Not Our Problem Anymore

Dwight Howard is moving to the Houston Rockets. As a Lakers fan, I am relieved. Actually, I'm happy, despite the fact that D12's numbers are better than any other center in the league. The man has attitude and thinking problems that get in the way on the court. He's Houston's problem now.

It was obvious he did not like the situation in Los Angeles, but he was never honest and forthright about it because he is worried about what people think of him. He's the type that hides the essential problem and says nice things to fool people into thinking he's a nice guy and everything is everyone else's fault.

Throughout the "Dwightmare" in Orlando, when he was trying to leave the team without angering anyone -- in which he ended up angering everyone -- and throughout his time with the Lakers, he has shown himself more obsessed with his image than with his performance on court. Ayn Rand had a term for this mindset: social metaphysics. The social metaphysician puts what people think above reality; opinions and perception become reality for this type.

Dwight's famous "indecision" is actually his changing his story when people are angered by his last explanation. He thinks if he can just say the right words, he can make everyone love him -- regardless of whether those words correspond to reality.

It has been clear that he had decided long ago to leave the Los Angeles Lakers, but he has gone through this kabuki theatre of pretending to consider their offer -- and it was all a dishonest show intended to make people like him.

From ESPN:

A Lakers source in the team's pitch meeting for Howard last Tuesday said they felt Howard essentially had "made up his mind" before even meeting with them and described him as "emotionless."

"He would barely look us in the eye," the source said. 

Another Lakers source said "we felt like we were wasting our time" in the meeting.

Of course, they were wasting their time. Dwight wastes everyone's time because he wants everyone to love him.

It's impossible to know his real reasons for leaving. His statements are pure PR: they say what he thinks he should say to make him look good. His thinking is so twisted that at this point Dwight Howard might not even know why he does the things he does.

He is making a big deal of how he is accepting $30 million less in Houston, as if he is a noble soul above mere greed. This is BS because the difference in state taxes makes his paycheck about the same in Texas or California.

Here is a statement from Dwight:

"... This is an opportunity for me to write my own story," he said. "It's an opportunity for me to move forward, to change the perception of what other people have tried to make of me. It starts on the court with winning and that's what I'm doing. This is a fresh start for me. It's a clean slate. I get the opportunity to start from scratch and I'm going to make the most of it. I've been working all summer already to get my body, to get myself back right and getting ready for the next couple of years. I'm just looking forward to it."

So for some mysterious reason people have a misperception of Dwight -- which could not possibly be Dwight's fault -- and the poor dear has to move to Houston to get a "fresh start" and change the way everyone thinks about him.

Houston, you have a problem.

His greatest moment in the NBA came when he dressed up as Superman and won the slam dunk contest with an amazing throw down. When a guy that big can jump like that, it gets people's attention. But dressing up as Superman in an exhibition is not winning a championship any more than a circus clown is Laurence Olivier.

I think of another iconic moment: game four against the San Antonio Spurs, when Dwight Howard quit on his teammates and got himself kicked out of the game. As he walked off he passed the hobbling Kobe Bryant, who was coming out to the bench to show solidarity with his teammates.

Dwight Howard is a good player with a phenomenal body, but he will never be great. At 27 he has nowhere near the moves of a Kareem or Olajuwon. He is overrated in a time when there are not many good centers. I'm glad he's gone.

"Riverworld"

This morning at 1am I sat down to watch "Riverworld" on Syfy. The science-fantasy series by Philip Jose Farmer had captivated my youth with its "Oh, wow!" factor.

I should have known better than to expect anything remotely intelligent on a network called Syfy. (I can just imagine an exec there saying, "Hey, the name Sci-Fi makes people think we're like geeky, you know? Let's change it to all Y's. Wouldn't that be kewl?" If you imagine a woman saying these lines, the chauvinism is yours, not mine.)

"Riverworld" the 2010 TV movie is an abomination. The only worse adaptation of famous science fiction to the screen that I can think of is "I, Robot," where Hollywood took Isaac Asimov's enchanting series of puzzle stories revolving around the Laws of Robotics, threw out everything but the title and turned it into a mindless Will Smith action flick. I hope the Asimov estate was well paid for the title. "Riverworld" and "I, Robot" make "Dune" look good. (Doubtless, readers will think of other disasters of screen adaptation I have forgotten.)

The geniuses at Syfy did pretty much the same thing to "Riverworld." They completely rewrote the story, making the hero, the 19th century explorer Richard Burton, a bad guy. I could only watch the first hour, so he might turn into a good guy later in the story.

The great thing about Farmer's series of books is the sense of wonder. Science Fiction does sense of wonder like no other genre, and it is the reason many young people love it. Imagine everyone who ever lived, tens of billions of people dating back to the cavemen, waking up on the beach of a river that circles a world over and over, from north pole to south. Imagine a stretch of river where prudish Victorians are the ones waking up naked, and you have a captivating start to a novel. My young self thought it was awesome when this mass of naked people erupted into an orgy.

Farmer increases the sense of wonder by rarely if ever having people meet others they knew back on Earth. A man could spend decades going up and down the river searching for the woman he once loved. In this TV movie a whole group of people who knew one another on Earth wake up on the same stretch of beach.

Syfy threw out anything that smelled of wonder (scents of wonder?). There are no masses of naked people awaking on a beach. In fact, you get the impression that Riverworld is a scenic campground sparsely populated by mediocre actors. You see no one on the other side of the river. This defeats the mind-boggling idea that EVERYONE WHO EVER LIVED is there. The first book of the series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, won a Hugo award in 1972, despite the pretentious title. This means that a lot of science fiction readers loved it Why buy such a property to delete what made it popular to readers?

Maybe Syfy knows what it is doing. Obviously, their audience is not science fiction readers. Their audience wants SF eye candy, not SF ideas. But this movie even fails at the eye candy. People on a river is not spaceships, BEM's, explosions and laser blasters.

