formed a band called the Del-Byzanteens, and he lived in the East Village, the same neighborhood he lives in now. The punk and new-wave scene in Lower Manhattan at the time not only introduced bands like the Ramones and the Talking Heads but also gave rise to a group of enterprising filmmakers, like Amos Poe, whose 1978 movie ''The Foreigner'' (in which Debbie Harry played a prostitute) influenced Jarmusch. ''I feel so lucky,'' Jarmusch said. ''During the late 70's in New York, anything seemed possible. You could make a movie or a record and work part time, and you could find an apartment for 160 bucks a month. And the conversations were about ideas. No one was talking about money. It was pretty amazing. But looking back is dangerous. I don't like nostalgia.'' He smiled. ''But, still, damn, it was fun. I'm glad I was there.''
In most of the important ways, he is still there. In the last 30 years, New York may have changed, but Jarmusch has stuck to his original ethos. ''I prefer to be subcultural rather than mass-cultural,'' he explained. ''I'm not interested in hitting the vein of the mainstream.''
And yet ''Broken Flowers'' is, by far, his most mainstream film. By casting Murray, who is in virtually every scene of the movie, Jarmusch has given audiences a more traditional leading man rather than his usual downtown habitue. Immediately, the movie seems adult, grown-up. The subtleties of Murray's beautiful performance -- his ability to move seamlessly from comedy to drama, his sense of stillness when faced with an absurd situation, his distinct out-of-time Americanness -- fit perfectly into Jarmusch's playfully moody world. But the story line of ''Broken Flowers'' -- a man visits his ex-girlfriends (who are played by Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy and Tilda Swinton) to discover which, if any, gave birth to his son -- is more conventional, and more emotionally direct, than Jarmusch's plots have ever been. '''Broken Flowers' is completely accessible,'' Bill Murray told me when I phoned him not long ago. ''A lot of people are going to see this film that have never seen one of Jim's films. It's going to touch all kinds of people. And I think that frightens Jim a little bit. When you're really independent, the fear is as much about losing your independence as having success.''
As we got ready to leave, Jarmusch shrugged off any talk of box-office popularity. ''Bill called and said, 'I'm glad I'm responsible for your crossing over,''' he recalled as he finished a cigarette. ''I called back and said: 'Yeah, I'm crossing over. So if you want to reach me, call my people, and maybe I'll get back to you.''' Jarmusch laughed, but the anxiety in his statement was clear: it may be difficult to remain an outsider -- an independent -- if the paying public applauds your efforts.
It was a rainy Wednesday night around 9 p.m., and Jarmusch, his hair glowing in the semidarkness, was staring intently at a naked girl on a video monitor. ''You don't want her skin too warm,'' Jarmusch said to John Dowdell, a post-production colorist who was sitting next to him in a studio on Leroy Street in Manhattan. Jarmusch was overseeing a transfer of ''Broken Flowers'' from film to video, tweaking the tones and shades in nearly every scene. ''It's so delicate,'' Jarmusch said, as the naked girl's skin was turned slightly pinker. ''If you go one way or the other, it has a different emotional effect on you.'' He stared a second. ''Now she's kind of glowing,'' he said. He tilted his head. ''Very Helmut Newton or Guy Bourdin.''
They moved on to the next frame. ''This is extremely time-consuming,'' Jarmusch said. ''We're getting close to giving the baby away, and I'm exhausted. I'm happiest when I'm shooting the movie. Filming is like sex. Writing the script is like seduction, then shooting is like sex because you're doing the movie with other people. Editing is like being pregnant, and then you give birth and they take your baby away.'' He took a swig of cranberry juice. ''After this process is done, I will watch the movie one more time with a paying audience that doesn't know I'm there, and then I will never see it again. I'm so sick of it.''
As Jarmusch's films go, ''Broken Flowers'' came together quickly. Although he likes to set his films in slightly mythic cities that he never visited (Memphis in ''Mystery Train,'' New Orleans in ''Down by Law''), he prefers to create characters with an actor he knows in mind. He wrote ''Down by Law'' thinking of Tom Waits, ''Dead Man'' was for Johnny Depp and John Lurie inspired ''Stranger Than Paradise.'' Four years ago, Jarmusch spoke with Murray when both were guests on a television show. ''Jim thought and talked about movies the way I think and talk about them,'' Murray recalls. ''It was like meeting a cousin I didn't know I had.''
That kind of empathetic connection with Jarmusch is common. From a distance, Jarmusch is taciturn and can seem forbidding, but he is actually a sort of muscular romantic. He is defined by oppositions: he loves pulp action films from Asia but dedicated ''Broken Flowers'' to the relatively obscure French film director Jean Eustache; he rides old English motorcycles and owns two El Caminos but is a devotee of pearls and sonnets. He is keenly aware of history, especially as it concerns certain actors. A few years ago, Jarmusch created the Sons of Lee Marvin, a secret society that counts as its members Jarmusch, Waits and Lurie. Waits designed fancy business cards for the group, whose members are united in having some physical resemblance to the late actor. ''I can't tell you too much about the Sons of Lee Marvin,'' Waits whispered to me when I asked about the group. ''But we all speak the same language.''
Jarmusch was similarly attuned to Murray. After meeting him, Jarmusch wrote a script called ''Three Moons in the Sky'' with a lead role for Murray. It was the story of a man with three separate wives and families. Murray loved the premise, and Jarmusch went to Cannes in 2002 to raise money for the production of the film.
