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Ray Carney's Mailbag -- This section of the site contains letters written to Prof. Carney by students and artists, announcements of news, events, and screenings, and miscellaneous observations about life and art by Ray Carney. Letters and notices submitted by readers are in black. Prof. Carney's responses, observations, and recommendations are in blue. Note that Prof. Carney receives many more letters and announcements than he can possibly include on the site. The material on these pages has been selected as being that which will be the most interesting, inspiring, useful, or informative to site readers. Click on the first page (via the links at the top or bottom of the page) to read an explanation of this material, why it is being posted, and how this relatively small selection was made from among the tens of thousands of messages Prof. Carney has received.

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hello Ray-

hope you are doing well and are enjoying 2007. Thank you for the Derrick Jensen pick on your website. Your recommendations are always gold and pay wonderful dividends. I'm ripping through Endgame at the moment and it is just the right book at the right time--a really sane voice when the world is losing its mind. Thank you.

I don't know if you have ever taught a courses on Ernanno Olmi, but I think he would be a wonderful filmmaker to take an intensive class on. I'm re-watching Tree of Wooden Clogs right now and was absolutely blown away--again!! The film is a wonderful example of how we have lost connection to mother earth. I'm so thankful for this work of art.

Anyway, it has been eerily warm in Philadelphia the last two months. I just read an article on Cnn.com that we should not worry--that this could be normal. Well, I'm really fucking worried.

I had a short come out on a French DVD and an article in a French magazine. It made me really happy that something I did five years ago still has staying power.

Best wishes,

Lucas Sabean

RC replies:

Subj: Yes, You Too Can Have a Glamorous Career in Modeling

Lucas,

Forgive the delay in my response. I was hiding out writing.

Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison

Good to hear from you, Lucas. Thanks for the kind words. Re: the climate. The climate scientists (at NASA's Goddard Space Center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, our universities, etc.) are using an incorrect model. Talking about .2 degree rise in heat per decade,blah, blah, blah. That is a model from the 1970s. Scientists are really not that smart as independent intellects, and most are trapped in old-fashioned thermodynamic computer modeling systems. Like generals fighting the last war. (Or the current one!) And they are concerned about rises in sea level. Another old model. What really matters are two other changes, both (just for a little poetic irony at the climate scientists' expense!) related to COLD not HEAT: First, the cooling of the stratosphere (which is connected with the warming of the troposphere), which will create extraordinary and unprecedented convection currents between the two layers of the atmosphere that will result in storms greater in strength than anything experienced on earth in the past two million years. They will be hurricane-like in nature, but far, far greater in force than a hurricane. We're talking about winds hundreds of miles an hour in speed and with the force of bombs going off on everything in their path. The second major change will be a precipitously rapid and nearly complete cessation of the current systems of the North Atlantic (the technical term for this is a cessation of the North Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation System), affected by decreases in ocean water salinity and its concomitant buoyancy/density (which will decrease due to the influx of non-salty water into the north Atlantic as the polar ice cap melts), accompanied by a radical diminishment of the thermal circulatory effect of the north polar heat sink. With only brief and comparatively minor fluctuations -- much more minor than will take place in the very near future -- this system has powered the Northern Atlantic part of the so-called Global Thermohaline Circulation System and moderated the winters throughout Europe and Asia Minor as far as the Urals and North America east of the Rockies for more than two million years. Both of these changes will have been caused by increases in temperature, of course, but they will have results that are much more radical and far-reaching -- much more catastrophic -- than merely raising the temperature of the atmosphere a few degrees or the height of the ocean levels a few meters. In fact, those things -- the things the climate scientists are currently predicting -- are ridiculously trivial in comparison with the changes I am describing. The next major event will be the melting of the north polar ice cap, which will precipitate a major change or complete cessation of the North Atlantic currents (the slowing of the Gulf Stream will be part of this process, but what I am describing will be much more widespread than that and will involve other current systems throughout the Atlantic and particularly the North Atlantic). Both events (the atmospheric and the oceanic) will precipitate a series of devastatingly strong thunderstorms, tornados, and hurricanes with unprecedented wind speeds, duration, and violence, which will not only destroy buildings, power systems, and much of the industrial and agricultural infrastructure in the Northern latitudes, but will radically and irrevocably change the climate. The result will be--are you ready for this? you better brace yourself--a new Ice Age. Coming on with incredible rapidity. (The gradualism of that event that we were taught in school is another computer modeling error.) Followed by..... well, I'll leave the rest to your imagination in terms of crops and harvests and growing seasons.... Or, to put it in other words:

In desperate need of help, hell-bent for catastrophe. The melting of the polar ice cap, the change in oceanic salinity, the slowing, then cessation of the Atlantic current, the unbelieveable rapidity of a new Ice Age, accompanied by famine then extermination.

