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Recently released on Netflix is “Playing Shakespeare,” a program that aired on PBS in America in the early 80’s. The series features John Barton, director, and his cast of thespians from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Many of us will recognize X-Men heavyweights Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, British luminaries like Judi Dench and Ben Kingsley, as well as a host of other actors of note.

Barton will set up an aspect of performing Shakespeare and call forth the performers to illustrate the concept under discussion. Occasionally other actors of the company toss in observations and methodological notes. In that capacity the actor Alan Howard had come to notice as a particularly reserved if not nebbishly. In his collar and sweater and large brown plastic frames he was almost reminiscent of a mid-career Jarvis Cocker.

But then Mr. Howard was called forth to demonstrate his solicitation to the widow of his slain enemy, Queen Anne, in the guise of Richard III. Free of smoldering cigarette and spectacles the camera comes in on a tight close-up of another man: his body was crouched, his eyes glinted with malice, and his tonguue turned into a triangle, like an arrow’s point. He hobbled, crab like to his quarry and professed his love.

While this was noticable, the moment of truth is that the lady Anne spits on Richard, square in the face and Howard betrayed no wince, no flinch as her saliva sat fat on his face. Oddly, his eyes seemed to burn slightly brighter, this facial defilement being nothing but a mere annoyance on the hatiching of his plan.

He was stunning to watch.

In any case, the show, thus far, has been a joy to watch and I recommend it.

Let me leave with a review of Howard’s performance in this role:

Alan Howard’s Richard must surely rank among the few truly outstanding interpretations of this fascinating and exacting role seen during the last decade or so.

This Richard, the very epitome of bitter malevolence, heaves and wrestles his twisted body about a dark cavern of a stage, his vicious tongue as sharp and menacing as the dagger that is rarely far from his hand, and with which he points his vicious verbal barbs.

His mind as twisted as the body he so loathes and resents, he weaves his verbal spells around his victims with the cunning of a snake and the devilish impishness of a medieval Quilp.

From: http://www.alanhoward.org.uk/richard3.htm

Tom Friedman, the walrus-mustachio’d NY Times columnist and pundit, that frequent guest of the void of Charlie Rose’s studio, the author of the World is Flat, The Olive Branch and the Lexus, and countless — if my friend Alfredo Garcia IV is to be believed — howlers of rhetoric, reminded me in his article this Sunday of an acute talent of his. He has the ability to distill the political payload of a complex topic fit it in a single construct of a subject, verb, and a concluding period.

It has been a long established problem with the communications plans of the Democrats that, unlike the Republicans, their nuanced messages simply do not distill succinctly to a bumper-sticker platform. Want to know what Republicans (pace amici, I differentiate between Republicans and Conservatives) stand for? Try this out:

Traditional Values. Low Taxes. Small Government. Strong military.

Guiding, succinct, and can fit easily with room to spare on the back of your Tahoe. Try that with a Democratic stance. Take, say, the particularly thorny issue of gay marriage. The Republican formulation is “TRADITIONAL VALUES,” leaving it pretty clear that their platform is a “No” on that one. But what’s the Democratic stance? “Well, we note that the objective fact is that marriage is a ceremony performed on top of a civil recognition of the granting of a marriage license, so in fact no one really has a marriage. You technically have a civil union whose paperwork is signed by an officiant with a state-recognized right so to do, but who also, in many cases, is a representative of a religious order…”. Undoubtedly someone who considers the matter could be led to the same point of view, but who’s, honestly, going to stay awake that long or fight their gut response long enough to allow their mind to be changed? If the R’s can put their platform on a bumper sticker, the D’s would have to print it on police tape and wrap it around their Prius nine times.

Ergo, match made in heaven. Tom could give the D’s the succinctness to, as the rhetorical scholar Foghorn J. Leghorn once said, “Spit it out, Son!”

Case in point, in the article dated 23 January 2010, Friedman gives these one-liners:

” What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again.

• Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America.”

• The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. (bene scriptu!)

• Without inventing more new products and services that make people more productive, healthier or entertained — that we can sell around the world — we’ll never be able to afford the health care our people need, let alone pay off our debts.

• You want more good jobs, spawn more Steve Jobs.

It helps that I agree with Friendman’s conclusion: Grow America by business and communities organizing together to create commercial successes. It’s pretty much the pat Silicon Valley liberal / independent software hacker mantra.

