The Creative Life Adventure

Pay your writers!

Boston University students to Warner Bros. CEO David “Buffoon” Zaslav

I support the ongoing WGA strike 100% and was tickled to see overpaid Warner Bros. CEO David “Grossly Incompetent” Zaslav heckled by students when he delivered the commencement address at Boston University on May 21. (This showed up in my news feed this week for some reason, another argument against algorithms.) Netflix, Amazon, HBO (or whatever they are calling themselves these days), all of the big streaming operations and movie/TV studios could easily dump their knuckle-dragging CEO’s and pay writers – and everyone else who’s doing the real work – reasonable wages. But I’m not a fan of corporate CEO’s in general.

We planted a wild coffee plant in our yard three years ago and this summer it is blooming for the first time. I was thrilled to see the blossoms and look forward to these turning into wild coffee beans for our local birds to eat. Native landscaping can take a little effort to get established but almost always pays off in the long run.

It’s heartbreaking that Treat Williams passed away in a motorcycle crash; these days 71 doesn’t seem old and he seems to have been going strong right up to the end. Watch Prince of the City (1981) if you can find it – current streaming options seem limited, but Movies Unlimited offers it on Blu-Ray. It’s quite a film and Williams’ performance was brilliant.

And we lost John Romita, Sr., this week. Steve Ditko was a genius, but it was John Romita who largely defined the look of Amazing Spider-Man, and Marvel comics in general, during my formative years. Peter Parker went through periods of sadness and hopelessness just like my own youth, and Romita illustrated the experience better than anyone, along with the inevitable sense of exuberance that eventually returned, with Spider-Man swinging through the brightly colored New York skyline. It’s hard to over-emphasize how much entertainment I got from Romita’s work. John Romita was the iconic artist of my comic collecting days, his work probably only rivaled by Howard Chaykin’s brilliant adaptation of Star Wars with writer Roy Thomas.

I continue reading Lewis Mumford’s The City in History. A tough read for this simple mind but great stuff and so much that’s relevant today.

• P. 229: “The peace and justice that the Romans boasted had about the same degree of reality as the ‘competition’ that operates under the current monopolistic control and forced consumption imposed by American business. It was a cold sham. The very pretense of law and order was repeatedly undermined by the murderous court plots, the rapacious blackmail, and the army uprisings that attended the choice of each successive emperor.”

• P. 229: “Roman life, for all its claims of peace, centered more and more on the imposing rituals of extermination. In the pursuit of sensations sufficiently sharp to cover momentarily the emptiness and meaninglessness of their parasitic existence, the Romans took to staging chariot races, spectacular naval battles set in an artificial lake, theatrical pantomimes in which the strip tease and lewder sexual acts were performed in public. But sensations need constant whipping as people become inured to them: so the whole effort reached a pinnacle in the gladiatorial spectacles, where the agents of this regime applied a diabolic inventiveness to human torture and human extermination.”

• P. 240: “The secret of Rome’s domination was Divide and Rule. To prevent the smaller cities from uniting against Rome, the dominant partner in fact encouraged rivalry, lest a whole province should join together and present its united strength against Rome. This would hardly have been necessary if the Roman system had been founded on justice and equal participation in responsibilities and benefits.”