Setting up a Jarmusch movie is a complicated process. Because he doesn't work within the studio system, each film has to be sold individually. He and his agent, Bart Walker of Creative Artists Agency (who also represents, among others, Sofia Coppola), meet with foreign distributors who have worked with Jarmusch before. Jarmusch has one especially difficult and costly requirement: unlike many other American directors, he strongly resists his films' being dubbed into other languages. ''Jim feels that an actor's voice is a part of who they are in the film,'' Walker explained to me. ''The integrity of his film changes when the actor's voice is changed.'' Jarmusch is also known to shoot his movies in black and white, which also alienates investors; television networks and movie-rental outlets like Blockbuster are chiefly interested in color films.
It helps that Jarmusch is a major star internationally. His movies are acclaimed overseas, and foreign distributors are always interested in hearing about his latest project. In Europe and Asia, filmgoers generally do not differentiate between independent and studio films, and the international film community does not view Jarmusch as some kind of alternative cult director. ''In America, independent film is treated like the minor leagues,'' Jarmusch said. ''And then you're supposed to try and try to get into the majors, which are the studios. That's never been my goal. And in Europe they understand that.''
After hearing Jarmusch describe the plot and cast of his new film (or reading the script if it's ready), foreign movie companies decide how much they are willing to pay for the distribution rights. This negotiation is a laborious process. But if all goes well, agreements are forged, and the contract is then taken to a bank, where a loan is secured, and the movie production can begin. This can take months. After Jarmusch finishes the film, he and Walker will then sell it to an American distributor. (For ''Broken Flowers,'' an American company, Focus Features, provided the financing and is handling worldwide distribution. This is a one-off relationship designed to accommodate Bill Murray's schedule, rather than a long-term creative marriage.)
With ''Three Moons,'' Jarmusch had already raised the money when he began to have qualms about his script. He decided he wanted to write another one instead. The new script, which became ''Broken Flowers,'' was completed in a speedy two and a half weeks. Jarmusch wrote as he always does: at his house in the Catskills, in longhand in unlined sketchbooks, with the scenes composed out of order. He lives upstate (and in the city) with his longtime girlfriend, the filmmaker Sara Driver, who has worked with him since the beginning of his career. His writing desk is in a small room and is surrounded by photographs of Joe Louis, Robert Mitchum, Geronimo, Buster Keaton and Jean Eustache, all tacked to the wall for inspiration. ''Jim's scripts are really like haikus,'' Waits says. ''The script is like a rough map that someone gives you to get to the store. He figures that since he wrote the part with you in mind, you're already the guy, so everything you do in the movie just seems to make sense.''
Murray may have first read the finished script for ''Broken Flowers'' only when filming began -- or he may have never read it at all. ''I can't recall him ever telling me what he thought of the script,'' Jarmusch told me matter-of-factly. At one point in pre-production, Jarmusch and Murray were having dinner, and halfway through the meal Murray left the table, presumably to make a phone call or have a cigarette. He never came back. ''That didn't bother me,'' Jarmusch recalled. ''All my friends are like that. They may disappear, but they always return.''
The first real film that Jarmusch remembers seeing was ''Thunder Road,'' starring Robert Mitchum. Jarmusch was about 6, and he watched it at a drive-in with his mother and older sister. Jarmusch has never seen the whole film again, but something about it stuck in his mind. ''I liked being there,'' he said over yet another cup of hot green tea, at a restaurant in TriBeCa. Although Jarmusch's most recent movie, in 2004, was a collection of 11 short films titled ''Coffee and Cigarettes,'' he has not drunk coffee in years. ''In 1986,'' he explained, ''I decided to stop all kinds of chemicals and drugs at once. I think it had to do with William Burroughs treating his body like an experiment. So, no alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, sugar, beef, coffee. I went insane. I don't remember what I did, but I was insane. When I came back, I never took drugs in the form of powders or pills again. I still don't drink coffee. I never ate meat again. I still smoke. It was an experiment -- it wasn't really for health. And it was interesting.''
When Jarmusch spoke about his past, it was often in the measured manner of a cultural anthropologist. Throughout his life, he has courted and cultivated influences and mentors, and though many of his mentors have now died, they seem to float around his brain like wise, stubborn, pontificating ghosts. ''I really miss Joe Strummer,'' he said. ''Even though he's dead, I still get advice from him. He's very good at telling you to stick to your guns. I have Nick Ray, Sam Fuller and Joe -- I have some great spirits when I need guidance. I hear William Burroughs a lot, too, but I don't really want to listen to his advice.''
Jarmusch grew up in Akron, Ohio, the middle of three children. ''Jim is from Ohio,'' Waits told me, as if it were more an explanation than a fact. ''It's very flat. You dream in very flat places. You learn to solve problems. Six presidents were born there. And Jim.'' Jarmusch's father worked for BF Goodrich, and his mother, before marrying and becoming a housewife, reviewed films for The Akron Beacon Journal. ''My maternal grandmother was amazingly inspiring to me,'' Jarmusch said. ''On my 16th birthday, my grandmother gave me the Moncrieff translation of Proust. She had a lot of activities: she traded Oriental rugs, she knew gypsies and got me interested in Native American culture. By the time I was 14, I discovered the Beats and rock 'n' roll, and I knew I wanted to get out of Akron. By 17, I was gone.''