The Farmer Riverworld series, by the way, is good for the first two or three books, then it gets tedious. Farmer had no idea how to end the thing. I fear George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series is undergoing the same frustrating disintegration.

George Lucas got science fiction right in the first two Star Wars movies, although he was lambasted by envious SF writers for being 40 years behind the state of the art. Early Steven Spielberg was great with sense of wonder. Think of the look on those faces when they see the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. ET nailed it as well. These movies broke ground that has not been well trod since. Decline comes fast in Hollywood. Rust never sleeps.

Adrift

No captain steers the ship that we’re aboard;

We’ve floated past the now forgotten beach,

And hipsters mock where once the lion roared,

And stupid teachers kill whom they should teach.

I need an ogre in my soul to keep

The mindless hordes from cutting out

My heart to feed it to the dogs that leap.

I need an ogre in my soul to doubt.

Beneath the surface swims the waiting shark.

The ocean everywhere – which way to row?

The water leaks in, soon will sink the barque,

And Yeats’s centre gave up long ago.

In five-twenty-nine AD did they know

The lamps that lit the world were burning low?

"Mad Men"

I just finished a "Mad Men" binge. I had never seen the show before last week. Now I've seen seasons 1-5 and the first two hours of season 6. I caught up.

The show is well written, directed and acted. It is interesting, although I completely disagree with the show's point of view. The theme -- if I may be so bold as to state a theme when the naturalist writers of the show would maintain there is none -- is the conflict between the New Leftist culture and the older, less egalitarian culture it replaced. It's squares vs. hippies, and the show assumes that the hippies were on history's side. In a way, they are right: the squares are dead and political correctness reigns unchallenged in the present age. Whether history will show this to be a good thing remains to be seen.

The decade of the '60s is great for drama because it is so different, and yet so familiar. You get both worlds -- the other, as in science fiction, fantasy and historical; and the realism of contemporary life. I believe much of the show's appeal is a guilty fascination with life before the New Leftist/egalitarian cultural revolution. The clothing fashions, the attitudes and the furniture are appealing and deliciously non-PC. But even as the show uses the smoking, drinking and male-dominated office culture to keep viewers interested, it looks down on these ways with irony and sneers. The implication is that the nanny state was justified in outlawing tobacco smoke from the workplace, and of course all the isms of the New Left -- multiculturalism, environmentalism, feminism, PC -- are assumed to be positive advances.

There is a broader theme about man's nature that is shown mostly in the lead character, Don Draper, played perfectly by Jon Hamm. Draper is a man who lives a lie. To avoid spoilers, I won't go into his backstory. In the tradition of noir crime fiction, the character made a stupid decision and he struggles to live with it. Moreover, he lies to his wife and screws just about anything in a skirt. By one count he has sex with 13 different women.

The show asks if Don has a choice and if he can change. He is a tormented soul who struggles with these questions. The answer so far is unknown. Maybe the show will decide one way or another as to whether Don has free will. Jon Hamm says the underlying message about right and wrong is,

"There ain't none of us on the planet that are perfect. And I think that people recognize human frailties and foibles and f***-ups and identify with it, honestly. Superman is a cartoon character. He's not a real person. And no one is without sin, without mistakes."

Don is neither black nor white, but very gray -- and exasperatingly stupid, in my opinion. So the show is naturalism, which Ayn Rand defined as literature based on the premise that man does not have volition. If the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, reforms Don in the next two seasons, it will be interesting to see if he can pull it off believably.

As with most serious dramatic writing today, all ideas are delivered in subtext, but sometimes they are buried so deep that I wonder if I'm missing the point. (Subtext itself is a naturalistic technique; it makes characters inarticulate and incapable of consciously stating and pursuing their goals. It makes all characters ironic in Northrop Frye's meaning of the word: we look down on them, rather than admire them. Subtext is held as the the highest kind of writing today.)

The show is too slow for my taste. To have a good plot, you need more purposeful action. Not only are there no heroes in this show, there are no villains -- although in season 5 Betty Draper, Don's ex-wife, gets a little twisted by envy. I fear I might get bored in season 6.

There is one character who is supposed to be a fan of Ayn Rand, and who pushes Atlas Shrugged on his employees. This is hardly worth mentioning, because the writers show no understanding of how an Objectivist thinks. Nothing in this character sounds right. He comes off as an eccentric who liked Rand but didn't think about her philosophy for two minutes. (A typical conservative! No wonder he makes no sense.)

Anyway, it's nice to live for a while in a world where people smoke at the office, men wear hats and women wear dresses. Sadly, this world has disappeared from America and can only be experienced now in costume dramas.

UPDATE: Watched the third episode of season 6. Something snapped in me and I became bored and disgusted with the show. Those characters for whom I feel no contempt I am indifferent to. I have especially lost patience with Don Draper. Who cares about that weak, lying bastard? Same with Peter Campbell. Weiner has said he does not want to repeat himself, but men cheating on their wives gets old fast. I think they made a mistake trying to push the series into a sixth season.

Kumare

I watched Kumare on Netflix. It is a documentary by Vikram Gandhi, an American of Hindu Indian descent. He is dubious of gurus, so he grows his hair and beard long, wears an orange monk-like costume and speaks in a phony Indian accent. He moves to Phoenix to operate as a guru, and actually gains a small group of followers. He creates a cult, but his followers do not know it is phony.

So far so good. As an Objectivist, the film strikes me as a dramatization of the absurdities contemporary Americans go through to find values and fulfillment (a profoundly selfish pursuit) when they have been told all their life that selfishness is evil. One woman cries because (as I remember it) she fears people will say she is selfish. Several others make a big show of saying that "helping others" is what life is all about.  All this nonsense results from altruism separating ideals from the reality of existence. The people in this film are seekers of ideals, but hopelessly lost in a sea of mysticism because modern philosophy teaches us that ideals cannot exist in reality. There is no logical thinking on display among the cultists in this documentary.

