iHone

The morning after a March snowstorm. After years of relatively mild winters, we’re just not used to the frequent precipitation and prolonged cold.

At least we’re getting our money’s worth out of our snowblower.

I was going through some digital photos yesterday and discovered this image of the Arch.

I only get this close to the monument once or twice a year. This picture was taken when my sister and niece came for a visit late last fall.

Whenever I take photos of the Arch, I usually focus on just a part of it because it’s just too big to take in all at once. No two views are ever the same. Perhaps because of it’s incompleteness, this one has an edgy, disorienting quality.

William F. Buckley died today at the age of 82.

When I was an undergraduate, I read “God & Man at Yale,” his first treatise on the role of the university in shaping public discourse, morality and conscience.

The book was published in 1951, little more than a year after his graduation from Yale. It was his first shot over the bow of liberalism as it had evolved in the post-New Deal era. There would be many others. As a student in the mid-1970′s, however, it seemed to me that his prescriptions had little effect on academic life.

But that was Bill Buckley – always something of an anachronism with his patrician speech (he was actually a Catholic) and high-falutin’ vocabulary. Along with politicians like the Kennedys or artists like Mailer and Dylan, Buckley, founder of “The National Review,” host of the popular “Firing Line,” was a fixture of a very seminal age.

In time, his work and influence would be felt when conservatives finally came into their own with the election of Ronald Reagan on 1980.

American conservatism has come a long way down since then. An individualist in the vein of Ayn Rand and a believer in the power of free markets, I’m not so sure that Buckley was totally comfortable with the rise of the religious right, corporate corruption, the politics of fear and the unchecked power of the executive branch.

He took a lot of positions that he eventually changed. A foe of voting rights during the civil rights struggles of the 60′s, he later repented of that view. He also admitted to trying marijuana – just the once, mind you – on his yacht, beyond the territorial waters of the US.

And that was his special charm: as much as he valued tradition and orthodoxy, he could still learn a thing or two.

Last month I was approached by Actor/Producer Robert Nolan Clark and Production Coordinator Mike Ketcher to work as a Script Supervisor on a short feature called “Capdance.”

Over the weekend, I joined a small army of professionals, volunteers and supporters for two 12-hour days of shooting. While the call times were insane – 12:01 AM and 3:00 AM respectively – I had the time of my life.

Most of the Saturday shoot was dedicated to action scenes. There wasn’t much for me to do and from 4:00AM on I was struggling to keep my eyes open. On Sunday we shot most of the dialogue; I was engaged from the moment I walked on the set and had energy to spare at the end of the day.

It was great to work with professionals like Sean Keough, the director, and his assistant, Joe Bitzer. They calmly made a lot of crucial decisions and combined many shots in fairly short order. Nick Gartner, the DP, always seemed to be working from some kind of internal storyboard. The crew from Bad Dog Pictures performed like the Army Corps of Engineers.

I’m deeply grateful to Rob and Mike for asking me to come on board. I walked away feeling like I made a contribution.

I have long said that working on a movie set is something I wanted to do before I die. I would like to do it again – as a producer, director, actor or crew member – because the greatest thing in life is to work with passionate, creative people laboring to realize the same vision.

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost October and I haven’t posted since mid-July.

Things have been very busy for me these last few months with work, freelance audiobook editing, Web site creation (on a volunteer basis – dumb, I know), career development and life in general.

I realize that no one out there is holding their breath for any of this, but it’s something I need to do for myself.

I have continued to shoot and edit video and I plan to post some segments soon.

You may argue with his marshalling of the facts and cringe at the thought of what he’s proposing, but Michael Moore’s Sicko is one exceptional piece of documentary filmmaking.

In Sicko, Moore turns his attention to the state of America’s healthcare system. Unsurprisingly, he finds it dominated by greedy HMO’s and insurance companies. Even less surprising is the amount of money they contribute to the coffers of national legislators. In one devastating sequence, Moore chronicles the career of a particular reformer turned friend of the industry – Hillary Rodham Clinton.

There are also moments of pure visual poetry. Among the film’s most haunting sequences was the time-lapse recording of a disoriented, elderly woman dumped at a skid-row mission in downtown Los Angeles because she was unable to pay her bill at one of the city’s leading hospitals.

Moore’s special knack for identifying the victims of the system is only surpassed by his talent for telling their stories. Inevitably, he makes comparisons to the medical systems of France, Britain, Canada and Cuba – socialized systems we’ve always been taught to distrust. While the filmmaker can be faulted for presenting too rosy a view of these systems, he does it, ultimately, to ask the question: what kind of people have we become?

But something even deeper is at work here. Three years after Fahrenheit 9/11 – with Osama bin Laden still at large, nearly a trillion dollars spent, 3600 Americans and countless Iraqis dead – I believe that Moore is trying to answer the question: where’s the outrage?

In his wickedly funny way, he’s already shown us how deeply our political system and media outlets are compromised. With Sicko, Moore is diagnosing the paralyzing fear created in each of us by a healthcare system that keeps us scared and our growing indebtedness (think student loans, credit cards and subprime mortgages) to our corporate masters.

A few months ago, I read that The New Republic was coming under new ownership. It was said at the time that the liberal graylady would be retooled to appeal to a more aggressive left as well as readers accustomed to blogs and a 24/7 news cycle. I also understood that Martin Peretz, the Harvard teaching assistant turned publisher-editor who transformed TNR into a mouthpiece of inside-the-beltway Democratic Leadership Council types, would play a more restrained role in the publication’s future.

