Blogcritics Author: Adam Ash

Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama: How One Man's Character Can Change Your Life For Good Or Bad

Adam Ash — Wed, 4 Jun 2008 19:52:08 EDT

In politics, people of character are rare -- let's hope Barack Obama is one of them
The existence of Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama proves one thing: the character of a single man can affect history. The “great man theory” of history is true: one man can change the world. Not that Clinton, Bush or Obama are great men, although Obama, who’s only 46, may turn out to be, if he comes anywhere near walking...

All The Reviews Miss The Point Of Sex And The City

Adam Ash — Mon, 2 Jun 2008 07:35:04 EDT

At last, a chick flick with serious themes -- and none of the reviewers got it.
I’m male and straight, therefore not the audience for Sex and the City: The Movie (I was one of only six guys in a movie house packed with women). I’ve seen chick flicks before -- The Diary of Bridget Jones and The Devil Wears Prada -- and I like them, but this one is in a different class. It’s way more chick-flicky glossy, yet...

Why Barack Is Beating The Pantsuits Off Hillary -- And How Her "Experience" Has Handed Him His Victory On A Plate

Adam Ash — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:08:56 EDT

Barack Obama knows what he's fighting for, and Hillary Clinton's campaign is all wrong, which is why she's losing
It's sad to say, but Hillary Clinton shares a moral failing with George W. Bush - a lapse that makes her fail not only herself, but her country, too. Just as Bush has. Fortunately for America, Barack Obama does not share this moral failing, which is why our next president will not be another Clinton.So what is the moral failing that Hillary shares...

Why I Pick Hillary Over Obama: She Can Crush The GOP Like The Toxic Bugs They Are

Adam Ash — Sat, 2 Feb 2008 11:53:35 EST

Hillary Clinton is a fire-tested, battle-hardened warrior who knows the enemy
Finally the Democrats have two excellent presidential candidates. Both of them are great organizers, smart politicians, practical people, and sane.Unlike the Republican candidates. One of them doesn't understand economics, and is a total loony who wants to keep our troops in Iraq for a hundred years. Another one subscribes to a religion for...

Ron Paul vs. A Nation Of Suckers: Why We Won't Listen To One Man's Common Sense About Terrorism

Adam Ash — Wed, 5 Dec 2007 18:37:05 EST

We'd rather spend a trillion bucks on killing Iraqis than on a Green Tech initiative for oil-independence.
Read these two statements about terrorism.Ron Paul: "They're not attacking us because we're rich and free, they're attacking us because we're over there."Osama Bin Laden: "Contrary to what Bush says and claims -- that we hate freedom -- let him tell us then: why did we not attack Sweden?"And this one from Alan Greenspan about the Iraq War: "I am...

Privatizing Murder, Or Blackwater: The Perfect Combo Of Christianity, Capitalism And Killing

Adam Ash — Sat, 6 Oct 2007 10:43:47 EDT

Are Bush/Cheney raising their own private army of Blackshirts?
Just when you think the Bush/Cheney cancer cannot any more poisonous, another scandal breaks.Now it's Blackwater, and it rests on a number of horrific facts.The administration has been giving million-dollar contracts to mercenary organizations like Blackwater whose soldiers, recruited from the scum of the earth -- the Stormtrooper thugs of former...

The Nazification Of America Or: We Are All Good Germans Now

Adam Ash — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:44:58 EDT

We want out of the war because it's not getting us anywhere -- not because of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
I was looking at Sunday morning TV the other day and watching that George Stephanopoulos bit where they show a list of our soldiers who've died in Iraq the past seven days....

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Hillary's Baffling Appeal

Adam Ash — Tue, 7 Aug 2007 15:11:57 EDT

Let’s face it. Hillary Clinton has something. Otherwise, why would she be leading Mega-Charisma Barack Obama by 15 points?What is it about her that appeals to some voters? Rather weird, isn't it, since almost half of US voters say they'll NEVER vote for her-46%, to be precise-in a Zogby poll in March. That's a whole lot of voters who can't stand her, for reasons we'll get to a little later.I must confess, I used to be against Hillary myself, because she won’t apologize for her vote giving Bush the power to go to war in Iraq if diplomacy failed. When she said, if she knew then what she knows now, I figured this was total BS, because plenty of Democrats knew back then that Bush was full of crap about WMD and voted against the resolution. Also, I used to be an Obama man. Down the line. He bowled me over. His rhetoric, his manner, his self-deprecation, his smile, his intelligence, his writing: I thought he had it all.Until I saw him on stage next to Hillary.Then something happened.The most bizarre thing.Hillary looked like the leader. Not Barack. In fact, when I saw her smack dab between Barack and John Edwards-where they prefer to put her these days-she not only looked like the leader, but also, they looked like her two able assistants.Why does she look like the leader?It’s her manner. She has it all together. She gives pithy, forceful answers. She never waffles, or goes off on a tangent, or ums or ahs, which Edwards and Obama frequently do.She looks like the strongest personality among all the candidates. She’s the one the others look up to. She’s the one presiding over them. Like a real President. She looks the most Presidential.And boy, does she have the one-liners.When she was asked during the YouTube Dem Prez debate how she feels about being in a long line of 28 years of Clintons and Bushes, she turned it around.She said: “I agree. I think it was a mistake that George Bush was elected.” And the crowd roared.Then she said: “In fact, I thought somebody else was elected.” And the crowd roared.And then: “I’m proud of my husband’s record.” And the crowd roared.And finally: “I think anyone on this stage would be a better President than George Bush, or any of the Republican candidates.” And the crowd started roaring before she even finished her sentence.She turned a negative into four crowd-roaring positives. Now that’s real sharp and classy.I have my own theory about this. Yes, I know she’s a wonk, and is therefore very well prepared, and she has the most experience any candidate in history has ever had, since she's spent 8 years in the White House already. But I think it comes down to this: as smart as John Edwards and Barack Obama are, she’s smarter.As for those who don’t like her- because she’s a woman, because she stood by her philandering husband, because she won’t apologize for her vote giving Bush war power if diplomacy failed, because she never seems sincere, because she’s all calculation, well, I could rebut all of your misgivings:. If you’re worried because she’s a woman, get over it. Think Maggie Thatcher, Golda Meir and Angela Merkel, and shut the heck up.. If you think she should’ve left Bill who lied to her about Monica, that’s none of your business. The heart has its reasons, and ambition does too. So what? In the end, this is a family affair between her and Bill, so lay off.. Let me tell you why she won’t apologize for her vote to give Bush the power to go to war against Saddam. This is a matter of national security. If she apologizes about a matter of national security, she’ll come off like a flip-flopping John Kerry. She can apologize for anything else, but not on a matter of national security. National security is something on which the Republicans habitually beat the Democrats. It would be bad politics for Hillary to apologize. It would satisfy her left wing, but make her look weak. By NOT apologizing, she looks like a stronger Commander-in-Chief. . Here’s the charge aimed at her very nature: she never seems sincere, she’s too calculating. Why does she hold herself in like she does? Listen, because she’s a woman, she cannot let her hair down. If she became sincere and went all Oprah Winfrey on us, she wouldn’t look like a Commander-in-Chief. She has to come off measured. If you think that makes her appear insincere and calculating, get over it. She’s doing what she has to do to win. Do you want a thrice-married creep like Giuliani to win? Do you need a craven bastard like him as your President, a man whose second wife first heard he was going to divorce her when he announced it on TV? Get real.Hillary Clinton deserves to be president. She’s earned it. She knows what she’s doing. Her record as a Senator for New York is absolutely outstanding. She has often reached across the aisle in the Senate. Having spent eight years in the White House already, she’s the best-prepared President we’ll ever get. She knows how to lead. I’d sleep real good knowing she’s at the helm. I’m most comfortable with our country in her hands than in anyone else’s.And it will be real nice to have a woman ordering the men of the world around for a change.So there, you Hillary-haters. You better start getting used to it. Hillary Clinton is going to be your next President.

