Two new poems from Simone. And a fragment.

(Simone continues to spontaneously create poems. Her features turn a bit strange when she’s doing it, as if she’s channeling the words. A new Yeats? We only have a fragment of the third, as she said this while riding on the bike with Beth. The first isn’t much to speak of, but the second? She’s on to something. Here and here are her earlier poems. One more thing: except for a few cartoons, she hasn’t seen any vampires, yet she seems oddly obsessed with them.)

1.

Vampires and ghosts were all over the world.

Nobody has seen them at all.

I have seen more people than vampires or ghosts.

But nobody has seen vampires and ghosts at all.

I think people would be frightened to see vampires.

2.

Kaboom.

Lightning and thunder came long, long ago.

Snakes came slithering.

It’s the king snake of the king.

tiny, tiny, tiny.

ting, ting, ting.

Bells are ringing in the church.

Sing, sing, sing of dead people coming out of the ground.

3.

Diamonds flickering

from the end of a cave

locked with silver and gold.

wild beasts . . .

Nobody has seen

that you are just made of dirt.

Interlude 4: Simone’s second poem

(Simone continues to dictate poems to Beth. She did one in the car today, titled “Quiet Streets in London.” “Quiet street is sad, but London is happy!” she said. And no, she’s never been to London. Or seen anything about it. Anyway, this is her second poem, dictated right after her first. Meanwhile, I’ve been limping through my writing life the last few days. I’ve finished a new section of Brotherhood of the Eye, gone through a second draft, and I suppose I should start a third revision of The Taunting Light, and I want to write some short stories—I have five or six killer ideas—but I can’t seem to harness the will. Enjoy.)

“A Winter Poem”

Trees were falling like leaves.

people were made of stone.

everyone was beautifully made of stars and pink feathers.

everyone had beautiful, nice mothers.

vampires set pink cakes and flowers on the table, set for dinner with eggs and cheese.

everyone was so glad to have a nice, warm, healthy dinner.

everyone was so glad to see the warm, nice sun.

spiders were beautiful trampolines.

peaople were really, really pink, and they had red foreheads.

and Rumblebuffins. giants.

clocks clarmed and ding-a-linged.

everyone had flowers with sparkles, diamond glitters.

everyone was so focussed on what they were making for dinner.

giants were wobbling around having delicious dinner and buying stuff at the food store.

people have beautiful lives in their hearts.

Interlude 3: Simone’s first poem!

(Beth overheard Simone free-styling this morning, and asked Simone to dictate the poem while Beth wrote down everything she said. It’s her first poem. She’s calling it “A Fall Poem,” and it’s dynamite. Beth didn’t alter any of her words or thoughts, and neither did I. We don’t read her much poetry, at all, and we don’t tend to recite verse out loud. She dictated two more to Beth over the course of the day. So, dear believers, they’ll be more to come.)

 

A Fall Poem

 

eyes were like diamonds.

vampires were dreadful of cake on the table.

everyone was made to stone.

tables were beautiful pink diamonds on a skirt.

people were made to be fun, to be a monster.

everyone had eyes on Wyoming.

people were beautiful class.

everyone was being a human life.

people were coming to dreadful.

everyone had cats who died.

dogs barked at gates.

everyone had eyes on books that were torn.

paper had eyes on books that you couldn’t read,

books about New York City.

your shirt is made of stars and pink ribbons.

roses were beautifully made in a garden.

falling leaves were made of orange and red and yellow and green.

kitty cats played with Hello Kitty.

vampires set cake on a table for them to eat.

pigges said oink, oink.

skeletons were made of sugar.

books were made of beautiful pink pieces of paper.

 

Simone and Pearl and the Power Cosmic!, part 8: Into the Jump Zone.

1.

The plan is complex. First, pick up a gift for the birthday girl. Second, eat something, drink some coffee at home, while getting the girls ready. Third, drive the thirty-minutes to Jump Zone. Fourth, watch the girls have fun, and stave off any tears. Fifth, keep the girls awake on the journey home. Sixth, don’t shoot self out of self-pitying distress. Seventh, get Pearl down for nap, and maybe Simone. Eighth, rouse girls in time for Dolphin Tale 2. Ninth, repeat number six. Tenth, make it home in time to make a nice dinner with feeble contents of fridge. Eleventh, feed girls with minimum complaining. Twelfth, get girls in pajamas, brush their teeth, read books with their mama, and to bed. Thirteenth, avoid feeling guilty about another night without a bath. Fourteenth, try to grab some enjoyment once girls are asleep. fifteenth, sleep thyself.