He studied journalism briefly at Northwestern University and then transferred to Columbia, where he majored in literature. In 1977, he enrolled at N.Y.U.'s film school. In the third year of the program, he became a teaching assistant for Nicholas Ray, the director of ''Rebel Without a Cause.'' Ray, who was dying of cancer at the time, became hugely important to Jarmusch. ''Ray said, 'If you want to make a film, you can make a film,''' Jarmusch said. ''And that sense of possibility made all the difference. It also mirrored the feeling in New York then. Technical expertise was not as crucial as spirit: the punk scene was about expression over virtuosity. It was more important to be open to all influences.''
Ray died in 1979, and afterward the director Wim Wenders, who met Jarmusch while filming a documentary about Ray's last years, gave Jarmusch about 40 minutes' worth of unused black-and-white film stock he had left over from another movie -- a precious gift for a young filmmaker. Seizing the opportunity, Jarmusch used the film to make a 30-minute short, which eventually became the first third of ''Stranger Than Paradise.'' The final, complete film, which the critic Pauline Kael aptly titled a ''punk picaresque,'' has a cool, absurdist sensibility. There is no real plot -- just snippets of conversation between two buddies and a teenage girl from Budapest and a road trip to Cleveland -- but ''Stranger Than Paradise,'' with its irresistible evocation of the downtown spirit of the time, was one of those rare movies that change the culture. The film had a big-city release in the United States, played for one solid year in a theater in Paris and established a new breed of do-it-yourself filmmaking. '''Stranger Than Paradise' made me feel that films could be made in a different way in America,'' Tilda Swinton, who met Jarmusch backstage at a concert by the rock band the Darkness, told me. ''Jim has a way of explaining America. He says, 'I'm an alien, but I'm also an American, and we'll experience this world together.' That's why he's become such a force in international film -- he explains America to aliens, while remaining an alien himself.''
After ''Stranger Than Paradise,'' Hollywood came calling. Eager to absorb his cinematic sensibility, the industry offered Jarmusch action movies, teen movies, movies about hipsters in New York clubs, movies with cocaine-dealing plot lines. He turned everything down. When it became clear that Jarmusch was not interested in signing a deal with any studio, Hollywood stopped offering him projects. He had cemented his reputation as a staunch outsider. ''My place is in the margins,'' he said. ''If I made a film that a lot of people liked, I might wonder what I did wrong.''
Truly independent filmmaking is risky, and the failures can be tremendously frustrating. When ''Dead Man,'' Jarmusch's most ambitious film, finished playing in competition at Cannes in 1995, the audience was virtually silent. The movie, which stars Johnny Depp as an accountant named William Blake (as an homage to the visionary, romantic poet of the same name), is a modernist twist on a classic film genre. Jarmusch loves to take his characters on a journey, and ''Dead Man'' is the western as road trip, with Depp gaining enlightenment through his exposure to Native American culture. Jarmusch persuaded Robert Mitchum, one of his heroes -- ''The only actor I ever found intimidating'' -- to play one of the film's villains. Jarmusch flew out to Mitchum's home in Santa Barbara, Calif., to woo him. They had lunch, and Mitchum said, ''I'll do your damn movie.'' This is typical Jarmusch: by casting Mitchum, he pushed the past into the present and aligned his western with Mitchum's classic persona. Although the film has oddball, comic moments, it is the only Jarmusch movie to directly ponder the subject of mortality. ''Life is very fragile,'' Jarmusch told reporters at the time, ''and 'Dead Man' is about that -- that life is fragile and cruel and that it's also beautiful and funny and emotional.''
Nearly all of Jarmusch's films had been warmly received in competition at Cannes, and ''Dead Man'' had momentum; there had been talk that it was going to be the best movie at the festival. But after the film was shown on the huge screen at the Palais, only a few people applauded. And then, in the vast, mostly quiet auditorium, a voice boomed down from the balcony. ''Jeem,'' a man yelled in a heavy French accent, ''it's [expletive].''
''Jim must have told me that story five times,'' Murray says. ''It's a good story, but it's also upsetting to hear and tells you a lot about how complicated this international film world can be.''
''Dead Man'' had been sold to Miramax before it was shown in Cannes. Excited by the marketing possibilities of Depp and Jarmusch and a new kind of western, Harvey Weinstein, the co-head of Miramax, bought the movie without even seeing it. But after Cannes, Miramax barely released the film. Jarmusch had struggled to make the movie for a budget of only $9 million (astonishingly small for a period film set on location in the American West), and he admits today that it was the most difficult film he has ever directed, but he will not break his Zen-like code and show any disappointment that ''Dead Man'' played in theaters for just a few weeks.
''I never expected Harvey to cross me over to a new audience,'' Jarmusch said. ''I just wanted a classy release, and Miramax kind of washed their hands of the movie.'' Jarmusch paused. ''But it was a great relief to not have another urban film in theaters. At least the press couldn't hang all that on me again. No more aging-punk-rock-indie-downtown-urban. Oh, please -- I'm going to make a western in black and white.''
Jarmusch laughed. If he was ever enraged over ''Dead Man,'' his anger had dissipated. He listens to his mentor-ghosts, who tell him not to dwell on the past but to concentrate, instead, on the work. ''Blake said, 'The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow,''' Jarmusch recited, as if this explained the heartache of a good movie going unseen. He stared a second. ''I'd like to own a crow,'' he said. ''I think that would be an excellent pet.''