Like this article? Writer Adam Ash's band, the Dingbots, have just released Kidd Radar, a rock opera, available on iTunes and as a CD at CD Baby. Watch their video on YouTube.com by typing "Dingbots" into the YouTube search box or clicking here. If you are a natural rebel, a wild libertine, a transgressive intellectual - or if you have two heads - you might want the Dingbots to land inside your cerebellum. It's never too late to get fucked up on sex, drugs and rock 'n roll.

After A Full Artistic Life, Ingmar Bergman Lets Death Checkmate Him

Adam Ash — Wed, 1 Aug 2007 21:44:07 EDT

Bergman is one of my all-time heroes, along with Nelson Mandela, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, J.M. Coetzee, Anselm Kiefer, Bernardo Bertolucci, and not many others. I have spent the past two days reading countless obituaries, and writing my own tribute to him. Here it is.1. ALL-TIME GREATEST FILMMAKERPeople say Bergman’s films were bleak. What they should really be saying is that all other films are sentimental. One might go further: Bergman was an artist; all other filmmakers are boulevardiers.Let’s not pull our punches here: in writing we have Shakespeare, in music we have Beethoven, in painting we have Picasso, and in film we have Bergman. Unlike any other filmmaker, he belongs in the pantheon of humankind’s greatest artists.I count myself lucky: Bergman made his films in my lifetime. I could live my life waiting for the next Bergman film, like I spent my teens and twenties waiting for the next Beatles album. I am happy to have been alive when these two giant entities were doing their work, experiencing the same good fortune of those lucky Londoners who went to see Shakespeare when he was doing his work, those Germans who heard Beethoven and Mozart at the time they were creating their music, and those Parisians who went to Picasso’s shows while he was painting away in their hometown.I have Woody Allen on my side: "There's no question in my mind that Bergman is the greatest of all filmmakers. No one else even comes close. His accomplishment is that immense. He is the only movie director to ever probe the human psyche on such a profound level. He's the first director to dramatize metaphysical issues. His body of work compares to Proust's cycle of novels or even the plays of Shakespeare."Our greatest artists are known for the breadth and volume of their work, for their incredible work ethic. This is true of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Picasso, and Bergman: they churned them out like regular sausage-makers. Bergman made at least three to four times as many movies as a typical director of today, over fifty in all (only the really old film guys got to be this prolific: Ford made 144 movies, Mizoguchi 90, Kurosawa wrote 69, Ozu made 54, Howard Hawks 47). Our greatest artists are also known for the transforming nature of their achievements. Picasso, for example, upended the way we look at things, banging forth from realism to cubism to abstraction. This Bergman did, too, incorporating all of film made before him in his work, and leaving his mark on all others who followed.2. A PECULIAR PERSONAL VISIONBergman’s achievement was something extraordinary and rather peculiar, in that his art was totally personal. He carried the highly metaphysical and the deeply psychological into moviedom, but it was all about the personal self – his own personal self. No other filmmaker brought such commitment to his own personal vision to his art. That’s all he did – commit his own dreams, fears, hurts, and loves to his films. There is no other filmmaker who gets more personal, who was such a public dispenser of private angst. His films are one long, lasting, and painful confession, sometimes veiled, sometimes open, always brutally honest. Nobody delved deeper into the contradictions of his own human heart. Not for him the world out there – it was all about himself. Him and God. Him and death. Him and women. Him and his horror of himself. His personal vision was exclusively inward into his own ego, which made his the single and singular vision that penetrated the human psyche deeper than any other filmmaker. His was the art of personal intensity and obsession. He was the poet of personal extremes.Touched by the Vietnam War, he gave us Shame, which is a grim meditation about how he himself would’ve handled a war that came to his island of Faro, and how it would’ve degraded him personally, and exposed his own defectiveness. This war film is not about war. It’s about projecting Ingmar Bergman into a war."The people in my films are exactly like myself -- creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they're talking," Bergman once said. "Mostly they're body, with a little hollow for the soul."His life was a great mess until his last marriage (from 1971 till her death in 1995 to Ingrid von Rosen, who became his secretary and manager). This mess, this utter “fiasco” as he called it, was the material for his films. "I had been married three times when I was 30," he said. "I wanted to become a good director because as a human being I was a failure. In the studio and the theater I could live happily. I still feel that way." He had five marriages and innumerable affairs, moving from woman to woman like a randy tomcat. He had nine children in and out of wedlock, none of whom he was a father to. In the documentary Bergman’s Island, he admits ruefully about his non-parenting: "I had a bad conscience until I discovered that having a bad conscience about something so gravely serious as leaving your children is an affectation, a way of achieving a little suffering that can't for a moment be equal to the suffering you've caused. I haven't put an ounce of effort into my families. I never have."The Christian Science Monitor film critic Peter Rainer put the point of Bergman’s personal filmmaking extremely well in an obituary in the LA Times: The movies of Ingmar Bergman constitute a spiritual autobiography unlike any other in the history of film. He worked out of his deepest passions and, for many of us, this made the experience of watching his films seem almost surgically invasive. He pulled us into his secret torments. Looking at The Seventh Seal or Persona or Cries and Whispers, it's easy to imagine that Bergman, who died Monday, was the most private of film artists, and yet, no matter how far removed the circumstances of his life may have been from ours, he made his anguish our own. Another way to put this is that Bergman -- despite the high-toned metaphysics that overlays many, though not all, of his greatest films -- was a showman first and a Deep Thinker second. His philosophical odysseys might have been epoxied to matters of Life and Death, of God and Man, but this most sophisticated of filmmakers had an inherently childlike core. He wanted to startle us as he himself had been startled. He wanted us to feel his terrors in our bones. A case could be made that Bergman was, in the most voluminous sense, the greatest of all horror movie directors.Bergman’s life side-stepped family and children into art and an extraordinary work ethic. He lived the life of the