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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Visiting my father in Noe Valley, kids in tow. He announces his latest obsession. The founder of the Chinese Film Industry was a jew from Odessa named Benjamin Brodsky<\/a>. My father\u2019s planning to visit Beijing in October, and has secured permission from the Chinese State Film Archives to look at Brodsky\u2019s papers. Apparently Brodsky lived through the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco and may have owned a chain of Nickleodeons. If Brodsky hadn\u2019t existed, I wonder if my father might have invented him, as he conveniently embodies all his obsessions: early cinema, China, and Jewish identity. I google Brodsky and discover someone\u2019s just made a documentary about him. Scooped.<\/p>\n On the coffee table, an old issue of Ramparts<\/a><\/em> magazine. In his early, radical days, my father was an editor at Ramparts\u2019 publishing imprint, and edited Richard Boyle\u2019s Vietnam War memoir, Flower of the Dragon<\/em>. Boyle was a wild-man, the inspiration for Oliver Stone\u2019s Salvador<\/em>. He used to come stay at our house and play marathon war games with my older brother, elaborate mock battles (The Siege of Khe Sanh was one) with toy soldiers on the living room floor. <\/p>\n I browse an article about little retailers fighting big chain stores, and a piece about the brutality of the Oakland Police Force. All strikingly current subjects for a 42 year-old magazine. The ads however, are pure nostalgia (\u201cNudism Explained\u201d). I find them oddly compelling, like the ads for strange novelties in old comic books, a window into an alternate universe. <\/p>\n Dinner at the Universal Caf\u00e9, a foodie outpost in the outer Mission. We stare at the menu and talk about food. My wife accuses my father of being a self-hating foodie. On our last visit he proclaimed himself sick of talking about food with his foodie friends. He would eat it, he said, but not talk about it. But of course, like everyone here, he can\u2019t help himself. I hail my wife for coining the phrase. <\/p>\n At Clooney\u2019s Pub, a Lesbian dive-bar in Bernal Heights, we celebrate our friend Eric\u2019s birthday. Eric and his girlfriend Amanda have just seen Dark Passage<\/a><\/em>, the Delmer Daves film noir, with Bogart and Bacall. We talk noir, and Nightfall<\/a><\/em> the Aldo Ray film we saw at the Film Forum. <\/p>\n My wife has skipped ahead on Deadwood<\/em>, a violation of the marital code. I\u2019m furious. I take my computer back.<\/p>\n My mother emails me about a live performance of Lincoln Center\u2019s production of South Pacific<\/a><\/em> on PBS tonight. Brilliant. But possibly terrible. I remember suffering through Richard Burton\u2019s televised stage production of Hamlet<\/em> on videotape, in my high school English class and again at a Wooster Group Production at St Ann\u2019s Warehouse. <\/p>\n So I sit in the dark and watch a documentary on PBS called Salt<\/a><\/em>, about a photographer in the Australian salt flats. Its beautiful. I can\u2019t turn it off. <\/p>\n Visting old friends in Encinitas, a little surfer town north of San Diego. Jerry\u2019s a civil rights lawyer. His \u201cFree Mumia\u201d bumper-sticker stands out on the palm-lined cul-de-sac. They have chickens in the back yard and Christian neighbors. Jerry<\/span> plays Bruce Springsteen all morning. I try to like Bruce, but can\u2019t. Jerry\u2019s the biggest book lover I know. I marvel at his ability to read, to concentrate, amidst the chaos around him: kids, a menagerie of animals, 300 pending cases. He finds the fragments of time, where most of us would fail to even look. I remember him on my last visit, on the elliptical in his living room, watching a \u201cGreat Courses\u201d history lecture. He sent me a book<\/a> about the murder of Fred Hampton months ago. I haven\u2019t read it.<\/p>\n Jerry hands me an essay by Nick Turse called \u201cDeath on Your Doorstep<\/a>,\u201d about the documentary Restrepo<\/em>. Turse says the film neglects the impact of the war on Afghan civilians and is \u201cuseless for telling us anything of note.\u201d I defend the film in part for showing some of the most shocking combat footage I\u2019ve seen in the last seven years, footage that is heavily censored in the mainstream media. I suggest Jerry read Nir Rosen\u2019s unembedded reporting<\/a> from Iraq and Afghanistan. I worked with Nir earlier this year and have tremendous respect for his reporting.