This is the plan. And like all plans, almost every step of it will fail.

2.

We head up Lincoln. Traffic is light. I listen to a Gospel/Funk compilation for a while and then switch to U2’s War and October. I loved them both when I was thirteen. I try to listen with fresh ears, but I can’t. I only hear summer time and creative loafing. There’s that doubling feeling when listening to music you loved as a child. I find myself singing along. I remember all the words, despite the passage of 20+ years.

I glance back. Pearl is asleep. Plans already awry. She’s like me; if she falls asleep for even a few minutes she can’t sleep later on. I resist despair. Simone is asleep too. I focus on U2. My mind drifts to In the Name of the Father, which is sort of odd, and my college teammates from Trinidad and England, which is odder.

We arrive at Jump Zone with a giant blue sign. The girls are still asleep. I park the car. I wake the girls and hustle them inside. They take off their shoes while I sign a waiver.

Jump Zone is an enormous hangar filled with airwalks of various design. Above me, a thousand lost balloons hang from the metal rafters, looking like teary lost dreams in rainbow kaleidoscope.

There are running children everywhere. The Twilight Zone analogy is obvious, but that’s what I think of first.

The men all have bellies and the women are all trying to stave off that dumpy suburban look. Simone latches onto a group of children. Pearl wanders on her own. The inflatable rides—a giant alligator, race cars, a pirate ship, the Justice League, and the goddamn ubiquitous princess castle—jiggle beneath the feet of all the happy children. The parents congregate in the middle of the place, chatting about their children. The carpet beneath them swirls in multi-colored spirals. Arena rock plays on loud speakers over the sound of whooshing fans.

Now Jimmy Buffet. Now Queen. Now Journey. And now Journey again. I wait for R.E.O. Speedwagon or .38 Special, but they never come on.

The walls are mustard yellow. (Now Michael Jackson; the music is all from my youth.) The swirling carpet the people the balloons in the rafters and I lose sight of Pearl.

Noise and color and the feeling of being trapped and my children kidnapped.

This is me going insane.

Pearl appears and takes off her socks.

She removes her wristband.

I tell her to put on her socks. She runs away. I catch her. Socks back on, she refuses the wristband. Everything’s a battle. I threaten her with an early exit. She acquiesces. Something jars in my thoughts. I take out this paper and start taking notes. Simone is off with her new posse. Tearing shit up.

Pearl runs to and fro. Every time she slips out of sight I have a momentary panic, I keep remembering that Wells Tower story, “On the Show,” where the girl is murdered in a theme park. Or Bunny Lake Is Missing. Pearl disappears inside a carnival airwalk and I can’t find her. Shit, shit, shit. But then she appears, smiling at the mesh-covered exit.

Pearl runs to a basketball game. A little boy climbs inside at the same time. His dad is a chubby bearded fellow of about forty. He tries to get his son to let Pearl go in first. He fails. “He’s gotta figure out ‘ladies first,’” he says.

I shrug. “She needs to figure out there are other people in the world.” It isn’t the nicest answer. I sense he wants to chat. I’m not in the mood. I detach. I drift. I act busy. I’m not always crazy about my own behavior.

Pearl climbs the stairs of a giant fire engine. It ha a high, steep slide. She chickens out.

Michael Jackson returns to the loudspeakers. I’m so disoriented I can’t quite make out which song.

2.

Simone hands me a water bottle and asks me to open it. I brought water for her but I open it anyway. She takes one sip and then hands it to me. There’s waste everywhere. I try to put it into my pocket for later and some water spills out. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

A teenager announces the next stage of the party; her voice drips with that peculiar sarcastic disaffection only a teenager can fully pull off. We hustle back to a side room. The walls are still yellow. The floor is a series of red, white and blue tiles. America! Beneath our feet! There’s cake and pizza and party hats—so much of our lives is a repeat of some earlier memory. Simone and Pearl eat pizza. Something’s irritating Pearl. She pouts. I ask her what’s wrong. “I want a pink hat,” she says. I ignore it; the pink hats are all spoken for.

There’s Chex Mix in little blue doggie bowls. Weird, but I can’t resist. Tastes like childhood. Tastes like sunshine, saturday soccer games and barbecues with my family. I’m in the corner writing this while the party rages on. No one seems to notice. I kept thinking how much I like being around groups of children, but hate being around groups of children with their parents. Everything feels infantilized. Including adult conversation.