true artist: transmuting the entirety of his life into his art. Not other lives: he made art of his own life only. (Or of the art of other artists, in his other life of theater director: "The theater is like a loyal wife," he said in 1950. "Film is the great adventure, the costly and demanding mistress -- you worship both, each in its own way.")3. BERGMAN’S LIFE IN BRIEFErnst Ingmar Bergman was born July 14, 1918, in Uppsala, Sweden. He grew up in Stockholm, where his father, a Lutheran minister, eventually became chaplain to the Swedish royals. His father was a harsh punisher, and his mother blew hot and cold, an unreliable source of comfort. He later speculated that she wanted to leave her husband but hung in there for the children: "That strict middle-class home gave me a wall to pound on, something to sharpen myself against," Bergman said, giving his family some back-handed credit. "At the same time they taught me a number of values -- efficiency, punctuality, a sense of financial responsibility -- which may be 'bourgeois' but are nevertheless important to the artist." He was grateful for his parents having "created a world for me to revolt against." His revolt started with an escape into self. He saw his first play — a Swedish fairy tale — at the age of 12. He built his own puppet theatre under a table, complete with a revolving stage and moving scenery, where he entertained his younger sister. He put on little works of the famous playwright Strindberg, whose dramas of torment struck a chord. He recalled his seeing films for the first time as “an entry into heaven.” His grandmother took him to matinées at the local movie house. One of his first ambitions was to become a cinema projectionist. One Christmas, he traded 100 precious tin soldiers for a primitive movie projector, a "magic lantern," that a wealthy aunt had given to his brother Dag instead of to him. He got lengths of film from a local photography shop, and spliced together his own short dramas from this ‘found’ material. His eccentric Uncle Carl was a failed inventor (hiding his patent applications in his underwear, and because he often wet himself, wrapping them in oilskin). He showed young Ingmar how to strip emulsion from film with hot soda water, and then paint scenes right on the strip. None of these bits of early films exist anymore, but in his movie Prison of 1949 Bergman refashioned one of them for a scene in which he had young lovers watch an antique biograph. He went to the University of Stockholm in 1937. He worked in many student productions. He studied art and literature, doing a thesis on August Strindberg, the Swedish dramatist who was an overwhelming influence. And he wrote: plays, novels, short stories -- none published. He took a job as an apprentice director at a Stockholm theater and in 1941 joined the Swedish film industry as a script doctor. Three years later his first script, Torment, written with the film’s director Alf Sjoberg, became a hit in Sweden. Accordingly, he got his first directing assignment on Crisis. There followed a run of journeyman stuff. In 1949, he produced his first characteristic excellent work, The Devil's Wanton, about a prostitute's suicide, in which his metaphysical, psychological and moral interests came to the fore. Three films about women -- Three Strange Loves, Summer with Monika, Sawdust and Tinsel –- cemented his reputation in Sweden in the '50s. Then Smiles of a Summer Night won critical acclaim at Cannes and made real money in Europe, and Bergman was free to make anything he wanted. He rose to the challenge with two masterpieces. The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries made Bergman an immediate international arthouse staple, and he entered a golden period in the '60s and '70s, that included the Oscar-winning The Virgin Spring and his Absence-of-God trilogy Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence. In 1976, his golden age came to a bizarre stop. Bergman was arrested during a rehearsal of his artistic forebear Strindberg’s The Dance of Death at the Royal Dramatic Theater, bundled off in handcuffs, and charged with income tax fraud. He went into a long pout and exiled himself from Sweden for eight years. Eventually the Swedish government dropped the charges and apologized profusely, hoping to lure him back. He had some sour revenge: hundreds of people lost their jobs because he wasn’t around anymore, and the Swedish film industry lost millions in potential income.Abroad, he tried various things. He visited Hollywood and other filmmaking centers, he made his first film in English, the flop The Serpent's Egg. He made a movie with his namesake (no relation) Ingrid Bergman, the very good Autumn Sonata. He directed plays, basing himself in Munich. He finally returned to Sweden when he was 60, more or less washed up. In 1983, he made a comeback film that became his greatest international success – a rather gentler-than-usual-for-Bergman autobiographical family movie, Fanny and Alexander. It got six Oscar nominations (two for best director and original screenwriter) and won four Oscars – the biggest Oscar haul by a foreign film ever. "Making 'Fanny and Alexander' was such joy that I thought that feeling will never come back,'' he told NY Times critic Michiko Kakutani when she visited him at his island home on Faro. ''I will try to explain: When I was at university many years ago, we were all in love with this extremely beautiful girl. She said no to all of us, and we didn't understand. She had had a love affair with a prince from Egypt and, for her, everything after this love affair had to be a failure. So she rejected all our proposals. I would like to say the same thing. The time with 'Fanny and Alexander' was so wonderful that I decided it was time to stop. I have had my prince of Egypt. To make another picture and have it feel gray and heavy and difficult with lots of problems - that would be very sad. And I have seen many of my colleagues get older and older and more and more dusty until suddenly they are thrown out, and they cannot get money for their next picture and must go around with their hats in their hands. That is something I do not want - better to stop now when everything is perfect.''This melancholy Swede whose life ended with a great triumph, was probably a low-grade clinical depressive for long periods of his life, and perhaps worked as hard as he did to keep depression at bay."I was very cruel to actors and to other people," he said when he was in his 60s. "I was a very, very unpleasant young man. If I met the young Ingmar today, I think I would say, 'You are very talented and I will see if I can help you, but I don't think I want anything else to do with you.' I don't say I'm pleasant now, but I think I changed slowly in my 50s. At least I hope I've changed." Liv Ullmann, who lived with him for five years and had a child by him, tells this story: "We always had breakfast together, And, as we ate, Ingmar would relate all the nightmares he had experienced during the previous night. And I listened in horror. Because I knew that I would be acting them out as he filmed, later that day."The