But an odd thing happens about halfway through the film. Mr. Gandhi loses his nerve. He sees that these vulnerable people believe in him, and he wants to help them. In a way, he begins to believe his lie. He gives them psychotherapeutic counseling.

He tells them to write down five things they want to accomplish and then take action to accomplish them. This is not bad advice, and many of the cult members do improve their life. Gandhi wants his followers to look within for solutions, not to a guru -- and this is good advice indeed. But one wonders if a filmmaker perpetrating a hoax, like Sasha Baron Cohen but not funny, has the right to change people's lives.

Gandhi plays a dangerous game with real people's lives, and it shows on his face as he nears the time he is supposed to reveal who he really is. In his first attempt, with his cult gathered around his backyard pool, he fails to come clean. He can't do it.

The second time he tries to reveal himself, some 40 days later in what seems to be a banquet room or community center, he does tell his real name, but the ending does not satisfy. He should have said something like, "I must apologize for perpetrating an elaborate hoax on you." But no apology comes. Instead, he maintains that he has done this for their good. He says his "ideal self is Kumare" instead of admitting that Kumare was a lie.

It is the eternal cry of meddling do-gooders: I lied to you for your own good! Sorry, I don't buy it. The most deluded fool in this film is Vikram Gandhi, who believed his own lie.

Happy New Year

Well, my kitchen is clean, which means I’m avoiding novel writing. (I have only one resolution this year: at least 1,000 words a day, which is 4 pp.) Let me put it off a little longer by writing my first blog post of 2013.

I just read Obama’s election night speech because a recent PJTV show reminds us of a remarkable passage:

What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth, the belief that our destiny is shared — (cheers, applause) — that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations, so that the freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for come with responsibilities as well as rights, and among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism. That’s what makes America great. (Cheers, applause.)

This is one of Obama’s many explicit statements of collectivism. He doesn’t hide his collectivism; it’s out there for anyone to think about and judge.

He is saying that because Americans have rights, they also have the responsibilities to love, be charitable, be duteous and be patriotic. Because America protects its citizens’ rights, they owe the state. The individual must sacrifice to the collective. It’s only fair!

So all those people who came to America from Cuba, China and the rest of the world to escape collectivism did so… to be bound by more collectivism. Sure, they did.

Obama calls these collective responsibilities “bonds.” Bonds are chains. Perhaps the word “bonds” can have a legitimate metaphorical meaning in one’s personal life. You could say there is a bond between man and wife, or between parent and child — but even those bonds can be broken if an individual so wishes. Between the individual and the state, however, bonds can only mean chains put on the individual by the state.

As I said, Obama puts his beliefs out there for anyone to judge. He knows he can do this, just as he gets away with all his lies, because America is no longer a nation of people who can think independently. 12 years of public education, four or more years of college, and a culture of political correctness forge a nation of conformists, not thinkers. The mainstream media now function as the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party.

As Ayn Rand said, today’s absurdities become tomorrow’s bromides. Obama states his collectivism clearly. Tomorrow his statements will be business as usual. The day after tomorrow the state will begin passing laws that forge the bonds of love, charity, duty and patriotism — for our own good. Those who shirk their responsibilities as a citizen will be thrown in jail.

Look for a law demanding two years of mandatory “service” from young people to the state in the next four years. Obama has mentioned it several times that I know of. He wants it. He equates sacrifice to the collective with the highest moral ideals. I believe he is waiting for the next crisis to test the idea. Perhaps we should be thankful that he is still careful enough to wait for a crisis. Hey, I’ll take any silver lining!

And Obama’s policies, both foreign and domestic, make future crises certain.

My blogging has diminished during the Obama years. To the two or three of you out there reading this, I’m sorry. One of the keys to being a successful blogger is to do it every day. Feed the monster, as Stephen Green says. I will never be a successful blogger.

Part of the reason is that it’s just too depressing. The naked cynicism of the left gets me down — which is precisely what they want. Perhaps if blogging were more than a hobby I would find the courage to persist, to fight every day. There are other reasons, such as those 1,000 words a day that I hear calling right now.

I don’t expect my political blogging to pick up in 2013. I do expect to finish the fantasy/adventure novel I’m writing. If I can’t find a publisher, I’ll have to publish it myself. I’ll let you know when there is news to report.

Okay — kitchen is clean, blog is written. As they say at Writing Excuses, you’re out of excuses, now write.

The March of Fascism

The federal government long ago expanded its powers far beyond anything James Madison and his fellow framers imagined. The Constitution is in reality meaningless, but the Supreme Court, whose purpose is to make sure our laws conform to the Constitution, twists its reasoning to justify interventionist laws as the mixed economy marches toward fascism.

Yesterday the court upheld Obamacare as a tax increase, and sure enough, Congress has the power to levy taxes. It’s right there in the Constitution; you can see for yourself.

You can’t expect the Supreme Court to save America from continuing down the road to serfdom. Not only is our culture moving that way, but the Court would have to rule against its own precedents such as Wickard v. Filburn, which stretched the Commerce Clause to cover any economic activity that affects interstate commerce. It would take five remarkable Justices to defy the rest of government, academia, the media and the nihilist postmodern philosophy or our culture — and apparently, the Court has only four such men.

The idea of being limited by the words of an 18th century document makes people like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi laugh. To them providing for the general welfare means whatever the state thinks is good for you. And their intentions are good; all they want to do is give us all free health care. Any further argument is just politics and legalistic quibbling.

Do you think the word “fascism” is hyperbolic? The “tax” in Obamacare will be payments to health insurance companies. If fascism is the form of socialism in which private property is kept nominally in private ownership but dictated by the state, then Obamacare is something Mussolini would have loved.