I run out of paper. I scribble on the back of our dog’s vet bill. I write around the dashed-off notes for a stalled novel. Pearl begins picking all the pretzels out of the doggie bowl. She isn’t eating them. She seems happy so I leave her alone.

Simone has two party hats resting on dangling slinky ears. She looks like a child’s version of a devil. I check in. “Are you happy?”

She doesn’t answer. “Pearl, are you happy?”

She nods.

I eat more Chex Mix. What am I eating? Salt and crunch. Soupcon of Worcestershire amped up by MSG. Can’t get enough.

Simone tries to sneak out and play. I tell her stay; we have to sing happy birthday to the birthday girl. Simone doesn’t understand. “She’s still eating pizza.”

The birthday girl’s mom is friendly. She cuts Pearl’s pizza. Pearl lets her. (Pearl gets angry when we try to cut her food.)

Simone and some other children huddle around an i-phone. All this activity and they plug in. I weep for the future. Simone falls off the bench, cries. I try to offer her solace but she refuses. I’m becoming obsolete already.

We sing happy birthday.

The girls stuff their faces with cake.

I don’t take any. I can’t hear any music. Is it my hearing or is the music switched off? Am I losing my senses?

I skulk. I hover. I write notes. No one seems to notice but surely someone sees that I’ve faded out of the festivities, that I’m writing something with my back against the wall. I can never see myself through other people’s eyes. Am I interesting? Creepy? Boorish?

I alternate my hands in my pockets and then resting by my sides; neither feels right. I never know what to do with my lanky body when I don’t want to socialize. I’m running out of paper. Why did I, for the first time in years, leave my notebook at home? Do I look aloof? Am I posturing? Am I acting like D.H. Lawrence, a hundred years ago, who jumped up at a dinner party and yelled, “Why are we doing this? I don’t want to do this! I don’t want to talk with these people!” and stormed out.

I chat with a woman about Detroit. “The day our eight-year-old was robbed at gunpoint for her bike, and on our street, a nice neighborhood, we knew it was time to move,” she says.

I mention “Detroit Arcadia,” the article I read in The Nation so long ago. (Or was it The Atlantic?) We chat for a moment, but then the girls follow the birthday girl back to the airwalks. I follow.

3.

My cousins had a trampoline when I was a child. It didn’t have any safety netting. It was ringed by a metal bar. And often it rested on a patch of concrete. The very best thing you could do was double-jump someone off the trampoline onto the ground. Once this happened to a neighbor and he bloodied his elbow. He was mildly hurt. It was awesome. I jammed my fingers in the metal springs more than once. I caught my leg in the space between them. We jumped on that thing even as the springs began to break. I’m sure we violated every safety rule that accompanied the packaging. It was (one of our) wild spaces.

My cousins moved the trampoline beneath a basketball hoop. We used to dunk nasty on each other, have competitions. Their dog, Lady, a black lab, would get on the trampoline with us and frantically slid around. She couldn’t have liked this but we thought it was hilarious.

And we played a bouncy version of blind man’s bluff up there. Or am I misremembering? We spend hours on the trampoline, taking breaks to explore the creek behind their house or shoot each other to pieces with toy guns. Something about Pearl and Simone on these giant airwalks reminds me of them. Those were halcyon days.

The music has definitely stopped. Strange. Does it signify something? Are we supposed to leave?

Simone removes her socks. This time I lose the battle. I shove them in my left pocket. Her new friends include me in their game. I’m their “boss.” The rules are they bring me garbage and I pretend it’s treasure. I feign enthusiasm, but I’m not crazy about this game. They bring me a single lost scrunchie and then move on.

Pearl covers herself with stickers: both legs, both arms and her chest. I ask her where she got them but she doesn’t remember. She runs off for more jumping. I’m losing steam.

I feel adrift, isolated, useless. My mind turns to other things. A time I got sick at a party. I was eighteen and awkward and too self-aware. I was also losing weight, nervous about college. I threw up in the bathroom at the party, in the sink, and I can’t believe I still feel shame at this so many years later. Who else remembers it? Who else could?

And my dog. Annie, who my mom put to sleep. And Pepper, who I put to sleep. And Spot, who was killed by a car. And Izzie, who my parents put to sleep. And now Jack, who is aging and just last night dodged some reaction to a vaccine to the tune of 200 bucks.

