RANDOM THOUGHTS ABOUT OSCAR

There Will Be Blood. How I hated that title when told not to miss it. More like a warning to a first-year medical student than a film. But I went anyhow, and was rewarded with a few really great opening sequences of movie making. A solitary silver miner down a bleak sunless shaft in the California hills pick-pick-picking away at the walls for ore until falling, breaking a leg, he struggles mightily to drag himself to the surface. The drama of his plight captured vividly by cinematographer Robert Elswit. Elswit won an Oscar for this one. Though in that same year (2007), he did equally distinguished camera work on Michael Clayton. For example, the memorable scene with Arthur Edens--ace litigator of Kenner, Bach, and Ledeen, gone bonkers after six years defending the manufacturer of a toxic pesticide--walking down Broadway, a haunted expression on his face, totally lost in the dazzling lights of corporate America.

In Blood, Daniel Plainview (the prospector), goes from silver to oil, and the thrilling scene in which he brings in his first gusher and his son H.W. is injured--the oil turning into an inferno of flame--is riveting. But what makes the action truly spectacular is the compelling music (an uneasy mob of muttering strings that breaks into a deafening dissonant wail) by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead who composed an "unearthly, beautiful score," according to Alex Ross of the New Yorker.

James Newton Howard who wrote the music for Michael Clayton was nominated for an academy award. His score for the legal thriller struck me as no better than C+. So where was Greenwood? Declared hors concours, by the judges, he wasn't even in the running for an Oscar because too much of his music wasn't made specifically for Paul Thomas Anderson's powerful movie. The irony in this case--not unknown in Hollywoodland--is that his Bartokian ostinatos and Pendereckian glissandos fit Anderson's flick like a glove. And so it goes...

Then comes the acting. And the winners in the best acting category for 2007 were Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood), and Marion Cotillard (La Vie En Rose). The best supporting actors were Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men), and Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton). In all four of these roles, the characters they play are under enormous stress. Day-Lewis handles this sort of situation as if it's in his bones. Remember his first Oscar-winning tour-de-force role as the palsied Christy Brown in My Left Foot. And as Plainview, he makes obsession seem as natural to him as his limp.

For her part as Edith Piaf, Cotillard, an attractive woman, underwent a major facial downgrade good enough to win the Best Makeup Oscar for La Vie En Rose, and for her singing she had the recorded benefit of Piaf's actual voice. It wasn't the excellent lip synching that made her raised-in-a-brothel performance as the brash, hard-living, alcohol and drug abusing little sparrow so persuasive, nor her death at 47 so moving. The woman can act, too! In addition to Cotillard's Best Actress Oscar, the French actress made a clean sweep of the Golden Globe, Caesar, and BAFTA awards as well.

Though very different, the psychopathic tight-lipped sinister killer played by Javier Bardem and the successful, socially-adept corporate lawyer of Tilda Swinton are remarkably similar in at least one way--their absolute ruthlessness. In effect, both are exterminators. They'll stop at nothing to achieve their ends. The difference between the two is that hitman Bardem handles his murders personally, and Swinton's Karen Crowder hires the diabolical pro Mr. Verne. For Karen, the elimination of Arthur and attempted murder of Clayton are means to an end, not something she does primarily either for pleasure or profit. Nevertheless, she doesn't hesitate. Or only just long enough to lay out the chic outfit she'll wear to tell the Board of U-North of her sudden recommendation to settle the class-action suit against them, a case that has gone on almost as long as Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

If you're looking for bravura performances, I'd have to agree with the two actors the Academy chose for their major acting award. On the other hand, there was George Clooney. The understated , carefully nuanced, oppressed, unsmiling, damaged character he creates in Michael Clayton is utterly perfect for the role. Though in no way as flashy as Day-Lewis's Plainview, it's a sharply-etched portrait of a good man who goes glumly--almost monochromatically-- through life cleaning up other people's messes. Why? Probably because his boss thinks he's good at it and that's what he gets paid for. But Clayton himself feels he's a failure--as a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a businessman, and a lawyer. Even as a fixer he has his doubts.

Rarely does Clayton get exercised about anything. Until he's sent to Milwaukee to get his colleague out of police custody after an out-of-control Arthur during a routine deposition has stripped off his clothes. "You promised me," Clayton tells Arthur. "You want to go off your medication, fine. But you call me first." Clayton becomes as angry as if he's talking to someone completely rational. That's his first mistake. His second is in trusting his sick friend once again. In a frenzy when Arthur refuses to open his locked hotel door, Clayton kicks it in and discovers that he's fled.