I believe the Affordable Care Act has been deceptive from the beginning. The purpose of Obamacare is to create a mess. What will happen when insurance companies must cover people with pre-existing conditions? They will lose money, and then they will go to the government for subsidies in order to remain in business. Eventually, the statists will argue that health care would be cheaper to the taxpayers if the federal government eliminated the middle man and managed it on the European model. (Yes, that model that is now in economic crisis.)

I think they will succeed. If there is one thing I am confident our government can create, it’s a mess. You must remember, Obama does not work on the old model — that of getting practical results and spreading prosperity. He doesn’t care if his policies work. He only wants the strong to sacrifice to the weak and the individual to sacrifice to the collective. To leftists this is good and all else is evil, even if evil is more practical.

The Supreme Court cannot save freedom in America. Can anyone? Is there any hope? We need cultural change, which means the spread of reason, individualism and free market economics, which means the philosophy of Ayn Rand. A nation gets the government it deserves.

Actors Are Not Dogs

I got drunk with this director. It happens now and then. Around 1:30am, when we were both deep in our cups, he confessed to me what he really thinks of actors.

"An actor's job," he said, "is to follow the director's orders."

If only actors would do the things directors tell them to do -- learn your lines, project, move as directed, pick up cues and pace and energy, pursue your objectives -- then a show would be fine.

Dogs can be taught to follow commands -- why not actors? Come to think of it, in the shows I am now in I sit, heel, beg, roll over, play dead and stay. Why, actors are just a fancy breed of dog that speaks Shakespeare! All they need are the commands of a firm but loving master.

This director is utterly wrong because he misses the essence of acting. I am convinced, after 40 years of acting, being in plays in New York and LA, studying four years with a hard-core Stanislavskian, reading a shelf full of books and contemplating for hours, that acting is about finding a personal response to the lines. (If you want to know more about this theory, read the best book on acting ever written, How to Stop Acting by Harold Guskin.)

This essential act cannot be done by a director's orders any more than an editor can dictate what words a novelist should use in his first draft. Like the fiction writer, the actor must get his personal response from his subconscious mind. The results will often surprise, and they cannot be dictated or anticipated, not even by the greatest director in the world. Like the editor, the director at most can only say "This does not work. Find something else." (And that editorial function is important.)

When a director concludes that obedience is the most valued aspect of an actor, then it is all too easy for him to conclude that he must intimidate and frighten the actors into obeying his commands. He creates a climate of fear. Thus creativity dies.

As William Ball writes in A Sense of Direction,

Fear is the primary enemy of creativity. When an actor approaches his role, it is always with some degree of fear. One of the jobs of the director is to encourage the actor to overcome his fear. Every director will find different techniques to supersede fear, but the most effective technique is for the director to assure the actor by what is said and done that they are allies; that the work will proceed on the basis of two people working toward a mutual goal.

The actor will learn to relinquish his fear when he sees that the director never causes another actor to be frightened. If the director terrorizes, victimizes or humiliates someone else in the cast, an actor will automatically deduce, "That may happen to me one day," and his guard will be up perpetually. So it is important for the director to have tremendous self-control. He must never send messages of derogation or contempt to any member of the cast. It is essential for the director to be the actor's ally, and each director must develop techniques that send messages quickly about that alliance -- the kindness with which he speaks to actors, the way he touches them, the way he praises them, the way he always has time for their questions, the way he overlooks their mistakes. Fear has to be supserseded if the director expects to get the best out of an actor.

(And it does not help if the director plays good cop while his surly production manager plays bad cop.)

When a director establishes a climate of fear, then the actors stop contributing. They do the safe thing: sit back and wait for orders. They're a little like the good Nazis -- you can't blame me, I'm just following orders.

Actors who do nothing but follow a director's orders are bad actors. They are not doing the important work, which is finding the values in each line and finding their personal response to those values. There is a lot more to acting than just playing dead.

Finding the Values

Watching actors rehearse lately, one thought comes to me over and over: they're not finding the specific values in each line.

It is often said that art is about concrete specifics. Generality is the enemy of art. I think this is partly right, but also expresses the empiricist bias of our time. Art should integrate the concrete with the theme.

But I can see the point in this when I watch beginning actors. Their biggest mistake is to generalize; they think something like, "this character is angry in this scene," and then play every line angry without variations. That's bad acting.

The actor has to look for the possibilities in every line -- and this process takes more time than many actors like to spend. The actor should give himself a standing order to watch for passages in which everything he does is the same. That's a warning that he is not finding the specific values in the lines.

I like to act the way Hendrix played guitar: the odd surprise can come at any moment. The line can go anywhere. Sometimes grief can elicit laughter and joy can mean quiet solemnity.

Scrambled Eggs

As a brief addendum to my recent post on acting, this video on YouTube, 10 Reasons Why I Hate Method Acting, got me thinking about all the nonsense about acting. For the most part I agree with Coach Scotland. David Mamet's books on acting also demolish the Strasburg school of acting that places so much emphasis on evoking emotions -- in the actor, not in the audience.

When I was a teenager and a drama geek in high school, I read something that said if you act Hamlet, you should know what Hamlet ate for breakfast. I took this advice seriously. It came from an AUTHORITY. He must know what he is talking about, right?

For years after that when I would prepare a role, I took a few minutes to decide what my character ate for breakfast. It was always scrambled eggs. Perhaps this is because I enjoy scrambled eggs.

Bottom the weaver in A Midsummer-Night's Dream? He ate scrambled eggs for breakfast. Joe Keller in All My Sons? Scrambled eggs. Jupiter in Amphitryon 38? Even the gods eat scrambled eggs.

Finally, I told myself, "If someone asks the breakfast question, just say scrambled eggs for all characters." (I even wondered at one point if I should have an answer for lunch and dinner, too.)

I did not suffer this nonsense because I thought it would help my acting. I knew it was pretty much a waste of time. I did it so that if anyone asked about my character's breakfast, I would have an answer -- because I wanted people to think I was a serious actor. I did not want some acting know-it-all to sneer at me and ask, "You don't know what your character ate for breakfast? And you call yourself an actor?"