world knows Ingmar Bergman for his films, but in his native Sweden he was an almost overbearing cultural figure. Besides his filmmaking, he was the country's top theater director, he wrote and directed radio plays, he did a lot of work for television, he made soap commercials, he wrote novels and two memoirs. Half the country watched his film of the Mozart opera The Magic Flute on TV. His TV series Scenes from a Marriage embroiled the whole nation in a continuing debate on marriage. When he died, Sweden stopped. TV was interrupted to show his work, flags were hung half-mast, and the whole country mourned the passing of the world’s most famous Swede.4. A MASTER CRAFTSMANBergman made his films beautifully. He called them "handmade." His budgets were all under well under half a million dollars. Technically, as a craftsman, he has no peer. The camera simply exists where he put it. It moves like the gaze of an ur-observer. It frames like a Matisse or a Hopper. It sees the light like Rembrandt. He never saw a reason to hurry the viewer along, like Hollywood story-telling does, scared by its own vacuity. In fact, he was more interested in nailing the viewer from image to beautiful image. What he achieved in his cinematography and montage, in the pacing and flow of his images, in his magisterial control, is beyond compare. Nobody touches him. Technically, put next to Bergman, a much-touted technophile like Steven Spielberg is a loud, crass, obvious, and unsubtle boor. A set routine and a set crew brought Bergman to his technical mastery. He worked like Fassbinder, flitting between stage and screen with the same repertory company. "We've already discussed the new film the year before," Sven Nykvist, his second great cinematographer after Gunnar Fischer (The Seventh Seal), told critic Roger Ebert in 1975. "Then Ingmar goes to his island and writes the screenplay. The next year, we shoot -- usually about the 15th of April. Usually we are the same 18 people working with him, year after year, one film a year." Among the 18, there was the important job of the "hostess," she who served coffee and pastries and made the set a haven of domesticity. "How large a crew do you use?" David Lean asked Bergman one year at Cannes. "I always work with 18 friends," Bergman replied "That's funny," said Lean. "I work with 150 enemies."Haskell Wexler, the great cinematographer, wrote: "I was good friends with Sven Nykvist, who told me stories about Bergman. They sat in a big old church from very early in the morning until as black as the night gets. They noted where the light moved through the stained glass windows. Bergman planned where he would stage the scenes for a picture they were about to do. This had the practical advantage of minimizing light and generator costs. Sven said sitting alone with Ingmar in the church had a profound effect on him. I asked him if it made him more religious. He said he didn't think so but it did give him some kind of spiritual connection to Ingmar, which helped him deal with the times Bergman became very mean."Bergman said rather humbly of his own process: “I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain. I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!”In fact, he made three films about the artist and his persecution by society: The Magician, Sawdust and Tinsel, Hour of the Wolf. He had two traumatic brushes with society: his tax arrest was one. The other one sprang from a stay in Germany in 1934 at the age of 16, when he lived as an exchange student with a clergyman's family. He attended a Nazi rally in Weimar. He listened to the clergyman toss off sermons based on Mein Kampf. ''We were absolute virgins politically and we found it marvelous,'' he recalled. ''We were infected.'' He returned to Sweden a ''little pro-German fanatic.'' Years later, he was overcome with shame. ''I understood I had made a great mistake, and since then political thinking has scared me to death.'' For many years, he never read political books or editorials. He didn’t vote. 5. HIS WORK WITH ACTORS AND ACTRESSESThe actress Sheila Reid worked with him: “He gave me very helpful notes that said things like, ‘She is a candle that never goes out’ and ‘She has a screen inside her up to her neck.’ I was extremely fortunate to have worked with Ingmar in both theatre and cinema.”His actors and actresses were eternally grateful to him – he put their greatest performances on screen for all to see. Typically, he gave them little room for maneuver: he always told them exactly what he wanted and acted it out for them. They had to learn to shine and glow within absolutely exact and precise instructions. In that way, he was like Hitchcock: actors were cattle to him. He knew what he wanted from them and he got it. No director worked with more dictatorial freedom. After the international success of Smiles of a Summer Night, he had carte blanche from the Swedish film industry.6. EXTRAORDINARY RANGEDespite his films being so personal, Bergman displayed an extraordinary range. When one looks at his greatest films – Persona, Cries and Whispers, The Silence, Shame, The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Wild Strawberries, Scenes from a Marriage, Smiles of a Summer Night – the nine outright pinnacles of masterpieces in his enduring canon (at least twice as many masterpieces than from any other filmmaker), what does one see? A dizzying range. The following brief descriptions will give the reader some idea. They're ranked in my personal order of greatness.1. Persona: an actress struck mute and her talky nurse. This film is Begrman's harshest blow struck deepest into the human soul. Into its alienation and cruelty. Also, into the depths of the making of art, specifically the art of film. Bergman’s “experimental” film.2. Cries and Whispers: sisters and servant gathered around a dying woman. The excruciating pain and emotional isolation of life. First film in color, and the color is mostly red. Bergman’s great “family” film (way more devastating than his other "family" film, Fanny and Alexander).3. The Silence: two women and a boy, disoriented in a hotel in a country whose language they don’t speak. Bergman’s Huis Clos and Germany Year Zero.4. Shame: a man and a woman on an island where war arrives. Bergman’s Rome Open City.5. The Seventh Seal: a knight in the plague-ridden Middle Ages striking a bargain with death. Bergman’s Faust. It was his medieval dance-of-death take on living in the spiritual crisis of the nuclear age, awaiting our apocalypse. 