<\/p>\n I pick up The Magna Carta Manifesto<\/em> by Peter Linebaugh and quickly put it down. But I give him points for quoting a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Man to King Arthur: \u201cyou can\u2019t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you.\u201d<\/p>\n We go to the community pool. It\u2019s some kind of party, and a band is playing AOR. They must be in their fifties. I\u2019m in the pool with my daughter, when a middle-age woman informs me that the local sheriff has parked nearby and invited kids to visit his squad car. We stay in the pool. On cue, the sheriff hits the siren. And the band plays \u201cI Fought the Law.\u201d Jerry makes a joke about police brutality. <\/p>\n Later, we take the Avocado Highway east to Escondido, for a vegetarian potluck at La Milpa<\/a>, an organic farm. I feel like I\u2019ve stepped into a time-warp, like a Grateful Dead show at Frost Amphitheater. There\u2019s even a VW bus parked in the field. Only in California. I ask Jerry if the bus is a prop. My daughter runs through the corn. I imagine her remembering this event, as a fragment of a memory<\/span>, years from now. It reminds me so much of my own half-remembered early 70s childhood. <\/p>\n On a bluff overlooking Swami\u2019s, the famous So Cal surf spot, my daughter and I tape a farewell message on Neptune TV<\/a>, a local Encinitas art project, or, as they describe it, \u201ca community based interactive art process.\u201d<\/p>\n I suspend reading the Sledge when my daughter dumps an entire container of macaroni on my seatmate. I read my (other) daughter the Roald Dahl book about the crocodile. I\u2019d forgotten about it in my backpack while we were in California. She loves it. She wants me to read it again immediately. <\/p>\n Ritu had contracted polio as an infant and his parents, certain that he was destined to die, had given up on the sickly child, but he survived, miraculously, but not before he infected his sister, who slept beside him on a plain straw mat.<\/p>\n My entry is greeted with jeers. Too melodramatic! The funny thing is, the story is true. I borrowed the details from someone I recently filmed in India.<\/p>\n Jesse Moss is a New York-based filmmaker and the founder of Mile End Films<\/a>. His most recent documentary is Full Battle Rattle<\/a><\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" DAY FOUR, San Francisco Visiting my father in Noe Valley, kids in tow. He announces his latest obsession. The founder of the Chinese Film Industry was a jew from Odessa named Benjamin Brodsky. My father\u2019s planning to visit Beijing in October, and has secured permission from the Chinese State Film Archives to look at Brodsky\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[782,775,780,786,779,783,778,781,53,784,785],"class_list":["post-4439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-culture-diaries","tag-alice-walker","tag-california","tag-civil-rights","tag-dorothea-lange","tag-e-m-forester","tag-mumia-abu-jamal","tag-passage-to-india","tag-police","tag-reading","tag-restrepo","tag-wiki-leaks"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/restrepo1.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
It\u2019s the July 13, 1968 issue of Ramparts<\/em>. I read \u201cWhy We Lost the War,\u201d an interview with the French General Andr\u00e9 Beaufre. The first question is \u201cHow do you explain why the most powerful, best armed and supposedly best informed nation in history could not achieve success in ground fighting?\u201d I\u2019ve just seen the Afghan war documentary Restrepo<\/a><\/em>, by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington and read Junger\u2019s companion book, War<\/em>. The question echoes strongly. Counter-insurgency strategy has come to seem like nothing more than pseudo-science to me, 21st Century phrenology and publishing a manual<\/a> about it doesn\u2019t mean it works. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/dorothealangue-150x150.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
I flip through a catalogue for a 1978 exhibition of Dorothea Lange\u2019s photographs<\/a> at the Oakland Museum. The photos are beautiful. An alchemy of art and propaganda. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/silver-crest.jpg\" "\\"silver")