What's so astonishing about Clooney's performance is not these rare emotional blowups. Rather it's how well he listens to the other characters and can, without a word, convey what's on his mind. Actually that's what makes the final slow fade-out of Michael Clayton in close up on the back seat of a taxi so memorable. Frankly, I don't think there are too many actors who could handle it as well.


* * *

MICHAEL GOLDBERG (December 24, 1924-December 30, 2007)

A Memorial was held for the artist on March 1, 2008 at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. There were tributes by members of the family and friends:

Gerald Jay Goldberg
Lynda Benglis (read by the artist's wife, Lynn Umlauf)
Phong Bui
Janet Coleman
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
Klaus Kertess
Luke Matthiessen
Ellen Phelan
Lucio Pozzi
David Shapiro
Larry Osgood
Phil Schrager

In addition, a video entitled Michael Goldberg--Bowery Studio Days (1998-2000) by Bill Page Productions was played. The event was supported by The Poetry Project and Knoedler & Company.

* * *

The following remarks were made by his brother:

There were three boys in the Goldberg family. Mike was the eldest, I came next, and Alan was youngest. Every five years another one of us showed up as punctually as cicadas. We were a noisy, high-pitched, lively crew living at the top of our lungs. Spaced far enough apart to be, vis-à-vis each other, slightly exotic, and not so near that we'd step on each other's toes. Then one day at the end of 2007, December 30th to be exact at 5 A.M.--my birthday, actually--the phone rang, and I discovered I was the only one of us left.

So I thought I'd like to share with you, his friends, gathered here to celebrate Mike, a few private snaps of him--real or imagined--from the family album that I've collected over the years. The first is undated, but must be from 1925 or so. A baby carriage with a very young-looking woman in front of our first-floor apartment on Hull Avenue in the Bronx. It's hot, summer, the middle of the night, and our mom has taken her new unhappy baby outside because in that stifling apartment he was having trouble breathing. Soon she'll learn that her baby has asthma.

Next, a photo of a 4th grade class sitting on the front steps of the local elementary school. In the middle of the group, there's Mike dressed up as Uncle Sam in a wonderful red, white, and blue top hat. The costume handmade by our mom. Staring at the camera, the white-bearded 8-year-old Mike has a no-nonsense look on his thin face.

Mike was a good student. A good kid. A board-eraser monitor. Soon he had, as they picturesquely called it back then, "skipped" a grade or two and was already in high school. He attended Townsend Harris, one of those public high schools requiring an entrance exam that New York has always had for its "best and brightest." A major difference between it and the others, however, was that Townsend Harris students completed four years in three. When Mike graduated high school, he was unusually young and it was the beginning of that ominous summer of 1939 with war clouds gathering in Europe.

The transition between high school and college for Mike was not as smooth as his parents had hoped. Somehow City College didn't seem to hold much interest for him. Whether it was his gradual discovery of the attractions of Manhattan or clothes or girls or jazz or art, or all of the above, his appearances in his classes became as rare as hummingbirds. When notified , his parents were not amused. They had suspected something, and one day they caught him in flagrante. He was wearing a zoot suit. Not quite the purple sort with black polkadots that Cab Calloway used to wear at the Cotton Club in the 1940s, but the same padded shoulders, long hip-hugging jacket, draped pants pegged at the ankles, and topping it all off the wide-brimmed porkpie hat redolent of those worn in the bullring by picadors. Whatever else his new suit might have said about the jazz culture, which teenage Mike found almost as fascinating as the music, it was an attention-grabbing style, a wild statement of assertiveness in dress announcing: HEY WORLD, I'M HERE!

Mike was only eighteen when in April of 1943 he tried to enlist in the army. His mother wasn't worried. Given his asthma, she had little doubt the army would ever take her youngster. Surprisingly it did. Even more surprising to the family was that Mike was never bothered by asthma again. In fact, he seemed to flourish in the military. There were cards and pictures of Mike in camouflage fatigues from strange romantic places like Champaign, Illinois and Karachi, India.