6. The Virgin Spring: a father avenging the rape of his daughter in a medieval setting. The closest to a plot-driven Hollywood movie Bergman ever came, and it wasn’t close at all.7. Wild Strawberries: a successful man looking back on an emotionally stunted life. Bergman’s Citizen Kane.8. Scenes from a Marriage: Bergman’s own marriages, all-in-one. There will never be a better film on marriage.9. Smiles of a Summer Night: a partying night of changing loves among couples. Bergman’s Rules of the Game.Looking at this list, it is amazing to see how often he worked in allegorical conceits, the way J.M. Coetzee and Beckett and Kafka write. (Also, symbols: all those ticking clocks, windows, doors.) His people are himself, and he casts himself in allegory and conceits. The conceit of death as a white-faced monk playing chess with a knight. The spooky interaction between a woman struck mute and one sparked into talking talking talking. The startling Dali-like dream life of a professor on the brink of death. Et cetera.7. BERGMAN’S PERSONALITYThe master of angst was always a suffering, sensitive creature. He was constantly scared of death. He thought about it all the time. But one day, coming out of a death-like anesthesia during a hospital visit, he found himself suddenly unafraid of death. The question of God vanished, too, after which his movies exhibited a sort of nervous humanism: maybe in human love there lay salvation.He fed off his own anguish and that of others. ''If I would tell him I have a cancer and was going to die, he would be extremely sorry, but also extremely curious,'' said Harry Schein, a former director of the Swedish Film Institute. ''He's interested in the unhappiness of his friends. He dwells on it - he can get material. We often have long phone calls, and if he asks, 'How are you?' and I say, 'Fine,' he would be extremely disappointed. A human being in pain - he can learn much more.''He had a direct line to his childhood self. ''I have maintained open channels with my childhood. I think it may be that way with many artists. Sometimes in the night, when I am on the limit between sleeping and being awake, I can just go through a door into my childhood and everything is as it was - with lights, smells, sounds and people. ... I remember the silent street where my grandmother lived, the sudden aggressivity of the grown-up world, the terror of the unknown and the fear from the tension between my father and mother.''''I think I have just one obsession -- to touch other human beings. That desire for contact, I think, was the reason why I came to this profession, because as a child I was very shy and very lonely and very afraid of other people. Of course, it was not only this very beautiful reason, but it was also a longing for power, for manipulating other people. I think that's a disease every director has - a kind of professional illness.''Unhappy with his own father, who beat him and locked him a closet for hours at a time, scaring him with the threat that mice would nibble his toes, Bergman played the father to everyone else, discovering early on that he had the power to make people put themselves out for him. His colleagues aver that his manipulation of people reached far outside the studio. ''With his friends, with his actors, he plays the authority figure,'' said Jorn Donner, his producer on Fanny and Alexander. ''In a sense, he has become the father he hated. He can become very jealous, say, if one of the actors in his film works in the theater in the evening. And he tries to influence their professional life. He says, 'You should do that, you should not do this.' In Sweden, he has enormous power - he has made careers and indirectly probably destroyed them - and so people tend to listen.'' Mind you, he could be very helpful. Here’s director Thomas Vinterberg (Festen) on some fatherly advice from Ingmar: “He asked me if I'd decided what to do after my film, and when I said no, he said, ‘Well you're fucked,’ and I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘One thing that can happen is that you fail, and it won't be good for your self-confidence. It's much worse if you have success - you're absolutely paralysed by it. So you always have to decide your next movie before the opening of the present one.’ And he was so right. You don't turn into a career pilot, trying to navigate by success or failure, instead of deciding from your heart.”Bergman has said that his films grew ''like a snowball'' from some insignificant fleck of an event, often triggering a memory. Filmmaking was therapy. ''I have been working all the time,'' he said, ''and it's like a flood going through the landscape of your soul. It's good because it takes away a lot. It's cleansing. If I hadn't been at work all the time, I would have been a lunatic.''''When Ingmar was younger, there was a bitterness to his films,'' said Harry Schein. ''With Fanny and Alexander, there's a greater sense of harmony. I think Ingmar has it personally as well. In many ways, I feel he still lives a very difficult life - he talks of Angst, of that anxiety where you wake up in the middle of the night - but superficially he seems more harmonic. On the surface, he is nice and charming and almost civilized.'' The '50s Bergman, bent on establishing himself, was the archetypal angry young man, a temperamental, bohemian poseur. He split home, after coming to blows with his father. He read Sartre and Camus. He signed his letters with a scribble of a little devil. He even wore a beret and a scruffy beard. He tore telephones from the wall. He threw adolescent fits of temper. Once he chucked a chair right through the glass of a control booth. ''I was a package of emotions on two legs -- my life was completely chaotic.'' Since those halcyon days, said producer Jorn Donner, Bergman tried hard to change. ''Ingmar has been trying to fight the bohemianism in himself by leading a well-ordered life. When you think you are a bohemian or a lazy person, you have to fight that and impose a discipline - it's a little puritanical. He is very much the bourgeois today - he likes to see Ingrid and himself as the proprietors of a small French restaurant - you can't get more bourgeois than that.'' His wife Ingrid - a steady, kindly woman who looked exactly like his mother -- helped him get together with his brood of eight children from various marriages and liaisons. Later in life, his grown-up children and four grandchildren gathered at Faro every July for his birthday. On Faro, in his last years, Bergman rose every morning at 8 and wrote from 9 till noon. A lunch of berries and sour milk, and then back to work for two more hours. At 3, a nap. Before dinner, a walk. After dinner, TV – he liked Dallas - or a movie from his 16-mm collection. Like the shrink Jenny in Face to Face who has a nervous breakdown, Bergman cultivated neatness and efficiency to contain his anxieties and fears. His surface calm was like Sweden's; underneath, he claimed, he was still ''extremely neurotic.'' ''Ingmar, at the slightest provocation, will produce a nervous breakdown,'' said his agent, Paul Kohner. ''He has a delicate disposition.''8. AN EYE FOR WOMENBergman was a man, but it is interesting that his three greatest films – Persona, Cries and Whispers, The Silence – feature women. Before he exploded on the international scene, he established his reputation in Sweden in the early '50s with three films -- Three Strange Loves, Summer with Monika, Sawdust and Tinsel -- that internalized the psychology of women and what he labeled "their special inner world." He had a dour view of his own gender, i.e. of himself. His male characters are always selfish, intolerant haters, self-indulgent and helplessly standing by, while his women are admirable, strong, empathetic, patient, and