Thus does nonsense flourish. Some authority says this is good, this is cool, and young people, desperate to have others think they are smart and hip, parrot the nonsense. Political Correctness preys upon fearful young people this way. The argument from intimidation, which Ayn Rand dismantled in one of her many great essays, uses the same fear.

By the way, Ian Fleming was also a great lover of scrambled eggs and he made his hero James Bond eat them. He loved to detail Bond's style -- what he drank, his clothes, his cigarette lighter, his car. He even wrote a recipe now called Scrambled Eggs James Bond.

So if Daniel Craig were asked what Bond ate for breakfast, he could say scrambled eggs and actually get it right. Or he could give the questioner a withering stare and make him feel really, really stupid.

I am currently working on Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing and Buckingham in Richard III. They are both huge eaters of scrambled eggs, you bet.

100 Points

Today is the 50th anniversary of Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game. It is an astonishing achievement, one of the greatest personal feats in sports history.

On 710 ESPN people have been discussing whether it will ever be done again in an NBA game. All the experts say no. In 1962 Wilt towered over the  rest of the league; today the players are taller. Only Kobe Bryant, who scored 81 points in a game himself, says yes, it will be done again.

Kobe is right! It will be done again, though maybe not in my lifetime.

I base this prediction on one fact: never is a long, long time. It's not just the rest of my lifetime or the rest of the 21st century or the 22nd century or the 23rd century. Never is forever.

If the NBA lasts long enough, someone will score 100 points again. It will take a perfect storm: a great player will have to be "unconscious," shooting phenomenally well; the opponent will have to have lousy defense, but stay close enough in the game to keep the great player on the floor; and the opposing coach will have to be stupid enough not to double or triple team the great player. So it will take greatness on one side and epic stupidity on the other.

But what if America meets its demise? It could all end in a nuclear holocaust or a meteor strike. In that case, the naysayers can go "Nyah, nyah, nyah, no more 100-point games!"

The NBA could survive the political discorporation of the USA -- if the people in North America want their basketball more than they want a nation called the United States of America.

I think sports would survive if America became some kind of dictatorship because tyrants need bread and circuses to keep the masses sedated. The quality of sports would decline with the end of freedom, as dictatorship causes economic decline and scarcity of resources. The market creates more and more resources and scientific advances that can go into training, medicine and sports science; this would end under dictatorship, and the quality of everything, including sports, would deteriorate. Olympic times would go up and people would wonder how athletes in the old days ever ran so fast and jumped so high. But this might actually make the possibility of another 100-point game more likely. A phenomenon like Wilt or Michael Jordan could blow away a league of declining skills in the darkness of tyranny.

Then there are the Christian mystics who believe the end of the world is nigh. (How can they know when it's supposed to come like a thief in the night? They write books, make movies, run web sites and predict the exact day the world will end. This is a noisy thief coming.) If these people are right, then Wilt's record is safe.

I say it will happen again. But don't hold your breath.

UPDATE: Revisions.

The Art of Acting: Recent Thoughts

My thoughts on acting continue to evolve. Here is where I stand now.

I am more convinced than ever that the great theorist of acting has yet to come. Stanislavsky, though of much value, is not the last word on acting. He was the first word, and a good start, too. The theory of acting is like the science of physics after Galileo but before Newton. We know some, but it hasn't all been put together yet.

Until the great theorist appears, actors must stumble on, learning their craft by trial and error from the most important teacher: the audience. You learn to act by acting, just as writers learn by writing.

At the moment I am preparing several roles for a Shakespeare festival -- Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing and Buckingham in Richard III. I am using the approach of Harold Guskin, as set down in his book, How to Stop Acting.

It's good. Damn good. It's the best "method" I've ever used. As I work, I find surprising line readings and points of view, all unplanned, all coming to me from my subconscious mind. I speak the lines more naturally than ever; it is me in those circumstances and conditions.

Guskin opposes scene analysis. He thinks such intellectual work just gets in the way of what he calls "instinct" -- what I call the subconscious. The whole point of his approach is to get rid of all preconceptions so that you get in touch with what your subconscious mind feeds you.

Why is this good? Because that's the way you talk in real life. The words come to you from the subconscious, and that's the natural way we talk. If you can get to the point as an actor that the words in the script are coming to you the way words normally do, then you sound natural.

His approach takes a lot of time -- probably more time than most actors are used to spending on their lines, especially actors who are not getting paid for what they do.

I am not convinced that all scene analysis is bad. In real life, you have a purpose when you speak. How do you find the character's purpose in speaking? Well, by thinking a little about his intention, or objective. That's scene analysis.

Then again: when I studied verse speaking with David Melville of Independent Shakespeare Company, I asked him if he worried about objectives. He said no. He is strictly of the Noel Coward school of acting: learn your lines and don't bump into the furniture. And he is a good actor. Go figure.

Guskin is good because he mirrors so much of the theory about writing fiction. The writer must tap his subconscious. Same with the actor. I think Guskin's approach integrates well with Ayn Rand's The Art of Fiction.

Here are some principles of my own that I hold as important.

1. Don't rush results. I believe this is the number one mistake made by beginners. They have a shallow idea of how the line is supposed to sound -- which they got from watching actors on stage and in film and TV -- and they imitate those results. Then they stop thinking about the line and carry their vapid results into performance. Method acting, and all good schools of acting, are all about getting to results in a good way rather than imitating the results of famous actors.

Of course, you will have problems with many directors who want immediate results. I worked with one director who, on the first day of blocking, while we were stumbling around with scripts in hand, wanted projection, energy and quick cues. He wanted the performance. This is called "bad directing." What do you do with such a director? Give him what he wants, then go home and do the real work. When you shine before the audience, he'll take all the credit for his brilliant direction. You'll know the truth.

