American Splendor: Harvey Pekar and the Splendor that was Cleveland
American Splendor
Harvey Pekar and the Splendor that was Cleveland
by Henry Edward Hardy
American Splendor is the story of Harvey Pekar, a file clerk and down-market intellectual from the east side of Cleveland, Ohio. He is also the schlubby hero of his own comic, and the multifarious protagonist of his own movie. Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, American Splendor (2003) is a sweet, funny film about a cynical, good-hearted loser and his idiosyncratic friends and family.
I had read that this film involved a combination of the real Harvey Pekar, dramatizations of the comic and still frames by various artists. I expected the movie to be incoherent, pretentious, arty and boring. Having lived in Cleveland Heights, Ohio in the ’60s and ’70s, I anticipated the depiction of Cleveland would be a phony, cheap satire.
Surprisingly, American Splendor is brilliant. The transitions between cartoon frames, the understated acting of Paul Giamatti, and the real Pekar, work wonderfully. The result is like a moving Kandinsky montage, a collision of disparate elements that nonetheless combine with the spaces between them to make a harmonious whole. The location shots are true to life and the gritty urban scenes made me downright homesick for Cleveland in the ’70s. And any movie that makes you homesick for Cleveland in the ’70s is a brilliant film.
Pekar worked as a hospital file clerk and as a music critic on the side. The music of American Splendor underlines Pekar’s love of jazz and his massive jazz record collection. Harvey Pekar is the loveable, acerbic, intellectual, grouchy yet well-meaning lower-white-collar guy that Woody Allen always wanted to be.
American Splendor is also a love story. It is a story about Pekar’s affair and somewhat functional marriage with his third wife, Joyce Brabner. American Splendor is about making a life among the urban decay of post-industrial Cleveland. The film celebrates all the people who don’t fit in, the misfits, artists and non-conformists. It is an uplifting story about a miserable, gloomy guy who has no life as we know it. Pekar is a modern Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce, an apostle for the common man.
If your life sucks, if you are a nerd or quasi-autistic, if you have bad luck or no luck at all — or if you have a sense of humor that always carries you through, see American Splendor.
American Spendor (IMDB)
American Spendor (wikipedia)
American Spendor (Rotten Tomatoes)
A version of this article appeared previously in Current Magazine and on Electric Current
Copyright © 2006, 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
James Risen’s compelling book, State of War
James Risen’s Compelling
State of War,
The Secret History Of The C.I.A. And The Bush Administration
by Henry Edward Hardy
State of War, (Free Press, 2006) is the bestselling expose of the Bush administration’s manipulations of the U.S. intelligence community. In State of War, New York Times national security reporter James Risen accuses the George W. Bush administration of massaging intelligence to support their post-9/11 political agenda.
Risen has written one-ninth of a blockbuster book about the CIA and the Bush administration. That is to say, one of the nine chapters has spawned a continuing national controversy and talk of impeaching George W. Bush. Curiously, the no-less explosive material in the rest of the book has been met with resounding silence by the mainstream American media.
Risen’s most resounding charge is that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has engaged in widespread and systematic surveillance within the United States in contravention of the law.
According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978:
“A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally —
(1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute; or
(2) discloses or uses information obtained under color of law by electronic surveillance, knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through electronic surveillance not authorized by statute.”
The imminent publication of Risen’s book caused The New York Times to reveal that it had known of, and suppressed, news of warrantless National Security Agency surveillance of Americans for a year. In a Times story on Dec. 16, 2005 titled, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” Risen and co-author Eric Lichtblau revealed that the NSA, under direction from the Bush administration, had engaged in widespread violations of the FISA law by engaging in warrantless surveillance of Americans.
The reason The New York Times waited so long to run the NSA eavesdropping story remains murky. In a New Year’s Day column titled, “Behind the Eavesdropping Story, a Loud Silence,” the Times Public Editor, Brian Calame wrote, “For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making,” leaving both Mr. Calame and the public to wonder what machinations underlay the year-long hold on the story and the subsequent decision to publish.
The NSA program was fueled by concern that foreign calls routed through the U.S. were not being monitored because of the probable cause stipulation under FISA. But once the “back door” capability was in place at the major telecommunications hubs, the program expanded to include calls in which one, and sometimes both callers were physically within the U.S. In the absence of any congressional or judicial oversight, there must be tremendous temptation to listen first, and seek a warrant later if at all. The implications of such widespread illegality raises a number of questions. Have we seen the beginnings of an electronic police state such as was envisaged in George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World ?