intuitively wise. He was sometimes described as a prescient, vanguard feminist.''I was in love with my mother,'' he says. ''I knew what she liked and disliked and I used to try to find ways to win her love.” He believes that ''women are more intuitive than men - they have their emotional life more intact.''He certainly had an eye for women, featuring an extraordinary range of beautiful actresses in his movies. He was an inveterate ladies man and skirt chaser. He got all the best and brightest babes. He used the same actresses over and over, on stage and in film. 9. THE HUMAN FACE, THE BOURGEOIS SOULBergman's landscape was the human face. And he got hold of some amazing faces. The supremely spiritual face of Max Von Sydow (The Seventh Seal). The sexually ravenous face of Gunnel Lindblom (The Silence). The unflappable, unfailingly polite face of Gunnar Bjornstrand. The suffering face of Harriet Anderson (Cries and Whispers). The kind face of Kari Sylwan (Cries and Whispers). The sensuous, troubled face of Bibi Anderson (Persona). The intelligent, caring face of Liv Ullmann (The Shame). The everyday face of Erland Josephson, an ardent excusemaker of a man (Scenes from a Marriage). His films expose the human face, blister and blast it, celebrate its suffering, burn it into our own faces.He gave our inner life an outer form in his glowing, glowering full-frontal closeups. In filming the human face, he gave form to the human soul.In fact, Bergman’s art makes it possible to speak of the human soul. But what kind of soul is that? It is the suffering soul. But not the soul under the duress of material want. If his art can be said to be about anything bigger than himself (and it can and it can’t), it would have to be about what he was – a bourgeois European. One could say his art was about the soul of the bourgeois. He asks us to think about how the fat, contented bourgeois soul – the soul from which, ostensibly, all worldly suffering has been removed by a fair and just society such as Sweden’s – still suffers. He convinces us that the bourgeois soul is still capable of human suffering -- that the bourgeois soul is perhaps, because of its contented lifestyle, doomed to suffer.I’d like to get out of the way for the last thought, and quote someone who posted on a NY Times comments section when Bergman died:July 30th, 2007 1:39 pm There is a totality of scope in Bergman’s films that mystically inhabits every moment of time and every seemingly unimportant article, along the lines of what the poet William Blake expressed: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.” Perhaps above all his films call for a life of inner courage, both in spite of and because of the human tenderness, frailty and resilience which his films exalt. — Posted by Eric Spaeth10. HOW TO SEE HIS FILMS AGAINIndividual DVDs of most of his films are available in the Criterion Collection. Then there are these boxed sets:1. For the total devotee, his first apprenticeship films are on the Criterion Collection’s "Early Bergman" - Torment (1944), Crisis (1946), Port of Call (1948), Thirst (1949) and To Joy (1950).2. In the Criterion Collection, there’s a boxed set of his 1960s Absence-of-God trilogy, The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly, and Winter Light. It also includes is a fourth film, Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie, a five-part comprehensive documentary on the making of Winter Light, one of Bergman's favorite films. The documentary is directed by filmmaker Vilgot Sjoman (I Am Curious -- Yellow), and was, in Sjoman's words, "the first and only time that Bergman let someone document his filmmaking from the first idea to the first showings."3. Scenes From a Marriage (1973). The film was released theatrically in the United States in a 167-minute version. Criterion released the full 299-minute television series as a DVD in 2004. 4. Fanny and Alexander (1983). Both the 188-minute feature and the 312-minute original are now part of the Criterion catalog. 5. His final made-for-TV movie, Saraband, a look back at the long-divorced characters in Scenes from a Marriage, is on DVD from Sony Pictures.6. There’s an Ingmar Bergman collection by MGM: six DVDs of Persona, Shame, The Hour of the Wolf, The Passion of Anna, and the big-budget mess The Serpent’s Egg, with a 2002 interview with Bergman.11. ALL HIS MOVIESApprentice Work:Crisis (1946) (Kris)It Rains on Our Love (1946) (Det regnar på vår kärlek)A Ship to India (1947) (Skepp till Indialand)Music in Darkness (1948) (Musik i mörker)Port of Call (1948) (Hamnstad)Prison (1949) (Fängelse)Thirst /Three Strange Loves (1949) (Törst)This Can't Happen Here (1950) (Sånt händer inte här)To Joy (1950) (Till glädje)Summer Interlude (1951) (Sommarlek)Secrets of Women (1952) (Kvinnors väntan)Maturity:Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) (Gycklarnas afton)Summer with Monika (1953) (Sommaren med Monika)A Lesson in Love (1954) (En lektion i kärlek)Dreams (1955) (Kvinnodröm) aka Journey Into Autumn International Breakthrough:Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) (Sommarnattens leende)The Seventh Seal (1957) (Det sjunde inseglet)Wild Strawberries (1957) (Smultronstället)Period Movies:The Magician/The Face (1958) (Ansiktet)Brink of Life (1958) (Nära livet)The Devil's Eye (1960) (Djävulens öga)The Virgin Spring (1960) (Jungfrukällan) (won Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film)Absence-of-God trilogy:Through a Glass Darkly (1961) (Såsom i en spegel) (won Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film)Winter Light (1962) (Nattvardsgästerna)The Silence (1963) (Tystnaden)Greatness:All These Women (1964) (För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor)Persona (1966) Hour of the Wolf (1967) (Vargtimmen)Shame (1968) (Skammen)The Rite (1968) (Riten) (TV) The Passion of Anna (1969) (En passion)The Touch (1971) (Beröringen)Cries and Whispers (1973) (Viskningar och rop) (won Academy Award for Best Cinematography)Scenes from a Marriage (1973) (Scener ur ett äktenskap)The Magic Flute (1975) (Trollflöjten), first shown on Swedish television, followed by a cinematic release Face to Face (1976) (Ansikte mot ansikte)After tax arrest:The Serpent's Egg (1977) (Das Schlangenei)Autumn Sonata (1978) (Höstsonaten)From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) (Aus dem Leben der Marionetten)Last Period:Fanny and Alexander (1982) (Fanny och Alexander) (won 4 Academy Awards)Karin's Face (1984) (Karins ansikte) (TV) After the Rehearsal (1984) (Efter repetitionen)In The Presence of a Clown (1997) (Larmar och gör sig till) (TV) Saraband (2003) (TV)Last work written for others:The Best Intentions (1992) (Den goda viljan) (directed by Bille August)Sunday’s Children (1992) (Söndagsbarn) (directed by son Daniel Bergman)Faithless (2000) (Trolösa) (directed by Liv Ullmann) SOURCES:Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman -- by Ingmar Bergman (Author) and Stig Bjorkman, Torsten Manns, Jonas Sima (Collaborators); Simon & Schuster; First US edition (1974) "Ingmar Bergman: Summing Up a Life in Film" by Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1983

