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Now Reading: Lush Life

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times. Richard Price in Schiller's Liquor Bar. His new novel, "Lush Life," is his first since 2003.

via NYTimes, Books:

Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: March 2, 2008

Judy Hudson. Mr. Price in a photograph from 1983. His new novel is set on the Lower East Side.

YOU might not know it to look at him, but the novelist Richard Price has over the years picked up what one of his characters might call some cheddar. He has a house in Gramercy Park and a summer place out on the Island; his work has earned him an Edgar award for television writing, an Academy Award nomination and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. But Mr. Price, who grew up in the Parkside Projects, has shed neither his Bronx accent nor any of his street-smarts.
   

He is still wary, even a little jumpy at times. Walking around the Lower East Side, where his new novel, "Lush Life," is set, he could easily be mistaken for one of the locals. Pale, thin, high-strung, with the baggy eyes of someone who doesn’t get enough sleep, he could even be a guy looking to score a little coke - something Mr. Price admits to doing with regularity back in the '80s. He walks quickly, jokes a lot without smiling much, and, as readers of his books know, has a pitch-perfect mastery of urban speech in all its varieties. He may be the only middle-aged white man in America who can say "True dat" without sounding ridiculous.

Now 58, Mr. Price published his first book, "The Wanderers," set in the blue-collar Bronx of his childhood, when he was just 24 and barely out of Cornell - from which he emerged, he has said, even streetier and more Bronx-sounding than when he began - and the M.F.A. program at Columbia, where his models were Hubert Selby and Lenny Bruce.

He has published steadily every since, eventually turning from more or less autobiographical work to books like "Clockers" and "Freedomland," big, Dickensian novels about the drug trade and life in the projects. He has also written the screenplays for "Clockers," "The Color of Money" (for which he received the Oscar nomination), "Sea of Love" and "Mad Dog and Glory," among other movies, and recently he has written some episodes for the HBO series "The Wire," which won him the Edgar. He's one of a handful of contemporary novelists to work for Hollywood and emerge more or less unscathed.

Like "Clockers" and "Freedomland," "Lush Life" is at its core a thriller or a mystery story - about a holdup ending in a murder. "I tend to like crime for a backbone," Mr. Price said recently. "An investigation will take you through a landscape." The landscape in this case - the subject of the book, really - is the Lower East Side, which Mr. Price depicts as a neighborhood of colliding populations: the few remaining Jewish old-timers; the people from the projects; the La Bohèmers, as he calls them, the trust-fund couples with their M.F.A.'s and videocams; the Chinese immigrants, many of them illegal, who sleep, stacked on shelves, in some of the old tenements.

[read on...]

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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times. Richard Price on Rivington Street (above); Mr. Price on Ludlow Street (below)

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Times Topics: Richard Price

Kimberly Peirce: Stop-Loss

Francois Duhamel/Paramount Pictures. Kimberly Peirce and Ryan Phillippe on the set of "Stop-Loss." More Photos >

via NYTimes, Film:

Phenom Director Goes to War
By KATRINA ONSTAD
Published: March 23, 2008

KIMBERLY PEIRCE talked at double speed and walked faster, cutting through a hotel lobby during an interview, huge strides belying her tiny stature. And yet, while she appeared to be trailed by those little horizontal stripes that indicate a cartoon character's speediness, Ms. Peirce is slow at something: making movies. It has taken her nine years to follow up her much lauded feature debut, "Boys Don’t Cry."

"Yes, I should have made a movie sooner," she said with a deep laugh. "Yes, I should be a lot richer than I am. Mea culpa."

After almost a decade in the Hollywood wilderness trying to find a project that would equal her first film, Ms. Peirce earned just a single directorial credit, for an episode of the television series "The L Word." Now 40, she has a new film called "Stop-Loss," opening Friday, about American soldiers who have served in Iraq. Since November she’s been promoting the movie on an extended road trip to colleges and theaters, hoping to generate buzz for a subject that has yet to seduce audiences, as producers of "In the Valley of Elah" and "Redacted," among others, can attest.