A fragment from one of those 65-year-old letters to my parents--this one written in brown ink on ecru stationery worthy of Brideshead Revisited--surfaced for me recently, and I'd like to share the end of it with you. Mike had recently learned that a good friend of his--an Air Force bombardier--had been shot down over Germany. "Your news," the young soldier writes, "that Lenny might possibly be a prisoner of war is a very bright hope--I'll pray that he is. I can imagine the tortures his mother must be going through; but here's a thought not only for her but for you also--True we're young, but in the short years of our lives we've had a good deal of fun, seen quite a bit, and have had all the care and comfort loving parents could provide--this is a war to the death and if some of us don't come back at least we've known good things....Of course I want to return and I'll do all in my power to insure my return, but Christ!, this is war and anything can happen--God! That's morbid!

All my love..."

One day at the end of 1943, which just happened to coincide with my fourteenth birthday, Mike suddenly appeared in our Bronx doorway blooming in full paratrooper fig, his khaki trousers tucked into his boots, his boots gleaming like mirrors, his overseas cap cocked at a jaunty angle, a crooked smile on his lips. He had a present for me. The Jazz Record Book by Charles Edward Smith, New York, 1943. The inscription read, "On your fourteenth birthday, from your everloving brother." I was thrilled. At fourteen, I was a clarinet player in love with Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw. Mike wanted me to check out what was available in Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, Barney Bigard, and Pee Wee Russell. Cool, but there were two things that troubled me about the inscription. It was addressed "To Gerald," with a formality I found hard to recognize, and the second was that it was signed by someone named "Micky."

That was the first time I had ever heard of Micky. My brother's name was Sylvan. Perhaps a parental longing for the pastoral in an urban setting. As in "The mossy fountains and the sylvan shades/The dreams of Pindus, and Aonian maids." Whatever it was, my brother apparently had made the same discovery that Samuel Clemens and Pablo Ruiz Blasco and Yitroch Loiza Grossberg had made. His parents, in labeling him Sylvan Irwin, had given him the wrong name. But I didn't realize until then that he was seriously looking around for a new one. Or even that you could.

Following a brief period after he returned from the war when he flirted with the Waspy name Michael Stuart, he decided that Michael worked well with Goldberg too. It was also a trochee, so the downbeat was strong, and he could live with it. In fact he did, all the rest of his life...to a jazz beat.

Mike's Bowery studio was filled with jazz. The picture of Charlie Parker signed "Prez" near the stairs, his huge record collection against the walls. Whether in his style working improvisationally against painterly conventions, which Ken Johnson in a review nicely likens to a young jazz musician's approach to an old standard, or in his subject matter in the paintings he did born out of his enthusiasm for such stride pianists as Fats Waller, Art Tatum, and James P. Johnson, jazz music was close to the bone of Mike's art. On that Friday, July 17th, 1959, "The Day Lady Died," when he had been grieving all day over Billy's death, Mike told his friend Frank O'Hara, "I've been playing her records all afternoon."

On Mike's 83rd birthday, December 24th, 2007, Nancy and I arrived with an armful of flowers for what turned out to be the most bittersweet birthday party that I've ever been to. Lynda Benglis had brought flowers, too, but she had to leave. We were the only guests. Mike was sitting in a wheelchair, his head shaved to the scalp. I kept telling myself Yul Brynner, Telly Sevales, Patrick Stewart, but I couldn't feel it. He seemed so different from the rosy feisty way he had looked in the hospital a few weeks earlier, even after they had chopped off his toes. Even while in intensive care I could hear him thinking: "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger."

But here, too, the flame was still burning and Mike quickly began to cheer up. John Coltrane and tight-lipped Miles were grooving "So What?" in the background to a cool easy beat. There was no room for self-pity. Mike was making plans. He was telling us how he was going to handle his teaching from a wheelchair at SVA, how he had already gotten started on a new painting. Covering his work table were the oil sticks he was now using, big as the cigars he once smoked and thicker than a handful of robustos. Full of life. And Mike was pouring champagne. A bottle of Bollingers that had been highly recommended by his dealer. We toasted him on his birthday.
"Should you be drinking that?" I asked
"Only a sip." He swirled it around in his mouth professionally as if that made it okay. He looked worried. "I don't know. I think it's a little off. What do you think?"
A tad, I thought, though I wasn't about to make a fuss. But the truth is Mike enjoyed making a fuss, one way or the other, about the things he felt mattered. "I'm going to call him," he abruptly announced, wheeling around his chair and picking up the phone. Lynn said, "He's not going to be there at this hour, Mike. They're closed by now."