The Fun Of Waiting For The Barbarians To Leave Washington

Adam Ash — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:35:41 EDT

What will Washington be like when the Barbarians leave town next year? Will this hapless burg feel the relief of an epic enema? Will this home of flagrant hypocrites and BS ejaculators, stuffed from snout to stern with an indigestible lumpen elite of corrupt souls, moral myopics, and wannabe-messiahs -- will it actually change? We know what Washington has become since the Barbarians took over in 2000. Who back then, when Bush was campaigning as a "compassionate conservative," could have foreseen what his Cheney presidency would bring us?1. The turning of our proud Army and CIA into low-life torturers.2. The deaths of tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of innocent Arab men, women and children, and nearly four thousand Americans -- not counting the thousands of severed limbs dropped on Iraqi soil.3. The hatred and contempt of the world.4. The creation of thousands of fresh, motivated, diehard al Qaeda terrorists and hundreds of suicide bombers.5. The tactic of the Big Lie to con us into a "pre-emptive" war (it worked for Hitler, it worked for Bush).6. A headlong plunge from a comfortable surplus into a tsunami of debt, making us the #1 debtor nation on earth, which includes the staggering waste of $12 billion a month on the Iraq War, the millions wasted on mercenaries -- hired goons -- by the truckload, and the stunning charity to the super-rich, to the point that beneficiaries like Warren Buffett and Bill Clinton apologize for it.7. The rebuilding of al Qaeda in Pakistan.8. The trashing of our Constitution, Bill of Rights, habeas corpus, separation of church and state, Geneva Convention, warrants for surveillance, laws via "signing statements", the environment, the middle-class, the poor, US attorney credibility, FEMA, stem-cell research, and good American jobs.9. No-bid contracts for Cheney's cronies at Halliburton.Truly, we've had six years of government by the Barbarians, our historic worst. It's the sacking of Rome from the inside. The cons are running the prison. Darth Vader rules the galaxy. Child molesters oversee the nursery.During Watergate, pundits proudly stated that the system worked. Well, in the case of the Barbarians, the system worked all right, but it was not the system we call democracy. It was something new in America -- dictatorship lite. Our so-called democracy -- this supposedly robust system established by our founding fathers, of a separation of powers, of checks and balances, of equality before the law -- was hijacked by no more than twelve men with a wacky agenda: Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney General Gonzales. The shame of it is that they were ably supported by not only the usual suspects, which include the Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the "scholars" of the American Enterprise Institute, the batty "Rapture" Evangelicals and creationists, the rightwing radio windbags, the flag-waving "uberpatriot" imbeciles, the greedy military-industrial complex slurping up our tax dollars -- the whole pea-brained troglodyte spastic chorus of hate-speech-spouting Bible-thumping crooked free-market monopoly capitalism liberal-decrying family-values war-on-terror gay-baiting women-suppressing stem-cell-fearing enemies-under-our-beds science-ignorant paranoid fetus-pitying SUV-driving beer-bellied gun-toting bash-the-poor hysterical racist ideologues who've made America the laughing stock of the civilized world, given noble conservatism a bad name, and caused Barry Goldwater to puke on the worms in his grave. These twelve Barbarians -- who in any other country would be marginalized on the far-right loony fringe -- were also enthusiastically cheered on by the self-proclaimed stalwarts of our "democracy," such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC. These highly intelligent and "liberal" media fell for the most obvious lies, and became the useful idiots of the Barbarians. Twelve Barbarians hijacked the country, and the country was only too willing to be hijacked. Hey, we may be against gay marriage, but that doesn�t stop us from bending over when our elite waves a big blunt organ our way.So much for our so-called democracy. Turns out it can be easily busted by a few determined wingnuts. Even an election win by the Democratic Party has made little difference. Our kids are still being killed for no good reason in Iraq. The Barbarians, bloodied but unbowed, still rule. Nobody has thought to impeach the most impeachable President and Vice-President in history.Our system of "democracy" has failed us. The truth is, the system never works. It's people who make the system work, and we've elected the wrong people to make our system work. Nancy Pelosi doesn't want to impeach, and that's that. The electorate never gets a proper alternative to the dictatorial powers-that-be.It doesn't really matter which party is in power. The credit-card companies will still get to write the bankruptcy laws. Big Pharma will still be writing drug laws. HMOs will be writing healthcare laws. Big Oil will make sure they're subsidized by our taxes. The American people will still find