The Washington Times
Published July 22, 2005
After the July 7 London bombings, some in the United Kingdom wondered if the bombing was in retaliation for Britain having troops in Iraq. Perhaps, they suggested, a withdrawal, emulating the Spanish appeasement after the March 2004 bombings in Madrid, would prevent further attacks. Now there has been another series of explosions in London.
There are two flaws in such thinking.
First, after the Spanish ordered their soldiers home, the emboldened jihadists plotted further murders -- most notably, the foiled plot to assassinate members of the Spanish High Court in Madrid.
Second, after the London bombings, the al Qaeda-linked group that took credit for the carnage threatened, "We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all crusader governments that they will receive the same punishment if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan."
Note the reference to both theaters. In the West, the new orthodoxy is that removing the theocratic Taliban in Afghanistan was the "correct" war that enjoyed widespread European and American support. In contrast, George W. Bush, in a "unilateral" and "pre-emptive" fashion, unnecessarily attacked the "secular" Saddam Hussein.
The terrorists, unlike us, make no such distinctions. Both actions, they insist, were equal affronts to radical Islam.
Somehow even Israel gets pulled into the story of the London bombings. The murderers decry the "Zionist crusader government" of Britain.
Speaking of Israel, shortly after the London attacks, a suicide bomber in Netanya, perhaps in sympathy with his kindred spirits in Britain, walked over to a group of women and blew them up.
He killed five persons, including two 16-year-old girls. This slaughter, in Israel proper, not the West Bank, took place during a mutually agreed "cease-fire" -- and on the eve of Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
The supposedly more "moderate" Hamas refused to condemn the attack by Islamic Jihad. That was logical given the recent statement of a senior Hamas official. Mahmoud al-Zahar said he would "definitely not" settle for co-existence with Israel -- even if it withdrew to it 1967 borders. As he put it, "[I]n the end, Palestine must return to become Muslim, and in the long term Israel will disappear from the face of the Earth."
Americans and others in the West should not be surprised at the Islamicists' determination to wage all-out war because of who we are rather than what we do.
When the killer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh confessed last week, he boasted, "I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do exactly the same."
If many progressives in the Netherlands expected the Dutch-Moroccan Mohammed Bouyeri would cite past ill-treatment by Westerners, they were sorely disappointed. Instead, the psychopath icily advised the mother of the murdered van Gogh: "I have to admit I do not feel for you, I do not feel your pain" and "I cannot feel for you. ... because I believe you are an infidel."
Thousands of innocent civilians such as van Gogh have been murdered by Islamic extremists -- in Darfur, Gaza, India, Israel, Lebanon, London, Madrid, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey and the United States. The carnage gives credence to the adage that while the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, the vast majority of global terrorists most certainly are Muslims.
The killers always allege particular gripes -- Australian troops in Iraq, Christian proselytizing, Hindu intolerance, occupation of the West Bank, theft of Arab petroleum, the Jews, attacks on the Taliban, the 15th-century reconquest of Spain, and, of course, the Crusades.
But in most cases -- from Mohamed Atta, who crashed into the World Trade Center, to Ahmed Sheik, the former London School of Economics student who planned the beheading of Daniel Pearl, to Magdy Mahmoud Mustafa el-Nashar, the suspected American-educated bomb-maker in London -- the common bond is not poverty, a lack of education or legitimate grievance. Instead it is blind hatred instilled by militant Islam.
Civilization has only two choices. It can continue appeasing these murderers, looking in vain for "root causes" of the mayhem. Maybe Mohammed Bouyeri did not have equal opportunity in the Netherlands? Maybe $50 billion in past American aid to Mohamed Atta's Egypt was too little? Maybe Britain was too insensitive to its Muslim minorities? Maybe the price paid for Middle East oil really is too low?
Or the United States and its allies can deny suspect Middle Eastern males entry into the West while distancing themselves from all Middle East dictatorships, which neither punish nor even shame thousands of their citizens whose money and psychological support fuel murderers across the globe.
We wait for a Western leader with the intellectual integrity and guts at last to say, "Enough is enough."
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a nationally syndicated columnist.
Friday, July 22, 2005
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Christopher Hitchens: Rove Rage
The poverty of our current scandal.
Slate.com
Posted Monday, July 18, 2005, at 1:10 PM PT
Writing to a friend in 1954, P.G. Wodehouse commented:
Are you following the McCarthy business? If so, can you tell me what it's all about? "You dined with Mr. X on Friday the tenth?" "Yes, sir." (Keenly) "What did you eat?" "A chocolate nut sundae, sir." (Sensation) It's like Bardell vs Pickwick.
Wodehouse of course was only affecting ignorance and making light of a ludicrously pompous and slightly sinister proceeding. But he was essentially correct in his lampooning of the McCarthy hearings, since even the most convinced anti-communist would not learn anything from the spectacle that he did not already know, and since the show trials managed to go on without producing either any evidence of any crime, or any evidence of any perpetrator, or any evidence of any victim.
It is the entire absence of the above three elements that makes the hunt for Karl Rove (who was once so confidently confused with I. Lewis Libby) so utterly Snark-like. In fact, in his column of July 17, Frank Rich was compelled to concede that the whole thing is absolutely nothing in itself, but is rather a sideshow to a much larger event: the deception of the Bush-Cheney administration in preparing an intervention in Iraq. I want to return to this, but one must first winnow out some other chaff and nonsense.
First, the most exploded figure in the entire argument is Joseph Wilson. This is for three reasons. He claimed, in his own book, that his wife had nothing to do with his brief and inconclusive visit to Niger. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," he wrote. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." There isn't enough wiggle room in those two definitive statements to make either of them congruent with a memo written by Valerie Wilson (or Valerie Plame, if you prefer) to a deputy chief in the CIA's directorate of operations. In this memo, in her wifely way, she announced that her husband would be ideal for the mission since he had "good relations with both the Prime Minister and the former Minister of Mines (of Niger), not to mention lots of French contacts." If you want to read the original, turn to the Senate committee's published report on the many "intelligence failures" that we have suffered recently. I want to return to those, too.
Speaking to the Washington Post about the CIA's documents on the Niger connection, Wilson made the further claim that "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." Again according to the Senate report, these papers were not in CIA hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip. He has since admitted to the same newspaper that he may have "misspoken" about this.
The third bogus element in Wilson's boastful story is the claim that Niger's "yellowcake" uranium was never a subject of any interest to Saddam Hussein's agents. The British intelligence report on this, which does not lack criticism of the Blair government, finds the Niger connection to be among the most credible of the assertions made about Saddam's double-dealing. If you care to consult the Financial Times of June 28, 2004, and see the front-page report by its national security correspondent Mark Huband, you will be able to review the evidence that Niger—with whose ministers Mr. Wilson had such "good relations"—was trying to deal in yellowcake with North Korea and Libya as well as Iraq and Iran. This evidence is by no means refuted or contradicted by a forged or faked Italian document saying the same thing. It was a useful axiom of the late I.F. Stone that few people are so foolish as to counterfeit a bankrupt currency.
Thus, and to begin with, Joseph Wilson comes before us as a man whose word is effectively worthless. What do you do, if you work for the Bush administration, when a man of such quality is being lionized by an anti-war press? Well, you can fold your tent and let them print the legend. Or you can say that the word of a mediocre political malcontent who is at a loose end, and who is picking up side work from a wife who works at the anti-regime-change CIA, may not be as "objective" as it looks. I dare say that more than one supporter of regime change took this option. I would certainly have done so as a reporter if I had known.
OK, then, how do the opponents of regime change in Iraq make my last sentence into a statement of criminal intent and national-security endangerment? By citing the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. This law, which is one of the most repressive and absurd pieces of legislation on our statute book, was a panicky attempt by the right to silence whistle-blowers at the CIA. In a rough effort to make it congruent with freedom of information and the First Amendment (after all, the United States managed to get through the Second World War and most of the Cold War without such a law), it sets a fairly high bar. You must knowingly wish to expose the cover of a CIA officer who you understand may be harmed as a result. It seems quite clear that nobody has broken even that arbitrary element of this silly law.
But the coverage of this non-storm in an un-teacup has gone far beyond the fantasy of a Rovean hidden hand. Supposedly responsible journalists are now writing as if there was never any problem with Saddam's attempt to acquire yellowcake (or his regime's now-proven concealment of a nuclear centrifuge, or his regime's now-proven attempt to buy long-range missiles off the shelf from North Korea as late as March 2003). In the same way, the carefully phrased yet indistinct statement of the 9/11 Commission that Saddam had no proven "operational" relationship with al-Qaida has mutated lazily into the belief that there were no contacts or exchanges at all, which the commission by no means asserts and which in any case by no means possesses the merit of being true. The CIA got everything wrong before 9/11, and thereafter. It was conditioned by its own culture to see no evil. It regularly leaked—see any of Bob Woodward's narratives—against the administration. Now it, and its partisans and publicity-famished husband-and-wife teams, want to imprison or depose people who leak back at it. No, thanks. Many journalists are rightly appalled at Time magazine's collusion with a prosecutor who has proved no crime and identified no victim. Far worse is the willingness of the New York Times to accept the demented premise of a prosecutor who has put one of its own writers behind bars.
Related in Slate
In 2004, Christopher Hitchens examined the unholy alliance between the CIA and the Left in the Plame investigation. Last week, Mickey Kaus assessed the speculation that the press leaked to Rove, and why Joseph Wilson wrote that op-ed about the CIA if his wife's job was a concern. Bruce Reed wondered why Matthew Cooper couldn't find anyone better than Karl Rove to talk with about welfare reform. Timothy Noah speculated about whether Rove will get canned in the Rove Death Watch, parts one, two, three, and four; Noah asserted that "if Dubya doesn't fire the man he nicknamed 'Turd Blossom' for this offense, he's an even bigger hack than I think." And Jacob Weisberg argued that reporters are too obsessed with protecting anonymous sources.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.
Slate.com
Posted Monday, July 18, 2005, at 1:10 PM PT
Writing to a friend in 1954, P.G. Wodehouse commented:
Are you following the McCarthy business? If so, can you tell me what it's all about? "You dined with Mr. X on Friday the tenth?" "Yes, sir." (Keenly) "What did you eat?" "A chocolate nut sundae, sir." (Sensation) It's like Bardell vs Pickwick.
Wodehouse of course was only affecting ignorance and making light of a ludicrously pompous and slightly sinister proceeding. But he was essentially correct in his lampooning of the McCarthy hearings, since even the most convinced anti-communist would not learn anything from the spectacle that he did not already know, and since the show trials managed to go on without producing either any evidence of any crime, or any evidence of any perpetrator, or any evidence of any victim.
It is the entire absence of the above three elements that makes the hunt for Karl Rove (who was once so confidently confused with I. Lewis Libby) so utterly Snark-like. In fact, in his column of July 17, Frank Rich was compelled to concede that the whole thing is absolutely nothing in itself, but is rather a sideshow to a much larger event: the deception of the Bush-Cheney administration in preparing an intervention in Iraq. I want to return to this, but one must first winnow out some other chaff and nonsense.
First, the most exploded figure in the entire argument is Joseph Wilson. This is for three reasons. He claimed, in his own book, that his wife had nothing to do with his brief and inconclusive visit to Niger. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," he wrote. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." There isn't enough wiggle room in those two definitive statements to make either of them congruent with a memo written by Valerie Wilson (or Valerie Plame, if you prefer) to a deputy chief in the CIA's directorate of operations. In this memo, in her wifely way, she announced that her husband would be ideal for the mission since he had "good relations with both the Prime Minister and the former Minister of Mines (of Niger), not to mention lots of French contacts." If you want to read the original, turn to the Senate committee's published report on the many "intelligence failures" that we have suffered recently. I want to return to those, too.
Speaking to the Washington Post about the CIA's documents on the Niger connection, Wilson made the further claim that "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." Again according to the Senate report, these papers were not in CIA hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip. He has since admitted to the same newspaper that he may have "misspoken" about this.
The third bogus element in Wilson's boastful story is the claim that Niger's "yellowcake" uranium was never a subject of any interest to Saddam Hussein's agents. The British intelligence report on this, which does not lack criticism of the Blair government, finds the Niger connection to be among the most credible of the assertions made about Saddam's double-dealing. If you care to consult the Financial Times of June 28, 2004, and see the front-page report by its national security correspondent Mark Huband, you will be able to review the evidence that Niger—with whose ministers Mr. Wilson had such "good relations"—was trying to deal in yellowcake with North Korea and Libya as well as Iraq and Iran. This evidence is by no means refuted or contradicted by a forged or faked Italian document saying the same thing. It was a useful axiom of the late I.F. Stone that few people are so foolish as to counterfeit a bankrupt currency.
Thus, and to begin with, Joseph Wilson comes before us as a man whose word is effectively worthless. What do you do, if you work for the Bush administration, when a man of such quality is being lionized by an anti-war press? Well, you can fold your tent and let them print the legend. Or you can say that the word of a mediocre political malcontent who is at a loose end, and who is picking up side work from a wife who works at the anti-regime-change CIA, may not be as "objective" as it looks. I dare say that more than one supporter of regime change took this option. I would certainly have done so as a reporter if I had known.
OK, then, how do the opponents of regime change in Iraq make my last sentence into a statement of criminal intent and national-security endangerment? By citing the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. This law, which is one of the most repressive and absurd pieces of legislation on our statute book, was a panicky attempt by the right to silence whistle-blowers at the CIA. In a rough effort to make it congruent with freedom of information and the First Amendment (after all, the United States managed to get through the Second World War and most of the Cold War without such a law), it sets a fairly high bar. You must knowingly wish to expose the cover of a CIA officer who you understand may be harmed as a result. It seems quite clear that nobody has broken even that arbitrary element of this silly law.
But the coverage of this non-storm in an un-teacup has gone far beyond the fantasy of a Rovean hidden hand. Supposedly responsible journalists are now writing as if there was never any problem with Saddam's attempt to acquire yellowcake (or his regime's now-proven concealment of a nuclear centrifuge, or his regime's now-proven attempt to buy long-range missiles off the shelf from North Korea as late as March 2003). In the same way, the carefully phrased yet indistinct statement of the 9/11 Commission that Saddam had no proven "operational" relationship with al-Qaida has mutated lazily into the belief that there were no contacts or exchanges at all, which the commission by no means asserts and which in any case by no means possesses the merit of being true. The CIA got everything wrong before 9/11, and thereafter. It was conditioned by its own culture to see no evil. It regularly leaked—see any of Bob Woodward's narratives—against the administration. Now it, and its partisans and publicity-famished husband-and-wife teams, want to imprison or depose people who leak back at it. No, thanks. Many journalists are rightly appalled at Time magazine's collusion with a prosecutor who has proved no crime and identified no victim. Far worse is the willingness of the New York Times to accept the demented premise of a prosecutor who has put one of its own writers behind bars.
Related in Slate
In 2004, Christopher Hitchens examined the unholy alliance between the CIA and the Left in the Plame investigation. Last week, Mickey Kaus assessed the speculation that the press leaked to Rove, and why Joseph Wilson wrote that op-ed about the CIA if his wife's job was a concern. Bruce Reed wondered why Matthew Cooper couldn't find anyone better than Karl Rove to talk with about welfare reform. Timothy Noah speculated about whether Rove will get canned in the Rove Death Watch, parts one, two, three, and four; Noah asserted that "if Dubya doesn't fire the man he nicknamed 'Turd Blossom' for this offense, he's an even bigger hack than I think." And Jacob Weisberg argued that reporters are too obsessed with protecting anonymous sources.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.
David Hinckley: Confirming Springsteen, 1975
The Goods
By DAVID HINCKLEY
The Daily News
31 May 2005
When Columbia Records signed Bruce Springsteen and released his first album in 1973, there was more than the occasional stray piece of talk that he was the New Bob Dylan.
But the phrase, while vaguely complimentary, did little to set Springsteen apart. In the early 1970s, New Dylans were as common as sea gulls on the Coney Island Boardwalk.
Steve Goodman was a New Dylan. John Prine was a New Dylan. Loudon Wainwright 3rd was a New Dylan. It was like the title was the door prize at the opening of a new supermarket.