At Cannes in May, before the screening of ''Broken Flowers,'' Jarmusch expected the worst. As he later told me, ''It's easier that way.'' Murray, who was also there, attending Cannes for the first time with a film in competition, said, ''Unlike Jim, I always prefer that people actually see the movie.'' Jarmusch praised Murray's performance: ''Nick Ray said: 'Acting is like piano playing. The dialogue is just the left hand; the melody is in the eyes.' And that would apply to Bill in this movie.'' Before the screening, Murray zipped around La Croisette on a moped, picking up passengers, and gave interviews about searching for his own ex-girlfriends, as his character does in the movie. ''I usually decide to try in the middle of the night in a strange town, and I don't recommend it,'' he said.
It rained on the night of the premiere at the Palais, and the weather nicely underscored the comic melancholy of ''Broken Flowers.'' By all accounts, the Cannes audiences loved the movie, which of course made Jarmusch uncomfortable. ''If something gets too good a response, I want to head for the hills,'' he said later. ''And not Beverly Hills. Popular success is not my area of expertise.''
Before he left the festival, Murray, who claims to be ''semi-psychic,'' turned to Jarmusch and said, enigmatically, ''I think second place is O.K.'' He was referring to the coming announcement of the Palme d'Or, the top prize at Cannes. Jarmusch doesn't really remember the moment, but two days later, ''Broken Flowers'' won the Grand Prix, the runner-up prize at the festival, just as Murray predicted. ''That was better for Jim,'' Murray said. ''He could win and not feel awkward. His victory was a bit off to the side. And he's happier there.''
Lynn Hirschberg, editor at large for the magazine, writes frequently about the movies.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
posted by jdstern at 5:43 AM
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Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Astronomy Picture of the Day
I have a new Dashboard Widget (a new feature of Mac OS X - Tiger) which puts a new "Astronomy Picture of the Day" in a window on my desktop. Check it out. Today's picture is of "Water Ice in a Martian Crater."
posted by jdstern at 6:18 PM
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Saturday, July 16, 2005
Second Word of the Day
trope |trōp|
noun
a figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression : he used the two-Americas trope to explain how a nation free and democratic at home could act wantonly abroad.
• a conventional idea or phrase : her suspicion of ambiguity was more a trope than a fact.
verb [ intrans. ]
create a trope.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via Latin from Greek tropos ‘turn, way, trope,’ from trepein ‘to turn.’
posted by jdstern at 1:30 AM
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Word of the Day
Bildungsroman |ˈbildoŏ ng zrōˌmän; ˈbēldoŏ ng ks-| noun a novel dealing with one person's formative years or spiritual education. ORIGIN German, from Bildung ‘education’ + Roman ‘a novel.’
posted by jdstern at 1:25 AM
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Friday, July 15, 2005
Karl Rove's America
Karl Rove's America
John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a medal. I agree: Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his prison cell.
What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.
I first realized that we were living in Karl Rove's America during the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush began saying things about Social Security privatization and tax cuts that were simply false. At first, I thought the Bush campaign was making a big mistake - that these blatant falsehoods would be condemned by prominent Republican politicians and Republican economists, especially those who had spent years building reputations as advocates of fiscal responsibility. In fact, with hardly any exceptions they lined up to praise Mr. Bush's proposals.
But the real demonstration that Mr. Rove understands American politics better than any pundit came after 9/11.
Every time I read a lament for the post-9/11 era of national unity, I wonder what people are talking about. On the issues I was watching, the Republicans' exploitation of the atrocity began while ground zero was still smoldering.
Mr. Rove has been much criticized for saying that liberals responded to the attack by wanting to offer the terrorists therapy - but what he said about conservatives, that they "saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war," is equally false. What many of them actually saw was a domestic political opportunity - and none more so than Mr. Rove.
A less insightful political strategist might have hesitated right after 9/11 before using it to cast the Democrats as weak on national security. After all, there were no facts to support that accusation.
But Mr. Rove understood that the facts were irrelevant. For one thing, he knew he could count on the administration's supporters to obediently accept a changing story line. Read the before-and-after columns by pro-administration pundits about Iraq: before the war they castigated the C.I.A. for understating the threat posed by Saddam's W.M.D.; after the war they castigated the C.I.A. for exaggerating the very same threat.
Mr. Rove also understands, better than anyone else in American politics, the power of smear tactics. Attacks on someone who contradicts the official line don't have to be true, or even plausible, to undermine that person's effectiveness. All they have to do is get a lot of media play, and they'll create the sense that there must be something wrong with the guy.
And now we know just how far he was willing to go with these smear tactics: as part of the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, Mr. Rove leaked the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the C.I.A. I don't know whether Mr. Rove can be convicted of a crime, but there's no question that he damaged national security for partisan advantage. If a Democrat had done that, Republicans would call it treason.
But what we're getting, instead, is yet another impressive demonstration that these days, truth is political. One after another, prominent Republicans and conservative pundits have declared their allegiance to the party line. They haven't just gone along with the diversionary tactics, like the irrelevant questions about whether Mr. Rove used Valerie Wilson's name in identifying her (Robert Novak later identified her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame), or the false, easily refuted claim that Mr. Wilson lied about who sent him to Niger. They're now a chorus, praising Mr. Rove as a patriotic whistle-blower.
Ultimately, this isn't just about Mr. Rove. It's also about Mr. Bush, who has always known that his trusted political adviser - a disciple of the late Lee Atwater, whose smear tactics helped President Bush's father win the 1988 election - is a thug, and obviously made no attempt to find out if he was the leaker.