Quantos tremor est futurus
Quando judex est venturus...
Dies irae, dies illa,
Solvet seculum in favilla.

An intellectual lesson here: Like all great creative activities, science does not grow in the center but on the edges. A guy at Stanford named Paul Berg has a wonderful essay on that subject. The mainstream of science is almost always wrong or a century behind in its understandings. The more important or revolutionary discoveries are made on the fringes by fringe individuals, not in the mainstream bymainstream researchers. Thomas Kuhn has a bit to say about that too: most of the breakthrough understandings of the past--Galileo's work on the solar system, Newton's on gravity, Darwin's on evolution, Maxwell's on electromagnetism, Milliken's on the electron, Einstein's on special and general relativity, etc. --represented the triumph of the iconoclastic individual thinker over the repressiveness or narrowness of inherited patterns of group-thought. James Hanson is the only climatologist who dares to think differently at present, but even he has a limited understanding, which relies overly much on the old thermodynamic-based modeling systems. (Currents, in both water and air, are not so easily modeled. Fluid dynamics is much harder to map and predict than thermal changes, so the scientists ignore the currents and focus on the temperatures. It's the old searching for the key under the streetlight when it was lost somewhere else joke. But that's twentieth-century science. At least Newton and Galileo tried intellectually to go where no man had gone before. Our science is all about follow the leader, computationally at least.)

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. -- Robert Frost

The problem in getting the scientists to see the truth is compounded by the problem of getting them to tell the truth. The grant system encourages them to suppress original ideas. No scientist wants to break from the pack. They have the ultimate group mentality. Dwight MacDonald's herd of independent minds. They fear real independence of intellect since the grant world retaliates against it. The Pope has been replaced by the Department of Energy, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. The more things change, da da da. The Pope wasn't all that keen on fresh ideas, and the DOE and NSF are no different. If you rock the boat or propose changing course too radically, you won't get funded, since the referees for your grant are the scientists who set the course now being steered. In short, it comes down to the same cravenness and the desire for funding that business is driven by.

And, as an additional factor, as if we needed one more, there is the suborning of scientific witnesses, the bribing of the scientific jury, the buying of scientific testimony, by Exxon Mobil and other big businesses. Welcome to America. And people think science is an independent search for truth. Not quite.

Anyway, congratulations on the DVD. All good work from the heart has staying power. It's the work that is in fashion and on everyone's lips and on all the talk shows and news reports that won't last. The fashion system keeps replacing it with a new fashion. Truth breaks out of that dead and deadening cycle.

Meanwhile the Golden Globes, the People's Choice Awards, and the Academy Awards go on forever. Neil Postman's late work is the relevant reference for these matters. Read "Entertaining Ourselves to Death."

Ray

Lucas Sabean responded:

Subject: Jensen On Hope

Hey Ray- I think this is my favorite part of book (Endgame), so far. I'd like to share it with you.

Thanks for turning me on to him again.

Lucas

A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn't kill you. It didn't even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems-you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself-and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.

When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there's a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they-those in power-cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you're dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell-you can still live because you are still alive, more alive in fact than ever before. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.

And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are. The you who can say yes, the you who can say no. The you who is a part of the land where you live. The you who will fight (or not) to defend your family. The you who will fight (or not) to defend those you love. The you who will fight (or not) to defend the land upon which your life and the lives of those you love depends. The you whose morality is not based on what you have been taught by the culture that is killing the planet, killing you, but on your own animal feelings of love and connection to your family, your friends, your landbase-not to your family as self-identified civilized beings but as animals who require a landbase, animals who are being killed by chemicals, animals who have been formed and deformed to fit the needs of the culture.

When you give up on hope-when you are dead in this way, and by so being are really alive-you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the co-option of rationality and fear that Nazis inflicted on Jews and others, that abusers like my father inflict on their victims, that the dominant culture inflicts on all of us. Or is it rather the case that these exploiters frame physical, social, and emotional circumstances such that victims perceive themselves as having no choice but to inflict this co-option on themselves?

But when you give up on hope, this exploiter/victim relationship is broken. You become like the Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.

And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.

In case you're wondering, that's a very good thing.

RC replies:

Love it! A deep (almost Buddhistic) spiritual understanding. Thank you, Lucas.