It was also worth noting that virtually none of the artists who got this label asked for it or wanted it. They all loved Dylan's music, sure, but singing and songwriting in Dylan's shadow was a one-way ticket to Desolation Row.
In Springsteen's case, he got the tag for a couple of reasons. He had been signed by Columbia, Dylan's label, and had gone through John Hammond, the guy who signed Dylan.
Springsteen was also a singer-songwriter whose first album, "Greetings from Asbury Park," was stuffed with Dylanesque songs rife with colorful metaphors, verbal minidramas and breathless wordplay.
It produced no hit singles, however, and only modest sales, though it did help expand a loyal fan base.
When Springsteen came back a year later with "The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle," much the same thing happened. Springsteen fans were enchanted, but sales were tepid and murmurs were heard that this latest New Dylan was never going to be in the ballpark with the Old Dylan, who in 1974 had reemerged from a long hibernation for an electrifying reunion tour with his old buddies The Band.
Springsteen, however, had a trump card. Almost everyone who saw him in concert said he gave the greatest show this side of James Brown. Now he just needed to transfer some of that electricity to recordings.
So he got a new keyboard player, a new drummer and a new manager and he headed into the studio to make an album that would eventually be called "Born to Run."
Springsteen would in later years become legendary for the amount of time he spent making records, but as the "Born to Run" sessions stretched on, the murmurs started again about whether this kid really had the goods.
The preparation process got a lot of attention, however — so much that Springsteen was in the curious position of feeling a backlash to the volume of prerelease hype.
So once it finally had a firm release date, Sept. 1, 1975, Springsteen and CBS decided the best answer to the doubters would be to introduce it with live performances.
They booked the Bottom Line, a 400-seat club on Mercer St. in the Village, Aug. 13 to 17.
The Bottom Line had only been open about a year but had a reputation as a keeper. Although owners Allan Pepper and Stanley Snadowsky weren't known for overpaying their acts, they gave top names a good showcase, and getting Springsteen would hardly hurt their reputation.
Springsteen's regular venue was theaters that held five to 10 times as many fans, so from the moment the Bottom Line shows were announced they were an almost impossible ticket. Columbia also saved seats for busloads of press, industry people, VIPs, anyone who could help spread the word.
Columbia also mounted a major media campaign that prominently displayed a quote by Jon Landau, a longtime rock critic who was now a Springsteen confidante. He had seen the future of rock 'n' roll, wrote Landau in Rolling Stone, and it was Springsteen.
The stage, then, was set. The Bottom Line run would confirm either the fan buzz about Springsteen's electric stage presence — or the skeptics' weariness with The Hype.
The schedule called for two shows a night, with the early show Aug. 15 broadcast live over WNEW-FM. That further raised the stakes for shows built on songs almost no one had yet heard.
On the first night, first show, Springsteen walked out alone, sat at the piano and played a new tune called "Thunder Road." It received ripples of applause.
By the third night, for the WNEW show, the full band was with him from the start. That show, which would become one of the most famous in rock history, started with "Tenth Avenue Freezeout" and "Spirit in the Night," then tossed in Springsteen's version of an old Phil Spector favorite, "And Then She Kissed Me."
He played three of his earlier songs, "Growin' Up," "Hard to Be a Saint in the City" and "E Street Shuffle," before "Every Time You Walk Into the Room" and a run of new ones — "She's the One," "Born to Run" and "Thunder Road."
Then he did three more old ones, "Kitty's Back," "Rosalita" and "Sandy," before he closed with Gary U.S. Bonds' "Quarter to Three."
By the end of the run, the shows had their intended effect: They had lived up to and thus overshadowed The Hype. The New York Times started its review on the front page and even found a new way to praise Springsteen, suggesting that rather than the New Dylan, he might be the New Mick Jagger.
The record came out as scheduled Sept. 1 and was a major hit. It became an instant FM radio staple, though top-40 radio still found Springsteen's voice too raw to give him any significant pop exposure.
In October, Time and Newsweek both put him on their covers, in the same week.
But it was those five nights in mid-August that seemed to suggest both the New Bruce and the little club he picked for this coming-out party might be around for a while.
By DAVID HINCKLEY
The Daily News
31 May 2005
When Columbia Records signed Bruce Springsteen and released his first album in 1973, there was more than the occasional stray piece of talk that he was the New Bob Dylan.But the phrase, while vaguely complimentary, did little to set Springsteen apart. In the early 1970s, New Dylans were as common as sea gulls on the Coney Island Boardwalk.
Steve Goodman was a New Dylan. John Prine was a New Dylan. Loudon Wainwright 3rd was a New Dylan. It was like the title was the door prize at the opening of a new supermarket.
It was also worth noting that virtually none of the artists who got this label asked for it or wanted it. They all loved Dylan's music, sure, but singing and songwriting in Dylan's shadow was a one-way ticket to Desolation Row.
In Springsteen's case, he got the tag for a couple of reasons. He had been signed by Columbia, Dylan's label, and had gone through John Hammond, the guy who signed Dylan.
Springsteen was also a singer-songwriter whose first album, "Greetings from Asbury Park," was stuffed with Dylanesque songs rife with colorful metaphors, verbal minidramas and breathless wordplay.
It produced no hit singles, however, and only modest sales, though it did help expand a loyal fan base.
When Springsteen came back a year later with "The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle," much the same thing happened. Springsteen fans were enchanted, but sales were tepid and murmurs were heard that this latest New Dylan was never going to be in the ballpark with the Old Dylan, who in 1974 had reemerged from a long hibernation for an electrifying reunion tour with his old buddies The Band.
Springsteen, however, had a trump card. Almost everyone who saw him in concert said he gave the greatest show this side of James Brown. Now he just needed to transfer some of that electricity to recordings.
So he got a new keyboard player, a new drummer and a new manager and he headed into the studio to make an album that would eventually be called "Born to Run."Springsteen would in later years become legendary for the amount of time he spent making records, but as the "Born to Run" sessions stretched on, the murmurs started again about whether this kid really had the goods.
The preparation process got a lot of attention, however — so much that Springsteen was in the curious position of feeling a backlash to the volume of prerelease hype.
So once it finally had a firm release date, Sept. 1, 1975, Springsteen and CBS decided the best answer to the doubters would be to introduce it with live performances.
They booked the Bottom Line, a 400-seat club on Mercer St. in the Village, Aug. 13 to 17.
The Bottom Line had only been open about a year but had a reputation as a keeper. Although owners Allan Pepper and Stanley Snadowsky weren't known for overpaying their acts, they gave top names a good showcase, and getting Springsteen would hardly hurt their reputation.
Springsteen's regular venue was theaters that held five to 10 times as many fans, so from the moment the Bottom Line shows were announced they were an almost impossible ticket. Columbia also saved seats for busloads of press, industry people, VIPs, anyone who could help spread the word.
Columbia also mounted a major media campaign that prominently displayed a quote by Jon Landau, a longtime rock critic who was now a Springsteen confidante. He had seen the future of rock 'n' roll, wrote Landau in Rolling Stone, and it was Springsteen.
The stage, then, was set. The Bottom Line run would confirm either the fan buzz about Springsteen's electric stage presence — or the skeptics' weariness with The Hype.
The schedule called for two shows a night, with the early show Aug. 15 broadcast live over WNEW-FM. That further raised the stakes for shows built on songs almost no one had yet heard.
On the first night, first show, Springsteen walked out alone, sat at the piano and played a new tune called "Thunder Road." It received ripples of applause.By the third night, for the WNEW show, the full band was with him from the start. That show, which would become one of the most famous in rock history, started with "Tenth Avenue Freezeout" and "Spirit in the Night," then tossed in Springsteen's version of an old Phil Spector favorite, "And Then She Kissed Me."
He played three of his earlier songs, "Growin' Up," "Hard to Be a Saint in the City" and "E Street Shuffle," before "Every Time You Walk Into the Room" and a run of new ones — "She's the One," "Born to Run" and "Thunder Road."
Then he did three more old ones, "Kitty's Back," "Rosalita" and "Sandy," before he closed with Gary U.S. Bonds' "Quarter to Three."
By the end of the run, the shows had their intended effect: They had lived up to and thus overshadowed The Hype. The New York Times started its review on the front page and even found a new way to praise Springsteen, suggesting that rather than the New Dylan, he might be the New Mick Jagger.
The record came out as scheduled Sept. 1 and was a major hit. It became an instant FM radio staple, though top-40 radio still found Springsteen's voice too raw to give him any significant pop exposure.
In October, Time and Newsweek both put him on their covers, in the same week.
But it was those five nights in mid-August that seemed to suggest both the New Bruce and the little club he picked for this coming-out party might be around for a while.
Nick Hornby Interviews Bruce Springsteen
A fan's eye view
Nick Hornby has always been a Springsteen fan, and listened to his music every day while writing his latest bestseller. But he never had the chance to meet his hero - until The Boss came to London for his recent Royal Albert Hall shows. In this OMM exclusive, the star reveals how he keeps abreast of modern music via his son, and why the likes of 'Born to Run' continue to inspire.
Sunday July 17, 2005
The Guardian
Still the Boss: Bruce Springsteen
Earlier on in the week that I met Bruce Springsteen, and before I knew I was going to meet him, I'd decided I was going to send him a copy of my new book. I got his home address off a mutual friend, and signed it to him, and the book was lying around in my office in an unstamped Jiffy bag when the editor of this magazine asked if I'd like to do this interview. So I took the book with me.
I wasn't expecting him to read the bloody thing, nor even to keep it, and yet even so it seemed like something I needed to do. A Long Way Down was fuelled by coffee, Silk Cuts and Bruce (specifically, a 1978 live bootleg recording of 'Prove it all Night', which I listened to a lot on the walk to my office as I was finishing the book). And Springsteen is one of the people who made me want to write in the first place, and one of the people who has, through words and deeds, helped me to think about the career I have had since that initial impulse. It seems to me that his ability to keep his working life fresh and compelling while working within the mainstream is an object lesson to just about anyone whose work has any sort of popular audience. [The live versions of 'Prove it All Night' from the 1978 tour remain some of the most moving songs that I've ever heard...the intro is staggering...If someone can listen to those renditions and remain untouched, then I just think they are doomed to wander the wasteland of popular music...lost out on the crags...probably tapping their toes to far lesser imitators like John Mellencamp and Bob Seger. Speaking of Mellencamp...what the hell is wrong with this world where one can see a concert that has Mellencamp getting top-billing over the great John Fogerty? Good Lord what a travesty! - JTF]
The first time I met him was after his Friday night show at the Royal Albert Hall, at a party in an upmarket West End hotel. He talked with an impressive ferocity and fluency to a little group of us about why he demanded restraint from his fans during the solo shows. The following afternoon I went to the soundcheck for the Saturday show, and sat on my own in the auditorium while he played 'My Father's House', from Nebraska. It wasn't the sort of experience you forget in a hurry. I interviewed him in his dressing room, and I was nervous: I have, in transcribing the questions, made them seem more cogent than they actually were.
He looked younger than the last time I saw him, and he's clearly incredibly fit; he changed his shirt for the photographer, and I could tell that he does a lot more two-and-a-half hour shows than I do. He was pleasant and friendly, but though he asked after a couple of younger musicians who both he and I know, there wasn't much small talk; his answers came in unbroken yet very carefully considered streams. He is one of the few artists I've met who is able to talk cogently about what he does without sounding either arrogant or defensively self-deprecating.
I gave him the book, and he thanked me. I have no idea whether the cleaner took it home, but it didn't matter much to me either way.
Nick Hornby: I was thinking when I was watching the show last night that maybe when you play with the band you can at least say to yourself, 'I know why people are coming to see us. We're good at what we do, and there's this dynamic between us.' But when it's you on your own, you can't tell yourself that any more. How does that feel? Have you got to a stage in life where it doesn't feel weird that so many people come to see only you?
Bruce Springsteen: I performed like this in different periods of most of my playing life before I made records (1) [for footnotes see below]. It just so happens that I didn't do it on the Nebraska tour, maybe I was feeling unsure about ... I hadn't performed by myself in a while. It feels very natural to me, and I assume people come for the very same reasons as they do when I'm with the band: to be moved, for something to happen to them. So I think the same things that make people plunk down their hard-earned bucks for the tickets, it works both ways. You're looking for an experience and something that contextualises, as best as possible, a piece of the world. I'm just taking a different road to it out there at night. It's the same thing, you know?
NH: It's always struck me that you work very hard on the stage side of things, that you have a theory of stagecraft. Is that right?
BS: Well, I don't know if I've worked hard at it. It's always felt natural, because I'm generally very comfortable with people. That's probably genetic in some fashion (laughs). There is a presentation and I think being aware of the fact that there's a show going on is a good idea (laughs) (2). I think it fell into some disrepute when the idea of the show became linked to falseness in some fashion, which is a superficial way to look at it. It's actually a bridge when used appropriately. It's simply a bridge for your ideas to reach the audience. It assists the music in connecting and that's what you're out there for. I think if you do it wrong, you can diminish your work, but if you do it right you can lightly assist what you're doing. It can be an enormous asset in reaching people with what might be otherwise difficult material. I have a large audience coming to see this kind of music, an audience which in other circumstances would not be there. The audiences are there as a result of my history with the band but also as a result of my being able to reach people with a tune. I have my ideas, I have my music and I also just enjoy showing off [laughs], so that's a big part of it. Also, I like to get up onstage and behave insanely or express myself physically, and the band can get pretty silly. But even in the course of an evening like this there's a way that you sort of attenuate the evening. Your spoken voice is a part of it - not a big part of it, but it's something. It puts people at ease, and once again kind of reaches out and makes a bridge for what's otherwise difficult music.
NH: I think that's right. Those shows where you borrowed things from James Brown ... I think some people did find it troubling that this music is supposed to be real and authentic and yet there's this stagecraft, this messing around, at the same time (3). I think the people who get the shows always see that there's not a contradiction.
BS: Plus, you know, when I was young, there was a lot of respect for clowning in rock music - look at Little Richard. It was a part of the whole thing, and I always also believed that it released the audience. And it was also a way that you shrunk yourself down to a certain sort of life-size (laughs) but I also enjoyed it, I had fun with it, and I never thought that seriousness and clowning were exclusive, so I've approached my work and my stagecraft with the idea that they're not exclusive. You can go from doing something quite silly to something dead serious in the blink of an eye, and if you're making those connections with your audience then they're going to go right along with it.
NH: What have you been listening to the past couple of years?
BS: I listen to all kinds of things, you know? Take your choice. [He reaches into a bag and pulls out a whole heap of home-made CDs.] I've made all this music for walking ... A lot of this is a little acoustic-oriented but I hear everything. I hear all the Britpop stuff, the Stone Roses and Oasis, and I go on to Suede and Pulp. I'm generally interested in almost everything.
NH: For the benefit of the tape I'm looking at CDs which feature Dylan and Sleater Kinney and the Beach Boys and Jimmy Cliff and Sam Cooke and Bobby Bland and Joe Strummer; pretty much the whole history of recorded music.
BS: I left a lot of my more rock things off, because this is my walking music. But I listen to old music; some Louis Armstrong stuff recently. And then I'll listen to, I don't know, Four Tet or something. I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination. I still like to go to record stores, I like to just wander around and I'll buy whatever catches my attention ... Maybe I'll read a good review of something or even an interesting review. But then I go through long periods where I don't listen to things, usually when I'm working. In between the records and in between the writing I suck up books and music and movies and anything I can find.
NH: And is that part of the process of writing for you?
BS: I don't think it has to be. I tend to be a subscriber to the idea that you have everything you need by the time you're 12 years old to do interesting writing for most of the rest of your life - certainly by the time you're 18. But I do find it helps me with form, in that something may just inspire me, may give me an idea as to the form I'm going to create something in, or maybe the setting. Ten or 12 years ago, nature writing struck my imagination and it's seeped into my work a little bit here and there ever since.. It's all kinds of things. I heard this live version of 'Too Much Monkey Business' by Chuck Berry and it sounds so close to punk music. So when you go to record with your band, you have all those sounds, you've created a bank. I like to stay as awake and as alert as I can. And I enjoy it too, I have a lot of interest in it ... I like not being sealed off from what's going on culturally.