We drive down to Old Bayshore Road to Silver Crest Donut Shop<\/a>. It\u2019s Eric\u2019s birthday tradition. In the parking lot, he warns us to expect trouble in the donut shop bar. I think, what donut shop has a bar? It\u2019s a rough place, in a rough part of town. The Greek bartender greets us warmly, and pours six shots of Ouzo. On the jukebox, I put in a quarter and select a track called simply: \u201cGreek Music.\u201d The shots are free. We chase the Ouzo with huge, greasy, delicious donuts. <\/p>\nDAY FIVE, Woodside, California<\/h3>\n
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My mother joins us for the show. I\u2019m enjoying it. Kelli O\u2019Hara and Paulo Szot are great. My daughter is fascinated by the shower on stage. Kelli O\u2019Hara is actually getting her hair wet, singing, \u201cI\u2019m gonna wash that man right out of my hair.\u201d My father-in-law walks in and starts singing along. The curtain closes on Act I. The kids melt down and everyone flees. My wife comes home and curses at me for keeping the kids up to watch a musical. I spend an hour getting my kids to sleep and miss the second act. <\/p>\nDAY SIX, Encinitas, California<\/h3>\n
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Jerry points to an enormous stack of books that publishers have sent him for free. A shard of time while the kids chase the cats. I pick up a book\u2014a collection of essays\u2014on the top of the stack. An Alice Walker poem stops me cold. The poem is Silver Writes<\/em>, about the \u201cdaring ones\u201d\u2014the \u201cblack young man\/who tried\/to crash\/All barriers\/at once\/wanted to\/swim\/at a white beach (in Alabama)\/nude.\u201d In the essay that follows she writes about her fraught relationship with a white civil rights worker in the South. I\u2019ve never read anything by Alice Walker, and I regret it.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/veggies-150x150.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
I skim a book from Jerry\u2019s bathroom called Growing Your Own Vegetables<\/em>, published by the US Department of Agriculture in 1977. The chapter is \u201cThe Popular, Cultivated Tomato and Kinfolk Peppers and Eggplant.<\/a>\u201d It sounds like a fairy-tale.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/alg_assange_wikileaks-150x150.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
The kids are asleep. We stay up and talk Wiki Leaks, \u201cCollateral Murder<\/a>,\u201d and Behind the Green Door<\/em>, the \u201cclassic\u201d Marilyn Chambers porn film, which I saw in 1982. My friend Seth Godfrey claimed to have found a VHS copy of the film in a field behind an adult bookstore, a field that is now the new Facebook Offices<\/a> in Palo Alto.<\/p>\nDAY SEVEN, New York<\/h3>\n
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<\/a>On the plane home, I neglect Tinkers<\/em> again, and read an airport impulse purchase, With the Old Breed<\/a><\/em>, E. B. Sledge\u2019s memoir of the Pacific War. I thought the Sledge story was the best part of the HBO mini-series. The book is moving and horrifying. I consider re-reading Mailer\u2019s The Naked and the Dead<\/a><\/em>. I remember it as a pretty square, old-fashioned novel. Oddly, Michener\u2019s Tales of the South Pacific<\/em> strikes me as the book Mailer would have written, and The Naked and the Dead<\/em>, the book Michener would have written. The Mailer book is notable for its use of the word \u201cfug\u201d in lieu of fuck. My downstairs neighbor Tuli Kupferberg was a founding member of the The Fugs<\/a>, the anarchic folk rock band (\u201cKill, Kill for Peace\u201d) that took its name from Mailer\u2019s book. Tuli died recently. At his memorial service someone gave me a lock of his wiry grey hair in a plastic bag\u2014a true 60s relic.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/passagetoindia1.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
My book group is meeting in Brooklyn. There\u2019s something slightly embarrassing about it. Sort of like reading James Michener. But I love it. Unfortunately, I haven\u2019t read the book\u2014John Crowley\u2019s Little, Big<\/a><\/em>. In fact, I didn\u2019t even open it. I didn\u2019t even crack the cover to read the pull quotes, or the \u201creaders guide.\u201d This is a book club foul. I feel guilty. My host hands me a martini, and says, \u201cSo, Little Big…\u201d and I consider trying to fake it. A moment of doubt. I confess. I feel more shame than I have in a long time. I slide into the couch, sip my martini, and try to look thoughtfully engaged. Later, we play the novel game, and compete to see who can write the best fake first sentence of the next book we\u2019re reading. The book is Passage to India<\/em>. I write: <\/p>\n