Re: Mike Leigh

Hello Ray, Do you have a favourite Mike Leigh film? My own favourite is probably High Hopes. best wishes

Peter Quinn

RC replies:

You should read my book. And "favorites" is not a very useful game when it comes to great art. Save it for TV and the Grammys. Nothing personal.

But just to be accommodating: I like Meantime very, very, very much. And Abigail's Party. And about twelve others by him too.

Peter replies:

I know what you mean about favorites being a bit trite. I too am very fond of Meantime. Phil Daniels is excellent. A great actor.

One of my favourite scenes in Meantime is towards the end of the film, when Mark and Barbara are upstairs in the bedroom and Colin has gone. I think this is one of the most moving and powerful scenes in Leigh's work.

I saw The Death of Mr Lazarescu recently. I loved it. There is a nice feel of Leigh and Cassavetes about it. The director said that Cassavetes was his favorite director.

Peter

RC replies:

Yes to the Meantime scene. A great study of the limits of our imaginations, our imaginative worlds, our identities. Barbara so wants to be "open" and "liberal." She has so many good intentions and dreams and desires. But she is dealing with a world and realities that resist them and that she, ultimately, doesn't understand. Good intentions are not enough. Come to think about it, that could be the motto for American foreign policy and most Americans of any era. Should put it on our coins. It would be a damn sight better and more relevant than "E pluribus unum." We know that's a lie.

I should also add how much I love High Hopes and Life is Sweet and so many others of his films. So many other great great films about the limits of human imagination and desire.

Peter replies:

Re: Mike Leigh

Yes, I agree. The problem with Barbara is that she is a victim of her own complacency. She is fixed in her own idea of herself (a bit like the US?) She is unable to listen, to really listen and respond creatively which is a pre-requisite of growth and change. I wonder if she has some insight into her own plight when she is drunk and her husband John returns. There seems to be a glimmer of something here. It might only be self-pity but I would give her the benefit of the doubt. Leigh's compassion and empathy for his characters his magnificent.

I think Mark is the most interesting character, in a way. He is the most mercurial and intelligent. He is able to listen and respond to changing circumstances. Take the scene I mentioned in the bedroom. I love the way Mark recognizes a suffering human standing in front of him. He is silenced. He is able to empathize with Barbara.

By the way, I loved your "Two Forms of Cinematic Modernism: Notes Towards a Pragmatic Aesthetic." I am a great admirer of John Dewey. Dewey is a great example of a man desirous of change in every sense.

Peter

RC replies:

Great stuff! I need you as a student! Most of the Boston U. film students are lined up to take courses in -- or write essays about -- Hitchcock. Or John Ford. Or Howard Hawks. Or that ilk. The old Hollywood hacks. I wish I could break them free to see the kind of things you are noticing. Well, maybe it will happen.

I enjoyed this exchange very much. And thanks for you compliment on the essay. I tried to suggest the limitations of Hollywood aesthetic in it, so it's related to this whole issue of what we value and why, of course. (As I'm sure you understand.)

Subject: Happy New Year!

Dear Mr Carney,

Hope you had a Happy Christmas and are feeling revived to continue to bring light to so many people as you always do every year. Thank you for your website. I just thought about it again last night after many months of feeling a little lost and then made a little copy and paste booklet of your letters to and from people to read on a long journey I am on today. It's so lovely it came back into my mind so early on in 2007 as I find your writing so inspiring and enlightening. How great to have so many people be so grateful for you renewing creative inspiration and motivation within them. That really is a gist as those people go on to give light to others. You really have a gift and it's so great that you share it so much. Like a light. Thank you. I have my JC collection of DVDs at home which I am going to start on this week :) and then I am off to see his daughter's film at Sundance... Broken English.

Hooray and hope all is well with you!

Best wishes

Mary Kerr

RC replies:

Thanks, Mary. I appreciate the good wishes and kind words. Zoe Cassavetes is an interesting filmmaker. Even as a child people said that she had a little of her father in her, while the older son took much more after his mother. Genetics is interesting that way. (We know genius is not necessarily hereditary.) For the record, Xan (Alexandra), the documentary filmmaker, has even more of John in her.

Let me know what you think of Broken English. And if you haven't already, check out Men Make Women Crazy Theory.

PS. HNY back to you!