NH: Have you got to the stage where your kids are introducing you to things?
BS: Yeah, my son likes a lot of guitar bands. He gave me something the other day which was really good. He'll burn a CD for me full of things that he has, so he's a pretty good call if I want to check some of that stuff out ... The other two aren't quite into that yet. My daughter's 12, 13, and she likes the top 40. So I end up at the Z100 Christmas show, sitting in the audience with my daughter and her friends watching every top 40 act ... I'm all over the place.
NH: How did that Suicide thing come about (4)?
BS: I met Alan [Vega] in the late Seventies. I was just a fan. I liked them, they were unique. They're very dreamy, they have a dreamy quality, and they were also incredibly atmospheric and were going were others weren't. I just enjoyed them a lot. I happened to hear that song recently, I came across a compilation that it was on and it's very different at the end of the night. It's just those few phrases repeated, very mantra-like.
NH: It's especially striking in a show that's built almost exclusively on narrative.
BS: Right, but it's the fundamental idea behind all of the songs anyway (5). (Laughs) It's just a different moment at the end of the night, where you go to some of the same places with virtually very few words. I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition. But this envelops the night. It's interesting watching people's faces. They look very different while that's happening. It's a look of some surprise, and that's part of what I set the night up for - unconventional pieces at the top to surprise the audience and to also make them aware that it's not going to be a regular night. It's going to be a night of all different things and the ritualistic aspect of the night is dispelled. As long as it's not something that I've done before ...
NH: How do you think of your relationship with your own material? Because when you were here with the band a couple of years ago, you were playing stuff from the first three albums and some of those you were doing solo as well. And yet last night I think there was one song from the first four albums ...
BS: Is that right? On certain nights I'll play more. I think I played 'For You' for a while ... It depends. My only general rule was to steer away from things I played with the band over the past couple of tours. I was interested in re-shaping the Rising material for live shows, so people could hear the bare bones of that. And the new material and [The Ghost of] Tom Joad and Nebraska gets a nod, and I think 'Tunnel of Love' comes up. I play 'Racing in the Street' ... I haven't played much off Born to Run. It's predicated on anything that doesn't have a formulated response built in.
NH: Does it feel like young man's music to you now, the first three, four records?
BS: I would say that it is, you know, because a lot of young people actually mention those records to me. I remember I was playing over here a while back and I was staring down and there was a kid, he couldn't have been more than 14, 15, he was mouthing every word to us, Greetings From Asbury Park, literally word for word and this kid - forget about it, his parents were the glimmer in somebody's eye [laughs]. In some ways I suppose it is, but also a good song takes years to find itself. When I go back and play 'Thunder Road' or something, I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost [laughs].
And that was the country at the time I wrote that music. I wrote that music immediately preceding the end of the Vietnam war, when that feeling swept the country. A part of me was interested in music which contained that innocence, the Spector stuff, a lot of the Fifties and Sixties rock'n'roll, but I myself wasn't one of those people. I realised I wasn't one of my heroes, I was something else and I had to take that into consideration. So when I wrote that music and incorporated a lot of the things I loved from those particular years, I was also aware that I had to set in place something that acknowledged what had happened to me and everybody else where I lived.
NH: I presume that's where the emotional connection with your music came for so many people at the time. Because all those people had grown up loving that music, but it wasn't doing the job any more.
BS: I think we were a funny amalgam of things at that moment. There was so much familiarity in the music that for a lot of people it felt like home; it touched either your real memories or just your imaginary home, the place that you think of when you think of your home town, or who you were, or who you might have been. And the music collected those things, so there was an element that made you feel comfortable. And yet at the same time we were in the process of moving some place else, and that was acknowledged in my music also, and that's why I think people felt deeply about it.
I think that it made some people comfortable, and there were stylistic things that caught people's ears, that they were used to hearing ... but that alone wouldn't have made people feel very deeply, it was the other stuff. That's why 'Born to Run' resonates and 'Thunder Road'; people took that music and they really made it theirs. I think I worked hard for that to happen. I am providing a service and it's one that I like to think is needed. It's at the core of trying to do it right, from year to year. It's the motive when you go out there. You want that reaction: 'Hey, I know that kid. That's me!'. Because I still remember that my needs were very great, and they were addressed by things that people at the time thought were trash, popular music and B-movies ... But I found a real self in them that helped me make sense of the self that I grew up with - the person I actually was.
· Bruce Springsteen's latest album, 'Devils & Dust', is out now on Columbia.
· Nick Hornby's novel, 'A Long Way Down', is published by Viking, priced £17.99
Hornby's footnotes
1. A few years ago, a friend gave me a DVD of early Springsteen performances, bootleg stuff taken from the internet, and on it there's shaky black-and-white film of Bruce performing solo at some folk club, probably in 1970/71. And, of course, there's a difference between performing solo as an unknown artist and performing solo when you're one of the biggest acts in the world. Back then, it would have been very hard for Bruce to kid himself that anyone in the crowd had come to see him; they'd come to see the headline act, or they'd come for a drink. And if in those circumstances you can delay one person's retreat to the bar, then you're doing well. At the Royal Albert Hall, people had paid £50-£60 to watch Springsteen's every move, for over two hours. That must focus the mind.
2. This sounds like a throwaway remark, but how many shows have you been to where the band pretend to be unaware that there's a show going on? All that tuning up and talking to each other, while the audience waits for something to happen. Springsteen's simple recognition of the fact that people pay for every onstage second separates him from almost every single other act I've seen.
3. Every now and then, No Nukes, the film of a big 1979 anti-nuclear concert in Madison Square Garden, turns up in the middle of the night on Sky Movies. Springsteen is one of the artists featured: he sings 'The River', 'Thunder Road' and then 'Quarter to Three', the old Gary US Bonds hit that he used to play as an encore. In 'Quarter to Three', he does the whole hammy James Brown thing; he collapses on the stage, the band attempts to lead him off, he suddenly pulls away from them and does another couple of verses, stripped to the waist. It's electrifying, and funny; but what's remarkable, looking at it now, is that Springsteen's uncomplicated showbiz gestures seem way more 'authentic' than all the smiley, gleaming-teeth sincerity that James Taylor, Carly Simon and the rest of the performers are trying to project. What, after all, could be more sincere than a performer performing - and acknowledging that he's performing?
4. Springsteen closed the Royal Albert Hall shows with an extraordinary cover of 'Dream Baby Dream'. an old song by the scary punk-era experimental duo Suicide. He got some kind of echoed loop going out of his pump-organ and strolled around the stage singing the song's disconnected phrases; there were no beats, of course, but it was as hypnotic and as hymnal as Underworld's 'Born Slippy'.
5. 'All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,' said the critic Walter Pater. As it turns out, even musicians aspire towards the condition of music - something less wordy, less structured, more visceral.
Those other fans ...
Dave Marsh Music critic
'The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle is still, to me, one of the greatest records that anybody's ever made. It just left you feeling more alive.'
Tony Blair Prime Minister
'I like Bruce Springsteen tremendously. Cherie and I used to listen [to him] together. I had this extremely grotty flat in St John's Wood [in north London], just around the corner from where she used to live, and we would play Bruce there.'
Eric Alterman Author of 'It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive: the Promise of Bruce Springsteen'
'He's the only iconographic figure in my life who ultimately didn't betray me. He keeps growing and changing.'
Stephen Merchant Comedy writer
'Initially, when I first heard Born to Run it didn't grab me. Later, though, the romanticism of 'Thunder Road' got to me. It sounded like the soundtrack to a teen movie that one day I'd hope to make. When the sax comes in, that's the guy running through the rain at the end to get the girl.'
Ronald Reagan Former American President (misreading 'Born in the USA' in October 1984)
'America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside our hearts. It rests in the message of hope so many young people admire: New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen.' [I don't see where Mr. Reagan even mentioned 'BITUSA' let alone misread it...this silly myth has been making the rounds for years and it's time it was put down for good. George Will misread 'BITUSA' in a column from that time...Reagan misread nothing...it's a non-story that still rears its ugly head 20 years later. - JTF]
Danny Jones McFly
'When I came home from school, instead of watching The Tweenies, I'd roll my sleeves up like him, put a band around my head and watch Springsteen live.'
Damon Gough Badly Drawn Boy
'It took me a long, long time to decide that I was going to be a songwriter myself, but 'Thunder Road' started the process.'
Greil Marcus Author
'It's amazing how much he can do in just a few lines ... you know exactly where you are and you can follow the story.'
Billy Bragg Singer
'Springsteen makes me keep faith in America.'
Related articles
30.05.2005: Review: Bruce Springsteen, Royal Albert Hall, London
22.04.2005: CD review: Bruce Springsteen, Devils and Dust
Useful link
Bruce Springsteen official site
Nick Hornby has always been a Springsteen fan, and listened to his music every day while writing his latest bestseller. But he never had the chance to meet his hero - until The Boss came to London for his recent Royal Albert Hall shows. In this OMM exclusive, the star reveals how he keeps abreast of modern music via his son, and why the likes of 'Born to Run' continue to inspire.
Sunday July 17, 2005
The Guardian
Still the Boss: Bruce SpringsteenEarlier on in the week that I met Bruce Springsteen, and before I knew I was going to meet him, I'd decided I was going to send him a copy of my new book. I got his home address off a mutual friend, and signed it to him, and the book was lying around in my office in an unstamped Jiffy bag when the editor of this magazine asked if I'd like to do this interview. So I took the book with me.
I wasn't expecting him to read the bloody thing, nor even to keep it, and yet even so it seemed like something I needed to do. A Long Way Down was fuelled by coffee, Silk Cuts and Bruce (specifically, a 1978 live bootleg recording of 'Prove it all Night', which I listened to a lot on the walk to my office as I was finishing the book). And Springsteen is one of the people who made me want to write in the first place, and one of the people who has, through words and deeds, helped me to think about the career I have had since that initial impulse. It seems to me that his ability to keep his working life fresh and compelling while working within the mainstream is an object lesson to just about anyone whose work has any sort of popular audience. [The live versions of 'Prove it All Night' from the 1978 tour remain some of the most moving songs that I've ever heard...the intro is staggering...If someone can listen to those renditions and remain untouched, then I just think they are doomed to wander the wasteland of popular music...lost out on the crags...probably tapping their toes to far lesser imitators like John Mellencamp and Bob Seger. Speaking of Mellencamp...what the hell is wrong with this world where one can see a concert that has Mellencamp getting top-billing over the great John Fogerty? Good Lord what a travesty! - JTF]
The first time I met him was after his Friday night show at the Royal Albert Hall, at a party in an upmarket West End hotel. He talked with an impressive ferocity and fluency to a little group of us about why he demanded restraint from his fans during the solo shows. The following afternoon I went to the soundcheck for the Saturday show, and sat on my own in the auditorium while he played 'My Father's House', from Nebraska. It wasn't the sort of experience you forget in a hurry. I interviewed him in his dressing room, and I was nervous: I have, in transcribing the questions, made them seem more cogent than they actually were.
He looked younger than the last time I saw him, and he's clearly incredibly fit; he changed his shirt for the photographer, and I could tell that he does a lot more two-and-a-half hour shows than I do. He was pleasant and friendly, but though he asked after a couple of younger musicians who both he and I know, there wasn't much small talk; his answers came in unbroken yet very carefully considered streams. He is one of the few artists I've met who is able to talk cogently about what he does without sounding either arrogant or defensively self-deprecating.
I gave him the book, and he thanked me. I have no idea whether the cleaner took it home, but it didn't matter much to me either way.
Nick Hornby: I was thinking when I was watching the show last night that maybe when you play with the band you can at least say to yourself, 'I know why people are coming to see us. We're good at what we do, and there's this dynamic between us.' But when it's you on your own, you can't tell yourself that any more. How does that feel? Have you got to a stage in life where it doesn't feel weird that so many people come to see only you?
Bruce Springsteen: I performed like this in different periods of most of my playing life before I made records (1) [for footnotes see below]. It just so happens that I didn't do it on the Nebraska tour, maybe I was feeling unsure about ... I hadn't performed by myself in a while. It feels very natural to me, and I assume people come for the very same reasons as they do when I'm with the band: to be moved, for something to happen to them. So I think the same things that make people plunk down their hard-earned bucks for the tickets, it works both ways. You're looking for an experience and something that contextualises, as best as possible, a piece of the world. I'm just taking a different road to it out there at night. It's the same thing, you know?
NH: It's always struck me that you work very hard on the stage side of things, that you have a theory of stagecraft. Is that right?
BS: Well, I don't know if I've worked hard at it. It's always felt natural, because I'm generally very comfortable with people. That's probably genetic in some fashion (laughs). There is a presentation and I think being aware of the fact that there's a show going on is a good idea (laughs) (2). I think it fell into some disrepute when the idea of the show became linked to falseness in some fashion, which is a superficial way to look at it. It's actually a bridge when used appropriately. It's simply a bridge for your ideas to reach the audience. It assists the music in connecting and that's what you're out there for. I think if you do it wrong, you can diminish your work, but if you do it right you can lightly assist what you're doing. It can be an enormous asset in reaching people with what might be otherwise difficult material. I have a large audience coming to see this kind of music, an audience which in other circumstances would not be there. The audiences are there as a result of my history with the band but also as a result of my being able to reach people with a tune. I have my ideas, I have my music and I also just enjoy showing off [laughs], so that's a big part of it. Also, I like to get up onstage and behave insanely or express myself physically, and the band can get pretty silly. But even in the course of an evening like this there's a way that you sort of attenuate the evening. Your spoken voice is a part of it - not a big part of it, but it's something. It puts people at ease, and once again kind of reaches out and makes a bridge for what's otherwise difficult music.
NH: I think that's right. Those shows where you borrowed things from James Brown ... I think some people did find it troubling that this music is supposed to be real and authentic and yet there's this stagecraft, this messing around, at the same time (3). I think the people who get the shows always see that there's not a contradiction.
BS: Plus, you know, when I was young, there was a lot of respect for clowning in rock music - look at Little Richard. It was a part of the whole thing, and I always also believed that it released the audience. And it was also a way that you shrunk yourself down to a certain sort of life-size (laughs) but I also enjoyed it, I had fun with it, and I never thought that seriousness and clowning were exclusive, so I've approached my work and my stagecraft with the idea that they're not exclusive. You can go from doing something quite silly to something dead serious in the blink of an eye, and if you're making those connections with your audience then they're going to go right along with it.
NH: What have you been listening to the past couple of years?
BS: I listen to all kinds of things, you know? Take your choice. [He reaches into a bag and pulls out a whole heap of home-made CDs.] I've made all this music for walking ... A lot of this is a little acoustic-oriented but I hear everything. I hear all the Britpop stuff, the Stone Roses and Oasis, and I go on to Suede and Pulp. I'm generally interested in almost everything.
NH: For the benefit of the tape I'm looking at CDs which feature Dylan and Sleater Kinney and the Beach Boys and Jimmy Cliff and Sam Cooke and Bobby Bland and Joe Strummer; pretty much the whole history of recorded music.
BS: I left a lot of my more rock things off, because this is my walking music. But I listen to old music; some Louis Armstrong stuff recently. And then I'll listen to, I don't know, Four Tet or something. I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination. I still like to go to record stores, I like to just wander around and I'll buy whatever catches my attention ... Maybe I'll read a good review of something or even an interesting review. But then I go through long periods where I don't listen to things, usually when I'm working. In between the records and in between the writing I suck up books and music and movies and anything I can find.
NH: And is that part of the process of writing for you?
BS: I don't think it has to be. I tend to be a subscriber to the idea that you have everything you need by the time you're 12 years old to do interesting writing for most of the rest of your life - certainly by the time you're 18. But I do find it helps me with form, in that something may just inspire me, may give me an idea as to the form I'm going to create something in, or maybe the setting. Ten or 12 years ago, nature writing struck my imagination and it's seeped into my work a little bit here and there ever since.. It's all kinds of things. I heard this live version of 'Too Much Monkey Business' by Chuck Berry and it sounds so close to punk music. So when you go to record with your band, you have all those sounds, you've created a bank. I like to stay as awake and as alert as I can. And I enjoy it too, I have a lot of interest in it ... I like not being sealed off from what's going on culturally.