Most of all, it's about what has happened to America. How did our political system get to this point?
posted by jdstern at 6:58 AM
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Wednesday, July 13, 2005
The Speech the President Should Give
July 13, 2005
By SARAH VOWELL
A couple of weeks ago, on this very page of this here newspaper, Senator John Kerry wrote an Op-Ed article imagining "The Speech the President Should Give," about that night's televised presidential address on the war in Iraq. Of course, Kerry had about as much chance of George W. Bush's following his advice as the producers of "MTV Cribs" have of getting the president's mother to show them around Kennebunkport.
Still, Kerry stunned me, not because his ideas were sane, but because he was actually able to fantasize that President Bush would give a speech offering just and concrete solutions for that black hole. Because I don't even remember being able to dream that big.
The only possible presidential speech fantasy in my wildest of daydreams, my oratorical castle in the air, is that one day, for just one measly speech, the president - the man of "mission accomplished," the man who was once asked at a press conference to discuss one of his mistakes and couldn't think of any, the man who is surely the sunniest looker-on-the-bright-side east of Drew Barrymore - would sit behind his Oval Office desk, stare into a TV camera and say: "My fellow Americans, good evening. As if that's possible."
He continues, "We are a divided people, but let us celebrate what we have in common. We don't all worship the same god. Some of us do not believe in a god at all. But the good news is that, thanks to me, we all now believe in the Apocalypse. You're welcome."
Then he would address the worried Western states - which are afraid of going up in flames because so many copters and National Guardsmen, the region's usual summertime firefighters, are deployed to Iraq - adding, "Oops." This will remind him to remind us that his "Healthy Forests" initiative has at least reduced the fear of forest fires by making it easier to chop down those deadly trees.
"Which is what I'd like to do for the state of Florida," he says.
He continues: "In the future, you folks won't have to worry about all this hurricane damage anymore because of my inability to address, much less accept, the scientific consensus on the alarming consequences of global warming according to groups ranging from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to Mrs. Atkinson's eighth graders at Theodore Roosevelt Junior High. This means more hurricanes in the short term, but rest assured that icebergs melting from the greenhouse gases of unchecked American factories will flood Florida off the map eventually, so you'll no longer have homes to worry about."
The speech goes on for hours, pre-empting Conan. There are long tangents about mercury levels, under-armored military vehicles and war profiteering. Finally, losing his voice, he hoarsely ends his diatribe in the middle of the night, whispering "sweet dreams" while putting air quotes around the word "sweet."
Then I realized I was picturing George W. Bush giving this presidential bummer speech while wearing a cardigan sweater. Which is when it hit me. I was fantasizing about Jimmy Carter. I can stop whiling away the hours writing forlorn presidential speeches in my head and look up Carter's forlorn presidential speeches instead.
Of course, my favorite is the famous "malaise" speech of 1979 (it deals with the energy crisis - but never actually uses the word malaise). Considered by some to be the worst presidential speech in history, the address asserted that our problems are "deeper than gasoline lines." And: "This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning." Then: "There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice."
Those frank words, coming out of a presidential mouth, are shocking. It will be difficult, but think back and try to remember an America dependent on foreign oil, an America with high gasoline prices, an America consumed with crises in the Middle East. And imagine you feel there is nothing you, the average American, can do. Then your president goes on TV and instead of saying you can do something vague like "stay the course," he tells you that there is something small and practical you can do. You can carpool!
These days, there's just something refreshing about reading through Carter's clear-eyed political suicide. Daydreamer though I am, I have never expected a president to solve our chaos. It's just nice to know that once, one of them acknowledged it.
Maureen Dowd is on book leave (sob).
Sarah Vowell, a contributor to public radio's "This American Life," is the author, most recently, of "Assassination Vacation."
E-mail: vowell@nytimes.com
By SARAH VOWELL
A couple of weeks ago, on this very page of this here newspaper, Senator John Kerry wrote an Op-Ed article imagining "The Speech the President Should Give," about that night's televised presidential address on the war in Iraq. Of course, Kerry had about as much chance of George W. Bush's following his advice as the producers of "MTV Cribs" have of getting the president's mother to show them around Kennebunkport.
Still, Kerry stunned me, not because his ideas were sane, but because he was actually able to fantasize that President Bush would give a speech offering just and concrete solutions for that black hole. Because I don't even remember being able to dream that big.
The only possible presidential speech fantasy in my wildest of daydreams, my oratorical castle in the air, is that one day, for just one measly speech, the president - the man of "mission accomplished," the man who was once asked at a press conference to discuss one of his mistakes and couldn't think of any, the man who is surely the sunniest looker-on-the-bright-side east of Drew Barrymore - would sit behind his Oval Office desk, stare into a TV camera and say: "My fellow Americans, good evening. As if that's possible."
He continues, "We are a divided people, but let us celebrate what we have in common. We don't all worship the same god. Some of us do not believe in a god at all. But the good news is that, thanks to me, we all now believe in the Apocalypse. You're welcome."
Then he would address the worried Western states - which are afraid of going up in flames because so many copters and National Guardsmen, the region's usual summertime firefighters, are deployed to Iraq - adding, "Oops." This will remind him to remind us that his "Healthy Forests" initiative has at least reduced the fear of forest fires by making it easier to chop down those deadly trees.
"Which is what I'd like to do for the state of Florida," he says.
He continues: "In the future, you folks won't have to worry about all this hurricane damage anymore because of my inability to address, much less accept, the scientific consensus on the alarming consequences of global warming according to groups ranging from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to Mrs. Atkinson's eighth graders at Theodore Roosevelt Junior High. This means more hurricanes in the short term, but rest assured that icebergs melting from the greenhouse gases of unchecked American factories will flood Florida off the map eventually, so you'll no longer have homes to worry about."