Closely related to this:

2. Imitate what people do, not what other actors do.

3. There are two general stages of acting: finding the reality and communicating it to the audience. Strasberg erred too far on finding the reality, and forgot the audience. Mamet and perhaps Guskin err too far on ignoring the work of finding the reality. Rushing results is often worrying about the communication to the audience too soon.

4. An actor must act, just as a writer must write. Moreover, it's best to act in plays, in which the purpose is to perform before an audience. I've never liked exercises. They always say an artist must practice, practice, practice, but I believe the best practice is being in plays. The audience is the greatest school of acting. Having the ultimate purpose of performance makes all your practice purposeful, important, efficient and meaningful.

5. Listen to the other actors. This is emphasized by the Sanford Meisner school of acting. I don't know if all his exercises of two actors repeating things back and forth are worth a damn, but I do know that listening to other actors is great. Most people listen in real life (except bores who love the sound of their own voice). Listening creates reaction. Listening also puts you in touch with the subconscious. Listening is natural; it's what we do in life. Don't stand on stage just waiting for your time to speak.

6.  Research is BS. Anyone who reads medieval history while preparing for a role in Richard III is wasting his time. What does Shakespeare's Renaissance imagination have to do with the reality of the War of the Roses? It's all in the script. You must understand what you are doing and who you and the other characters are, but most of that information is in the lines. Ask the director or dramaturg if you're confused.

7. Ask yourself why you act. Do you love it?

Look at poets. Can there be a less rewarding artistic endeavor in our age than poetry? There is no money in poetry. Few care about it. But some people write poetry from some unquenchable inner urge. It's who they are; they are poets. Why are you an actor? It's good to think about these things. Stella Adler certainly did.

Andrew Breitbart, RIP

I never knew Andrew Breitbart, but I admired his courage. The left despised him; in fact, they still do, and they are now heaping scorn on his corpse, as one would expect from the tolerant and kindly left. They hate him because he was effective. He took down Acorn, their instrument for undermining elections in America, and so became a leading target of leftist bile.

Following his Twitter feed was a daily lesson in the frothing madness of the left. Breitbart always retweeted the insulting, hate-filled tweets he got; he was happy to let his enemies reveal themselves with their own vituperation. They are a seething, juvenile, mean-spirited lot, and not terribly clever, either.

(I gave up following Twitter because every week or so my password would not work and I would have to change it -- most exasperating. Maybe my computer has a virus or something.)

Courage is important in our age. The increasingly totalitarian left depends on conformity of thought. This does not mean persuading those who disagree with them, but shutting them up. And the best way to shut someone up is make him afraid to speak his mind. Smears, intimidation and character assassination are the methods of the left. (How many people in Hollywood , publishing, government or academia remain silent because they know that speaking out is career suicide? How many women, minorities and gays toe the PC line because stepping over it means shocking decent people more than profanity did in the Victorian age?)

The main purpose of government schooling now is to mold young Americans into docile conformists. Political correctness is leftist thought control: these things you are permitted to say -- those other things, no decent person must say. Independence is the virtue above all others that the left cannot abide.

When the left accepted the premise that the end justifies the means, they crossed a line. They are now the totalitarian left. This ain't your father's Democrat Party. These people are radicalized, and they mean war. Words are no longer tools of rational communication; they are weapons to be used in the political struggle.

With the left so far down the road to serfdom, good men need courage above all. Andrew Breitbart had it. We lost a brave fighter for freedom.

Infantilization of the West

A young man in college that I know says Hollywood did not perfect the art of making movies until the late '70s. He won't watch anything before the Blockbuster era. Forget Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, M, and a thousand other classics; give him Terminator.

I suspect most young people would agree with him, though they might not be so arrogant as to dismiss Hollywood's Golden Age in bold contempt. And not just young people: my Mother, who grew up watching the movies of the '30s and '40s now finds them too tedious to sit through.

It sickens me. I think just the opposite, that movies used to be good, but with Jaws, Excorcist, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc., Hollywood learned it's a fool's game to try to write intelligent movies for adults. They give the people what they want, and the people want comic books.

I recently read an anecdote from a writer who took his young son to see "Aristocats." It was a cartoon, so he thought his boy would want to see it. About five minutes into the movie he noticed his son had turned his back to the movie and was crying into the seat. When asked what was wrong, the boy said, "I don't want to watch a movie about grown ups!"

Apparently, "Aristocats" is about teenage cats who have teenage concerns such as falling in love. The boy wanted to watch cats his own age.

Now, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with this child. I think he is representative of kids today. But I must say, things have changed, and not for the better. When I was that kid's age, my favorite movie was Lawrence of Arabia. I enjoyed James Bond, horror movies, war movies, westerns, Jason and the Argonauts, Doris Day movies, Elvis Presley movies; these cats are all adults. Seriously, I can't think of any movie about children that I loved. The closest thing that comes to mind is Sound of Music, Mary Poppins or Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang.  But those were more about adults who had children around, like Father Goose.

I also noticed recently that Barnes and Noble has a large section, in its dwindling space alotted to those relics called books, for Teen Books. A whole aisle of books written for teenagers. Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but when did this happen? When I was a teenager, I was reading, among others, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Asimov, Heinlein, Ellison, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Dick, Simak, Farmer and Tolkien. (I also read comics, which are for kids, but even they are about adults trying to save the world. Not many comics deal with the agony of acne.) Teenage literature? You must be kidding me. Are today's teens retarded?

Western culture is being infantilized. I don't think it's a conspiracy, and I'm dubious of the claims that the Frankfurt School of communists is behind it all. I think it's a manifestation of the death of reason in philosophy. I don't know the exact chain of cause and effect. I suspect that consumers get used to what producers give them: no one knew he couldn't live without an iPhone until Steve Jobs invented it. The producers of our culture, the intellectual elite, long ago lost all confidence in reason, and the virtues dependent on reason, such as independence, productivity, integrity, and so on. They give us the reality they can believe in -- sensationalist action without thought, without mature values.