As it turned out, they were closed. Mike felt much better when Lynn took the lobsters out of the bag and held them aloft. Armor-plated crustaceans, they were enormous and irrepressibly frisky. I could see them getting loose and rumbling across the studio floor trying to make a break for it. Reminded of Annie Hall, we all laughed. It was a great dinner...but Mike couldn't stay to the end. I knew he was in trouble because Mike would never leave a party early--especially when it was for him. Lynn helped him upstairs (patient, dependable, and rock steady as she had been throughout the recent bad patches) and Mike went up bitching all the way.

When Lynn came back down, she smiled as if she had just remembered something. "You know, sometimes..." she said, pointing to the table full of oil sticks, "sometimes when Mike was down here working with those I could hear him from upstairs, and it sounded like he was playing the drums." Nancy and I thought that was just right. Mike had always longed to play an instrument. And whether he painted with a brush or a stick, in the end he did play...and brilliantly.

GJG

PART II: GERALD JAY GOLDBERG AND ROBERTSON DAVIES EXCHANGE LETTERS

October 29, 1986


Dear Mr Gol/d\berg,

In the July 1986 issue of Art in America you reviewed my most recent novel, What's Bred in the Bone, and I am obliged to you for the many kind things you say about it. The article has just come into my hands, as I have been away for several weeks, and there is a passage in it which interests me very much and I would be grateful if you could throw some light on it.

You speak of the letter that Papini published in Libro Nero in 1952 and say that it is `generally discredited' and later on speak of Papini's `barefaced bogus statements,' and suggest that I have been gullible in my use of the letter.

I assure you I took a great deal of trouble to investigate the matter of the letter, which first came to my notice in the writing of a well known English art critic who had accepted it as authentic. As the letter seemed a curious confession on Picasso's part, I made further enquiries and could find no evidence that Picasso had ever refuted the letter, or that Papini was other than a respectable interviewer and editor--to say nothing of his substantial reputation as a philosopher. I am curious, therefore, about the certainty with which you dismiss the letter and would be glad to hear from you with references which discredit it, other than the natural distaste of the art world for such a strange confession. I think that you have been unfair to me in omitting to mention that in my novel, directly following the letter, follows a conversation in which an art critic says about the letter very much what you have said yourself--but I understand, of course, that reviewers are obliged to read very rapidly.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Robertson Davies



* * *


11 December 1986


Dear Mr Davies,

Your letter suggests that you are a careful man, but even a careful man, on occasion, may omit the d in Goldberg in a first draft.

I, too, occasionally nod. I simply assumed that your date of 1952 for the first appearance of the Il Libro Nero "interview" was accurate, but there are some who claim it's November 5th, 1951. This, of course, is pedantic nitpicking. What I can tell you about the Papini material is that it was generally discredited even at the time it first appeared (witness the enclosed [not included here] which I happened to run across at New York's Museum of Modern Art library the other day: it's from the periodical Arts, published in Paris, in the issue of 19 June 1952, no. 364, p. 9. You'll note from the text that Arts is hardly a left-wing rag whitewashing one of its pinko pals. Given the year of the publication--1951-1952--the politics of Papini are as potentially suggestive as the art politics involved). I think, by and large, Pierre Cabanne's statement on the Papini affair (vid. Le Siècle de Picasso, vol. 2, pp.202-3) represents the considered position of recent Picasso scholarship.

No, I don't believe that I was unfair to you in not mentioning Ross's statements in his conversation with Francis. (I certainly hope I wasn't.) As I recall, Ross tacitly accepts Papini's Picasso as genuine and argues extenuating circumstances, the artist down in the dumps. While I'm sure that even Picasso had his bad days (many of them according to Olivier, Sabartès, Gilot, Penrose, et al.), I don't believe that makes this relevant or the interview genuine. Perhaps your awareness of other possible interpretations of the "interview" would be
more persuasive (vis-a-vis modern art) if your (and our) sympathy wasn't so squarely with Francis as opposed to that solipsistic and obnoxiously ambitious smoothie.