"Stop-Loss" stars Ryan Phillippe as Sgt. Brandon King, a golden boy from small-town Texas who returns home after two tours of duty in Iraq, ready to begin civilian life. But after a hero’s welcome and a Main Street parade, he receives orders to go back.

He is a victim of a stop-loss, the controversial practice that allows the military to retain soldiers who have already fulfilled their terms of service. Sometimes referred to as a back-door draft, stop-loss is a result of a loophole in the contract soldiers sign upon enlisting that permits "involuntary extensions" in the event of a threat to national security.

Ms. Peirce learned about the little-reported practice from her half brother Brett, who joined the Army at 18, immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Speaking of her brother with palpable pride (and straightening her back when saying his name), Ms. Peirce recalled that during his tour in Iraq she would often wake in the night to beeping instant messages from him. When she would ask what he was doing, he'd type back: "You know, the usual: kidnapping, razing houses, stuff like that." Ms. Peirce never knew how literally to take those missives.

By 2005 Ms. Peirce was working on a script about American soldiers, using the title "AWOL," but when her brother told her about friends being sent back for third, fourth and fifth tours of duty, her vision for the project changed.

"We had been struggling because every time we went down the road with a soldier who was like, 'I'm against the war, I don't want to fight,' something died in the script. Whereas if we could stay with a soldier who was severely patriotic and then had a change of heart, but was still conflicted, it was much more interesting," she said. "It's a very different debate than the people who don't want to fight at all."

In "Stop-Loss," Sergeant King, who has seen friends killed and maimed under his command, goes AWOL. He hits the road for Washington, accompanied by his best friend's girlfriend, Michele (played by Abbie Cornish, to whom Mr. Phillippe has been romantically linked in real life). Her fiancé, Steve (Channing Tatum), has returned with a case of post-traumatic stress disorder so severe that he digs a foxhole in his front yard. The film repeatedly circles back to the damaged soldiers' rescuing of one another, in battle and at home.

"When I talked to a wounded soldier who lost his limbs and still wants to go back, he told me, 'It's not the war, it's the men,'" said Ms. Peirce. "That blew my mind. There's this huge desire for camaraderie and male bonding."

That quest for intimacy is the only obvious link between "Stop-Loss" and "Boys Don't Cry," a love story based on the real life of Brandon Teena, a Nebraska woman living as a man who was raped and murdered in a grisly betrayal. A short version of Teena’s story was Ms. Peirce’s film school graduate thesis at Columbia in 1995. By the time she completed the feature in 1999, she had been researching Teena for five years. That indie, shot on a shoestring budget of $2 million, gobbled critical awards and turned Hilary Swank from a "Beverly Hills, 90210" bit player into an Academy Award-winner. It also propelled Ms. Peirce out of obscurity and into a realm of unmanageable expectations.

"I had given everything to that movie," Ms. Peirce said. "I was exhausted, and I got offered millions of dollars, many different movies. But it's like starting to run before you're ready to run. You're still the same. You're looking for emotional truth in your directing, but you’re dealing with 20 times more people, 20 times more money. People are looking at every stage of your process. How did I make 'Boys'? Well, I picked up a camera and just went and did it."

[read on...]

Obama's Speech on Race: Milestone and Antidote

Barack Obama at the National Constitution Center. (Photo: Alex Brandon/Associated Press)

via http://my.barackobama.com/hisownwords :

Video and transcript of speech

via Generalistgrant, 3/18/08:

Obama's Philadelphia Speech Marks Milestone in American Politics

Drawing on his half-black, half-white roots as no other presidential hopeful could, Obama asserted: "This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected."

PHILADELPHIA - (AP) - Democratic Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday tried to stem damage from divisive comments delivered by his pastor, while bluntly addressing anger between blacks and whites in the most racially pointed speech yet of his presidential campaign. Obama confronted America's legacy of racial division head on, tackling black grievance, white resentment and the uproar over his former pastor’s incendiary statements.