The speech goes on for hours, pre-empting Conan. There are long tangents about mercury levels, under-armored military vehicles and war profiteering. Finally, losing his voice, he hoarsely ends his diatribe in the middle of the night, whispering "sweet dreams" while putting air quotes around the word "sweet."
Then I realized I was picturing George W. Bush giving this presidential bummer speech while wearing a cardigan sweater. Which is when it hit me. I was fantasizing about Jimmy Carter. I can stop whiling away the hours writing forlorn presidential speeches in my head and look up Carter's forlorn presidential speeches instead.
Of course, my favorite is the famous "malaise" speech of 1979 (it deals with the energy crisis - but never actually uses the word malaise). Considered by some to be the worst presidential speech in history, the address asserted that our problems are "deeper than gasoline lines." And: "This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning." Then: "There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice."
Those frank words, coming out of a presidential mouth, are shocking. It will be difficult, but think back and try to remember an America dependent on foreign oil, an America with high gasoline prices, an America consumed with crises in the Middle East. And imagine you feel there is nothing you, the average American, can do. Then your president goes on TV and instead of saying you can do something vague like "stay the course," he tells you that there is something small and practical you can do. You can carpool!
These days, there's just something refreshing about reading through Carter's clear-eyed political suicide. Daydreamer though I am, I have never expected a president to solve our chaos. It's just nice to know that once, one of them acknowledged it.
Maureen Dowd is on book leave (sob).
Sarah Vowell, a contributor to public radio's "This American Life," is the author, most recently, of "Assassination Vacation."
E-mail: vowell@nytimes.com
posted by jdstern at 6:50 AM
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Tuesday, July 12, 2005
FYI re: Matthew Cooper
Matthew Cooper grew up in South Orange, NJ.
posted by jdstern at 8:55 AM
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Karl Rove is a Skunk
Matt Cooper's Source
What told Time magazine's reporter.
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
July 18 issue - It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy. "Subject: Rove/P&C," (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ..." Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, "please don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]" and suggested another reporter check with the CIA.
Last week, after Time turned over that e-mail, among other notes and e-mails, Cooper agreed to testify before a grand jury in the Valerie Plame case. Explaining that he had obtained last-minute "personal consent" from his source, Cooper was able to avoid a jail sentence for contempt of court. Another reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, refused to identify her source and chose to go to jail instead.
For two years, a federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has been investigating the leak of Plame's identity as an undercover CIA agent. The leak was first reported by columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. Novak apparently made some arrangement with the prosecutor, but Fitzgerald continued to press other reporters for their sources, possibly to show a pattern (to prove intent) or to make a perjury case. (It is illegal to knowingly identify an undercover CIA officer.) Rove's words on the Plame case have always been carefully chosen. "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name," Rove told CNN last year when asked if he had anything to do with the Plame leak. Rove has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. But last week, his lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed to NEWSWEEK that Rove did—and that Rove was the secret source who, at the request of both Cooper's lawyer and the prosecutor, gave Cooper permission to testify.
The controversy arose when Wilson wrote an op-ed column in The New York Times saying that he had been sent by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate charges that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from the African country of Niger. Wilson said he had found no evidence to support the claim. Wilson's column was an early attack on the evidence used by the Bush administration to justify going to war in Iraq. The White House wished to discredit Wilson and his attacks. The question for the prosecutor is whether someone in the administration, in an effort to undermine Wilson's credibility, intentionally revealed the covert identity of his wife.
In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson's criticisms. NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... "
Nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggests that Rove used Plame's name or knew she was a covert operative. Nonetheless, it is significant that Rove was speaking to Cooper before Novak's column appeared; in other words, before Plame's identity had been published. Fitzgerald has been looking for evidence that Rove spoke to other reporters as well. "Karl Rove has shared with Fitzgerald all the information he has about any potentially relevant contacts he has had with any reporters, including Matt Cooper," Luskin told NEWSWEEK.
A source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because he did not wish to run afoul of the prosecutor or government investigators, added that there was "absolutely no inconsistency" between Cooper's e-mail and what Rove has testified to during his three grand-jury appearances in the case. "A fair reading of the e-mail makes clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity, but was an effort to discourage Time from publishing things that turned out to be false," the source said, referring to claims in circulation at the time that Cheney and high-level CIA officials arranged for Wilson's trip to Africa.
Fitzgerald is known as a tenacious, thorough prosecutor. He refused to comment, and it is not clear whether he is pursuing evidence that will result in indictments, or just tying up loose ends in a messy case. But the Cooper e-mail offers one new clue to the mystery of what Fitzgerald is probing—and provides a glimpse of what was unfolding at the highest levels as the administration defended a part of its case for going to war in Iraq.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek/
posted by jdstern at 8:52 AM
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Monday, July 11, 2005
Picture of the Day
This is actually a photograph I shot and edited today, this evening in fact. I love digital photography.
posted by jdstern at 9:46 PM
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Saturday, July 09, 2005
I read this/ I heard this/ I thought this and You better too
What follows is an op-ed piece that one of my favorites from the NPR program "This American Life", Sarah Vowell published in the New York Times today. I know this blog is starting to look like a clipping service of things I've read in the Times or heard on NPR, but it's really about ideas that have resonated with me. As always your thoughts and resonances are encouraged and expected. Please hit the comment button and share them.