Subject: Excellent article

RC,

Just in case you have some time and interest, here is a terrific article called "The Spirit of Tom Paine" by Stephen Lendman. He reminds me of you! Great article about Tomo Paine that addresses how democracy is being destroyed at the hands of the corporate controlled media. Takes aim at the Times, Wall Street Journal, PBS, NPR, as well as a few suggestions for what to do about it. Guess what? It's all about EDUCATION. The president and the deans of your university should read this, and ponder whether BU is helping the media continue to go down this road by training the youth to go down the wrong (corporate) path. If anybody should be screaming about what's being done in communications today, it's the university.

I know you know all this, but it's a good article.

RC replies:

This argument is a bit of a stiff dose and a little extreme at points, with a lack of nuance, but it is generally on the mark. (By coincidence, I have a similar letter I wrote to a reporter at the Wall Street Journal deploring the "money-driven" nature of the paper's arts coverage only a page or two before this, at the top of the page.) But maybe it's good to be harsh on the press, if only to correct the holier-than-thou attitude most journalists have. Most of them sold their independence long ago in order to pander to business values and promote the maintenance of the status quo. Who was the last journalist who was fired for refusing to write a story based on some corporate press release? When was it when the last newsroom went on strike about the quality of the stories their editors want them to write? Journalists are an immoral group, by and large. And they are personally responsible for many of the ills of contemporary politics and culture. The days of Watergate are long past.

I would note that Ben Bagdikian, who is quoted on this web page, is wonderful. I highly recommend his work, particularly The New Media Monopoly, one of the canonical texts on this subject. And also the work of Robert McChesney. Both authors should be required reading for every journalist and journalism student. The last time I checked, no books by either were read in my own college's journalism classes. Too bad. It's the students' loss. And a loss to our culture once they become professionals.

A note from Ray Carney: I wanted to recommend two CD box sets. If they are not the bargains of the century, they are at least the bargains of the decade: The links will take you to the Daedalus Books web site.

Bach (155-CD Boxed Set): Complete Works

$109.00

On these 155 CDs are stellar performances of the complete works of J.S. Bach, namely all orchestral works and concertos (including the Brandenburgs), vocal works (including the Mass in B Minor, the motets, the Easter Oratorio, and the Passions), the keyboard works (including the Goldberg Variations), hundreds of secular and sacred cantatas, the organ works, and the chamber music.

Mozart (170-CD Boxed Set): Complete Works

$119.00

"Beethoven I take twice a week, Haydn four times, and Mozart every day!" wrote Rossini. With this gargantuan set it is possible to do likewise and never feel jaded or sated. This treasure chest of a boxed set contains Mozart's complete oeuvre, including symphonies, concertos, serenades, divertimenti, dances, chamber music, church sonatas, string ensembles, violin sonatas, keyboard works, sacred works, concert arias, songs, and operas. Among the vocal soloists are Ann Murray, Helen Donath, Teresa Berganza, Sandrine Piau, Arleen Auger, Edith Wiens, Anneliese Rothenberger, Thomas Hampson, Anthony Rolfe-Johnson, Peter Schreier, and Jerry Hadley; the instrumental soloists include Klára Würtz and Derek Han on piano, Peter-Lukas Graf on flute, Emmy Verhey on violin, Herman Jeurissen on horn, and Bart Schneemann on oboe. One hundred of the CDs come from Brilliant's own catalog, and the remaining recordings were licensed from various European labels such as Telarc and Hungaroton.

Dear Ray,

Thank you for responding to my letter. It is interesting that you mentioned La Boheme. A friend just turned me on to opera. I have been studying Don Giovanni and Aida, the latter of which will play locally next month. I am only capable of glimpsing the genius, but it is enough to force me to approach my art with a large dose of humility. (Of course the sense of ignorance is a little sickening. Every new art form I learn, leaves me wondering what else I don't know.)

You asked about me. I found art late in life, many years after earning an engineering degree, getting an MBA, and spending 20+ years in industry. My avocation is filmmaking. I've made several shorts, production managed a low-budget feature, and have written one feature screenplay and am working on a second. Many of my filmmaking friends aspire to a career in Hollywood. I try to tell them we have it made: no investors, no distributors, no studios, and no interference. Of course we have no budget either. All we have to do is produce really, really cheaply. I've continued studying Chekhov. I've read all his plays, including the minor ones. I am putting particular attention on Uncle Vanya, which I am going to see in Chicago at the Court Theatre next week. I will keep your point about logocentrism in mind. I've always described myself as a disciple of Robert McKee, the author of Story, which is a phenomenal book on plot-based screenwriting. You can imagine how one tries to reconcile McKee's ideas with the inspiration I've received from your writing and the study of Chekhov. It is all very perplexing. Next month, my friends and I are going to make a short in which we elevate the characters' internal processes to at least to the level of importance of the plot. We'll let the plot compete for time and attention. As I suggested to my co-producer (and paraphrasing John Lennon), "plot is what happens when you are making other plans."