Diabolical Plan

1. The greatest “Tonight Show” presenter ever was Johnny Carson
2. Conan gets the axe because NBC sucks and he will go somewhere else
3. Jay has ruined audience goodwill and “The Tonight Show” will fail spectacularly
4. Jimmy Fallon will have a “tragic accident”
5. Carson Daly will be left the lone man standing

Check and Mate, sir

Proof

They’re both named “Carson” for a reason.

Marla… the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it, but you can’t.

From “Fight Club”

There are those people, those special, special people who as much as you find reason(s) to be repelled by them — their boorish talk, their penchant for racist assumptions, the way they treat special moments of your life as a roadbump on the way to saying what they wanted to say, the way they indiscreetly ogle women as you talk to them — somehow you just can’t excise their cancerous character from your life.

You damn them when you go home: “I can’t believe she said that, that snarky bitch” or “Did you see him talk the entire time to her D-cups?” and yet somehow, someway they fascinate us with their disregard for the rules. I’m pretty sure this has something to do with the power psyochpaths have among the general population, as an aside.

Making the curiosity cocktail all the more potent, occasionally, amidst all that slovenliness or booziness or smacking of gum or incessant smoking, is a silver beam of heroism, brilliance, style, or sex appeal that casts a glamour on you. “She donated how much to the children?” or “He saved the old lady by rushing her in his arms to the ER?”

You question your assumptions and hold on to a crumb of hope that they were really more like this good person and less like that hideous being you dislike. If only you could get more of that good quality and less of the other. Perhaps the only solution is to hang around them more so that you can see these great qualities. Yes, that’s right.

…And then that Jeckyll side comes back out and they infuriate and disappoint you anew.

I don’t know what the DSM-IV specification for this type of personality is, or what the specification is for the sucker who is mesmerized thereby, but it describes my relationship with the œuvre of Ayn Rand. She beguiles and then revolts me with a one-two rhythm befitting unto windshield wipers.

She has a seductive way of writing about the poetry of the industrial age. She describes coke being blasted in industrial funaces, burning crucibles of steel pouring golden, flaming liquified power as (handsome!) men in hard hats look on — square-jawed and draped in the sartorial perfection of the “Mad Men” era. And these titans, these thinkers, these doers, these über-beings bearing strong names like Howard, Dominique, and Dagny, they do great things and bend before nothing. They pay no mind to sycophants or reputation, they do what’s right by their own measure for their own benefit and don’t let any morality of bad faith “Bad faith (existentialism) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”) slow the locomotive of their own genius. Reading of their lives and their passionate existences can run a reader to the top of a lofty peak where s/he inhales pure air and see the sunrise of a better tomorrow.

But for these visions and vistas, for imagining Angelina Jolie as Dagny in “Mad Men” garb in the mini-series version, you may almost miss the philosophical system underneath that has some uncomfortable ends. State-run hospitals for, as Rand called them, “sub-normals” should be shut down. In her portrayals, female sexual fulfillment necessarily borders on hero-worship and effectively calls for her to seek to be overpowered. And those living through these contracting economic times certainly have reason to pause at Rand’s philosophy’s suggestion that a more deregulated economy is needed.

Like Marla from “Fight Club” cited above, in my teens I couldn’t shake this (sick?) fascination with Rand’s world. This lead to reading Rand’s non-fiction work and reading Barbara Branden’s memoir “The Passion of Ayn Rand.” Like an overoptimistic girlfriend, I thought that perhaps by understanding Rand’s history better I could find a way to get rid of those nasty bits and have her poetry without the nausea.

If anything, the biography made it harder to tolerate Rand’s reasoning lived as her own life. She would not give up smoking until she had lung cancer owing to “lack of sufficient evidence.” She forced her husband and her protégé’s wife to accept a open affair (I believe that’s called “open marriage” these-a-days) between her and the protégé, Nathaniel Branden. In later years, Her YouTube videos show a harsh, severe person who’s tolerance for dissent is non-existent and whose favorite tools for debate were refusal to engage, weeding out dissenting parties, and Soviet-style “disownments.” Amidst these character assassinations and purges she radiates a Nixonian aura of paranoia.