The key problem that I find with the Papini business, however, is not its validity or lack of it (which we can leave to art historians) but the melodramatic way in which it's used. That Francis (hardly a bumpkin in aesthetic matters) would take Papini at face value and instantly, out of a sense of betrayal, give up his quest to become a modern painter is to me unconvincing. All he would have to do (though, of course, this is more time-consuming fictionally speaking) is look at Picasso's work and stop thinking of him as THE MASTER. Had he studied the man's art half as hard as he did that of Harry Furniss he could hardly have dismissed him as a cynical quack, an Iberian money-making machine. In any event, would you yourself care one whit less for Lear (assuming you have a partiality for beards) if some "respectable editor" turned up an interview with Bill in which he called himself nothing more than a public entertainer compared to those heavyweights Holinshed, Spenser, and Higgins?

As I said in my Art in America review, I did indeed enjoy the cornucopic pleasures of your novel, which I read very very slowly. That, alas, is the way I write, too; otherwise this note would have reached you much sooner.

Happy holidays!

Cordially,

Gerald Jay Goldberg

* * *

These letters are in Gerald Jay Goldberg's UCLA archive.

PART I: GERALD JAY GOLDBERG ON ROBERTSON DAVIES'S PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN WHAT'S BRED IN THE BONE

Centaurs, griffins, gorgons, and sphinxes are not for the timid. They're interesting, of course, but if you're looking for ordinary zoo critters you're bound to be disappointed. What's Bred in the Bone, the latest novel by the Canadian writer Robertson Davies, is like one of those weird mythical beasts. A peculiar amalgam of mystery story, family saga, espionage adventure and portrait of the artist, Davies's novel is sure to bring a taxonomical fusspot howling to his knees, but it just might amuse the casual impurist....

It is [the hero, Francis Chegwidden Cornish's] life in art that helps to baste the book together and hold the various parts in place. Early on there are clear indications that young Cornish may well have the right stuff because, like so many other artist-heroes in fiction, he is miserable in school, lousy at games. And like them, too, he's clever--"always top of his class in French," and "good in Latin and Greek." As if to confirm his artistic calling, Francis suddenly comes down with a serious illness, and like his countless fictional counterparts plagued by pneumonia or brain fever or TB, he is bedridden for weeks. If Francis's "wound," as Edmund Wilson might have termed it, has arrived, can his "bow" be far behind?

Sure enough, the boy loved to draw. The scene at the back of Devinney's Furniture and Undertaking Parlours in which he is furiously sketching as his friend, Zadok, goes about his business of embalming the body of Old McAlister is memorable. Zadok shows himself to be an artist of sorts. When young Francis tentatively suggests that he might be one, too, and hands over his sketchbook, his friend exclaims, "By the Powers of Old Melchizedek...you are, dear boy, and no mistake." Francis's apprenticeship includes copying old master drawings at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum and a summer in Paris studying oil painting under Othon Friesz at La Grande Chaumière, where he learns to paint fat on lean, warm on cold. But then the rebarbative Saraceni sums up Francis's talent as "substantial, but not first-rate," and invites him to Rome to study restoration. Accepting the Master's harsh judgment without question, the pusillanimous Francis takes him up on his offer.

While in most Kunstlerromanen the author is satisfied to limit his hero's role in art--thus narrowing the focus and heightening credibility--Davies characteristically opts for plenitude. Not only is Cornish a painter and restorer in this novel, but a celebrated connoisseur and collector and generous patron of art as well. All of these multiple strings to his bow are tied to the plot, though occasionally at some risk to plausibility. Take, for example, the case of the unmasking of Letzpfennig.

Summoned to the Netherlands to probe the legitimacy of a newly discovered painting attributed to Hubertus Van Eyck (The Harrowing of Hell), Saracini perversely chooses to send Cornish instead of going himself. That the Dutch judge at the Hague should predict that of all the internationally renowned art experts gathered there to authenticate the work, the opinion of Saraceni's untried assistant "will doubtless prove decisive," is to heighten drama at the expense of good sense. The situation becomes still more embarrassing when Francis zips open his briefcase and whips out his "Little Jiffy Bernard Berenson Art Expert Set"--a pair of binoculars, a large magnifying glass, and one medium-size brush. As events turn out, his connoisseurship has less to do with iconography than zoology and the timely intervention of the supernatural.

The Van Eyck faker--a troubled soul appropriately named Letzpfennig--admits his fraud. Even though exposed, he gloats over his achievement, for he has shown that a modern artist can create work as accomplished as the old masters. Francis offers further proof when two of his own paintings pass anonymously into art history as the work of a 16th-century Gothic genius dubbed by the critics as "The Alchemical Master." The question that Davies poses here is: Can great art actually be created when the artist is mimicking an esthetic more appropriate to an earlier age than his own--400 years earlier in this instance? Francis's daimon claims that it can, insisting that his charge has "forged nothing. He has painted an original picture in a highly individual style, and if any connoisseur misdates it, the more fool he."