Obama expressed understanding of the passions on both sides in what he called "a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races," he said in a speech at the National Constitution Center, not far from where the Declaration of Independence was adopted.

Obama rarely talks so openly about his race in such a prominent way, but his speech covered divisions from slavery to the O.J. Simpson trial to the recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina. He also recognized his race has been a major issue in the campaign that has taken a "particularly divisive turn" in the last few weeks as video of his longtime pastor spread on the Internet and on television.

via The Caucus, NYTimes Political Blog:

March 18, 2008,  10:14 am
Obama's Speech on Race
By Katharine Q. Seelye

11:50 a.m. From Kate Phillips: One of the more interesting comparisons Mr. Obama made in his speech reflected the highly pitched racial overtones of the last few weeks. In mentioning Geraldine Ferraro’'s comments that the success of his candidacy was only because he was black, and also parrying whether a surrogate of his opponent - Hillary Rodham Clinton - was helping her play the race card, Mr. Obama seemed to be trying to level the playing field between the criticisms he’s received for Mr. Wright’s comments and those that have been flung at him.

"And I suppose the politically safe thing to do would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro in the aftermath of her recent statements as harboring some deep-seated bias."

He invoked these instances even as he urged Americans to put an end to racially divisive politics.

We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.

We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies. We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction, and then another one, and then another one. And nothing will change.

[...]

11:27 a.m. Mr. Obama is delivering a sweeping discourse on race in America. He is getting a very warm and positive response from the audience, with murmurs of agreement at each new passage and an increase in applause as he builds toward the end. Audience members are nodding their heads at each other.

"I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election," he said.

One of the most powerful passages was when he spoke of Reverend Wright: "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love."

11:20 a.m. Mr. Obama says that, "The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old - is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know - what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation."

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Transcript of Obama's speech (via NYTimes)

Theory

via:

Keith Olbermann: Special Comment on Hillary Clinton

Here it is, perhaps what you were waiting for, via YouTube...

...and the transcript, via Inspired Voter - Thoughts from the Trenches:

The transcript from MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann:
Finally, as promised, a Special Comment on the presidential campaign of the Junior Senator from New York.
By way of necessary preface, President and Senator Clinton — and the Senator’s mother, and the Senator’s brother — were of immeasurable support to me at the moments when these very commentaries were the focus of the most surprise, the most uncertainty, and the most anger. My gratitude to them is abiding.Also, I am not here endorsing Senator Obama’s nomination, nor suggesting it is inevitable.

Thus I have fought with myself over whether or not to say anything.
Senator, as it has reached its apex in their tone-deaf, arrogant, and insensitive reaction to the remarks of Geraldine Ferraro… your own advisers are slowly killing your chances to become President.

Senator, their words, and your own, are now slowly killing the chances for any Democrat to become President.
In your tepid response to this Ferraro disaster, you may sincerely think you are disenthralling an enchanted media, and righting an unfair advance bestowed on Senator Obama.

You may think the matter has closed with Representative Ferraro’s bitter, almost threatening resignation.
But in fact, Senator, you are now campaigning, as if Barack Obama were the Democrat, and you were the Republican.
As Shakespeare wrote, Senator — that way.. madness lies.

You have missed a critical opportunity to do… what was right.
No matter what Ms. Ferraro now claims, no one took her comments out of context.
She had made them on at least three separate occasions, then twice more on television this morning.
Just hours ago, on NBC Nightly News, she denied she had made the remarks in an interview — only at a paid political speech.
In fact, the first time she spoke them, was ten days before the California newspaper published them… not in a speech, but in a radio interview.

On February 26th, quoting…
“If Barack Obama were a white man, would we be talking about this, as a potential real problem for Hillary? If he were a woman of any color, would he be in this position that he’s in? Absolutely not.”
The context was inescapable.
[read full transcript]