Trampolines and arena rock and children and party shame from drinking too much and dogs. The mind, the mind, what a weird organ.

I’ve lost Pearl again. I look for her. The music is still off. The paunchy men and women all around and I feel judgmental and misanthropic. I want to go home. Where is Pearl? I feel nervous. I can’t find her on any of the airwalks. I finally see her in the middle of a bunch of adults. She’s lost one of her socks. I pick her up. She hugs me. I find her sock and put it in my pocket, next to Simone’s.

Pearl goes back to the giant fire engine slide. She climbs up and slides down, backwards, and has a blast. I feel better about things. She goes again. I remember Disney World in eighth grade, with my friends, we ran through Space Mountain over and over, we rode it thirteen times in a row, it was one of the great memories of my childhood, we were free and loose and happy in a land that somehow looked like my dreams.

When do our experiences only become exercises in nostalgia? For other, earlier memories?

When does life lose its primacy?

Why do I feel inhibited in my joy?

I see Simone standing on the outside of a little conference between the birthday girl and two of her friends. Simone looks upset. I feel upset, too. We say goodbye to the birthday girl and her parents. Pearl hugs the birthday girl’s mama with a fierce abandon.

Outside, it’s raining.

In the car ride home, Simone is grouchy. Pearl looks out the rain-streaked window with angry eyes. I listen to U2. “The Drowning Man.”

Seems apt.

This time, I don’t sing along.

interlude 1: Simone’s favorite songs from 2013

Simone loves music, but she’s particular. She prefers female singers and a whimsical sound. I love that she’s developing her own tastes. My only concern is the influx of princess stories. (Pearl loves these, too.) I’ve been listening to the new National record, Trouble Will Find Me, and I love it. But both Pearl and Simone can switch the music off, which they do whenever I leave the room.

Anyway, here are Simone’s favorite songs from 2013 (most of them aren’t from 2013):

 

“A Real Hero” — College & Electric Youth

“San Francisco” — Foxygen (We belt this one out together, it’s adorable)

“Ho Hey” — Lumineers

“Girl on Fire” — Alicia Keyes

“If I had a Hammer” — Peter, Paul and Mary

“Faithful Man (bare bones version)” —Lee Fields (I love this song)

“Get Lucky” —Daft Punk

“Scarborough Fair” — Simon and Garfunkle

“Here Comes My Baby” — Cat Stevens

“Leaves that Are Green” — Simon and Garfunkle

“Royals” — Lorde

“Forever” — Haim

“Give Your Heart a Break — Demi Lovato (A guilty pleasure but I love this song, too)

“Hearts on Fire” — Cut Copy

“Don’t Sleep in the Subway” — Petulia Clark

Disney princess cds, especially Beauty and the Beast (ugh)

 

Interlude: Three new lines from Simone.

1.

Simone (chasing a seagull with a feather she found): Mr. Seagull? Do you want this feather?

 

2.

(At a Rash Hashanah party last week, in front of a number of Beth’s family members)

Beth: Where does daddy go during the day?

Simone: To work.

Beth: Where does daddy work?

Simone: He goes to the gym to work out.

Beth: But where does he go during the day?

Simone: To work.

Beth: And where does he work?

Simone (pauses, then smiles): The circus!

 

3.

Simone (at 7 in the morning, as I’m about to leave for work, with an enormous, cheshire grin on her face): Daddy . . . do you have Halloween treats and candies in your lunch bag?

Simone calls the movie “Guys and Dolls” “Dolls and Toys.”

It’s adorable.

Marlon Brando, in an underrated performance, in one of Simone’s new favorite movies.

Simone and Pearl and the Power Cosmic! part 5: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

1.

No posts for a while. The stomach flu whipped through our house, snagging Beth first, then Simone, and then me. Pearl remained half-sick throughout; her MO is to carry a cold eight days a week. She’s a happy, toothy, snuffly baby who doesn’t cry[1].

Fever, chills, the shakes and aches, ignominy, retching, and delirium times three; there’s little room for dignity in a household under the banner of sickness. Too sick to read, too miserable to watch movies, too uncomfortable to enjoy other people. Simone bore her burden well. She kept shaking her head when we would tell her it’s okay to get sick. Her response: “No! It’s too stinky!”

Despite the nausea, Simone was pretty happy; she went on a movie binge, watching My Fair Lady; Meet Me in St. Louis; Singin’ in the Rain; and Hello, Dolly. She’ll be an expert on movie musicals by the time she reaches kindergarten. Which has been my plan all along.