While thus recognizing the talent of living artists, Davies views modernist art (and, no doubt, modernist fiction as well) as suspect. His is the simple fusty notion that modern art is a private language based upon a subjective inner vision rather than on mythology or religion, the well-understood languages of the past. "Raw gobbets of the psyche displayed on canvas," Saraceni labels it, in one of those many pompous pronouncements that suggest he may have been sniffing turps too long.

There are some perhaps who would agree with Cornish that the division between art and crime is as "thin as a cigarette paper," but few serious minds can still hold the shopworn idea that modern artists, yes even the most famous of them, are trying to slip one over on us. Look what happens in the novel. No sooner does Francis attempt to become a contemporary painter by turning to Picasso for inspiration than Picasso betrays him. Davies employs the generally discredited Giovanni Papini Libro Nero interview of 1952 in which Picasso allegedly dismisses himself as nothing more than "a public entertainer," a modern trickster compared to the great artists of the past. Cornish, seeking to achieve consolation and exaltation in his work, reads this and weeps, and grinds his brushes into toothpicks. That he should accept Papini's barefaced bogus statements as gospel calls into question not only his knowledge of Picasso but of modern art as well.

The pleasures of What's Bred in the Bone are many: the complexity of the principal characters, the broad two-continent canvas, the knowing details. Anyone familiar with the earlier Deptford Trilogy of Davies will find here, too, a similar variety of curious information ranging from the finesses of astrology to those of embalming. Best of all are the wonderfully bizarre comic scenes. Davies is a master of the goofy grotesque. One is not likely soon to forget Francis's Auntie scalped by a Great Horned Owl that has mistaken her hat's black and white plumes for a skunk, or the powerful series of lectures on purity--sexual and otherwise--delivered to the boys in Francis's class by the astonishing Dr. Upper, a hilarious scene that culminates in the Doctor producing "after some rummaging, his own penis as an example of the adult member in its full splendour."

Of course in a multifaceted monster such as this there are bound to be a few inconsistencies, incredible coincidences, red herrings, and other extravagances. Perhaps like Walt Whitman, who also hung a handsome beard, Davies may claim to contain multitudes. An author who can pack four suicides into one novel--even if one of them may only be murder--is not to be taken lightly. That more isn't less in Davies's new novel is a credit to the breadth of his artistry rather than to his crotchety notion of art.

* * *

GJG's complete review appeared in Art in America (July 1986).

A TURKEY IN THE OVAL OFFICE

A TURKEY IN THE OVAL OFFICE

Imagine a turkey in the Oval Office. It's called November, which recently opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Starring Nathan Lane who looks presidential, even sounds presidential if you recall Nixon's obscenity-laced Watergate tapes. And, of course, being Nathan Lane he's funny too! An everyman president called Charlie Smith with a pinched smile, a trapped restless manner, and an unsettling splutter when excited, which is almost all the time. How come, Charlie? Maybe it's because the news he gets about his chances of winning a second term, or having a longed-for presidential library, or even just putting together enough cash to live on when he's finally booted out of the White House, arrives like telegrams from the poor house. No wonder he's constantly telling these desperate non-stop old and musty gags that smell of mothballs. But Lane tells them well, and you almost feel sorry for the poor angst-ridden bastard stuck in the OO for 1 hour and 35 minutes with these awful one-liners.

The writer is David Mamet. So you might think perhaps that the gray electric vision of the author of American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross had changed over the years to a still darker, more intense Becket hue. No such luck, alas! There's nothing like an idea rattling around in this president's head. But what he does have are schemes galore. Threatening the National Association of Turkey By-Products to turn America against turkey, he refuses to pardon the annual Thanksgiving bird unless the money is right. "Let them eat pork," he rants. "Let them eat cod!" The man might even stoop to broccoli for enough giblets. Unutterably corrupt, he deplores his job as providing "too little opportunity for theft." He's a prez for whom everything has a price, whether it's casino licenses for Native Americans or a pork industry "piggy plane" for deporting aliens.