themselves eternally ass-up-in-the-air, steadily buggered by their Barbarian elite.The Barbarians are in charge because a nation of Barbarians put them there, and it took our nation of ignoramus hicks all of six years to find out how Barbarian their chosen Barbarians can be. At last Bush's approval rate sleeps with the fishes, and most Americans want the end of a war most of them now think was a mistake, but wouldn't you know? Bush is still whining away on TV, refusing to get his butt out of Iraq.Now that we know how easy it is to turn our "democracy" into a dictatorship (in the current jargon, a "unitary executive"), what can we expect future administrations to get up to?Don't think you can trust an administration run by Democrats to be more "democratic" than the Barbarians. The template has been set. It's just too easy to hijack our "democracy." Our media are simply too compliant. Our citizens are simply too ignorant (how many of them realize they make no more money than they did in 1970, even though they're way more productive and work much harder?). And our business leaders can buy too many profit opportunities under the Barbarians. Heck, they love the war; they're making a killing in Iraq. That shrewd old Nazi, Hermann Goering, explained the whole thing at Nuremberg: "Naturally the common people don't want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." It sure worked here. The Barbarians took over, planning a war on Iraq long before 9/11 for their Barbarian dream of more military bases in the Middle East. Now they've afforded future administrations a shining example of just what a few determined men can do when they want war, or tax cuts for the rich, or the right for corporations to foul up our air, or however you want to screw average Americans. The spiders spin, and we sit trapped in their web, being sucked dry, while those who should be warning us are basking in access to power instead of speaking truth to it.Will anything happen to our Barbarians? Let's take just one example: pundit William Kristol, the editor of Rupert Murdoch's conservative vanity publication The Weekly Standard. He told NPR when the Iraq War started: "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America, that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni - There's been almost no evidence of that at all." What happened to this massive fool, whose brain has been squatting in his bowels since birth? Time Magazine made him one of their columnists. The stupider you are, the bigger the forum you're given to be stupid in. The more you screw up, the likelier you are to get a Medal of Freedom pinned on your incompetent backside by our Barbarian-In-Chief.Even now, our nation of Barbarians have no idea how truly Barbaric their Barbarian rulers are. Three of our GOP presidential candidates don't believe in evolution. All of them are for torture. How can this happen in an educated society of rational grownups? We're talking about idiocy on a massive scale here, a kind of dark age of the human spirit. Our leaders may be jokes, but what they do is not funny at all, since it usually entails thousands being ripped off or killed. (This month's joke from the NY Times: "Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel ... that he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches." America, never forget you voted for this pustule on a warthog's butt who would've felt at home in the Kremlin.)The American experiment with democracy is over. We need a new De Tocqueville to write not Democracy in America, but Kleptocracy in America. Here's the definition of kleptocracy: a government that extends the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class at the expense of the population. Rings a bell, doesn't it? Especially when we see our pols, after they lose elections, automatically become lobbyists to cash in big-time. And you thought they were there to work for you.We can now look forward to Barbarian rule in perpetuity. Sometimes it will be Barbarian Heavy, like today, and sometimes it will be Barbarian Lite, like it will be under Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Hillary or Obama might make a cosmetic difference, but Paris Hilton will become a nun in the Congo before any administration actually tries to SOLVE our problems of education, healthcare, energy, the environment, campaign funding and income inequality, as opposed to Congress paving them over with a thin coat of superficial law-making. Until public schools are funded equally and not by property taxes, until there's a single-payer healthcare system, until big business is forced to clean up after themselves, until corporate welfare for big oil and other businesses stop, until the rich pay their fair share of taxes, until we stop exporting our jobs overseas, until CEOs stop making more in one day than their workers make in a year, things will go on as before.The Barbarians have won. Under Bush/Cheney, government of the people by the people for the people has perished from America. Sorry, Abe. Our Constitution never stood a chance against our 21st century elite. You thought you birthed a democracy, founding fathers. Tsk, tsk. Long live government of the Barbarians by the Barbarians for the Barbarians.