The only good thing to come out of it is the return of my appetite and my first cup of coffee in three days. And a major itch to get back to writing. Of course, I also have to return to work.

Back to life. Back to reality[2].

2.

I have plenty of half-written essays soon to be posted, including a lengthy essay on The Master, and an essay on Downton Abbey[3]. I (mostly) ceased caring about the Oscars a long time ago, but I’ll be disappointed when Hoffman, Adams and Phoenix are passed over for the acting awards, despite the fact that they should all win the top honors. (Here’s another prediction: my gut tells me Silver Linings Playbook—which to me was mediocre, although it looked great—will run away with most of the awards. That and Argo.) I also have a multi-part history of black cinema, “Little Ben and the Gnostic Christ,” and “Soccer-skate-surf-punk Pensacola.” That’s a preview, however, not a promise. Don’t know what will make it here or when.

The imagination can be a mercurial thing. My thoughts slip and slide. I don’t procrastinate, I lose interest. I sometimes have difficulty focusing my attention. I write in manic bursts—always have—and then slide into a lonely stupor.

Since Christmas, I’ve been on a reading tear. The Twenty-Year Death (a neo-noir three-part novel written in the styles of Georges Simenon, then Raymond Chandler, then Jim Thompson and it’s excellent); The Natural (Bernard Malamud is superb, my nominee for the most underrated writer of the last fifty years); Tenth of December (worthy of all the attention it’s getting, and more so); The Big Screen (David Thomson’s history of the movies and it’s just great); Somebody (a marvelous biography of Marlon Brando, and I’m only a quarter of the way in); Little Big Man (a very fine romp of a western, I liked it, but ten years ago I would have loved it) and The Ginger Man (one of the best novels I’ve read in years, funny, complex, beautiful, moving, squalid, yet easy to read). I’m also re-reading Sandman for the umpteenth time and finding it to be as rich, satisfying and rewarding as the first time I read it. It’s a milestone, and alongside The Invisibles and Promethea, a reminder of how tame and un-ambitious most comics series are.

I also re-read Heart of Darkness, a few pages a week here and there, and it still holds a disturbing, dark magnetism, and plenty of surprises. There’s a scene near the end when the narrator first sees Kurtz’s house, and it’s ringed by decapitated heads stuck on poles, and the heads are all facing Kurtz’s house. A throwaway detail that explains so much. It’s such an appalling, dense and rich work. Why they teach it in high school is a mystery to me. I despised it when I was eighteen, loved it just two years later.

3.

Finally, the real reason I’ve been posting less: I’m back in the submitting game, with a novel manuscript (which I’ve worked through three drafts), an excerpt that (mostly) works as a stand-alone story, and a short story. I’ve sent the novel to three places. I’ve sent the short story to six or seven. I’ve sent the excerpt just to one place: the New Yorker. Fail big, my friends. That’s my motto. Any neo-friends in the digital ether who want to help a stranger, I’m here.

More to come.

---

[1] Except in the middle of the night.

[2] I doth quote En Vogue freely.

[3] Prepare to have your mindgrapes blown.

The Taste of Others, part 1: Nazis at the North Pole.

My wife has found a new way of entertaining herself online. She looks up picture books on Amazon, and then pokes around the lowest ratings. She’s started forwarding me the best of these, a kind of menagerie of crazed, chronically bored people. The criticism seems to span the political spectrum. On the right there’s the fear of communist (or other insidious leftwing ideological) indoctrination; on the left there’s the concerns of harmful stereotypes and gender roles. Fascinatingly, the reviewers often seem to have spent a lot of time in crafting their reviews.

I know a lot about children’s books. I read picture books to children as part of my job—as well as to Simone, every night—and spend a fair amount of time perusing their content, thinking on the message, and ordering books for the library. I’ve even studied them academically. They are often political, this much is true. But more often that not, the message of children’s picture books is plucked from Mr. Rogers. Let’s be nice. Other people have feelings. We don’t want to hurt others. The world is a big, wondrous place.

These readers see something else.

So here’s the first post, profiling the best of the worst, and part of a semi-regular feature. I’ve edited out people’s names, and fixed spelling and punctuation errors when necessary. I’ve provided my own commentary in boldface type.