Risen recounts a fascinating story of 30 relatives of people who were known to have had a role in Iraq’s pre-1991 nuclear bomb effort. Recruited by the CIA before the Iraq war to investigate their relatives’ knowledge of alleged WMDs, all 30, according to Risen, returned from Iraq with the same message: the programs had been shut down and the personnel mothballed.
What Risen does not provide is evidence. Much of the book has the odor of sour grapes from CIA, FBI and State Department lifers who have been run over or shunted aside by the gun-happy Vice President Dick Cheney. For more in this vein the curious reader might consult Imperial Hubris by Anonymous, as well as former Bush counter-terror czar Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies.
The allegations in State of War deserve a full public inquiry. If true, then the republic stands at a crisis, having fallen into the hands of fools and/or traitors. On the other hand, if false, then these accusations deserve to be discredited and laid to rest. Either way, one should read this book in order to gain a clearer perspective on what these charges against the administration are and how much or how little evidence there is to support them.
A version of this review was previously published in Current Magazine and at eCurrent.com.
State of War (Metacritic)
James Risen (wikipedia)
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Federation of American Scientists)
Behind the Eavesdropping Story, a Loud Silence. New York Times, January 1, 2006.
Copyright © 2006, 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
Harold Pinter receives Legion D’Honneur
…Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.
We did it.
Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.
American Football
Harold Pinter
Radical playwright and poet Harold Pinter has received the high honor of the French Legion D’Honneur from French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. de Villepin was quoted by BBC as praising Pinter’s poem, American Football: With its violence and its cruelty, it is for me one of the most accurate images of war, one of the most telling metaphors of the temptation of imperialism and violence. Pinter was the winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature.
American Football
French PM honours Harold Pinter (BBC)
Harold Pinter (wikipedia)
Art, Truth and Politics, Pinter’s Nobel lecture (text and video)
HaroldPinter.org
Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
Deconstructing Bush’s Iraq Speech
Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has done in the New York Times website a fine job of deconstructing and refuting President George W. Bush’s manipulative and propagandistic Iraq speech of January 10, 2007.
Bush’s Iraq Plan, Between the Lines
Iraq Plan, Between the Lines (interactive)
Anthony Cordesman profile
Center for Strategic and International Studies
President’s Address to the Nation
Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
“Control Room” Delivers Some Bitterly Ironic Retrospection
Control Room
Delivers Some Bitterly Ironic Retrospection
by Henry Edward Hardy
If 2004 was The Year of the Documentary, then Control Room, Jehane Noujaim’s film on the independent Arab News channel, Al-Jazeera, ranks among the best. Control Room tells the story of the network and the early days of the Iraq War through the eyes of Jazeera reporter Hassan Ibrahim, senior producer Samir Khader and U.S. spokesperson Lieutenant Josh Rushing.
Khader makes penetrating points about the climate of fear perpetuated inside the U.S. by the Administration, and both he and Ibrahim express substantial (and warranted) skepticism about Iraq’s mythical weapons of mass destruction.
“Pulverized. Dead bodies en masse — and why? We get these pictures and we show them. Unfortunately we get grief from the Americans who say we are inciting rebellion, instigating anti-American sentiments. They cannot have their cake and eat it,” says Ibrahim.
Lt. Rushing is a surprisingly appealing figure in the film, genuinely troubled by many of the inconsistencies between the war as he is told to present it and the feedback and questions presented by foreign press such as Jazeera.
The film shows powerfully how both Al-Jazeera and western coverage are manipulated by reporters, producers, governments and public opinion. We see how the iconic footage of the statue of Saddam being toppled was the result of a U.S. “Psyops” (psychological operations) battalion’s efforts and not a spontaneous uprising of the Iraqi people.
We see civilian casualties, simple homes of simple people. A woman stands in front of a house with its front blown off and shouts, “Welcome to my house, Mr. Bush. Look at this! Don’t you have any humanity? How can you accept a little girl crying for her mom and dad?”
We then cut to U.S. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, explaining, “What they do is when a bomb goes down, they grab some children, and some women, and pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children,” Rumsfeld continues with a death’s-head, rictus-like grin. “To the extent that people lie, ultimately they are caught lying. They lose their credibility. And one would think that that wouldn’t take long dealing with people like this.”
Viewing the film now is informed by subsequent revelations. One cannot help a bitter smile at the irony and self-serving hypocrisy of Bush when he says he expects Iraq to treat U.S. captives humanely and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, as he asserts, the U.S. treats its captives.
Control Room is available on DVD and VHS and for rental from local video stores.
A version of this article was previously published in Current Magazine and on Electric Current, http://www.eCurrent.com .
Control Room (IMDB)
Control Room (Rotten Tomatoes)
Control Room (wikipedia)
Copyright © 2005, 2006, 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
About Scanlyze
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
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