NH: Have you got to the stage where your kids are introducing you to things?
BS: Yeah, my son likes a lot of guitar bands. He gave me something the other day which was really good. He'll burn a CD for me full of things that he has, so he's a pretty good call if I want to check some of that stuff out ... The other two aren't quite into that yet. My daughter's 12, 13, and she likes the top 40. So I end up at the Z100 Christmas show, sitting in the audience with my daughter and her friends watching every top 40 act ... I'm all over the place.
NH: How did that Suicide thing come about (4)?
BS: I met Alan [Vega] in the late Seventies. I was just a fan. I liked them, they were unique. They're very dreamy, they have a dreamy quality, and they were also incredibly atmospheric and were going were others weren't. I just enjoyed them a lot. I happened to hear that song recently, I came across a compilation that it was on and it's very different at the end of the night. It's just those few phrases repeated, very mantra-like.
NH: It's especially striking in a show that's built almost exclusively on narrative.
BS: Right, but it's the fundamental idea behind all of the songs anyway (5). (Laughs) It's just a different moment at the end of the night, where you go to some of the same places with virtually very few words. I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition. But this envelops the night. It's interesting watching people's faces. They look very different while that's happening. It's a look of some surprise, and that's part of what I set the night up for - unconventional pieces at the top to surprise the audience and to also make them aware that it's not going to be a regular night. It's going to be a night of all different things and the ritualistic aspect of the night is dispelled. As long as it's not something that I've done before ...
NH: How do you think of your relationship with your own material? Because when you were here with the band a couple of years ago, you were playing stuff from the first three albums and some of those you were doing solo as well. And yet last night I think there was one song from the first four albums ...
BS: Is that right? On certain nights I'll play more. I think I played 'For You' for a while ... It depends. My only general rule was to steer away from things I played with the band over the past couple of tours. I was interested in re-shaping the Rising material for live shows, so people could hear the bare bones of that. And the new material and [The Ghost of] Tom Joad and Nebraska gets a nod, and I think 'Tunnel of Love' comes up. I play 'Racing in the Street' ... I haven't played much off Born to Run. It's predicated on anything that doesn't have a formulated response built in.
NH: Does it feel like young man's music to you now, the first three, four records?
BS: I would say that it is, you know, because a lot of young people actually mention those records to me. I remember I was playing over here a while back and I was staring down and there was a kid, he couldn't have been more than 14, 15, he was mouthing every word to us, Greetings From Asbury Park, literally word for word and this kid - forget about it, his parents were the glimmer in somebody's eye [laughs]. In some ways I suppose it is, but also a good song takes years to find itself. When I go back and play 'Thunder Road' or something, I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost [laughs].
And that was the country at the time I wrote that music. I wrote that music immediately preceding the end of the Vietnam war, when that feeling swept the country. A part of me was interested in music which contained that innocence, the Spector stuff, a lot of the Fifties and Sixties rock'n'roll, but I myself wasn't one of those people. I realised I wasn't one of my heroes, I was something else and I had to take that into consideration. So when I wrote that music and incorporated a lot of the things I loved from those particular years, I was also aware that I had to set in place something that acknowledged what had happened to me and everybody else where I lived.
NH: I presume that's where the emotional connection with your music came for so many people at the time. Because all those people had grown up loving that music, but it wasn't doing the job any more.
BS: I think we were a funny amalgam of things at that moment. There was so much familiarity in the music that for a lot of people it felt like home; it touched either your real memories or just your imaginary home, the place that you think of when you think of your home town, or who you were, or who you might have been. And the music collected those things, so there was an element that made you feel comfortable. And yet at the same time we were in the process of moving some place else, and that was acknowledged in my music also, and that's why I think people felt deeply about it.
I think that it made some people comfortable, and there were stylistic things that caught people's ears, that they were used to hearing ... but that alone wouldn't have made people feel very deeply, it was the other stuff. That's why 'Born to Run' resonates and 'Thunder Road'; people took that music and they really made it theirs. I think I worked hard for that to happen. I am providing a service and it's one that I like to think is needed. It's at the core of trying to do it right, from year to year. It's the motive when you go out there. You want that reaction: 'Hey, I know that kid. That's me!'. Because I still remember that my needs were very great, and they were addressed by things that people at the time thought were trash, popular music and B-movies ... But I found a real self in them that helped me make sense of the self that I grew up with - the person I actually was.
· Bruce Springsteen's latest album, 'Devils & Dust', is out now on Columbia.
· Nick Hornby's novel, 'A Long Way Down', is published by Viking, priced £17.99
Hornby's footnotes
1. A few years ago, a friend gave me a DVD of early Springsteen performances, bootleg stuff taken from the internet, and on it there's shaky black-and-white film of Bruce performing solo at some folk club, probably in 1970/71. And, of course, there's a difference between performing solo as an unknown artist and performing solo when you're one of the biggest acts in the world. Back then, it would have been very hard for Bruce to kid himself that anyone in the crowd had come to see him; they'd come to see the headline act, or they'd come for a drink. And if in those circumstances you can delay one person's retreat to the bar, then you're doing well. At the Royal Albert Hall, people had paid £50-£60 to watch Springsteen's every move, for over two hours. That must focus the mind.
2. This sounds like a throwaway remark, but how many shows have you been to where the band pretend to be unaware that there's a show going on? All that tuning up and talking to each other, while the audience waits for something to happen. Springsteen's simple recognition of the fact that people pay for every onstage second separates him from almost every single other act I've seen.
3. Every now and then, No Nukes, the film of a big 1979 anti-nuclear concert in Madison Square Garden, turns up in the middle of the night on Sky Movies. Springsteen is one of the artists featured: he sings 'The River', 'Thunder Road' and then 'Quarter to Three', the old Gary US Bonds hit that he used to play as an encore. In 'Quarter to Three', he does the whole hammy James Brown thing; he collapses on the stage, the band attempts to lead him off, he suddenly pulls away from them and does another couple of verses, stripped to the waist. It's electrifying, and funny; but what's remarkable, looking at it now, is that Springsteen's uncomplicated showbiz gestures seem way more 'authentic' than all the smiley, gleaming-teeth sincerity that James Taylor, Carly Simon and the rest of the performers are trying to project. What, after all, could be more sincere than a performer performing - and acknowledging that he's performing?
4. Springsteen closed the Royal Albert Hall shows with an extraordinary cover of 'Dream Baby Dream'. an old song by the scary punk-era experimental duo Suicide. He got some kind of echoed loop going out of his pump-organ and strolled around the stage singing the song's disconnected phrases; there were no beats, of course, but it was as hypnotic and as hymnal as Underworld's 'Born Slippy'.
5. 'All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,' said the critic Walter Pater. As it turns out, even musicians aspire towards the condition of music - something less wordy, less structured, more visceral.
Those other fans ...
Dave Marsh Music critic
'The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle is still, to me, one of the greatest records that anybody's ever made. It just left you feeling more alive.'
Tony Blair Prime Minister
'I like Bruce Springsteen tremendously. Cherie and I used to listen [to him] together. I had this extremely grotty flat in St John's Wood [in north London], just around the corner from where she used to live, and we would play Bruce there.'
Eric Alterman Author of 'It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive: the Promise of Bruce Springsteen'
'He's the only iconographic figure in my life who ultimately didn't betray me. He keeps growing and changing.'
Stephen Merchant Comedy writer
'Initially, when I first heard Born to Run it didn't grab me. Later, though, the romanticism of 'Thunder Road' got to me. It sounded like the soundtrack to a teen movie that one day I'd hope to make. When the sax comes in, that's the guy running through the rain at the end to get the girl.'
Ronald Reagan Former American President (misreading 'Born in the USA' in October 1984)
'America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside our hearts. It rests in the message of hope so many young people admire: New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen.' [I don't see where Mr. Reagan even mentioned 'BITUSA' let alone misread it...this silly myth has been making the rounds for years and it's time it was put down for good. George Will misread 'BITUSA' in a column from that time...Reagan misread nothing...it's a non-story that still rears its ugly head 20 years later. - JTF]
Danny Jones McFly
'When I came home from school, instead of watching The Tweenies, I'd roll my sleeves up like him, put a band around my head and watch Springsteen live.'
Damon Gough Badly Drawn Boy
'It took me a long, long time to decide that I was going to be a songwriter myself, but 'Thunder Road' started the process.'
Greil Marcus Author
'It's amazing how much he can do in just a few lines ... you know exactly where you are and you can follow the story.'
Billy Bragg Singer
'Springsteen makes me keep faith in America.'
Related articles
30.05.2005: Review: Bruce Springsteen, Royal Albert Hall, London
22.04.2005: CD review: Bruce Springsteen, Devils and Dust
Useful link
Bruce Springsteen official site
AP: Springsteen's Musical Education Continues On Tour
Photo Gallery
Photos: Bruce Springsteen
By LARRY McSHANE
Associated Press Writer
July 21, 2005, 9:13 AM EDT
NEW YORK -- Nearly three decades after "Born to Run," with a dozen Grammys and an Oscar to show for his songwriting skills, Bruce Springsteen says he's still learning things about his music each time he steps on stage."I'm once again in search of different and exiting ways of voicing the material," he explained after finishing a sound check before a weeknight show in Buffalo. "If you've written good songs, sturdy songs, you find you've just scratched the surface."
From "Rosalita" through "The River" and into "The Rising," the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee has consistently produced songs with such resonance. On the current solo tour supporting his "Devils & Dust" album, Springsteen has revitalized rarely played favorites such as "Point Blank" or "Wreck on the Highway" by backing himself on banjo, electric piano or pump organ.
"That's the job," Springsteen said about his live shows. "As you go along, you're bringing the music and all these characters to life every night. And you can't do it without doing it, you know? I'm not going to come out and just run through some songs, or play favorites. I'm in search of some life essence. That's why people come."
In addition to reinventing his classic songs, Springsteen said he's creating some new music. In the downtime between shows, particularly during his five-week swing through Europe, the Boss spent his spare time on new material.
"I spent quite a bit of time sitting and writing," Springsteen said in a telephone interview. "It was a pretty fruitful time. I'd have the guitar with me, and I'd come home and do a good bit of writing _ sometimes all on one song. Two weeks go by, and I'm going page after page refining it."
Along with new music comes something completely different for Springsteen: a longer, more detailed version of his VH-1 "Storytellers" appearance at a Jersey shore theater. The one-of-a-kind solo performance will show up in stores Sept. 6, with a running time more than double the hour-long version that already aired.
It will include a previously unseen question and answer period between Springsteen and some lucky fans."That was quite a thing," Springsteen said about the evening spent deconstructing eight songs, offering a rare glimpse into his method of melding words and music. "I never did anything quite like it before, I don't think I've ever done that before. I felt it was something very singular. And it was a lot of fun."
Springsteen, 55, launched his second solo acoustic tour earlier this year after releasing "Devils & Dust," which hit No. 1 on the charts in the United States and nine countries in Europe.
The Springsteen tour continues Saturday with a show in Atlanta, with dates to follow in Charlotte; Greensboro, N.C.; Pittsburgh; Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati; Grand Rapids, Mich.; St. Louis; Milwaukee; Portland, Seattle and Vancouver.
Springsteen suggested the tour could be extended to include a few more dates in cities with "longtime supporters," which typically includes East Coast strongholds like Boston, Philadelphia and New Jersey.But there was no official word yet on extra shows: "We may do a little more. There's a few cities we'll try to get back to."
Over the years, Springsteen has divided his time between band and solo records. In the last two decades, he's done just a single record with the E Street Band, while releasing the solo albums "Tunnel of Love," "The Ghost of Tom Joad" and "Devils & Dust."
Attention later this year, though, will turn to his seminal band album."Born to Run" was released in September 1975 _ putting the 30th anniversary of its debut at the end of this summer. Springsteen, who was just a 25-year-old Jersey shore kid destined for bigger things at the time, seemed somewhat perplexed at putting that number into perspective.
"Yeah, I don't know what to make of that, except here it is," Springsteen said. "Who woulda thunk? It's kind of funny. It some ways it doesn't seem that long, but when I look back at old (film) footage it's ..."Springsteen paused and laughed."Well," he finally said, "time flies when you're having fun."
http://www.brucespringsteen.net
http://www.backstreets.com
Friday, July 15, 2005
David Sancious Talks About BTR 30th Anniversary Set
http://www.backstreets.com
Sancious discusses Born To Run 30th Anniversary Release
Early E Street keyboardist David Sancious spoke with Jay Lustig in today's Star-Ledger, in advance of tomorrow night's show at the Two River Theatre in Red Bank. Along the way, he mentioned his participation in an upcoming 30th Anniversary reissue of Born to Run -- a project that has been in the works more many a month and rumored aplenty, though there has yet to be an official announcement.
Sancious says, "A couple of months ago, I did an interview for a documentary that Bruce's company is making about the 30th anniversary of Born to Run. They got everybody down to New York City in a studio and filmed interviews with everybody who played on [the album], getting people to remember the sessions and tell stories about what went on."
While it's too early for set-in-stone details, the reissue is planned as a lavishly packaged multi-disc affair, including the remastered BTR CD along with bonus material including a long-awaited official DVD of performance footage from the era and the making-of documentary Sancious mentions. Look for a release date in late summer or fall, and we'll have more details right here as it approaches.- July 15, 2005
Bill DeYoung: Emmylou Too Vital For Branson
Friday, July 15, 2005
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
Guy Clark and Emmylou Harris at the 2005 Americana Awards
Harris performs with Elvis Costello & the Imposters at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Central Park SummerStage, Manhattan. Enter at 69th Street and Fifth Avenue. Tickets ($57.50 in advance, $60 day of show) available through Ticketmaster.
Thirty years after her debut album, "Pieces of the Sky," helped redefine the relationship between country, folk and rock-and-roll, vocalist Emmylou Harris is still breaking new ground.
Her summer projects include an album of duets with Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler, songwriting sessions with Canadian folk artists Kate and Anna McGarrigle and a co-headlining tour with British rocker Elvis Costello - on which they'll harmonize on classic country tunes between solo sets.
She and John Prine sing together on the upcoming release by Rodney Crowell, Harris' longtime friend and collaborator.
"There are all these really interesting, exciting and inspiring projects. It's not just going and playing Branson - it's like really great stuff. If you had one of those in your career, it'd be pretty great."
Harris pauses and rephrases herself, eager to avoid insulting the folks in Branson, the Missouri town that battles the stereotype of being a country music retirement home.
"I use Branson as a metaphor for 'OK, your creative days are over. So let's just make it easy on ourselves,' she explains carefully.
"It's like retiring and going to Florida to just play golf. I love baseball, and I could be very happy just watching baseball for the rest of my life, so I understand that kind of passion. But I think you have to keep yourself involved, enthusiastic and excited about things. And I think it would be hard to stay excited about music in Branson, because I've played there. And for the audience, you were just one more ride in the amusement park between all-you-can-eat buffets."
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
Guy Clark and Emmylou Harris at the 2005 Americana Awards
Harris performs with Elvis Costello & the Imposters at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Central Park SummerStage, Manhattan. Enter at 69th Street and Fifth Avenue. Tickets ($57.50 in advance, $60 day of show) available through Ticketmaster.
Thirty years after her debut album, "Pieces of the Sky," helped redefine the relationship between country, folk and rock-and-roll, vocalist Emmylou Harris is still breaking new ground.
Her summer projects include an album of duets with Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler, songwriting sessions with Canadian folk artists Kate and Anna McGarrigle and a co-headlining tour with British rocker Elvis Costello - on which they'll harmonize on classic country tunes between solo sets.
She and John Prine sing together on the upcoming release by Rodney Crowell, Harris' longtime friend and collaborator.