The book in question here is The Polar Express. I didn’t realize it, but according to these reviewers, this sweet-natured tale of a Christmas jaunt with Santa is a vicious, fascist, anti-feminist slog that encourages children to get into cars with strangers. Read on.

The story of a little boy and Santa Claus. Filled with hateful propaganda.

These first two take umbrage with the story as somehow being a recruiting tool for Nazi ideology. I’m not kidding.

Title: Fascist Images Are Not Appropriate For Children

We took this book out of the public library for our three year old child expecting a nice, warm story about Christmas. This is not what we got. Apparently, Santa has become a 1930s style fascist leader who speaks in front of large crowds and raises his hand in a gesture that looks disturbingly like a Hitler salute. I never knew St. Nicholas made it to Nuremberg. (Weird. Santa here picks up a young boy and whisks him off to the north pole. Nuremburg has nothing to do with anything.)

Title: Perfect children’s tale for the Material Age

Bland unimaginative story about a tyke who doesn’t believe that someone up north doesn’t pump out toys for all the little girls and boys. Santa and his village as portrayed in this book would have fit in perfectly in Nazi Germany. A perfect book for the entitled and spoiled American child of the Uberclass of consumerist American drones. (Ouch.)

Here’s a self-serious take on the book, thankfully moving us away from comparisons to Goring or Himmler. The war on Christmas continues.

Title: Well…

A pleasure to read but has nothing to do with the meaning of Christmas. It makes me sad when people talk about Christmas meaning giving and showing kindness but leave out the birth of Jesus. If I would say no one knows the true meaning I’m sure I would be told that many people do. So why do almost every movie, tv show, and book, especially made for children, never mention Jesus’s birth? Instead of teaching about Santa, why not also teach children what Christmas is about. The book was sweet, but missed the meaning. (This reminds me of my childhood, and not in a good way.)

Here’s a decidedly feminist critique of the story, somehow telescoping the entire western canon’s diffidence towards female heroes into a battering ram to smash Allsberg’s book. I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but there’s the silly self-seriousness.

Title: Polar Express: Yet another boy’s tale

Have we learned nothing from the 60’s and 70’s studies of childrens’ books? Studies that showed that most children’s books, and textbooks, had boys as the heroes, as the active ones, while girls and women were relegated to minor ‘helping’ roles. I was about to buy this book for my 5 year old granddaughter, but when I read that it was just another story about a boy and his quest for whatever, I decided not to buy it. Where are the millennium’s great stories with girls as heroes? About a girl’s quest for knowledge and wisdom? Oh bother! I won’t be shelling out bucks for this one. How sad.

I have to think this one is a joke, but I’m not so sure. The stuff I’ve heard other parents say can be pretty wild. This reviewer clearly sees the wide-eyed wonder that defines much of children’s literature to be a bad thing. My response would be, why limit yourself to fairy tales? Why not just show them the first thirty minutes of Bad Lieutenant, over and over? Or the rape scene in Irreversible?

Title: stranger danger

Why is it okay to teach children that getting out of their beds, leaving the house, and getting on a train with a stranger in the middle of the night is a grand, desirable, adventure? I threw out a similar story about leaving the house and flying through the air with a snowman last year. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is another example. I have been searching for a copy of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales to counter-effect the message. My goal in teaching my children about the world is to instill a healthy dose of caution at least, about going off with strangers, forget political correctness.

More to come . . .

Oliver Stone and the persistence of false memories, part 7.

7. Poison in the well.

Race, power, money, politics, greed, sex, violence: Stone’s major subject, it was clear, was the United States. Killers was, in essence, a study in American celebrity gone wrong, a postmodern Bonnie and Clyde. Salvador was American foreign policy, Platoon America at war; Wallstreet was American fiscal policy, JFK America’s political machinery; Born on the Fourth of July was America’s treatment of its veterans, Talk Radio was America’s dark, often hidden, obsessions; U-turn was American small-mindedness and Nixon was America’s political memory.

Any Given Sunday is Stone’s take on American sports. And despite a promising premise—a young hothead becomes an overnight celebrity when the grizzled aged quarterback is injured—the film is a major misfire. The camera swoops and dives and shudders into absurd close-ups. The filmmaking eliminates any subtlety in the acting. The football scenes are garish, weighed down by shaky camera work. The movie is a tacky menagerie of speeches, cynicism, naked male bodies, dipping camera work and sports commentators playing themselves.

It’s smash and grab moviemaking, and it’s terrible.