When I heard that a new Rand biography was in release I again felt that urge to visit Rand-land and see if an intrepid researcher had somehow found something that could make it all hang together for me. Heller’s biography is well-researched, revealing, and entirely compelling. Heller starts with Rand’s youth in Russia, where she sees the collapse of the Tsar, the rise of Kerensky, and the Bolshevik authoritarian crackdown and takeover. Heller also gives full consideration to Rand, née Rosenbaum’s Jewish identity. Her father’s business was seized by the Bolsheviks and she had to endure the debilitating “tolerance” edicts that ghettoized and marginalized Jews and generally used them as a source of money when the Tsar’s coffers ran light. Heller’s research into Rand’s mother (“a little bit pink”), a social climber and Communist collaborator explains the callow, infantilizing mother character so often present in Rand’s work. Rand’s female role model exploration is paired with an examination of the roots of her masculine paragon. Rand’s sexual / heroic / intellectual male protagonists (in Rand’s thought the intellectual man is the sexual ideal and is never separate from his own sense of heroism) derive from her favorite teenage books: French picaresques where dashing Western Europeans subjugate voodoo powers in darkest Africa, darkest India, or in the wastes of the lands of The Great Game. These facets of a tumultuous childhood full of idealistic reasoning and hero-identification help explain some of the wooden, absolutist characterization seen in her novels.

Heller’s research also presents how Rand was the benificiary of altruistic kindness of others. This is decidedly against the Rand ur-myth. Rand’s relatives in America shelter her, help her out, and provide her some of the opportunities that give her the chance encounters that net her a career in screenwriting. While it’s important to note that Rand never had anything handed to her and her own spark and initiative certainly were the core personality traits that allowed her to advance, she did not do it in a vacuum, an orphan struggling entirely unaided.

Heller’s presentation of the intellectual content of We the Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged all provide a fair synopsis of the philosophical underpinnings of the books and Heller deftly identifies and traces the thread of “a Romantic ‘sense of life’” that Rand considered the basis for living well and thinking clearly. Heller cogently presents this system and manages to do so without sounding awed or pronouncedly skeptical. She describes these ethical systems with the neutrality of someone explaining a catalytic converter and her restraint and balance is to be lauded.

After the zenith of Atlas Shrugged’s publication, the rest of the tale is anticlimax. The superstar, the public intellectual begins to be surrounded by sycophants and intellectual hollow men. Before long they make a world around her where everyone walks on eggshells, everyone agrees with She Who Must be Obeyed, and dissenters are cut loose of their social support system as a punishment for invoking her ire. While I’ll stop short of calling it a “cult,” the occasional insistence of breaking family ties, leaving spouses, or being forced to tolerate the sexual infidelities (“Hey there, Bob, Larry there is Suzy’s romantic ideal, so, uh, can you arrange to be home late on Thursday night? Don’t worry, it’s not infidelity, it’s her being true to her Romantic sense of life. Mm’kay?”) definitely shows a dangerous insularity.

It was only when I considered this third act that I understood Heller meant “the world [Rand] made” not as the world of the aspiring, selfish individualist portrayed in her writing, but the world of hollow toadies and purges. The world she made, indeed.

But where did this leave me in my quest to attempt to sort out this maddening woman’s writing? Heller helped me find roots in her thinking, continuity in her actions, and helped me see the person more as the person in herself minus the reverential apologia of the remnants of her circle. Rand was brave and right in many ways. She correctly limned Communism’s philosophical implications, she decried racism (as uncaptalistic!), she dared be an open atheist, she portrayed strong female protagonists more interested in careers than suburbs with children and iceboxes in the 40’s, she was pro-choice, and she dared bring discussions of “rougher” sexual desire to the popular mind in some ways heralding the identity politics coming in the 70’s and 80’s. But she was also a real, vital, person. A person who cherished rationality so dearly that the hint that she was irrational was a slap to the face. She was a person who clung so tightly to the syllogism that she couldn’t see her blind spots. She overused amphetamines. In short, she was a person of her times, a times a contradictory mess.

Accordingly her works reflect this person. The works are both sublime and horrific, hopeful and cynical, egalitarian and oligarchaïc. I think perhaps time and Heller have made it more easy for me to accept that beautiful work can have ugly side-effects and brilliant people can have tragic flaws. If anything, Heller presents us Rand in full human-scale relief, and I think the young Rand would have very much appreciated that.