As a toy soldier collector, I was charmed by an article Mark Wallace wrote in the Times about H.G. Wells. His book Little Wars, published in 1913, after Wells “created a set of rules that the `recumbent strategist’ could use in his parlor or garden.” As Wallace tells us, “Wells entertained a number of notable literary and political figures with his diversion. According to Padre Paul Wright of the British Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, who is perhaps the world’s leading authority on Little Wars, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were among Wells’s guests while he was developing the game. “I think it is reasonable to suggest that Chesterton had some war gaming inspiration from Wells when writing The Napoleon of Notting Hill, ” Wright told me in an e-mail, referring to a novel in which toy soldiers play a decisive part. Winston Churchill and Wells maintained a correspondence too, though many of their letters have been lost. Wright wonders whether the two men ever faced off: “We are left with the fascinating prospect of an historical, toy soldier what-if between the two great toy soldier enthusiasts of the period.” Says Wallace “And his own interest in fighting little wars declined sharply with the start of World War I, along with his pacifism; as the violent century wore on, Wells became an advocate of an “armed peace,” with England holding the gun.” Wrote Wells: “You have only to play at Little Wars three or four times to realize just what a blundering thing Great War must be. Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but — the available heads we have for it, are too small.” In the wonderful drawing from The Illustrated Sunday News, above, Wells is at left.

My friend Dave Jensen and I had a terrific time last Friday night at the Tarrytown Music Hall where we say a program of songs of The Band, performed by Jimmy Vivino, Byron Issacs, Jim Weider, Randy Ciarlante, Amy Helm, and as a special treat, the immortal Garth Hudson, and as a very special treat, Sister Maud Hudson. Maud really shone on her performance of “It Makes No Difference,” and Garth’s playing was jaw-droppingly spectacular. I especially liked hearing “`King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” “This Wheel’s On Fire,” and “Rockin’ Chair”. Again, thanks to Mr. Vivino for the tickets.

Originally published in The Huffington Post on April 9, 2013:

Anyone who spends any time watching cable television is bound to develop a fairly depressed view of the American character. Vain housewives, self-absorbed designers, responsibility-denying restauranteurs, narcissistic chefs, fascistic dance teachers, scheming survivors, snide judges–altogether we see a whining, insecure, blame-shifting, easily-insulted mass of humanity at its shabbiest. Throw in the political channels, where we see one party drowning in denial, and the other a prisoner of its own helplessness. Thank goodness we can still watch sports, where pampered millionaires continue to explore the frontiers of chemistry in an effort to fend off inevitable decrepitude. All in all, it is a sad spectacle.

But then one sees the example of Roger Ebert. With his long and rewarding career as a film critic, Ebert would have had a deserved moment of respect had he died soon after being diagnosed with cancer in 2002. Instead, Ebert survived long enough to enter the most inspirational period of his life. Ebert’s initial surgery proved insufficient; the resilient cancer demanded stronger, more damaging measures, surgeries and radiation blasts that weakened him, cost him part of his jaw, and left him disfigured, and unable to speak, eat or drink.

Many of us would have been demolished by these developments. Not Ebert. Writing “I should be content with the abundance I have,” he threw himself into his work, reviewing films at a prodigious rate (300 last year alone) and embracing new technologies to become a frequent blogger and tweeter. He focused not on what had been denied to him, but what he retained; in his final blog post, written two days before his death, his mind was on gratitude. “Thank you for going on this journey with me,” he told his readers.

A similar tale can be told about Levon Helm, the first anniversary of whose death will fall on April 19th. Helm enjoyed vast success as a member of The Band, the rock group of the late sixties and early seventies. But after the group broke up, his career plateaued, and personal setbacks accumulated. Late in the nineties, Helm, like Ebert, was diagnosed with cancer, and the radiation treatments he underwent put the cancer in remission but robbed him of his distinctive, emotionally rich singing voice. Again, many of us would have been despondent; Helm threw himself into his music, and formed a new band in which focused on his talents as a drummer. Then, facing bankruptcy, he began putting on shows for small audiences at his home in Woodstock NY. Called Midnight Rambles, the shows spotlighted not oldies but an array of American musical genres–blues, country, gospel, New Orleans, rock. Every one was unique. When Helm recovered his singing voice, the Rambles became a must-see–an unpretentious, generous icon, heading a hot band, before a small audience in an intimate space. The Rambles revived Helm’s career and reestablished his stature as an artist, and he kept performing with joy and fortitude through his final illness until less than a month remained. As in Ebert’s case, Helm’s spirit and courage during the decade after his death sentence inspired everyone who knew the story.

