http://www.iesb.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3789&Itemid=99

Actors are expensive these days. You can't always afford ones who can sing and act at the same time.

No Country For Old Men

What will follow here will be an unapologetic sermon on the beauty, brilliance and importance (yes, importance) of both the Coen Brothers' movie "No Country for Old Men" and the Cormac McCarthy novel on which it is based. You have been forewarned.

The best political tracts, I think, are the ones that don't immediately register as political. Shanley's "Doubt" is a prime example. Without evoking the names of any presidents or generals or sandy foreign cities, Shanley cuts straight to the center of the American political atmosphere. We're right and they're wrong? Do you really believe that? And what if you don't? And, come to think of it, what if you do? That play speaks more to the American experience in the Iraq War years than any five plays which point out weak correlations between the War in Iraq and, say, the dropping of the A-bomb or, I don't know, the Athenian war with the Corinthians (I have actually read that play).

I've just finished Cormac McCarthy's novel, and, sitting here, I have an image from the Coen Brothers' adaptation burned into my mind. For those who haven't seen the movie, avert your eyes for a sentence or two: it's the ultimate image in the movie. Ed Tom Bell, erstwhile rough-and-tumble Texas sherrif, now retired and listless, haunted by his defeat at the hands of a killer he can neither catch nor name nor picture, sits at his breakfast table and recounts a dream in which his father passes him in the darkness, carrying fire in a horn to camp somewhere ahead. Ed Tom finishes, "And then I wake up." And for a moment, Tommy Lee Jones channels a feeling of pure, innocent confusion and a look of desolate desperation comes to his face, a look which is so potent that it honestly moves something within me to bring it to mind.

Here, Cormac McCarthy, writing in 2005, and the Coen Brothers, directing a movie this year, capture a feeling which is so distinctly American and distinctly of our time that it stirs a powerful feeling of sad recognition in me. Ed Tom Bell is a man who has built his life on the strict adherence to rules, but, when confronted with an entity that doesn't fit into those rules, in fact runs totally counter to his entire world view, his sense of security disappears and he is shaken so badly that he quits his life and runs for cover. Of course, there's no comfort in that either.

Does that feel familiar to anyone else? Does anyone else feel like we are being of disillusionment. We make rules. We set boundaries and guidelines. We establish a view of the way the world is. And does it scare anybody else (and I'm trying to be honest here) to think about what would happen if you suddenly realized that the world was absolutely not the way you thought it was. If your views were totally obsoleted? If your innocence was even slightly pulled away? How confused and disoriented and lost and helpless would you feel?

I think we all have some idea of how we would feel. And in that fact is the brilliance of McCarthy's work and the Coen Brothers' adaptation of it. Our world has become a place of no moral absolutes. Of no perfect rules. It's a cliche to talk about the loss of American innocence, but I think we all feel it. We don't know who to trust. The world has become more complicated than even I (at 23) thought that it could. We've got a war that nobody seems to understand, being orchestrated with no transparency or accountability. We receive a constant flow of information about it. Everywhere. Credible information? Who knows? We are talked at by a thousand different people a day, people with different perspectives and agendas and loyalties. Can we trust the people who are supposedly working in our best interest? Can we trust the people who are supposed to be protecting us? Is there anywhere to understand what is really going on in the world, or has the whole situation become so massively huge and infinitely tangled that no one person could ever hope to see the whole picture, let alone unravel it enough to form a thesis about it, or even to be able to really and adequately explain it in the way that we need -- we NEED -- for it to be explained to us. Will we ever really understand our world?

It sounds fogeyish to write like this. To say that things have gotten out of control. But, I don't think I'm even saying that. I'm just saying, basically and honestly, that I don't understand them. Really. And that... scares me? Frustrates me? Bothers me, at any rate. Bothers a lot of people. I don't think that the world was always like this. I mean, of course it's never been just like this, but I don't think that things were always this confusing, people this untrustworthy, information so ubiquitous, the world so ungraspable.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that you don't get much further from Ed Tom Bell than Alex Barron. He's a retired Texan sherriff and WWII veteran and I'm a 23-year-old theatre intern who's never serious entertained the notion of fighting for his country. And yet, I totally understand how he feels. I feel it myself. And I think -- or at least I wonder if -- other people do, too.

Now tell me that these feelings stirred up in me are not the mark of a work which speaks to the mind of the moment. The political mind. Tell me that the book and the movie that inspired these feelings don't provide more stirring political insight than any cable news special or Iraq War jeremiad. People should read the book, should see these movie, and maybe question something within themselves I think that's about the best way to encourage thought, to foster questions, and to connect with a work of (I groan to finish this idiom) art.

So, to recap. Bravo, Cormac McCarthy. Bravo, Joel and Ethan Coen.

Thanksgiving

I think I ate more food today than I've seen in the past three months. But, Thanksgiving isn't just about eating most of a turkey and falling asleep at the table. It's also about giving thanks. So, a quick list of things I'm thankful for.

1) That, after 23 years on this earth, I still possess a largely healthy and largely functional body.

2) That a year in Austin didn't totally eradicate my ability to think.

3) That I spend most of my time doing something that I a) care about, b) am good at and c) feel like I have a future in.

4) That I continue to be surrounded by a group of people who generally treat me at least as well as I treat them, and sometimes much much better.

5) That my luck, or whatever it is that determines how random situations play themselves out, tends, on the whole, to be good.

Those were the first five things that came to me, so they must be the five things that I'm most thankful for right at this moment. It's good to take a moment to sort out things like this. I should do it more often.

The walls of my apartment are pretty thin, so I can hear my neighbors pretty well when they're, say, having sex. But, let me tell you, when those neighbors are screaming and playing the bongos at two o'clock in the morning, I may as well be trying to sleep inside their apartment.

Oh, incidentally, they clearly aren't trained percussionists. I say this because, after listening to them for about ten minutes, I can't help but notice that their beatz ain't shit.