Open any book written by George Eliot. I am always struck by how characters talk in 19th century literature; they speak in rounded, complex, grammatical sentences. They have the respect for other people to speak in considered propositions, as if communicating with reason were important.

Compare that dialogue to just about anything you get in post-modern literature. Today's writers think subtext -- the hidden, unstated meaning -- is more important than explicit communication. (An idol of mine, Henrik Ibsen, was a pioneer in subtext, and it can be breathtaking when done well.) So you get inarticulate louts saying uh a lot, because they're experiencing a midlife crisis or hung up by their oedipus complex, or whatever. After a century of naturalism and modernism, we have lost all confidence in rationality; it just doesn't seem true to fiction writers.

The ramifications of all this will reverberate profoundly throughout the 21st century. It won't be good.

Superbowl XLVI

The New York Giants beat the New England Patriots 21-17. The experts on sports talk radio assured us that the Pats did not deserve to be two-point favorites with the strength of the Giants' defense, and they were right.

The game was a textbook study in the importance of field position. Tom Brady of the Patriots had his back against his own end zone much of the game, and was sacked in the end zone once for a safety. The Giants on the other hand started only two drives on less than their own 20-yard line, and started one drive on the 48. Congratulations to the Giants' kicking, punting and special teams for keeping New England in bad field position.

It was an exciting game, only the second NFL game I watched all the way through this year. I find the NBA immensely more entertaining. I'm more interested in watching my Lakers play the revitalized 76ers tonight than I ever was about the Superbowl.

Oh, and then there was the rest of the spectacle. Madonna was good. I don't know why anyone would sit around listening to her bubblegum/disco music and her chipmunk voice, but her live show is kitchy, campy fun. She entered like Cleopatra on a float pulled by slaves, wearing some headpiece that looked like it was stolen from the Asgaard set of Thor. Come on, who couldn't love that? It's better than some geriatric rock band singing songs of young lust from 1969.

The commercials were okay, but they have become too belabored and self-conscious for me to pay more attention to them than the ranch dip on the table. Their purpose is to make everyone talk about the commercial, which seems like a postmodern distortion of the purpose of advertising.

Like everything in American pop culture, the Superbowl spectacle long ago ossified into self-parody. It is important because we want important values in our lives and we return to such rituals in some nostalgic quest to find thrills that once meant something. Perhaps to the young Superbowl XLVI had real meaning.

I'm overthinking this, huh? Yeah, I'm no fun at parties.

Tebow

There are two distinct issues concerning Tim Tebow.

First is his ability as a quarterback in the National Football League. He finds a way to win. I respect that.

Second is the idea that he begs some all-powerful supernatural being for help, and this being helps Tebow because he begs with great sincerity and belief. I do not respect that.

Are we living in the dark ages? Or is the widespread respect and admiration for a football player who begs for help from some all-powerful supernatural being (for whom there has never been a shred of evidence) an indication that we are heading for the dark ages?

11/22/63 by Stephen King

11/22/63 by Stephen King is an imaginative and ambitious time travel story. This well-written science fiction novel should get nominated for a Hugo Award.

The story is about a man who goes back in time to kill Lee Harvey Oswald and stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy on the date that titles this novel. The hero thinks that American history would be vastly better if JFK was not killed: RFK and MLK would not have been shot, the Vietnam war would not have escalated, there would have been no race riots and I suppose Americans would have danced with flowers in their hair as they sang "Kumbaya."

The "rules" of this fantasy world are for the most part well thought out and they provide excellent plot twists. I won't spoil the plot, but I'll say that King is a master of suspense, and he kept me turning the pages, despite a few slow patches. The action sequences are superb.

The characterization is strong throughout. Oswald is particularly good; he is a mediocrity, driven crazy by an overbearing mother, who wants to be a big shot. Socialist literature stokes his resentment and reassures him that his failure is not his fault, but capitalist-imperialist America's. As an Objectivist I loved the scene in which Oswald and an ideological comrade discuss Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. King's knowledge of the period is so deep and well researched that everything has the ring of truth.

The most exasperating thing in this book is Stephen King's politics. Like most liberals, King overstates the importance of race in America. He also forgets that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supported by Republicans and opposed by Democrats. The hero tells his girlfriend in the past that in the future America elects a black man as president. She asks if he is doing a good job. The hero says, "Opinions vary. If you want mine, he's doing as well as anyone could expect, given the complexities." Stephen King writes comedy!

Creepy is a trendy word, and I try not to use it for that reason, but when it comes to King, no other word fits. It's way creepy that when the hero gets close to changing the world, time fights back, because as King puts it throughout, time is obdurate. And time has teeth. This makes all of reality out to get the hero; it's existential horror. Did I say it was creepy?

David Farland tells a story of Algis Budrys saying to him that King would never be a great writer because he can't decide whether evil comes from human choices or from the outside. Is it a matter of free will or is the universe malevolent? Judging from the last 50 pages or so, King has still not made up his mind and wants to have it both ways.

Oh, on the conspiracy stuff, King is sane. He believes Oswald acted alone.

What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear

The Nazis scapegoated the Jews; the communists scapegoated the bourgeoisie; the New Left scapegoats the rich. The Occupy Wall Street noise is an attempt by the Democrats to keep the narrative on point: to keep the American people's anger directed at the left's favorite scapegoat, the rich, and to keep the blame away from the Democrats.

Unlike the Tea Party, which was a spontaneous reaction to the Democrats' frightening power grabs, OWS (or the Flea Party) is a calculated movement orchestrated by the leadership on the left. An ad in Craig's List offered people between $350-$650 a week to protest. Behind the ads is the Working Families Party, which is tied to ACORN. The money for the "Occupied Wall Street Journal" comes from George Soros, among others.