The same kind of emotions greeted the film Searching for Sugar Man, which last February won the Oscar for Best Documentary . The film told the story of a couple of South African music fans who undertook a hunt for Rodriquez, an American singer who was wildly popular in South Africa in the seventies, and whose sudden disappearance mid-decade led to rumors of a lurid death. The intrepid fanst racked down every available lead, and eventually discovered that Sixto Rodriguez not only hadn’t died in 1975, but was still living in modest circumstances in his native Detroit.

Through the vagaries of fate, we learn, Rodriguez never achieved a show business breakthrough in America, and through the avarice of others, he was denied the income from his stardom in South Africa. But as the documentary shows, he still had a full life. He did not wallow in self-pity, He did not lose himself in bitterness over the past. Instead, he built a life. He raised a family. He worked at a job where he was valued by his colleagues. He earned a college degree and ran for office. Overall, it’s fair to say that the intrepid fans who found Rodriguez were more absorbed by his past than he was. Nor did he become starry-eyed by the money that now came to him, but gave most of it away. A prisoner neither to his disappointment nor to his success, he remains the captain of his life.

Ebert, Helm, Rodriquez–models of stoicism. They are men who met disappointment and worse, and faced their challenges with determination and courage. We used to have a lot of role models like them, a lot of people who got up before dawn and packed their lunches and went to work in hopes of making the lives of their families a little easier. Somewhere along the line, a brasher, nastier role model took over, people who built monuments to their own success but who were never satisfied with it. But the last five years have not been kind to most of us, and many of us have had to respond by lowering our heads to the wind and pushing on. We work longer, we do with less, and we begin to admire people who, facing even longer odds, embrace life, and the abundance that they have. Maybe the Stoic Hero is back.

Three of the most interesting hours of my life were spent in the company of Henry Bromell, who died the other day at the age of 65. Henry was a writer–of short stories and television scripts mostly, but also of an also of a novel and of screenplays. Ann Kolson had assigned me to write a piece on him for The New York Times; the occasion was his debut as a film director for a film called Panic, about a hitman, for which he had also written the screenplay. We met him at the Algonquin Hotel–the only interview I’ve ever conducted there–and I liked him immediately. Easy-going, friendly, funny, interested, smart–he was anything other than self-absorbed. We talked for literally three hours, which was about three times the amount of time usually required to complete the assignment. Although I was careful to cover the usual bases that needed for my assignment, the encounter wasn’t like an interview at all, but more just a delightful conversation. We talked about film, books, writing, his interesting upbringing, about Homicide: Life on the Streets (where had had performed distinguished work and which was one of my favorite series.) It was just an enormously enjoyable experience, with no sense of the professional wall that typically exists between subject and interviewer. I was thrilled to see that he had achieved recent success with Homeland; that was arena he knew well from his upbringing in the Middle East as the son of a CIA operative. I’m glad that he capped his career with success.

Here are a couple of Henry’s quotes from the piece:

”My editor says I’m the only person she knows who’s written for television that television has made a better writer,” said Mr. Bromell, pointing out that writing for David Chase, who was the executive producer of ”I’ll Fly Away” and is the executive producer of ”The Sopranos,” was the most rigorous experience of his career. ”He thinks in terms of a page and a half or two pages, and within that time, there should be two turns, two times where the scene goes someplace that you didn’t see coming, that’s real and is believable. And he’s a Chekovian, so for him the whole scene has to have a subtext. Even if it’s not mentioned, you’ve got to feel it and understand it. Really tough stuff. But you get excited by what he says, because you see that he’s made it better.”

Reaction to ”Panic” has been positive; Mr. Bromell seems particularly pleased by friends who’ve told him that he has made a European movie. ”Most of the filmmakers I love are Europeans,” he says, enumerating a catalog of favorites that quickly begins to include directors from Japan, India and America but that leaves out most of today’s Hollywood filmmakers.

”Working on the series, we would get as production assistant these very bright kids from U.S.C. film school and N.Y.U. film school who begin each day asking what would be entertaining for the greatest number of people. Not, ‘What if I take that character and put him in a room with that character?’ Now they think like agents and producers. They’re very comfortable servicing corporate culture. They don’t see as their fundamental role being critical or making people laugh in a way they’re not used to laughing.
They think, ‘All right, we got to bring in 30 million people, how are we going to do this?’ I think, ‘If all we’re going to do is serve corporate culture, where are our ideas going to come from?’ ”