He has another impressive cast: Jamie Fox, Al Pacino, James Woods, Ann-Margret, Dennis Quaid, Cameron Diaz, LL Cool J, Aaron Ekhart and Jim Brown. Fox somehow manages to carve 0ut a solid performance, and an intriguing character, but the rest sputter and moan and yell and confront without any real conviction. Dennis Quaid, in particular, struggles.

Jamie Fox as a hotheaded youngster full of arrogance and swag.

The story is awash with overwrought clichés. And although some of the off-field antics of the players, the cocaine and steroid abuse, the decadent parties, the violence, is interesting, the film attempts pretty banal arguments about race and money in professional football. We’ve been here before.

Stone’s politics hang like a millstone around his neck. He can’t shoot a straight story. Sunday clinched it. With this, he lost the ability to entertain.

And, so, how did he move from professional football to Alexander the Great? And how did he go so disastrously, gloriously wrong?

Alexander belongs to a small batch of filmmaking disasters. It’s on par with Showgirls, Gigli, The Avengers and Ishtar. It’s the holy grail of bad moviemaking, a gigantic, whopping turd of a film. Holy God, a terrible piece of celluloid, a turkey of the highest order, misguided, confused and unintentionally hilarious. Farrell is wrong as Alexander—he’s too brooding, too Irish—and his lieutenants are all wrong, too. Jared Leto in particular delivers a wretched performance, although he competes with Val Kilmer and Angelina Jolie for worst acting in the film. Anthony Hopkins is weak, and even Christopher Plummer in late-career bloom seems arch and stuffy. The acting—no surprise, really—is uniformly bad.

Colin Farrel with his little boy haircut. Jolie, strangely, plays his mother.

In the spirit of this essay, I rewatched some of Alexander to see if I remembered it wrong. I didn’t. It’s worse than I remembered. The sets are cheap, the costumes cheaper. The intrigues are mishandled. The movie feels bloated yet rushed. Alexander’s seduction by a young male Armenian is laughably handled. And Rosario Dawson has one of the funniest “serious” sex scenes in the history of cinema. (She and Farrell bark and scratch at each other like a pomeranian and a tabby cat.)

None of the characters are finely drawn. They exist as an indistinguishable horde at the edges of the movie, sometimes coming forward to deliver a few mediocre lines before returning to the chorus. The movie feels bungled, cluttered and chatty.

Once again, Stone has bitten off more than he can chew, sliding back and forth in Alexander’s lifetime. There are two or three great movies in Alexander’s invasions of the current Middle East, his drunken murder of one of his closest friends, and his death in the sands of Afghanistan. But none of them are here.

Stone’s worst error, however, is his perception of Alexander. Stone writes him as some sexually confused wunderkind devoted to bringing—I kid you not—literacy to the world. He likes battle, too, but he is motivated by some sense of the liberating freedom of globalization. This is all false, of course. He was a brutish, drunken thug, an early practitioner of germ warfare, and in the end a very bad leader of men. (His soldiers, after ten years of warfare, essentially mutinied.) Like all conquerors, Alexander was interested in fame, money, land, and power, and to portray him any other way is an insult to history. Stone knows better, and it’s intriguing that the director of Salvador, who sided with the little guys, has developed such a romantic view of political and military power.

Alexander reveals why Stone faltered. His ego got in the way. He lost the ability to see the weaknesses in his won writing. He’s drawn to Alexander because he thinks that he and the great general of old are cut from the same cloth.

Well, my little tour of Oliver Stone’s movies has come to an end; I’ve spent too much time in his mediocre company for the past month. I’ve written drafts about his other movies, but I’ve lost interest. Stone lost his edge a long time ago, and his take on George Bush, with its whiny spinelessness, its rushed wretched silliness, is another example of his precipitous decline in ideas. He refuses to take Bush to any real task, but also refuses to humanize him in any believable way. So the audience is left with a mealy-mouthed mama’s boy—which Bush most definitely was not—manipulated by Cheney every step of the way. All of Bush’s failures (or successes, if you’re so inclined) are erased. It’s a rubbing out of any agency in his own life.

And this is Stone’s legacy, I think, as we await yet another new film from him: heavy-handed treatment of serious subjects by a director too cynical to entertain and too afraid to critique. He  lacks the finesse required to interrogate big ideas.

I guess I won’t hold my breath for Savages. Who knows, even if I do see it, the loose synapses in my brain will distort the memory into some twisty knot.

Years later, I might even think it’s good.