"There are all these really interesting, exciting and inspiring projects. It's not just going and playing Branson - it's like really great stuff. If you had one of those in your career, it'd be pretty great."
Harris pauses and rephrases herself, eager to avoid insulting the folks in Branson, the Missouri town that battles the stereotype of being a country music retirement home.
"I use Branson as a metaphor for 'OK, your creative days are over. So let's just make it easy on ourselves,' she explains carefully.
"It's like retiring and going to Florida to just play golf. I love baseball, and I could be very happy just watching baseball for the rest of my life, so I understand that kind of passion. But I think you have to keep yourself involved, enthusiastic and excited about things. And I think it would be hard to stay excited about music in Branson, because I've played there. And for the audience, you were just one more ride in the amusement park between all-you-can-eat buffets."
Bob Klapisch: Dial 'R' for Roger
Friday, July 15, 2005
BOSTON - When Brian Cashman learned Monday that Chien-Ming Wang had blown out his shoulder, his first reflex was to call Joe Torre with the devastating news. Cashman started dialing his manager's cellphone, but then hung up when he remembered Torre was hosting a charity golf tournament in Westchester.
"I guess he was doing me a favor," is what Torre said with a rueful smile. It would be another 24 hours before Torre discovered Wang will be lost for the season, and that his Yankees are in their deepest pitching crisis in a decade.
Actually, it's a perfect storm of worst-case scenarios: With four starters on the disabled list, the Bombers can't possibly survive a brutal 11-game road trip (without any off-days), but they're too close to first place to justify handing the ball to the decomposing Tim Redding and/or Wayne Franklin.
Al Leiter will almost certainly be in pinstripes by Monday, but when asked to measure the former Met's rescue quotient, one Yankee elder just shook his head, unable to think of any false-hope response. Leiter has lost his fastball and cutter and would've never been set free by the Marlins if he had anything resembling his Shea-era stuff.
The Yankees are smart enough to know Leiter, Redding and Franklin could turn August (or even July) into a standings nightmare. In any other market, it might be the time and place to consider trading away the assets, like Tom Gordon and Gary Sheffield and replenish the naked farm system that's at the root of this emergency.
But George Steinbrenner needs to keep the Stadium's turnstiles in a steady blur. He'll draw close to 4 million fans this year, most of whom believe the Yankees are good enough to catch the Red Sox. Indeed, for all their early-season mediocrity, the Yankees arrived at Fenway on Thursday night just 2½ games out, and had hit 17 home runs in their past six games.
The Boss can't possibly call off the hunt just because there's no one left to pitch. Cashman is under orders to call anyone and everyone. "There's no name that's out of the question," is what the general manager said.
Including Roger Clemens'?
Cashman stared straight ahead, letting his silence act as an answer. The Yankees are convinced the Astros would never deal the Rocket, not now, not when they're back in the wild-card race. And with Clemens' teenage son Koby now officially a member of the organization, drafted and signed and on his way to rookie ball as an infielder, there's no way the Rocket would ever leave Houston.
Or would he? During the All-Star break, the right-hander put owner Drayton McLane on notice to find a replacement for Carlos Beltran before July 31. Clemens stopped short of directly threatening Astros management, but he's not exactly giving McLane unconditional love, either.
After all, Clemens has the lowest ERA of any pitcher this late in the season since Bob Gibson's 1.12 in 1968, yet the Astros still have a losing record in games he starts. Not only have the Astros not hit, they've diminished Clemens' Hall of Fame career.
That's the window of vulnerability the Yankees can exploit. They have to call the Astros today and be prepared to deal Robinson Cano and Eric Duncan and then start writing checks to McLane. And even then, the Yankees would need a complete and unconditional collapse by the Astros - nothing short of 10 straight losses that would make it virtually impossible for Clemens to get to the postseason.
At that point, the Bombers would still be facing the mother of long shots. Still, why not at least inquire? "Because they'd want a king's ransom, that's why" is what one major league scout said.
Of course they would. No one is in the business of helping the Yankees crawl out of the cesspool. There are general managers who are loving Cashman's predicament today - loving it. But the Yankees have to react intellectually, not with any macho defiance.
They shouldn't consider Cano an untouchable, even though they've spent the last two months building him up as a latter-day Rod Carew. He's a good, young player, athletic with a smattering of power, but he's no future superstar. It's possible the Yankees are seeing all they're ever going to get from Cano.
Trade him? Why not, if it means landing a front-line pitcher who can keep alive the possibility of getting the Yankees to the postseason. That savior obviously isn't Randy Johnson, who'll be under enormous pressure on Saturday, his start sandwiched between Redding's tonight and whatever desperation-move the Yankees make on Sunday.
Johnson is no longer the pitcher who threatens to throw a no-hitter every time he takes the ball. Mike Mussina has lost his aura of invincibility, too. With a chance to calm the Yankees' nerves on Thursday, Mussina allowed the Red Sox four runs before he even got two outs. So much for easing the crisis.
What the Yankees need is an arm - and a leader. They know where to find Clemens. They can start by picking up the phone. And this time, they shouldn't wait 24 hours.
E-mail: klapisch@northjersey.com
BOSTON - When Brian Cashman learned Monday that Chien-Ming Wang had blown out his shoulder, his first reflex was to call Joe Torre with the devastating news. Cashman started dialing his manager's cellphone, but then hung up when he remembered Torre was hosting a charity golf tournament in Westchester.
"I guess he was doing me a favor," is what Torre said with a rueful smile. It would be another 24 hours before Torre discovered Wang will be lost for the season, and that his Yankees are in their deepest pitching crisis in a decade.
Actually, it's a perfect storm of worst-case scenarios: With four starters on the disabled list, the Bombers can't possibly survive a brutal 11-game road trip (without any off-days), but they're too close to first place to justify handing the ball to the decomposing Tim Redding and/or Wayne Franklin.
Al Leiter will almost certainly be in pinstripes by Monday, but when asked to measure the former Met's rescue quotient, one Yankee elder just shook his head, unable to think of any false-hope response. Leiter has lost his fastball and cutter and would've never been set free by the Marlins if he had anything resembling his Shea-era stuff.
The Yankees are smart enough to know Leiter, Redding and Franklin could turn August (or even July) into a standings nightmare. In any other market, it might be the time and place to consider trading away the assets, like Tom Gordon and Gary Sheffield and replenish the naked farm system that's at the root of this emergency.
But George Steinbrenner needs to keep the Stadium's turnstiles in a steady blur. He'll draw close to 4 million fans this year, most of whom believe the Yankees are good enough to catch the Red Sox. Indeed, for all their early-season mediocrity, the Yankees arrived at Fenway on Thursday night just 2½ games out, and had hit 17 home runs in their past six games.
The Boss can't possibly call off the hunt just because there's no one left to pitch. Cashman is under orders to call anyone and everyone. "There's no name that's out of the question," is what the general manager said.
Including Roger Clemens'?
Cashman stared straight ahead, letting his silence act as an answer. The Yankees are convinced the Astros would never deal the Rocket, not now, not when they're back in the wild-card race. And with Clemens' teenage son Koby now officially a member of the organization, drafted and signed and on his way to rookie ball as an infielder, there's no way the Rocket would ever leave Houston.
Or would he? During the All-Star break, the right-hander put owner Drayton McLane on notice to find a replacement for Carlos Beltran before July 31. Clemens stopped short of directly threatening Astros management, but he's not exactly giving McLane unconditional love, either.
After all, Clemens has the lowest ERA of any pitcher this late in the season since Bob Gibson's 1.12 in 1968, yet the Astros still have a losing record in games he starts. Not only have the Astros not hit, they've diminished Clemens' Hall of Fame career.
That's the window of vulnerability the Yankees can exploit. They have to call the Astros today and be prepared to deal Robinson Cano and Eric Duncan and then start writing checks to McLane. And even then, the Yankees would need a complete and unconditional collapse by the Astros - nothing short of 10 straight losses that would make it virtually impossible for Clemens to get to the postseason.
At that point, the Bombers would still be facing the mother of long shots. Still, why not at least inquire? "Because they'd want a king's ransom, that's why" is what one major league scout said.
Of course they would. No one is in the business of helping the Yankees crawl out of the cesspool. There are general managers who are loving Cashman's predicament today - loving it. But the Yankees have to react intellectually, not with any macho defiance.
They shouldn't consider Cano an untouchable, even though they've spent the last two months building him up as a latter-day Rod Carew. He's a good, young player, athletic with a smattering of power, but he's no future superstar. It's possible the Yankees are seeing all they're ever going to get from Cano.
Trade him? Why not, if it means landing a front-line pitcher who can keep alive the possibility of getting the Yankees to the postseason. That savior obviously isn't Randy Johnson, who'll be under enormous pressure on Saturday, his start sandwiched between Redding's tonight and whatever desperation-move the Yankees make on Sunday.
Johnson is no longer the pitcher who threatens to throw a no-hitter every time he takes the ball. Mike Mussina has lost his aura of invincibility, too. With a chance to calm the Yankees' nerves on Thursday, Mussina allowed the Red Sox four runs before he even got two outs. So much for easing the crisis.
What the Yankees need is an arm - and a leader. They know where to find Clemens. They can start by picking up the phone. And this time, they shouldn't wait 24 hours.
E-mail: klapisch@northjersey.com
Stephen Schwartz- London: The Pakistani Connection
Those paying attention to Britain's Jamaati culture shouldn't be surprised by London's home-grown terrorists.
07/13/2005 3:45:00 PM
The Weekly Standard
In the first dew days after the horror in London on July 7, media in Britain and abroad focused considerable attention on "Londonistan"--the local zoo of Islamist agitators, almost entirely Arab, who have made headlines for years with their extremist preaching. Analytical lines, many of them useful, were drawn to al Qaeda and Iraq, but almost nobody looked at domestic Muslim extremism in the United Kingdom.
Close observers of the British Islamic community, however, few of whom seem to have been consulted by reporters or the government, had been discussing for months a dramatic increase in radical agitation by Pakistani Muslim immigrants in Britain, as well as among their children.
According to the authoritative Muslim Council of Britain, the British Islamic population, totaling 1.5 million, has a plurality of 610,000 Pakistanis, with an additional 360,000 from Bangladesh and India, and 350,000 Arab and African. Unfortunately, Pakistan is the world's second most significant front-line state (after Iraq) in the global war on terror. Pakistan produced the Jama'at-i-Islami (Community of Islam) movement, founded by Abu'l Ala Mawdudi, a theologian who died in 1979, strangely enough, in Buffalo, New York, at age 76. Known as Jamaatis, the followers of Mawdudi have attained exceptional influence in the Pakistani army and intelligence services, and were a key element in the Pakistani-Saudi alliance to support the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Western academics and journalists are often at pains to distinguish between the Jamaatis and Wahhabism, which is the state religion in Saudi Arabia. But differences in theological details,
although they do exist, are secondary; mainly, the Saudi Wahhabis hold to a deceptive alliance with the Western powers, while the Jamaatis were always frontally anti-Western. The Jamaatis study in Saudi Arabia and share with the Wahhabis a murderous hatred of Muslims who do not conform to their ideology, considering those who reject their teachings to be apostates from Islam. They regularly massacre Shia Muslims, in particular, in Pakistani cities. They also completely reject participation by Muslim immigrants in the political and social institutions of Western countries in which they live, and they consider suicide terror legitimate. Pakistan has very few energy resources, and the Saudis have used cheap oil to support Wahhabi infiltration. In the system of radical Islam, if Saudi Arabia may be compared with the former Soviet state, Pakistan could be a parallel to the former East Germany.
For these reasons, the identification of four British-born Muslims of Pakistani origin as the perpetrators of the London atrocity comes as no surprise to those who have been paying attention to these matters. The seething, ferocious rhetoric heard in Pakistani Sunni mosques, at Friday services every week in outlying cities such as Leeds, is far more insidious, as the London events may show, than the antics engaged in by Arab loudmouths like the Syrian Omar Bakri Muhammad, the hook-handed Egyptian Abu Hamza al-Masri, or the bogus Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih, all of who mainly perform for non-Muslim media attention. Social marginalization and underemployment of second generation ethnic Pakistani youth in Britain may be cited as a cause for the extremist appeal among them; but the constant drumming of the Jamaati message from the pulpit is much more significant. It is interesting to hear first-generation Pakistani Sunnis in Britain claim shock and surprise at the presence of terrorists among them. Pakistani Islamist radicalism dominates British Islam much as the "Wahhabi Lobby" in America monopolizes the voice of the Muslim community on our shores.
Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
07/13/2005 3:45:00 PM
The Weekly Standard
In the first dew days after the horror in London on July 7, media in Britain and abroad focused considerable attention on "Londonistan"--the local zoo of Islamist agitators, almost entirely Arab, who have made headlines for years with their extremist preaching. Analytical lines, many of them useful, were drawn to al Qaeda and Iraq, but almost nobody looked at domestic Muslim extremism in the United Kingdom.
Close observers of the British Islamic community, however, few of whom seem to have been consulted by reporters or the government, had been discussing for months a dramatic increase in radical agitation by Pakistani Muslim immigrants in Britain, as well as among their children.
According to the authoritative Muslim Council of Britain, the British Islamic population, totaling 1.5 million, has a plurality of 610,000 Pakistanis, with an additional 360,000 from Bangladesh and India, and 350,000 Arab and African. Unfortunately, Pakistan is the world's second most significant front-line state (after Iraq) in the global war on terror. Pakistan produced the Jama'at-i-Islami (Community of Islam) movement, founded by Abu'l Ala Mawdudi, a theologian who died in 1979, strangely enough, in Buffalo, New York, at age 76. Known as Jamaatis, the followers of Mawdudi have attained exceptional influence in the Pakistani army and intelligence services, and were a key element in the Pakistani-Saudi alliance to support the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Western academics and journalists are often at pains to distinguish between the Jamaatis and Wahhabism, which is the state religion in Saudi Arabia. But differences in theological details,
although they do exist, are secondary; mainly, the Saudi Wahhabis hold to a deceptive alliance with the Western powers, while the Jamaatis were always frontally anti-Western. The Jamaatis study in Saudi Arabia and share with the Wahhabis a murderous hatred of Muslims who do not conform to their ideology, considering those who reject their teachings to be apostates from Islam. They regularly massacre Shia Muslims, in particular, in Pakistani cities. They also completely reject participation by Muslim immigrants in the political and social institutions of Western countries in which they live, and they consider suicide terror legitimate. Pakistan has very few energy resources, and the Saudis have used cheap oil to support Wahhabi infiltration. In the system of radical Islam, if Saudi Arabia may be compared with the former Soviet state, Pakistan could be a parallel to the former East Germany.
For these reasons, the identification of four British-born Muslims of Pakistani origin as the perpetrators of the London atrocity comes as no surprise to those who have been paying attention to these matters. The seething, ferocious rhetoric heard in Pakistani Sunni mosques, at Friday services every week in outlying cities such as Leeds, is far more insidious, as the London events may show, than the antics engaged in by Arab loudmouths like the Syrian Omar Bakri Muhammad, the hook-handed Egyptian Abu Hamza al-Masri, or the bogus Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih, all of who mainly perform for non-Muslim media attention. Social marginalization and underemployment of second generation ethnic Pakistani youth in Britain may be cited as a cause for the extremist appeal among them; but the constant drumming of the Jamaati message from the pulpit is much more significant. It is interesting to hear first-generation Pakistani Sunnis in Britain claim shock and surprise at the presence of terrorists among them. Pakistani Islamist radicalism dominates British Islam much as the "Wahhabi Lobby" in America monopolizes the voice of the Muslim community on our shores.
Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
Isaac Constantine: Signs of Intelligence?
What the neo-Darwinists don't understand about theories of Intelligent Design.
by Isaac Constantine
http://www.weeklystandard.com
07/13/2005 12:00:00 AM
If you've been casting a sidelong glance at the world through the liberal press of late you've likely been alarmed by the latest faith-based assault on science and rationality. You might have been moved, despite your better instincts--born of the sad knowledge of hope's futility in the new Dark Age of George W. Bush's Evangelical Crusade at home and abroad--but perhaps you couldn't suppress the tepid delight at having your biases affirmed in the gallant counterassault on Darwin's religious assailants by Evolution's latter day devotees. The last defenders of Reason fight on in bold, quixotic determination, allied with the chattering presses, preaching to the choir in the name of their ancestral hero.