So there is something happening here. But what exactly? Here is my explanation, as informed by my understanding of Austrian economics.

Blog Update

Well, I sold a story to Daily Science Fiction. I will link when the story goes up.

The writing goes well. Even the stuff that gets rejected is good enough to e-publish myself. The best part is that I'm having fun writing adventure fiction. It exercises imagination and plotting ability. I surprise myself daily by achieving a level of writing I did not know I could reach.

I'll be getting into e-publishing. I've been reading some interesting blogs on self-publishing, such as Dean Wesley Smith's, David Gaughran's and Bob Mayer's.

The great things about putting fiction up on Kindle, Nook, etc. and making POD books are: 1) You get a lot of the money and have total control, because you are the publisher and there is no bloodsucking tic of an agent to take 15%; and 2) Your work stays available forever instead of sitting on the shelf for a month and then being remaindered.

The bad things are: 1) You have to do all the work publishers used to do; and 2) You will never make George R.R. Martin-J.K. Rowling-Stephen King kind of money -- your books will never make it to the tables in Costco.

But smart writers don't miss any option. Try to get a traditional publisher, and if that fails, publish it yourself. Or publish it, then send a letter to a traditional publisher offering them a free copy and saying you will take it down if they want to publish your book. All of this can be done without agents taking 15%.

As I publish, this blog will become part of my marketing plan. I'll have to change the name of the blog to my real name, William Greeley, and blog more actively. Using this blog might not be a good idea, as my views are not mainstream. I offend everyone, left and right. Is that a good marketing strategy?

I would announce the name of my self-publishing house, but I need to get the url first. Do I need to copyright the name? What is that process?

Should I get a checking account in the business's name? Smith says so. What if a store writes a check to the publishing name instead of my name?

This is an exciting time for writers. The internet has opened more possibilities than any time since the golden age of pulp fiction.

Speaking of which, I just read that H. Bedford-Jones, known as "King of the Pulps," regularly wrote 5,000-10,000 words a day -- on a typewriter -- and was capable of writing an entire 25,000-word novella in one day. That's 100 pages! At a penny a word, he would make $250 for that one day's work. At a time when lunch cost 15 cents, $250 would buy you last year's car.

If he can write 20-40 pages a day on a typewriter, surely I can write 10 on a computer. The key is motivation, and knowing I have the internet self-publishing option is quite motivating.

10 Crazy Things I Believe

I'm getting it all out in this post. After this you will be certain I am a certifiable lunatic.

I want to emphasize up front that I am not a physicist or scientist in any way. I took one physics class in college to fill my science requirement. As with most of the general courses outside my major, I skipped the classes, showed up to take the tests, and got a C. Then I returned to acting and drinking. I was not a good student.

What follows are my honestly held opinions.

1. The Big Bang never happened. Existence has no beginning and no ending. The universe cannot be measured by place or time, for it is all places and all times. The universe is eternal, which means "out of time." Time is the measurement of motion within the universe. It is impossible to step outside the universe to measure its size or time of existence.

2. Much of 20th century physics is nonsense -- Shroedinger's Cat, super string theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- it's all baloney. The problem is that modern physics has gotten away from reality, and is judged only by internal mathematical coherence. So physicists can spend their lives building cloud castles in the air that have nothing to do with the world we live in. Modern physics has been great for science fiction, because the physics theories themselves are science fiction.

3. God does not exist. There is no evidence. People exist, and people can lie. Religions are ancient lies. More recent lies are called cults.

4. Men and women are different. I've lived with many women. Not a one of them ever took out the garbage.

5. Western civilization is superior to all other cultures. This is why they are becoming like us.

6. Curtis LeMay and Joseph McCarthy were more right than their detractors. Unfortunately, history is written by the winners, and the left dominates academia and culture. LeMay was satirized in Dr. Strangelove, but his advice to bomb Vietnam into the stone age would have saved American lives. The Venona files have shown that McCarthy was right: there were communist agents in the US government.

7. The world will be a better place once the Baby Boomers are dead. This might seem cruel, but the death of every aging altruist/collectivist/statist/New Age fruitcake makes the world a better place. The New Leftist cultural revolution of the '60s and '70s left such a profound stamp on the Boomers that most of them are beyond redemption.

8. Some day Rock'n'Roll will be considered barbaric noise by most people. Only a small, drugged-out cult will listen to music with a backbeat; perhaps they will be called Deadheads. The rest will enjoy music that emphasizes melody, and that music will hit beats one and three, without the backbeats on two and four. Backbeat deemphasizes melody.

9. A rocket shot down TWA Flight 800 on July 17, 1996. I don't believe many conspiracy theories, but I do think Clinton stopped the investigation of Flight 800 before the truth was discovered because he did not want to go to war with Iran, especially not since he was in a reelection campaign. Airplanes do not just blow up in midair by themselves. Witnesses saw streaks of light going up before the explosion. Getting a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky is the least of Clinton's transgressions; ignoring the Islamist threat and giving missile technology to the Chinese are worse. The Clinton legacy will haunt national security for years to come. (To be fair, Reagan and Bush 41 also ignored the threat of Islamofascism.)

10. Environmentalism is not science. Ecology is an invalid concept. Environmentalism is an enormous pseudo-scientific attempt to destroy capitalism. The Old Left said it would be more productive than capitalism. In the 1930's many thought the west was doomed because Stalin had five-year plans, and we had no plan. By the 1960's it was clear that capitalism, without central planning, produces more than communism. (Read Mises.) So the New Left changed tactics and declared that productivity itself was bad; thus was the ecology movement born. Furthermore, there is no such thing as "the environment." There are environments -- my environment, your environment -- but THE environment is as mystical a concept as God.

If my 10 crazy ideas are true, then you can see that what most people take as normal is actually a twisted aberration. We live in a culture of lies and illusion. But when you've lived in a sewer all your life, you get used to the smell, and the air at the top of a mountain smells strange and unnatural.