July 9, 2005
Our Faith-Based Train Rides
July 9, 2005
Our Faith-Based Train Rides
By SARAH VOWELL
John is the A train. Robin and the other John are the L. Nicole used to be the 1 and the 9, but ever since they canceled the 9 she's been just the 1. Geoff and Jen, Joel and Kate, Ted and Scott and, Joan - they are the F. Four months ago, I moved east of Fifth Avenue and became the N and the 6, even though there's a part of me that will always be the C and the E.
It's not just the New York subway map I think of as a refrigerator door plastered with loved ones' snapshots. The Richmond BART line in California is Eli heading home to Berkeley; the orange line on the Washington Metro is Carson, reading her son a bedtime story in Arlington; the purple line in Paris is David, who moved there so he could smoke.
When I woke up on Thursday and turned on the radio to news of the London bus and tube bombings, the announcer said, "Piccadilly Line," but in my head it's just called "Nick."
I know all that sounds mushy. I get like that when 50 people are murdered, and sappier still when one of them may be the guy I think of as my own private Churchill. (I'm getting used to this selfishness. As with Oklahoma City and New York and the tsunami, my first thought was to hope that my friends and family weren't among the victims, which is to hope that others' loved ones were.)
Nick's alive. But during the four panicky hours it took to hear from him, I was too fidgety to sit on the couch in front of the news. I started pacing back and forth between the TV and a bookcase, where a detective novel set in London by dear old P. D. James caught my eye. Has someone checked on her, by the way? Who on earth would want to blow her up?
Seeing the books, I thought about the last time I had taken the subway. On Tuesday night, I took the No. 6 train down to Cooper Union and heard the writer Charles Baxter stand at the same lectern Lincoln used when he spoke there in 1860. Baxter read his wonderful story "Gryphon," about a substitute teacher who enchants schoolchildren with fanciful non sequiturs about how "unquenchable fires burn just under the surface of the earth in Ohio, and that the baby Mozart fainted dead away in his cradle when he first heard the sound of a trumpet."
Oh, it was nothing special, just another average magnificent night in New York City, a 10-minute subway ride from home. I suppose it's what Mayor Michael Bloomberg meant on Thursday when he reassured New Yorkers of beefed-up subway security and urged us to go out and "enjoy what others find so threatening."
And I can do that. I can take the 6 train uptown to see the Maurice Sendak exhibition to spite the terrorists. And for some bonus irk factor, it's at the Jewish Museum. But I might enjoy the things that others find so threatening just a little bit more if the federal Homeland Security Department showed a bit more concern about my travels underground - last year, it distributed $38.31 per resident of Wyoming, but only $5.50 for each person living in the state of New York.
When Senator Hillary Clinton started using the adjective "threat-based" in talking about how to divvy up the homeland security funds, I thought my head might explode. Not because she was wrong. But because - simpleton that I am - I kind of assumed that the "threat-based" thing went without saying.
I was clueless enough to think that the very idea or, let's face it, ideal, of effective counterterrorism involved, at the very least, an educated guess about our national vulnerabilities - and I even thought that the money and equipment and personnel would be distributed accordingly. Which probably sounds simply adorable to those of you who have ever heard of the United States Senate.
I love Wyoming. I grew up right next to it in Montana. But from where I now sit in an apartment in the Flatiron neighborhood, staring at the Empire State Building, an apartment that, admittedly, isn't the Brookings Institution or anything, but does have high-speed Internet access and all the cable channels, it seems to me that New York has more ports and borders and financial centers and people and, yes, subways, so Wyoming could stand to throw a buck or two more our way per person.
So doesn't that make sense, even to citizens of Wyoming? Or should the British Parliament convene in response to the despicable massacre Thursday in London and decide to allocate a disproportionate amount of counterterrorism resources to ... Cornwall.
Sarah Vowell, a contributor to public radio's "This American Life," is the author, most recently, of "Assassination Vacation."
E-mail: vowell@nytimes.com
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
posted by jdstern at 8:15 AM
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Friday, July 08, 2005
Murderball
There's a new movie out that documents quadriplegics involved in the sport of 'murderball' or 'quad rugby'. This is a movie I want to see.
The Leonard Lopate show had people from the film on today. You can hear that segment by clicking here.
The New York Times reviewed the movie today. That review follows.
July 8, 2005
These Gladiators on Wheels Are Not Playing for a Hug
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Who wins and who loses in the gripping sports documentary "Murderball" may not be a matter of life and death. But the ferocity of competition displayed in the film's full-body immersion in wheelchair rugby trumps any high-powered gamesmanship you'll find on reality television. Invented in Canada in the 1970's, the sport used to be known as murderball, until the name proved an insurmountable barrier to securing corporate sponsorship.
But in another way, wheelchair rugby, or quad rugby, as it's also called, really is a life-and-death matter. A synthesis of basketball, hockey and rugby, it is played by quadriplegic men, many disabled by catastrophic accidents during the prime of life. As the movie shows, the sport has restored meaning and hope to its players, who require two to three years of grueling rehabilitation and training to master it.
The film's charismatic real-life star, Mark Zupan, is a tattooed sitting gladiator with reddish hair, a goatee and a smoldering glare. Mr. Zupan was 18 when he went out drinking one night in 1993 with his best friend, Chris Igoe, and ended the evening passed out in the back of his friend's pickup truck. Mr. Igoe returned hours later, and unaware that Mr. Zupan was asleep in the back, accidentally crashed the truck on the way home.