A recent editorial in the New York Times bemoans the legislative progress of the "dangerous" brood of creationists, barely disguised in the pseudo-scientific trappings of "intelligent design." The editors charge the movement, and anyone who questions Darwin on the basis of "supernatural explanations," with breaking the presumably unspoken code of positing forces beyond "the usual domain of science." The editor's at the Times don't seem concerned that many physicists, in light of the curious ability of subatomic particles to occupy infinite locations at once (one of those quirks in nature resistant to "natural" explanation), propose a "Many Worlds hypothesis" where people live infinite lives in infinite parallel universes--each hidden from each other--to account for every possible quantum outcome.
Maybe ideas like this are "scientific" as long as they're labeled "hypotheses." Once you've called your idea a theory, only then does metaphysical speculation seem to breach the purview of physics. But another impassioned stab at the "junk science" of intelligent design in the New Yorker by H. Allen Orr, a biologist at the University of Rochester, belies any claim to scientific rigor by the liberal media or, when ideology compensates for intellectual laziness, science itself.
The purpose of this argument is not to defend the science of intelligent design. With legions of biblical activists and conservative lawmakers among self-appointed experts coming out of the woodwork to testify to the "problems with Darwin's theory," ID hardly seems to need my help. And to be fair, the counterassault on evolution's detractors has been convincing in casting reasonable doubt against ID's methods. On the evidence presented intelligent design does come off as less than sufficiently coherent or validated as a "theory"--especially if Darwin's ingenious, broadly encompassing, experimentally bolstered body of work sets the bar. Based on Orr's sometimes cogent parsing out of the so-called intelligent design theory's lapses in logic and consistency, even theists are left suspicious of the fledgling movement's present fitness for the classroom.
But while the would-be Darwins might have succeeded in dismissing ID on scientific grounds, their argument has been less convincing in a secondary aim. Much of the controversy surrounding their hero derives from an aspect of Darwinism (as currently construed) that is itself unscientific; one might even say, if not "religious," distinctly political--Darwinism's vaguely defined but apparent relationship to atheism. As a caveat to its attack on ID the press denies any such relationship. The Times op-ed invokes "many empirical scientists" who are implied to dismiss ID in spite of their faith. These theistic scientists, the editorial claims, understand that "theories about how God interacts with the world" are "beyond the scope of their discipline," and by implication are disinclined to entertain challenges to Darwin based on questions of divine agency. So the Times's preference among scientists of a religious turn of mind are those who keep God in church or the closet where He belongs. It's okay to believe in God as long as God doesn't step on Darwin's toes--as long as you've reconciled your faith with Darwin's ostensibly infallible insights.
In the New Yorker, Orr takes a similar tack. In careful language he denies the notion that Darwinism is "yoked to atheism" listing the "five founding fathers of twentieth-century evolutionary biology," three of whom were religious (a fourth dabbled in Eastern mysticism). He goes on to mention the late Pope John Paul II's oft-touted recognition of evolution as "more than a hypothesis" and then appears to give a sly wink-nod to his fellow atheists in concluding "Whatever larger conclusions one thinks should follow from Darwinism . . . evolution and religion have often coexisted."
(Of course, had Orr attempted to unpack the precise implications of John Paul's admission, he would have had to conclude one of two possibilities: the Pope was either claiming that Darwin's theory was "true" down to the last detail, which would suggest that God, or the "miraculous," has no agency at all in human development; or, on the other hand, the Pope might have been acknowledging the obvious, confirmed truths surrounding evolution's insights--man was not created in his present form all at once, the fossil record stretches back more than 10,000 years, etc.--while leaving room to disagree with radical atheistic interpretations of Darwin, or with Darwin himself on specifics. This is just one instance where Orr ignores nuance and distorts logic for polemical convenience.)
It may be the case that evolution's founding fathers had no deliberate pact with atheism, but if the two are still unrelated why does the Atheist Alliance ("the only national democratic atheist organization in the United States" according to their website) partake in the annual celebration of "Darwin Day"? Why does the National Secular Society of Great Britain feature the face of Charles Darwin as part of a series of "Hero's of Atheism" coffee mugs and why was the father of evolution voted the overwhelming favorite hero by the organizations members?
And those groups are just the riff-raff. Respected intellectuals often make the same association--people like Oxford's Richard Dawkins, for instance, the biologist and "great popularizer" of evolution whom Orr mentions. In an interview on beliefnet.com, Dawkins explains "why the world would be better off without religion." Dawkins compares religion to a computer virus; claims never to have met a "genuinely intelligent" person who was religious; and equates baptism with child abuse. The eminent British biologist envisions a "paradise on earth . . . ruled by enlightened rationality" and free of religion. Without religion, he reasons, there would be "a much better chance of no more war." "Obviously," he continues, "nothing like 9/11 [would happen], because that's clearly motivated by religion"; in the absence of religion "there would be less hatred, because a lot of the hatred in the world is sectarian hatred." If people lived "according to rationalism," says Dawkins, "There would be less waste of time. People would concentrate on really worthwhile things, instead of wasting time on religion, astrology, crystal-gazing, fortune-telling, things like that."
Dawkins, of course, would build his atheist "paradise" on the incorruptible moral foundations of science and art, as though Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong Il had never reigned. But that's the world according to one of Darwinism's central figures today. Is this the stuff of science and enlightened rationalism?
Orr's ideas on evolution and religion, though less caustic and vulgar than Dawkins's, are no more scientific. His New Yorker essay is evasive enough that it's hard to pin down his atheism, but in the end he can't resist weighing in on divine influence. In dismissing the ideas of William A. Dembski, a mathematician and leading theorist of intelligent design, Orr argues the following:
Organisms aren't trying to match any "independently given pattern": evolution has no goal, and the history of life isn't trying to get anywhere . . . Despite all the loose talk about design and machines, organisms aren't striving to realize some engineer's blueprint; they're striving (if they can be said to strive at all) only to have more offspring than the next fellow.
All this coming from someone who in the same essay denies that Darwinism and atheism go hand in hand--whether or not they "should." And why should they? Well, according to Orr, evolutionary biology provides evidence that life evolved on its own with no purpose but survival. Specifically he points to the fact that species of fish and crustaceans found in dark caves often have degenerate eyes, or "eyes that begin to form only to be covered by skin" which he deems "crazy contraptions that no intelligent agent would design."
If Darwinists and liberals examined their own logic as scrupulously as that of everyone else, they might deem this line of argument, which speaks to "theories about how God interacts with the world" (if only in denying any such interaction) "beyond the scope" of science. It doesn't take a trained biologist to recognize Orr's statements as nothing more than assertions, inferences based on the speculation that no intelligence could account for what Orr perceives as the chaos and randomness of life. Half-hearted concessions to faith notwithstanding, Orr doesn't really care that four of the five founding fathers of 20th century evolutionary biology, and many scientists today, and the 80 percent of Americans whose faith he mocks, clearly disagree with him in one way or another. He's interested in his understanding of evolution alone.
Orr's assertion that life arose purely by accident and evolves by itself--with no goal but to prolong itself--is simply an atheist creation myth. It might not contradict anything observable (or at least established) in the known universe, but neither does the notion that invisible forces act upon the visible, natural process of evolution. The difference is Orr assumes that what we see is what we see, that nothing eludes our--or his--current understanding.
In defiance of the varied voices and perspectives in and apart from his field, Orr squints through a keyhole view of the world, interpreting what little he sees in quasi-rational isolation: While all reasonable parties can understand why scientists and teachers might be loath to overhaul their methods based on the scientific expertise of Rick Santorum, surely sensitive liberal editors and readers get why decent, intelligent Americans, who believing in God believe that God might have some part in the way atoms interact to form life, and the way individual lives interact to inform the evolution of species-why people who believe in a guiding principle beyond selfish survival might be reluctant to entrust their children's minds to an Orr, let alone a Dawkins. The latter, in a rare twist of near-clarity allows that although life arises and evolves from nothing besides this violent preservationist instinct, humans have reached a point where we can "escape" the ugliness of our origins.
Our brains have become so big, says Dawkins, that we can conjure order from chaos on our own. We can create "new goals, new purposes that are not directly related to natural selection at all." Though we are born for no good reason we've become smart enough to "seek more altruistic, sympathetic, artistic things that have nothing to do with the preservation of our selfish genes."
But as for why once-lifeless particles are compelled to coalesce in ways that give rise to life, why microscopic particles that don't need to worry about surviving evolve to take on such a burden, and why, if life becomes life by accident, for no purpose, why then does it hold onto to itself, prolonging the agony of survival when it could just as easily let go and return to quiet oblivion; if you can't help but wonder why, if not for some hidden purpose, would selfish, brutal, mindless life evolve to pursue beautiful abstractions that have no clear evolutionary function--what purpose does evolutionary purpose serve--well, don't ask. Buzzwords like "random mutation" will only get you so far.
Interestingly, much of what today's evolutionists claim is far from clear in Darwin's own writing.
"I see no good reason," writes Darwin in the conclusion of The Origin of Species, "why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone." Illustrating his point he goes on to describe a letter he received from a "celebrated author and divine" that had "gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development and needful forms, as to believe He required a fresh act of creation . . . " Darwin doesn't exactly endorse this theistic take on evolution right then and there, though he ends his treatise with the following: "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on . . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved" [italics mine].
Darwin's lyrical crescendo calls to mind, among others, Michael J. Behe, the biochemist and intelligent design theorist claiming that, starting from the "irreducible complexity" of a cell (which itself must be designed by an unspecified intelligence), life might evolve on its own through Darwinian processes. Unlike the so-called "creationist" Behe, Darwin, to the discomfort of many of today's evolutionists, makes specific reference to "the Creator," only one of several references often ignored by those quoting Darwin.
So why, exactly, is intelligent design "squarely at odds with Darwin," as Orr claims in the New Yorker?
Granted this particular reference to the Creator, added after The Origin's first addition, might have been a pragmatic concession to the religious police of Darwin's time, an attempt at damage control. Or the reference might, as some suggest, have been added to keep peace within his home with his deeply devout wife. Maybe Darwin wrote what he did with tongue in cheek, confident that his ideas would revolutionize society and that people like Orr and Dawkins would one day come along to tell everyone what he really meant. It's unlikely, given Darwin's claim in his 1876 autobiography that he'd been convinced of God's existence when he first published his theory. But Darwin didn't end up religious in any tangible sense, and later in life his theistic conviction seemed to fade. Still it's somewhat confusing how he wound up with his face on an atheist coffee mug when he himself seems to have ended up an agnostic: In 1876 (six years before his death) he wrote "I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems [as the existence of God]. The mystery of the beginning of all things is impossible by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."
Not only did he claim not to know whether God existed, Darwin insisted that we can't know. So on what authority does Dawkins parade his atheism, and Orr hint slyly at his, if not Darwin's? Have they found definitive proof against God in evolution that Darwin missed? Dawkins and Orr could be said to depict the "neo-Darwinist" narrative of history, a vision of life and its origins that is less equivocal on God than Darwin's, taking his (almost) perfect theory to its "logical" conclusion. Given what we've seen of neo-Darwinist logic we might be safer sticking with Darwin's take on Darwin.
It's true that in the visible, known, world Darwin seemed to find no evidence of the Divine. He seemed to believe, like Dawkins and Orr, that life evolves without God. In the opening chapter of The Origin of Species Darwin, in tracing the roots of his theory, praises the natural scientist Lamark for "the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition." In the conclusion he adds "Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts have been perfected, not by means superior to, though analogous with, human reason, but by the innumerable slight variations . . . Nevertheless, this difficulty . . . cannot be considered real if we admit the following propositions . . . ." [Italics mine]
Darwin supports the view that life evolves autonomously with evidence of a "struggle for existence leading to the preservation of profitable deviations of structure or instinct." In other words organisms fend for themselves, and those that are strongest or most adaptable survive longer, passing on the distinguishing traits to their offspring, and they to theirs as weaker prototypes die off and a species evolves to look more like the elite minority with each successive generation. The evidence for this is overwhelming, and pretty much rules out the notion that God created man in his present form. Darwin, however, seems to jump from identifying the struggle to assuming it wholly unmediated.
Intelligent design's campaign against Darwin has been misdirected. ID's theorists concede too much in debating on neo-Darwinist terms, fighting assertion with assertion, or seeking to contradict evolution by way of obscure mathematics. In declaring one's intent to disprove Darwin one grants, based on all evidence until now, that Darwin had proven himself. And he did in many ways that most of us can agree on. But just because most of his theory remains sound and remarkably descriptive of the world as we now recognize it; just because he was right on so much doesn't mean we should take his every word for gospel.
Maybe changes that seem "random" to a neo-Darwinian fundamentalist, or to Darwin himself, might seem deliberate to a more evolved intelligence. How would Darwin's self-proclaimed legatees prove that we got here by sheer accident, with no inherent purpose and destined for nothing but extinction? If someone could explain this view without merely reciting Darwinian koans for "natural forces" that Darwin himself might not have thought through all the way--if Orr and Dawkins could prove all that I'd order my Darwin mug in the mail today and shoot myself tomorrow.
Imagine a world where high school students could not only absorb a fraction of Darwin's profound insights, but could discuss them critically. Imagine an open exchange of interpretations that make unembarrassed use of literature, philosophy, and even theology--ways of thinking beyond the limiting scope of science. All modes of thought and innovation come with their own set of limitations, blind spots which other disciplines can illuminate. If we read Darwin more carefully, or at all, and discussed his ideas in good faith to differing perspectives, atheists might be less anxious to claim his image for their anti-religious crusade and creationists might be slower to banish him and his modern minions to the fiery pits. The separation of church and state was intended to protect democracy and religious freedom from despots in holy robes, not to protect school children (or science) from religion. It is unbecoming of teachers to proselytize students on behalf of any particular faith or ethos, including atheism. If religious or theistic philosophies are deemed inappropriate to science curricula, so should any ideas that expressly contradict those philosophies. Neo-Darwinists, however, aren't interested in fairness or academic freedom. They'd rather take cheap shots at ideas that can't defend themselves. With the moral and propagandistic support of the media, they prefer to attack an argument at its weakest point instead of its strongest.
In the context of a serious, civilized debate a scientist like Dawkins might come to understand that religion, when properly invoked, is a vehicle for knowledge, progress, and humanistic unity like science and other rational disciplines. Religion is not inherently opposed to reason. At the same time, science often flirts with the mystical, veiled in the tortured gravitas of technical nomenclature; calling on the imagination but often reluctant to admit it.
If the current evolution debate is any indication science has hit a wall, reaching a point in its development where once-reliable paradigms will no longer suffice to keep up with the mysteries of existence, seeming greater and more numerous each day. Sorting it all out will take help from disciplines that have focused for centuries on the hidden dimensions of life that science has barely begun to acknowledge. One can only hope more scientists will find the humility to ask.
Isaac Constantine is a writer in New York City.
© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
by Isaac Constantine
http://www.weeklystandard.com
07/13/2005 12:00:00 AM
If you've been casting a sidelong glance at the world through the liberal press of late you've likely been alarmed by the latest faith-based assault on science and rationality. You might have been moved, despite your better instincts--born of the sad knowledge of hope's futility in the new Dark Age of George W. Bush's Evangelical Crusade at home and abroad--but perhaps you couldn't suppress the tepid delight at having your biases affirmed in the gallant counterassault on Darwin's religious assailants by Evolution's latter day devotees. The last defenders of Reason fight on in bold, quixotic determination, allied with the chattering presses, preaching to the choir in the name of their ancestral hero.
A recent editorial in the New York Times bemoans the legislative progress of the "dangerous" brood of creationists, barely disguised in the pseudo-scientific trappings of "intelligent design." The editors charge the movement, and anyone who questions Darwin on the basis of "supernatural explanations," with breaking the presumably unspoken code of positing forces beyond "the usual domain of science." The editor's at the Times don't seem concerned that many physicists, in light of the curious ability of subatomic particles to occupy infinite locations at once (one of those quirks in nature resistant to "natural" explanation), propose a "Many Worlds hypothesis" where people live infinite lives in infinite parallel universes--each hidden from each other--to account for every possible quantum outcome.