I decided to give it a try.

For the most part, I’ve not been disappointed with the magazine under the editorship of Franklin Foer. But this week came the editorial “Who Lost Gaza?”

Money quote:

Could any Israeli and American alleviations have preempted the the civil war in Palestine and robbed the clerics and the gunmen of Hamas of their prestige in Palestinian society? You must be kidding.

In the center of the issue was analysis of the latest developments in the West Bank and Gaza by Peretz himself. At the heart of article was this:

So what is Palestine? It is an improvisation from a series of rude facts. Palestine was never anything of especial importance to the Arabs or to the larger orbit of Muslims. Palestine was never even an integral territory of the Ottomans but split up into sanjaks that crossed the later post-World War I borders, a geographical and political jumble.

In short, there’s no such thing as Palestinians. Ergo, Israel had no partner for peace. So why bother?

This is an argument that hasn’t been heard since the rise of Yassir Arafat and Fatah. It’s also wishful thinking of a neconservative bent that’s woefully out of touch with the facts on the ground.

Israel is not responsible for the all the problems of the region. The peoples of the Middle East must indeed come to a new consciousness about themselves and their place in the world – beginning with their relationship to the thieves and stooges who run their nations. However, only the disaster of Iraq exceeds the hash the Bush Administration has made of Israeli-Palestinian relations – most of it through deliberate intransigence.

Frankly, I’m surprised that the editors signed off on the Peretz piece.  It isn’t much different from what he was writing fifteen years ago.

Please cancel my subscription.

While many panic-stricken viewers probably checked their television sets to see if they had lost their picture, I thought the closing moment of the final episode of “The Sopranos” was a fitting end to a series that always plumbed the depths of ambiguity.

Who were those guys who walked into the restaurant? Wiseguys sent to do a job? Feds sent to take Tony in? And why was Meadow in such a hurry to park her car?

Thanks to David Chase and his stellar cast and crew, we’ll be talking about it for years to come.

To those of us raised in northern New Jersey, “The Sopranos” imparted a certain street cred by association – even if we’d never been to West Caldwell. It gave us the opportunity to talk about the tough, flawed, colorful ethnic groups we grew up with.

Anthony Soprano and most of his associates undoubtedly fit the bill as sociopaths; guys who would kill you if you became inconvenient. They could be animals. But the genius of “The Sopranos” was its psychological realism and its portrayal of families we could all relate to.

Thanks for the memories.

For the last several months, my day job has been digitizing the audiovisual archive of former congressman Richard A. Gephardt for the Missouri Historical Society. While it’s not the most creative position I’ve ever held, the work straddles the digital/analog divide and never ceases to present complex technical challenges.

I’ve been given some excellent equipment to do the job – quad-core Mac workstations running Final Cut Studio and huge LaCie external drives. But we’ve also had to acquire technology on short notice – devices like time base correctors to help us manage the playback performance of VHS players. I’m thankful that MHS has trusted my advice.

I love the digital world we live in. I love that content producers like myself are able to do so much elegant, exquisite work with software engines like Final Cut for video, Pro Tools for audio and Creative Suite 3 for interactive web page design.

But this job has also taken me down a memory lane of old technologies like 2-inch and 1-inch videotape machines, U-matic and Betacam decks. For several weeks, I felt like I was going to work as a videotape technician at CBS.

I have come away with a profound respect for the people who built these machines that recorded and reproduced complex electronic signals while simultaneously performing dozens of complex mechanical functions involving finely tuned motors, servos, capstans and drums that moved at fantastic speeds.

The iPod is an incredible time-shifting device and its impact is only starting to be felt. But I feel sorry for all those young people who will never see a juke-box in action.

Since my wife is visiting her mother in the south of England this week, I’m naturally attuned to the news of Tony Blair’s planned resignation as head of the Labour Party, and consequently as Prime Minister of Great Britain, effective June 27.

In his ten years at No. 10 – he actually lived next door because the PM’s residence was too small for his family – Blair brought Britain to new levels of economic growth and was especially good to its senior citizens. It was a distinct pleasure to visit “Cool Brittania” in the fall of 2003 – so very different from the dreary, sooty, Labour-dominated England I experienced in 1979.

Blair’s mother was was an Irish Protestant who hailed from County Donegal. As a boy, he often spent part of the summer in Rossnowlagh, not far from where my own parents grew up. Northern Ireland has often been described as the graveyard of British leaders. Yet this did not prove to be the case for Blair, whose charm, patience and skillful diplomacy just paid off in the coalition government of Unionist Ian Paisley and IRA-man Martin MacGuiness, once blood rivals in the battle for control of the six counties.

I once read somewhere that Tony Blair felt slighted by Bill Clinton, that the former president treated him as a junior partner. By contrast, he felt himself the equal of George W. Bush. What a pity, then, that he staked so much of his reputation and legacy on the war in Iraq – even though his own intelligence, defense and foreign policy establishment understood the context far better than anyone else.

Blair believes that he and Bush will ultimately be vindicated on Iraq. Nevertheless, Britain plans to leave the coalition later this year. Even if the Bush administration could quell the sectarian violence by September, it will take decades to undo the strategic, diplomatic and moral damage wrought during this unhappy episode in the life of the Special Relationship.