Landing in a canal with a broken neck, unable to move his legs, Mr. Zupan was rescued after clinging to a branch for more than 13 hours. In 1996 he began playing wheelchair rugby and has since become the leader of the American Paralympic team. His ruptured friendship with Mr. Igoe is on the mend.
The combatants in wheelchair rugby, outfitted like warriors but without helmets, are strapped into armored, custom-made wheelchairs that collide in a kind of human demolition derby as the teams compete to carry a ball into the end zone.
"We're not going for a hug, we're going for a gold medal," one player declares irritably, recalling a naïve comparison of the Paralympics to the Special Olympics, the international games for children and adults with learning disabilities.
The documentary corrects the common misperception that all quadriplegics are totally immobilized. In the film's definition, quadriplegia means some impairment of all four limbs. The majority of players broke their necks; their degree of immobility depends on what part of the neck was fractured. With extensive rehabilitation, many are able to lead independent lives. The movie goes out of its way to address the question of sex, which is practiced enthusiastically by those athletes who discuss it.
Wheelchair rugby players are assigned rankings, from .5 to 3.5, depending on their degree of upper-body mobility. A team's total score cannot exceed 8. The more mobile players handle the ball; the rest play defense.
The movie spans more than two years, beginning with the 2002 World Wheelchair Rugby Championships in Sweden and ending after the 2004 International Paralympic Games in Athens. Based on a magazine article by Dana Adam Shapiro, who directed the movie with Henry-Alex Rubin, "Murderball" is almost as tough as the relentlessly combative players it profiles.
The film consciously steers away from the tears and gooey inspirational uplift associated with disability movies. Fast-paced and fluid, it also resists squandering time on dry sports statistics or medical analysis. The game sequences, many shot at wheelchair eye level, are as viscerally thrilling as they are concise. There is little attempt to build up or tease out suspense during a championship game; that kind of melodrama is out.
The heart of the movie is in the human dramas of Mr. Zupan and Joe Soares, the bullying, fanatically competitive coach of the Canadian team. We also meet Keith Cavill, an athlete who suffered a broken neck in 2003 in a Motocross race (a rough-course motorcycle competition), who discovers and embraces wheelchair rugby. The scenes of his daunting rehabilitative therapy and of his bitter return home from the hospital suggest the almost unimaginable distance he must travel to transcend despair and immobility to play the sport.
But the prize for the most competitive aggressor goes to Mr. Soares. Disabled by a childhood case of polio, he was once the leader of the American team. After being cut from the roster, he accepted the position of coach for the Canadian team, for which he is denounced as a Benedict Arnold by his former teammates. Mr. Soares is so obsessed with winning that he barely has time for his nonathletic adolescent son, who, despite excelling academically and playing the viola, is clearly a disappointment to his father. But in the middle of the movie, Mr. Soares suffers a serious heart attack. After his recovery, he emerges as a kinder, gentler dad.
As the Canadian and American teams go at each other, "Murderball" flirts with sentimentality and rah-rah button-pushing but never succumbs. The evenness of its emotional pitch almost incidentally helps the film become an unusually deep exploration of sports, machismo and the competitive spirit.
Where would these men be without the activity that has transformed their lives? Instead of warring with one another, they might be at war with themselves, locked in a cycle of resentment, despair and self-loathing.
The movie is in perfect sync with the survival-of-the-fittest values of the times. In a chilly era where go-for-broke competition and worship of the body rule entertainment, the sickness of the soul is only for losers, and no one wants to lose.
"Murderball" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has abundant profanity and frank sex talk.
Murderball
Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
Directed by Henry-Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro; based on an article in Maxim by Mr. Shapiro; director of photography, Mr. Rubin; edited by Geoffrey Richman and Conor O'Neill; music by Jamie Saft; produced by Jeffrey Mandel and Mr. Shapiro; released by ThinkFilm and MTV Films. Running time: 86 minutes. This film is rated R.
WITH: Mark Zupan, Joe Soares, Keith Cavill, Andy Cohn, Scott Hogsett and Bob Lujano.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
posted by jdstern at 10:59 PM
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Monday, July 04, 2005
Looking Out At You
I held my breath and looked at the iSight to send out this picture while writing today's post. Greetings to all.
posted by jdstern at 4:38 PM
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Mapping Our World
I just discovered an amazing new application on the web - mapping/satellite photographs of just about everywhere (in the US anyway and lots of places outside the country).
You can check it out at:
Google http://maps.google.com/
Microsoft http://www.terraserver.microsoft.com/
You can search for a place by address and then get a map (or at terraserver, a topographic map) or satellite photograph of the place and then you can zoom in and out and pan around. I find the Google site more user friendly (easier to pan and in color), but the topographic feature on the Microsoft site might come in handy too.
Being July 4th I guess I should say something patriotic. My Grandfather always said, "Happy Birthday America, I love you!" I subscribe to that too.
Hope you are all enjoying this early summer holiday break.
You can check it out at:
Google http://maps.google.com/
Microsoft http://www.terraserver.microsoft.com/
You can search for a place by address and then get a map (or at terraserver, a topographic map) or satellite photograph of the place and then you can zoom in and out and pan around. I find the Google site more user friendly (easier to pan and in color), but the topographic feature on the Microsoft site might come in handy too.
Being July 4th I guess I should say something patriotic. My Grandfather always said, "Happy Birthday America, I love you!" I subscribe to that too.
Hope you are all enjoying this early summer holiday break.
posted by jdstern at 4:27 PM
0 comments
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