Maybe ideas like this are "scientific" as long as they're labeled "hypotheses." Once you've called your idea a theory, only then does metaphysical speculation seem to breach the purview of physics. But another impassioned stab at the "junk science" of intelligent design in the New Yorker by H. Allen Orr, a biologist at the University of Rochester, belies any claim to scientific rigor by the liberal media or, when ideology compensates for intellectual laziness, science itself.
The purpose of this argument is not to defend the science of intelligent design. With legions of biblical activists and conservative lawmakers among self-appointed experts coming out of the woodwork to testify to the "problems with Darwin's theory," ID hardly seems to need my help. And to be fair, the counterassault on evolution's detractors has been convincing in casting reasonable doubt against ID's methods. On the evidence presented intelligent design does come off as less than sufficiently coherent or validated as a "theory"--especially if Darwin's ingenious, broadly encompassing, experimentally bolstered body of work sets the bar. Based on Orr's sometimes cogent parsing out of the so-called intelligent design theory's lapses in logic and consistency, even theists are left suspicious of the fledgling movement's present fitness for the classroom.
But while the would-be Darwins might have succeeded in dismissing ID on scientific grounds, their argument has been less convincing in a secondary aim. Much of the controversy surrounding their hero derives from an aspect of Darwinism (as currently construed) that is itself unscientific; one might even say, if not "religious," distinctly political--Darwinism's vaguely defined but apparent relationship to atheism. As a caveat to its attack on ID the press denies any such relationship. The Times op-ed invokes "many empirical scientists" who are implied to dismiss ID in spite of their faith. These theistic scientists, the editorial claims, understand that "theories about how God interacts with the world" are "beyond the scope of their discipline," and by implication are disinclined to entertain challenges to Darwin based on questions of divine agency. So the Times's preference among scientists of a religious turn of mind are those who keep God in church or the closet where He belongs. It's okay to believe in God as long as God doesn't step on Darwin's toes--as long as you've reconciled your faith with Darwin's ostensibly infallible insights.
In the New Yorker, Orr takes a similar tack. In careful language he denies the notion that Darwinism is "yoked to atheism" listing the "five founding fathers of twentieth-century evolutionary biology," three of whom were religious (a fourth dabbled in Eastern mysticism). He goes on to mention the late Pope John Paul II's oft-touted recognition of evolution as "more than a hypothesis" and then appears to give a sly wink-nod to his fellow atheists in concluding "Whatever larger conclusions one thinks should follow from Darwinism . . . evolution and religion have often coexisted."
(Of course, had Orr attempted to unpack the precise implications of John Paul's admission, he would have had to conclude one of two possibilities: the Pope was either claiming that Darwin's theory was "true" down to the last detail, which would suggest that God, or the "miraculous," has no agency at all in human development; or, on the other hand, the Pope might have been acknowledging the obvious, confirmed truths surrounding evolution's insights--man was not created in his present form all at once, the fossil record stretches back more than 10,000 years, etc.--while leaving room to disagree with radical atheistic interpretations of Darwin, or with Darwin himself on specifics. This is just one instance where Orr ignores nuance and distorts logic for polemical convenience.)
It may be the case that evolution's founding fathers had no deliberate pact with atheism, but if the two are still unrelated why does the Atheist Alliance ("the only national democratic atheist organization in the United States" according to their website) partake in the annual celebration of "Darwin Day"? Why does the National Secular Society of Great Britain feature the face of Charles Darwin as part of a series of "Hero's of Atheism" coffee mugs and why was the father of evolution voted the overwhelming favorite hero by the organizations members?
And those groups are just the riff-raff. Respected intellectuals often make the same association--people like Oxford's Richard Dawkins, for instance, the biologist and "great popularizer" of evolution whom Orr mentions. In an interview on beliefnet.com, Dawkins explains "why the world would be better off without religion." Dawkins compares religion to a computer virus; claims never to have met a "genuinely intelligent" person who was religious; and equates baptism with child abuse. The eminent British biologist envisions a "paradise on earth . . . ruled by enlightened rationality" and free of religion. Without religion, he reasons, there would be "a much better chance of no more war." "Obviously," he continues, "nothing like 9/11 [would happen], because that's clearly motivated by religion"; in the absence of religion "there would be less hatred, because a lot of the hatred in the world is sectarian hatred." If people lived "according to rationalism," says Dawkins, "There would be less waste of time. People would concentrate on really worthwhile things, instead of wasting time on religion, astrology, crystal-gazing, fortune-telling, things like that."
Dawkins, of course, would build his atheist "paradise" on the incorruptible moral foundations of science and art, as though Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong Il had never reigned. But that's the world according to one of Darwinism's central figures today. Is this the stuff of science and enlightened rationalism?
Orr's ideas on evolution and religion, though less caustic and vulgar than Dawkins's, are no more scientific. His New Yorker essay is evasive enough that it's hard to pin down his atheism, but in the end he can't resist weighing in on divine influence. In dismissing the ideas of William A. Dembski, a mathematician and leading theorist of intelligent design, Orr argues the following:
Organisms aren't trying to match any "independently given pattern": evolution has no goal, and the history of life isn't trying to get anywhere . . . Despite all the loose talk about design and machines, organisms aren't striving to realize some engineer's blueprint; they're striving (if they can be said to strive at all) only to have more offspring than the next fellow.
All this coming from someone who in the same essay denies that Darwinism and atheism go hand in hand--whether or not they "should." And why should they? Well, according to Orr, evolutionary biology provides evidence that life evolved on its own with no purpose but survival. Specifically he points to the fact that species of fish and crustaceans found in dark caves often have degenerate eyes, or "eyes that begin to form only to be covered by skin" which he deems "crazy contraptions that no intelligent agent would design."
If Darwinists and liberals examined their own logic as scrupulously as that of everyone else, they might deem this line of argument, which speaks to "theories about how God interacts with the world" (if only in denying any such interaction) "beyond the scope" of science. It doesn't take a trained biologist to recognize Orr's statements as nothing more than assertions, inferences based on the speculation that no intelligence could account for what Orr perceives as the chaos and randomness of life. Half-hearted concessions to faith notwithstanding, Orr doesn't really care that four of the five founding fathers of 20th century evolutionary biology, and many scientists today, and the 80 percent of Americans whose faith he mocks, clearly disagree with him in one way or another. He's interested in his understanding of evolution alone.
Orr's assertion that life arose purely by accident and evolves by itself--with no goal but to prolong itself--is simply an atheist creation myth. It might not contradict anything observable (or at least established) in the known universe, but neither does the notion that invisible forces act upon the visible, natural process of evolution. The difference is Orr assumes that what we see is what we see, that nothing eludes our--or his--current understanding.
In defiance of the varied voices and perspectives in and apart from his field, Orr squints through a keyhole view of the world, interpreting what little he sees in quasi-rational isolation: While all reasonable parties can understand why scientists and teachers might be loath to overhaul their methods based on the scientific expertise of Rick Santorum, surely sensitive liberal editors and readers get why decent, intelligent Americans, who believing in God believe that God might have some part in the way atoms interact to form life, and the way individual lives interact to inform the evolution of species-why people who believe in a guiding principle beyond selfish survival might be reluctant to entrust their children's minds to an Orr, let alone a Dawkins. The latter, in a rare twist of near-clarity allows that although life arises and evolves from nothing besides this violent preservationist instinct, humans have reached a point where we can "escape" the ugliness of our origins.
Our brains have become so big, says Dawkins, that we can conjure order from chaos on our own. We can create "new goals, new purposes that are not directly related to natural selection at all." Though we are born for no good reason we've become smart enough to "seek more altruistic, sympathetic, artistic things that have nothing to do with the preservation of our selfish genes."
But as for why once-lifeless particles are compelled to coalesce in ways that give rise to life, why microscopic particles that don't need to worry about surviving evolve to take on such a burden, and why, if life becomes life by accident, for no purpose, why then does it hold onto to itself, prolonging the agony of survival when it could just as easily let go and return to quiet oblivion; if you can't help but wonder why, if not for some hidden purpose, would selfish, brutal, mindless life evolve to pursue beautiful abstractions that have no clear evolutionary function--what purpose does evolutionary purpose serve--well, don't ask. Buzzwords like "random mutation" will only get you so far.
Interestingly, much of what today's evolutionists claim is far from clear in Darwin's own writing.
"I see no good reason," writes Darwin in the conclusion of The Origin of Species, "why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone." Illustrating his point he goes on to describe a letter he received from a "celebrated author and divine" that had "gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development and needful forms, as to believe He required a fresh act of creation . . . " Darwin doesn't exactly endorse this theistic take on evolution right then and there, though he ends his treatise with the following: "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on . . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved" [italics mine].
Darwin's lyrical crescendo calls to mind, among others, Michael J. Behe, the biochemist and intelligent design theorist claiming that, starting from the "irreducible complexity" of a cell (which itself must be designed by an unspecified intelligence), life might evolve on its own through Darwinian processes. Unlike the so-called "creationist" Behe, Darwin, to the discomfort of many of today's evolutionists, makes specific reference to "the Creator," only one of several references often ignored by those quoting Darwin.
So why, exactly, is intelligent design "squarely at odds with Darwin," as Orr claims in the New Yorker?
Granted this particular reference to the Creator, added after The Origin's first addition, might have been a pragmatic concession to the religious police of Darwin's time, an attempt at damage control. Or the reference might, as some suggest, have been added to keep peace within his home with his deeply devout wife. Maybe Darwin wrote what he did with tongue in cheek, confident that his ideas would revolutionize society and that people like Orr and Dawkins would one day come along to tell everyone what he really meant. It's unlikely, given Darwin's claim in his 1876 autobiography that he'd been convinced of God's existence when he first published his theory. But Darwin didn't end up religious in any tangible sense, and later in life his theistic conviction seemed to fade. Still it's somewhat confusing how he wound up with his face on an atheist coffee mug when he himself seems to have ended up an agnostic: In 1876 (six years before his death) he wrote "I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems [as the existence of God]. The mystery of the beginning of all things is impossible by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."
Not only did he claim not to know whether God existed, Darwin insisted that we can't know. So on what authority does Dawkins parade his atheism, and Orr hint slyly at his, if not Darwin's? Have they found definitive proof against God in evolution that Darwin missed? Dawkins and Orr could be said to depict the "neo-Darwinist" narrative of history, a vision of life and its origins that is less equivocal on God than Darwin's, taking his (almost) perfect theory to its "logical" conclusion. Given what we've seen of neo-Darwinist logic we might be safer sticking with Darwin's take on Darwin.
It's true that in the visible, known, world Darwin seemed to find no evidence of the Divine. He seemed to believe, like Dawkins and Orr, that life evolves without God. In the opening chapter of The Origin of Species Darwin, in tracing the roots of his theory, praises the natural scientist Lamark for "the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition." In the conclusion he adds "Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts have been perfected, not by means superior to, though analogous with, human reason, but by the innumerable slight variations . . . Nevertheless, this difficulty . . . cannot be considered real if we admit the following propositions . . . ." [Italics mine]
Darwin supports the view that life evolves autonomously with evidence of a "struggle for existence leading to the preservation of profitable deviations of structure or instinct." In other words organisms fend for themselves, and those that are strongest or most adaptable survive longer, passing on the distinguishing traits to their offspring, and they to theirs as weaker prototypes die off and a species evolves to look more like the elite minority with each successive generation. The evidence for this is overwhelming, and pretty much rules out the notion that God created man in his present form. Darwin, however, seems to jump from identifying the struggle to assuming it wholly unmediated.
Intelligent design's campaign against Darwin has been misdirected. ID's theorists concede too much in debating on neo-Darwinist terms, fighting assertion with assertion, or seeking to contradict evolution by way of obscure mathematics. In declaring one's intent to disprove Darwin one grants, based on all evidence until now, that Darwin had proven himself. And he did in many ways that most of us can agree on. But just because most of his theory remains sound and remarkably descriptive of the world as we now recognize it; just because he was right on so much doesn't mean we should take his every word for gospel.
Maybe changes that seem "random" to a neo-Darwinian fundamentalist, or to Darwin himself, might seem deliberate to a more evolved intelligence. How would Darwin's self-proclaimed legatees prove that we got here by sheer accident, with no inherent purpose and destined for nothing but extinction? If someone could explain this view without merely reciting Darwinian koans for "natural forces" that Darwin himself might not have thought through all the way--if Orr and Dawkins could prove all that I'd order my Darwin mug in the mail today and shoot myself tomorrow.
Imagine a world where high school students could not only absorb a fraction of Darwin's profound insights, but could discuss them critically. Imagine an open exchange of interpretations that make unembarrassed use of literature, philosophy, and even theology--ways of thinking beyond the limiting scope of science. All modes of thought and innovation come with their own set of limitations, blind spots which other disciplines can illuminate. If we read Darwin more carefully, or at all, and discussed his ideas in good faith to differing perspectives, atheists might be less anxious to claim his image for their anti-religious crusade and creationists might be slower to banish him and his modern minions to the fiery pits. The separation of church and state was intended to protect democracy and religious freedom from despots in holy robes, not to protect school children (or science) from religion. It is unbecoming of teachers to proselytize students on behalf of any particular faith or ethos, including atheism. If religious or theistic philosophies are deemed inappropriate to science curricula, so should any ideas that expressly contradict those philosophies. Neo-Darwinists, however, aren't interested in fairness or academic freedom. They'd rather take cheap shots at ideas that can't defend themselves. With the moral and propagandistic support of the media, they prefer to attack an argument at its weakest point instead of its strongest.
In the context of a serious, civilized debate a scientist like Dawkins might come to understand that religion, when properly invoked, is a vehicle for knowledge, progress, and humanistic unity like science and other rational disciplines. Religion is not inherently opposed to reason. At the same time, science often flirts with the mystical, veiled in the tortured gravitas of technical nomenclature; calling on the imagination but often reluctant to admit it.
If the current evolution debate is any indication science has hit a wall, reaching a point in its development where once-reliable paradigms will no longer suffice to keep up with the mysteries of existence, seeming greater and more numerous each day. Sorting it all out will take help from disciplines that have focused for centuries on the hidden dimensions of life that science has barely begun to acknowledge. One can only hope more scientists will find the humility to ask.
Isaac Constantine is a writer in New York City.
© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Steve Zipay: HBO Deftly Handles 'Mantle'
July 5, 2005
NY Newsday
With "Mantle," HBO Sports has produced the ultimate portrait of baseball's most tragic figure: the fair-haired American icon who was larger than life for a generation of fans but who never fully understood why he was so adored.
"He'd wonder, 'Why did they love me so much? I just played bleepin' baseball,'" sportswriter Skip Bayless recalls in the hour-long documentary that debuts Wednesday, July 13.
The enduring legacy of the Yankees star, of course, is much deeper than "bleepin' baseball," and "Mantle" explores the complex emotional maelstrom that swirled around him.
Much of Mantle's allure is familiar territory to a boy who was raised here in that golden age and understands what he meant to fans. Former Newsday sportswriter Marty Noble describes it in "Mantle" as "completely myopic hero worship" and WFAN's Mike Francesa notes, "There's a part of him that you carry with you your whole life."
But the exhaustive research - more than three dozen interviews and a bat rack full of footage and still photographs, all skillfully edited - lifts "Mantle" to another level and makes it resonate.
Above the subtle blend of dobro, guitar and fiddle, Mantle's relatives - including his wife, Merlyn - and childhood friends trace his upbringing in Commerce, Okla., through his painful demise due to liver problems and cancer.
Near the rusted metal barn where Mutt Mantle pitched to his son after school, cousin Max Mantle recalls Mickey's obsession with the game. Mickey's brother Ray recalls a day-long family trip to St. Louis to see the Cardinals - the first big-league game that Mickey saw - with Mutt never driving more than 35 miles an hour.