Fact is there are no characters in November, only stick figures that no one gives a damn about but are easy to laugh at. President Smith tells us that he can't even remember the last country he invaded, and the audience howls. Satire is made of sterner stuff. All sitcoms need is a laugh track. When Nathan Lane first agreed to play the part, Mamet told him , "I can't wait to get into the rehearsal room--I've got a million ideas for gags." But David Mamet is no Mel Brooks. (Any more than Nathan Lane is Jack Kennedy.) So what? He used to have language--though you'd never know it from this turkey. Besides there's more to comedy than The Producers, more to drama than "entertainment," and much more to Mamet than November.

ON THE OVERNIGHT TO ALGECIRAS

The latest issue of TLS is always worth a look. In this one (7 December 2007), John Fletcher has a review that I especially liked. Short and pregnant. The book, Les Trois Exils; Juifs d'Algerie, is by Benjamin Stora, considered by some the leading historian of French Algeria and the Algerian War. His subject here the Jews of Algeria, who in a matter of decades suffered what Stora describes as "three exiles" from a land that for centuries had been their home.
The "Cremieux decree" was the first. In 1870 while granting Jews French citizenship, it paradoxically set them apart from their Muslim neighbors. Then during WWII the Vichy government's anti-Semitic laws excluded Jews from any role in Algerian public life. And when that war was over and Algerian independence declared, the Jews--though rooted in the culture of the Magreb--fled to exile in Europe with other French citizens. According to Stora, they feared being reduced to the ancient status of dhimmis (a non-Muslim subject of a state governed in accordance with sharia law).
Stora recalls his family's poignant leave taking of their Algerian home in this matter-of-fact fashion: "Father locked the door and slipped the key in his pocket; we picked up our suitcases and left, just as if we were going on holiday. But we knew perfectly well that it was over, that we would not be coming back"

Reminding me of another much older Jewish exodus and an unusual encounter I had in 1962 on the overnight from Madrid to Algeciras. As our train began to pull out of the station, my wife and I were sitting in our 1st-class compartment congratulating each other on having it all to ourselves. Suddenly the outside door was thrown open and two suitcases and a backpack came flying in followed by a smiling good-looking young man in gleaming white slacks. He was waving a tennis racket. Dragging him in before he fell back on the platform, I slammed the door.
"Awfully sorry," he apologized. "Hope you don't mind."
His English sounded like Oxford. Actually, as we later learned, it was Cambridge. He had just graduated in civil engineering and was going home to Gibraltar. His name was Benjamin.
"Benjamin Azulay," he introduced himself.
He had the bluest eyes I'd ever seen.
"Sephardic?"
"Yes. How did you know?"
"A guess. Just a guess."
Over a shared bottle of Rioja, manchego, olives, the three of us talked, joked, and watched the sun go down. His dream was to go to Israel and build roads. Why not? That sounded okay to us. I asked how come his family ended up on the Rock. He told us that the Azulays in the 15th century had a house they loved in Toledo but, refusing to convert, they were kicked out of Spain by los reyes catolicos.
Benjamin smiled--a golden boy's smile. "My father still has the keys to our old house. Large iron ones. And when he dies, I'll get them. The house itself, of course, no longer exists."
All that existed for him were the keys and the stories. The heavy baggage of deracinated people.Strange how in Europe the presentness of the past is everywhere. Since then I've often thought of Benjamin and hoped that he actually made it to Israel, that he did build his roads. From time to time I've also wondered, as I did when I learned of the death of Edward Said in New York not many years ago, if Palestinians still have their keys too.

WOODY'S MIXED BAG

Happened to revisit Take the Money and Run last night on TCM and it was a mixed bag. Loads of laughs, but I came away feeling "Is that all?" First the good stuff. The faces, of course. Allen has a great eye for casting. The actors he chooses to tell the tale of the incompetent Virgil Starkwell from youthful nerd to would-be Napoleon of crime look the part, starting with himself--the little nebbish with glasses that everybody wants to stomp on. And then there's the angelic innocence of Janet Margolin's Louise who shares some of the lovely glow of Chaplin's Goddard (though little of her feistiness). The faces and haircuts of the cops, the prison warden, the bank tellers, and the hoods, are perfect and seem to come straight out of the Eisenhower/Nixon years. Not to mention the stentorian voice of the narrator Jackson Beck (who sounds like an old March of Time Newsreel but was actually for many years from radioland's Superman) which provides the glue that, more or less, holds the glittery pieces and one-liners together. Unfortunately, there isn't much of a story.