Thanks again for the advice and I hope the new year finds you well. Sincerely,

Scott Evans

RC replies:

Scott,

Best wishes to you too. Bob McKee is a friend of mine, and we've done some TV together in the UK. But we don't really agree about many things in terms of film. I regard his story seminars more as dramatic events than how-to-do-it guides. And I always note that the big names he lists as having taken his course generally: a) are famous for something they wrote before they took his course; or b) had someone else's expense account (a studio or production company) pay for their attendance.

I'm skeptical of "film school in a bottle" courses. Heck, I'm skeptical of film school period. Artists are not made. They are born. It's a defect in their DNA. A dooming mutation. And artistic sensitivity and awareness cannot be taught, or at least not taught the way most American film schools are currently organized. (See my "Auto Mechanics" essay for more on that subject. Click here to read it.) That's why virtually none of the greatest filmmakers of the past thirty years in the American indie movement got a film degree: not Mark Rappaport, not Robert Kramer, not Elaine May, not Barbara Loden, not John Cassavetes. Film school is designed to create factory workers, not artists. And if I feel that way about film school, imagine how I feel about trying to learn screenwriting or directing in a weekend seminar. Or from a book.

But here's a question for you: Why are recent American films (I mean the good ones, the best ones, not the dumb and dumber Hollywood movies) generally so shallow, so thin, so simple.... while the greatest recent Russian, Iranian, Italian works are (comparatively speaking) so much more complex? Is that false? Am I wrong? It sure seems that way to me. Is our culture doomed by its youth and immaturity to eternal thinness and "liteness": teenage silliness masquerading as wit and humor, adolescent angst for drama, twenty-something romantic squabbles in place of adult problems, group hugs and kisses for endings? I've just summarized the last ten years of American independent filmmaking, and it is a depressing summary. Is America simply incapable of making a film as serious, as thoughtful, as deep, as complex, as intellectually demanding, as emotionally mature as the best of Tarkovsky or Wong Kar Wei or Bela Tarr--or Chekhov? Is even the good American art somehow forced by its cultural circumstances to be as emotionally stupid as most Americans are, as intellectually shallow as most American discussions and debates are? Or is there lead or some chemical in the water or the food that does it? It must be something. I give up. Help me understand.

Cheerio,

Subject: A dream

"Dreamers are the saviors of the world, unless they only keep dreaming"-James Kennedy

I just began reading Rick Schmidt's Extreme DV at used car prices and love everything you had to say. I am a small town kid just out of highschool and am planning my first full length which will be filmed this summer. People in my family tell me its farfetched and a stupid dream, but they never dared to take chances. I am just starting my film company and picked up the book recently. I love to think outside of the typical hollywood recycling, and when you mentioned how the characters dont need character, and how they must be realistic to the everyday person...i got caught in. I always criticize movies for being too fake, or lacking that everyday people feel to them. I plan on making this film dive deep into the characters and captivate the audience (Whatever that may be after) by making them believable and for people to relate to thier feelings...feelings that are'nt over exaggerated or unrealistic...but feelings felt everyday. I just wanted to write you and let you know that in highschool, unfortunately, i never picked up a book on my own but after reading what you had to say I've almost finished the book in 2 days. Thank you Mr. Carney and thanks to Rick Schmidt...I have a whole new view on things and can't wait to film mine now.

-Ryan

RC replies:

Dear Touchdown Brown,

There is a statue of Samuel Eliot Morrisson not too far from my office that says pretty much the same thing as your Kennedy quote. It's for writers, who are not that different from filmmakers, and goes something like: "Dream dreams, and write them, but live them first." I liked it so much a few years ago that I think I put it in one of my books as an epigraph. Then there is, of course, Thoreau's even more lofty apercu: "People make fun of those who build castles in the clouds. I don't understand that. That's the right place for them, though of course we have to set to work putting the foundations underneath." And then there is Cassavetes' "The secret of life is to do." Shortest of all, but equally true.

I wish you grand dreams, airy crenelated towers, and lots of do, do, doing. Thanks for the kind words.

PS. Since you wrote to me at another email address, you may not have visited my website. The url is http://www.Cassavetes.com. I recommend the Mailbag section. You'll see that there are lots of dreamers out there, all working to realize their vision. You are not alone. Good luck!

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