This year that is fast disappearing will not be remembered in these quarters with very much warmth. It was a fairly hideous, sickening year, the year that I felt I got old. But like all good things, the bad ones come to an end as well, and thanks to some much appreciated end of the year action by Richard Plepler, Steve Koepp, David McCormick and others, we begin 2013 on an upswing, and with hopes for better times to come. In the meanwhile, here are some jewels, personally chosen and wholly idiosyncratic, recovered from 2012:
1.) Love for Levon. Without a doubt, everything about the tribute concert to Levon Helm–reporting the story, meeting the people involved, attending the event, the reception to the article, what may happen yet–turned this into the best thing that I was involved with this year.
2.) Searching for Sugarman. This modest documentary about a real-life Cinderella made my heart leap with joy. A very inspirational story.
3.) Call Me Maybe. Carly Rae Jepson‘s unassuming, sweet, girlish, flirty hit was attractive enough, but the way it went viral and enveloped everyone from the US Olympic Swim Team to Colin Powell was delightful. The song never failed to bring a smile to my lips, especially in Jepson’s collaboration with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots.
4.) The dauntless, rain-drenched performance of the young people of Royal College of Music Chamber Choir during the flotilla of the Queen’s Jubilee was simply stirring, especially when they sang “Land of Hope and Glory.”
5.) The presidential campaign as a whole this year was a fairly tedious affair, but the rousing Democratic convention, driven by one splendid speech after another culminating in Bill Clinton‘s masterful dissection/deconstruction/destruction of the GOP position was fairly brilliant, just as the Republicans’ ceaseless rhetorical self-destruction–“Oops”, “Nine, nine, nine”, “I like to fire people”, “legitimate rape”, “the 47 percent”–was the best long-running comedy series on TV.
6.) The Giants Win the Super Bowl. Just as in 2009, the inconsistent Giants managed to win four–or in this case, six–games that they could win but were not likely to, and managed, one play at a time, to walk off with the hardware.
7.) The Hour. A splendid, sophisticated, intelligent BBC series about a ground-breaking TV news magazine being produced in the early fifties. I love the way they can combine news judgment, inside baseball, and messy personal situations. Dominic West, Ben Whislaw and Romola Garai are just terrific. We also liked the posh Downton Abbey and the relentlessly vulgar The In-Betweeners. (I must say, I haven’t seen Homeland yet.
8.) Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel. Having loved Wolf Hall, I feared its sequel would suffer by comparison. I shouldn’t have worried. Other enjoyable books this year: Watergate, by Thomas Mallon; Passage of Power, by Robert Caro; The Long Road to Antietam, by Richard Slotkin.
9.) I went to Lincoln fearing a Spielbergian historical romance, full of longing gazes and quivering lips and swirling strings. But while there was some of that, it wasn’t enough to sicken the whole deal. I give total credit to screenwriter Tony Kushner for his decision to hang this pageant on a moment that has been largely overlooked by historians, the passage by the House of Representatives of a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery. Historians undercut the importance of that moment because there were other ways to accomplish Lincoln’s end, but that’s not the point: whether or not the vote had significant is irrelevant, it is a perfectly splendid motor for an historical drama.
10. Superstorm Sandy. “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result,” Winston Churchill once said. I have no reason to dispute him, but I can tell you this: it’s a humbling thing to realize that the killer hurricane has come and gone and that you’ve been missed.

My latest, in The American Interest:

About ten minutes into Skyfall, the new James Bond film, I was already in love. Not because of the long, opening chase scene, which among its obligatory demolishment of fruit carts and motor vehicles, did feature one brilliantly iconic moment when Bond smartly straightens his cuffs after the narrowest of escapes. No, the moment I succumbed came shortly after the chase ended, during Daniel Kleinman’s splendid opening titles, as Adele sang the film’s title song. As the female sihouettes swirled into one another and Adele’s big, brassy, bravura voice asserted itself over the soaring strings and propulsive beat, I was transported into the heart of Bondlandia, where I was once again a 13-year-old fanboy, watching Maurice Binder’s sensuous opening titles, listening to Shirley Bassey’s dramatic, dominant voice, and waiting for Sean Connery to prowl onto the screen like a tuxedo-clad panther. From Skyfall’s early moments, director Sam Mendes showed that he had captured the essence of the signature Bond movies, and happily, for the next two hours plus, he never relinquished it.

The opening chase, the elaborate titles, the anthem—Mendes keeps these Bond movie traditions, and cannily lets others go. Unlike the films of the Connery and Roger Moore eras, the number of women in the film falls below regulation harem levels, and the most important female character is Bond’s boss, a stout, sharp-tongued civil servant who probably hasn’t been seduced since Brezhnev was in his heyday. Q is back, but Mendes shrewdly reinvents him as a young computer nerd who disdains the Hammacher Schlemmer-style exploding gadgets that were a signature feature of Desmond Llewelyn’s long, fusty tenure as Q. Other Bond indicia are firmly in place. The scriptural “Bond, James Bond’’ signature introduction flows in naturally, and the essential “shaken, not stirred’’ instruction receives a clever twist. The fanfare of John Barry’s “James Bond Theme”, a brilliant brass and bass guitar-based totem of Swinging London, nudges into the picture a couple of times, but isn’t deployed in its entirety until fairly late in the film, when 007 takes the tarp off his still gleaming Aston-Martin and roars into the night.