The memories are supplemented with previously unseen images from the family's private collection: Dust Bowl chronicles of Mutt's job in the deadly zinc mines to backyard football games between Mickey and his young sons in Dallas to blurry shots of the teenagers, beers in hand, partying with their father, because that was the easiest way to relate to their alcoholic dad. To someone versed only in Mantle's stats, these are telling images.
Mantle's athleticism and on-field accomplishments from the minors to the Bronx are adeptly chronicled in testimonials from former teammates ("He didn't need steroids," former teammate Johnny Blanchard said. "We didn't even know how to spell it back then") and sports commentators and celebrities such as Bob Costas and Billy Crystal, who have become touchstones for any Mantle-related endeavor.
They also remind us that Mantle, hounded by expectations as Joe DiMaggio's successor and driven by fear of an early death in a family shadowed by Hodgkin's disease, veered toward an out-of-control lifestyle. Blanchard recalls watching "The Honeymooners" with Mantle in the St. Moritz Hotel in the early 1950s when Mantle asked, "Hey Blanch, you ever think about dying?"
In the name of dignity, some off-the-field stories remain buried off-screen; former pitcher Whitey Ford declines to revisit some of the ribald antics that sportswriters of the time recall.
Yogi Berra confesses that he used to leave his smoking-and-drinking teammates at 11 p.m. because he had to catch the next day. Billy Martin Jr., the son of the pugnacious extrovert who was the carousing ringleader of the Yankees, remembers a harrowing late-night journey along the ledge of a Cleveland hotel by Mantle and Martin Sr. in an attempt to spy on a teammate's tryst in another room. Photos of a hung-over and beer-glazed Mantle, in uniform, suffice to illustrate the extent of the deterioration.
The immensely sad journey of "Mantle" continues with only one upturn: the peace that he felt during his final 18 months, reconciling his life with himself and his family and becoming a courageous figure for a second time, speaking out against alcoholism and promoting organ donations.
No games are played the night after the All-Star Game. It's a time for fans and players to reflect on the past and reassess the future.
Surely it's no coincidence that "Mantle" debuts that night at 9.
Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.
David Carr- In Cold Print: The Genre Capote Started
July 13, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID CARR
It would please Truman Capote no end that there will be not one, but two, movies memorializing his life this year and next. Not only do "Capote" and "Have You Heard?" pivot around his favorite topic - Truman Capote - but the films' convergence, with the promise of conflict, adds a promise of deliciousness that he would have happily tied on a napkin for.
Fame and all of its discontents were persistent obsessions for Capote, which might explain why he seemed willing to do almost anything to obtain them. While reporting "In Cold Blood," the masterwork that serves as the frame for both films, Capote told some lies to tell a truth. As such, he became an object lesson in how journalistic truth is told and obtained. It is easy to forget in the current context of journalists willing to go to jail to protect sources that much of the profession involves less noble imperatives.
In the five years Capote worked on the project, which detailed the 1959 murders in Holcomb, Kan., of four members of a farm family by a pair of drifters, he developed an emotional attachment to both killers, especially Perry Smith, another tiny man who craved recognition. But that relationship did not prevent him from developing a rooting interest in their deaths, without which he would have no end for his most important work.
"Capote" pivots around Philip Seymour Hoffman's inhabitation of the Capote persona: the author was, as Mr. Hoffman demonstrates, his own darn thing, but came to embody larger issues. A novelist turned journalist, Capote knew that some eggs needed to be dropped to make his soufflé. "In Cold Blood," published in 1965, was reported and told with its own remorselessness: he won over two killers, convincing them to tell their story, and then sold them out, a motif that the writer Joan Didion has since suggested is the fundamental transaction of journalism.
"Capote is one of those people who represents something larger than himself," said Bennett Miller, the director of "Capote," which is to be distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. "I think that his ambition, his kind of success, and the downfall that followed are very contemporary."
It was apparently contemporary and resonant enough to interest two filmmakers. "Capote" is based on the Gerald Clarke biography of the same title (Random House, 1990), while "Have You Heard?" draws on George Plimpton's interviews in his book "Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career" (Nan A. Talese, 1997). But the basic differences end there. Each movie is framed by the reporting and writing of "In Cold Blood" and takes as its chief concerns Capote's motivation and methodology in telling that dark story.
"Capote," all but finished, is set for release on Sept. 30 (Capote's birthday), while "Have You Heard?," which stars Sandra Bullock, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sigourney Weaver, among others, is still being edited and has been pushed back to fall 2006 by its distributor, Warner Independent Pictures. While there may or may not be a market for both films - see "Valmont" and "Dangerous Liaisons," movies that depict a similar, albeit less charming, figure - there is plenty to turn over with a stick.
Both movies begin as Capote, a gay novelist from New York, drops improbably into rural Kansas to begin work on his story and watch as he sets about his spider-to-the-fly seduction. And both depict a talented but toxic storyteller, not a fabulist like Stephen Glass or a fabulist/plagiarist like Jayson Blair, but a writer who came up with a nonfiction novel that set the standard, for good or ill, for what came after it. It could easily be argued that there would be no "Armies of the Night," by Norman Mailer, or Bob Woodward's fly-on-the-wall series of contemporary historical books, without "In Cold Blood."
Most anyone who types today owes something to Capote. A novelist who developed a passing interest in real events, he transformed the hackwork of journalism into something far more literary and substantial.
"There was no one ever in American life who was remotely like Truman Capote," said Mr. Mailer, who once suggested that Capote was the best sentence writer alive. "Small wonder, then, if people are still fascinated by him."
From the beginning, Capote had an ambient neediness, a desire to be validated by anyone and almost everyone. Most journalists arrive at their profession with a similar bent - why take the gamble of making mistakes in public if not for the reward of recognition? But the profession requires cooperation: The subject must be enrolled in the enterprise, even though it is rarely in his or her express interest. Capote vividly demonstrated the faux footwork required - what is good for the writer is sold as good for the subject.
In doing so, he began a book genre, "literary journalism," which is built on intimacy. At its best, the author and, in turn, his readers learn what a subject thinks, feels, and fears. But the intimacy often requires a specific deceit: the journalist sits before the subject, all ears, endlessly sympathetic, determined to help the subject tell "his" (or "her") story. But it is never "his" story that is told, it is the one of the writer's choosing.
And once the pen hits the paper, all hell frequently breaks lose.
Jeffrey R. MacDonald, a former surgeon and captain in the Green Berets who was accused of murdering his family, found a seemingly sympathetic ear in Joe McGinniss, a nonfiction novelist who had written "The Selling of the President." He allowed Mr. McGinniss to sit in on his meetings with his defense team. But a funny thing happened on the way to the printing press with "Fatal Vision," Mr. McGinniss's account of the case - he came to believe that Mr. MacDonald had done precisely what he was accused of.
Janet Malcolm wrote an account of the journalistic seduction gone wrong in The New Yorker, suggesting that "the journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced moral anarchy." Ms. Malcolm herself was later sued by a disappointed and enraged source.
There are dozens of other examples, but Capote's primary sources were at the wrong end of the rope to do much litigating. In the film "Capote," Perry Smith hears that Capote has given a much-heralded reading in New York of a story he has called "In Cold Blood." Capote tells Smith that it is a mistake, that his book will be called no such thing.
"In order to tell the story he told, it requires a crafty and quick-thinking person who is not above manipulating the other person's hopes and dreams," said Douglas McGrath, director of "Have You Heard?"
The public has a well-established mistrust for the press. It is the people who endure journalism, in all of its blunt and wily manifestations, who hold it in the lowest esteem. They have learned, often painfully, that a fraud is embedded not so much in the telling, but in the finding out.
Although Capote's journalistic output was slim, there were other travails, including an accusation from Marlon Brando that he had taken a long off-the-record interview in Japan and used it for a searing profile. Lillian Ross, a contemporary of Capote's at The New Yorker, said in an e-mail message that William Shawn, then editor of the magazine, viewed Capote's work as suspect.
Shawn, she wrote, "not only had his doubts and regrets about having published Capote's work, especially the Brando piece, but also 'In Cold Blood.' "
"His influence was not a literary one," she added. "He demonstrated pragmatically to many journalists how to make money."
Capote's success or methods - take your pick - offended many people, including critics and some of his competitors. Tom Wolfe, who took the fictional narrative approach to new heights with "The Bonfire of the Vanities," is not among them.
"I always thought that he was much underrated by the lit-ry world," Mr. Wolfe said, using the pronunciation for effect. "Because he was so universally popular, it did not endear him to writers who can't stand people making a living on their writing."
Capote's success came at significant consequence. His planned follow-up to "In Cold Blood," "Answered Prayers," became a taunt, a novel that he never managed to finish, partly because it predicted that achieving what you desire can be crippling, according to Mr. Clarke's biography.
Reluctantly, after much prodding, Capote witnessed the executions of his two "In Cold Blood" protagonists, but in doing so, he built his own gallows. He was apparently unable to reconcile the needs of his story with the fate of the men involved.
"Before 'In Cold Blood,' Truman was a normal, if ambitious, person," Mr. Clarke said in an interview. "He said at the time that the book scraped him down to the marrow of his bones. It changed him."
The New York Times
By DAVID CARR
It would please Truman Capote no end that there will be not one, but two, movies memorializing his life this year and next. Not only do "Capote" and "Have You Heard?" pivot around his favorite topic - Truman Capote - but the films' convergence, with the promise of conflict, adds a promise of deliciousness that he would have happily tied on a napkin for.
Fame and all of its discontents were persistent obsessions for Capote, which might explain why he seemed willing to do almost anything to obtain them. While reporting "In Cold Blood," the masterwork that serves as the frame for both films, Capote told some lies to tell a truth. As such, he became an object lesson in how journalistic truth is told and obtained. It is easy to forget in the current context of journalists willing to go to jail to protect sources that much of the profession involves less noble imperatives.
In the five years Capote worked on the project, which detailed the 1959 murders in Holcomb, Kan., of four members of a farm family by a pair of drifters, he developed an emotional attachment to both killers, especially Perry Smith, another tiny man who craved recognition. But that relationship did not prevent him from developing a rooting interest in their deaths, without which he would have no end for his most important work.
"Capote" pivots around Philip Seymour Hoffman's inhabitation of the Capote persona: the author was, as Mr. Hoffman demonstrates, his own darn thing, but came to embody larger issues. A novelist turned journalist, Capote knew that some eggs needed to be dropped to make his soufflé. "In Cold Blood," published in 1965, was reported and told with its own remorselessness: he won over two killers, convincing them to tell their story, and then sold them out, a motif that the writer Joan Didion has since suggested is the fundamental transaction of journalism.
"Capote is one of those people who represents something larger than himself," said Bennett Miller, the director of "Capote," which is to be distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. "I think that his ambition, his kind of success, and the downfall that followed are very contemporary."
It was apparently contemporary and resonant enough to interest two filmmakers. "Capote" is based on the Gerald Clarke biography of the same title (Random House, 1990), while "Have You Heard?" draws on George Plimpton's interviews in his book "Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career" (Nan A. Talese, 1997). But the basic differences end there. Each movie is framed by the reporting and writing of "In Cold Blood" and takes as its chief concerns Capote's motivation and methodology in telling that dark story.
"Capote," all but finished, is set for release on Sept. 30 (Capote's birthday), while "Have You Heard?," which stars Sandra Bullock, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sigourney Weaver, among others, is still being edited and has been pushed back to fall 2006 by its distributor, Warner Independent Pictures. While there may or may not be a market for both films - see "Valmont" and "Dangerous Liaisons," movies that depict a similar, albeit less charming, figure - there is plenty to turn over with a stick.
Both movies begin as Capote, a gay novelist from New York, drops improbably into rural Kansas to begin work on his story and watch as he sets about his spider-to-the-fly seduction. And both depict a talented but toxic storyteller, not a fabulist like Stephen Glass or a fabulist/plagiarist like Jayson Blair, but a writer who came up with a nonfiction novel that set the standard, for good or ill, for what came after it. It could easily be argued that there would be no "Armies of the Night," by Norman Mailer, or Bob Woodward's fly-on-the-wall series of contemporary historical books, without "In Cold Blood."
Most anyone who types today owes something to Capote. A novelist who developed a passing interest in real events, he transformed the hackwork of journalism into something far more literary and substantial.
"There was no one ever in American life who was remotely like Truman Capote," said Mr. Mailer, who once suggested that Capote was the best sentence writer alive. "Small wonder, then, if people are still fascinated by him."
From the beginning, Capote had an ambient neediness, a desire to be validated by anyone and almost everyone. Most journalists arrive at their profession with a similar bent - why take the gamble of making mistakes in public if not for the reward of recognition? But the profession requires cooperation: The subject must be enrolled in the enterprise, even though it is rarely in his or her express interest. Capote vividly demonstrated the faux footwork required - what is good for the writer is sold as good for the subject.
In doing so, he began a book genre, "literary journalism," which is built on intimacy. At its best, the author and, in turn, his readers learn what a subject thinks, feels, and fears. But the intimacy often requires a specific deceit: the journalist sits before the subject, all ears, endlessly sympathetic, determined to help the subject tell "his" (or "her") story. But it is never "his" story that is told, it is the one of the writer's choosing.
And once the pen hits the paper, all hell frequently breaks lose.
Jeffrey R. MacDonald, a former surgeon and captain in the Green Berets who was accused of murdering his family, found a seemingly sympathetic ear in Joe McGinniss, a nonfiction novelist who had written "The Selling of the President." He allowed Mr. McGinniss to sit in on his meetings with his defense team. But a funny thing happened on the way to the printing press with "Fatal Vision," Mr. McGinniss's account of the case - he came to believe that Mr. MacDonald had done precisely what he was accused of.
Janet Malcolm wrote an account of the journalistic seduction gone wrong in The New Yorker, suggesting that "the journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced moral anarchy." Ms. Malcolm herself was later sued by a disappointed and enraged source.
There are dozens of other examples, but Capote's primary sources were at the wrong end of the rope to do much litigating. In the film "Capote," Perry Smith hears that Capote has given a much-heralded reading in New York of a story he has called "In Cold Blood." Capote tells Smith that it is a mistake, that his book will be called no such thing.
"In order to tell the story he told, it requires a crafty and quick-thinking person who is not above manipulating the other person's hopes and dreams," said Douglas McGrath, director of "Have You Heard?"
The public has a well-established mistrust for the press. It is the people who endure journalism, in all of its blunt and wily manifestations, who hold it in the lowest esteem. They have learned, often painfully, that a fraud is embedded not so much in the telling, but in the finding out.
Although Capote's journalistic output was slim, there were other travails, including an accusation from Marlon Brando that he had taken a long off-the-record interview in Japan and used it for a searing profile. Lillian Ross, a contemporary of Capote's at The New Yorker, said in an e-mail message that William Shawn, then editor of the magazine, viewed Capote's work as suspect.
Shawn, she wrote, "not only had his doubts and regrets about having published Capote's work, especially the Brando piece, but also 'In Cold Blood.' "
"His influence was not a literary one," she added. "He demonstrated pragmatically to many journalists how to make money."
Capote's success or methods - take your pick - offended many people, including critics and some of his competitors. Tom Wolfe, who took the fictional narrative approach to new heights with "The Bonfire of the Vanities," is not among them.
"I always thought that he was much underrated by the lit-ry world," Mr. Wolfe said, using the pronunciation for effect. "Because he was so universally popular, it did not endear him to writers who can't stand people making a living on their writing."
Capote's success came at significant consequence. His planned follow-up to "In Cold Blood," "Answered Prayers," became a taunt, a novel that he never managed to finish, partly because it predicted that achieving what you desire can be crippling, according to Mr. Clarke's biography.
Reluctantly, after much prodding, Capote witnessed the executions of his two "In Cold Blood" protagonists, but in doing so, he built his own gallows. He was apparently unable to reconcile the needs of his story with the fate of the men involved.
"Before 'In Cold Blood,' Truman was a normal, if ambitious, person," Mr. Clarke said in an interview. "He said at the time that the book scraped him down to the marrow of his bones. It changed him."
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