You can read the rest here.

Apart from that special day when the temperature was topping 90, a skunky stink was broaching the perimeter of the property, and poison ivy was breaking out all over my body–quite the trifecta!–nothing quite so pleased me this summer as those occasions when I happened upon Carly Rae Jepson singing “Call Me Maybe.” I know the song is a featherweight thing, but the tune is catchy, and, more important, the singer’s innocence flirtiness simply melts my heart. And it’s fun–just simple, silly, stupid, joyous fun. Of all the video versions–and it’s particularly hard to resist the US Olympic swim team’s version, featuring the charming Missy Franklin–I find the most pleasure in the video Jepson made with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots, all of them playing children’s instruments. I love the starstruck disbelief that is all over Jepson’s face, I love Fallon’s older brotherly earnestness, and most of all, I love the Roots’ implacable professional cool. It’s a smile, every time.

Searching for Sugar Man, a documentary by Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul, is an unbelievably uplifting film. It tells the story of Sixto Rodriquez, a man who lives in Detroit, who was a singer-songwriter of some promise forty years ago. He made two albums that received excellent reviews, but which did no business in the USA. It’s impossible to see why; I’ve never heard of the man, but these were my prime record-buying years, and this was exactly the sort of stuff I would have gobbled up. But for whatever reason, the records disappeared–except in South Africa. There, his records were huge, and Rodriguez became something of a countercultural figure, beloved by anti-apartheid students. But because of cultural boycotts caused by apartheid, South Africa was cut off from the rest of the world, Rodriguez had no idea that he was a star, and his fans in South Africa, hearing no new material from the singer, believed he was dead.

The movie is the story of his rediscovery by some intrepid fans, and his resurrection as a performer. It turns out that Rodriguez was living his life in Detroit, working as a construction laborer, participating actively in the life of his community, raising three daughters. Denied the life of a famous artist, he shouldered the life of a man. After we saw the film at the Jacob Burns Film Center, Rodriguez appeared with director Bendjelloul. Now 70 years old, Rodriguez was soft-spoken, charming, modest–pleased that his life had taken this turn, but not overly impressed with his new-found fame. Instead, I was impressed with his spirituality, his grace, his stoical wisdom.

There is an article in the Times today by Sarah Maslin Nir about “Civic Virtue,” am immense marble sculpture by Frederick MacMonnies. First unveiled in 1922 in City Hall Park, the statue, depicts a broad-chested nude man representing Virtue standing above two vanquished naked women representing Vice. From the beginning the statue, whose main, triumphant figure has been given such nicknames as Rough Boy, Fat Boy and Cave Man, earned howls of criticism, derision and protest. Feminists objected to its depiction of women, prudes to its depiction of nudity, and art lovers to its existence. Before long the statue was exiled to Kew Gardens, where it has sat outside Borough Hall for the last 70 years, popular if only among the youngsters who dived from the figures into the surrounding pool.

The Times reports that there are now signs that the little-loved statue may end up in Brooklyn, in Green-Wood Cemetery, where several of MacMonnies’ relatives are buried, and where another work of the artist can be found, and where its neighbors have never been known to be very local in their complaints.

This exile would be preferable to the usual alternative that has been proposed, which is to demolish the thing. But I have a different idea. The problem with “Civic Virtue” isn’t what it looks like; it’s what the thing is called. I wouldn’t hide or destroy the thing; I would rename it “Smug Self-Satisfaction,” and erect copies around the country. Maybe put one outside Eric Cantor‘s office, for example.

It wasn’t exactly a bucket list item, but after decades of enthusiastic fandom, Ginny and I finally got to see the great Aretha Franklin in concert at Radio City Music Hall. We had mixed views: Aretha was in good voice and good mood; although we expected her to be at least subdued after the shock of the death her godchild Whitney Houston, she was surprisingly playful and even flirtatious, and not at all the imperious diva that I expected. . But her song choices were uneven. I liked her rendition of “Daydreaming” and “Spirit in the Dark”, and “Natural Woman” was good. She absolutely blew me away with amazing version of “I Ain’t Never Loved a Man”, in which she found a low low low register that really brought out a feeling of desperation. That was really the high point of the evening. But I grew bored with her gospelly deconstruction of “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, wasn’t to happy that she performed not one but two of Whitney’s treacly hits, and was seriously, seriously miffed that she didn’t perform “Think” or “Respect”, my favorites of her repertoire. But I saw the Queen of Soul, one of the iconic artists of my lifetime, and I’m happy about that.