Susan Sarandon—one of her generation’s premier actresses, and featured in Joe, The Great Waldo Pepper, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pretty Baby, Atlantic City, The Hunger, A Dry White Season, Thelma and Louise, Light Sleeper, Lorenzo’s Oil, Little Women, Dead Man Walking, Stepmom, Igby Goes Down, Moonlight Mile, and Alfie—as Drew’s mother is able to suggest, in a few minutes, genuine grief for her dead husband and love for her son and daughter, before her character becomes preoccupied with getting on with doing things she never bothered to learn before, such as how to fix a car and tap-dancing. She has a scene when she speaks honestly with her husband’s somewhat estranged family—everything is there (dialog, talent, intention) but there’s something off in the staging and tone and I think that’s the director’s fault.

After Kirsten Dunst’s Claire gives Bloom’s Drew an elaborate map, which Drew will follow from Kentucky to Oregon as he disperses his father’s ashes, I thought the trip that Drew takes might be the real reason for the film—an adventure involving a gift of affection and music, a trip to idiosyncratic places, including a large farmer’s market and the place Martin Luther King Jr. was shot; however, the map Drew has looks like it was put together by a creative team, not a person, and I thought Drew, at times, handled his father’s ashes too casually. Elizabethtown is a beautiful artificial flower.

Loggerheads, a film written and directed by Tim Kirkman, is the real thing, with North Carolina locations—Asheville, Eden, and Kure Beach—that seem like the places people see every day, sometimes appreciating them, sometimes not; and the faces in the film look lived in, and though several of the characters are attractive, theirs is not the beauty of adjusted lights or make-up. The film is about family, and the adoption of children; and it contains a metaphor—regarding the patient, persistent migration of loggerhead turtles, and their recognition of mates and home. The female turtles return to where they were born to lay eggs, and lay the eggs and leave; and many of the turtles do not survive. Loggerheads unfolds in different time frames, with obscure connections involving a years-ago adoption slowly becoming apparent, clear; and for that the film can seem, to me, unnecessarily complicated, though the structure reminds me of the individuality of our lives (we do not always see how our stories are connected to others; also, here, adoption laws keep people apart). The film stars Kip Pardue, Michael Kelly, Bonnie Hunt, Tess Harper, Chris Sarandon, Michael Learned, and Ann Pierce. Kip Pardue is an adopted young man, Mark, who, after trouble with his family over his sexuality, becomes a drifter who has an interest in the lives of migrating turtles, and he meets George, a motel owner, who gives him a place to stay in Kure Beach. George is played by Michael Kelly, a Philadelphia-born but Georgia-reared actor who studied at South Carolina’s Carolina Coastal University and appeared in Man on the Moon and Unbreakable. Tess Harper and Chris Sarandon (Susan Sarandon’s ex-husband; an actor who has been in Dog Day Afternoon, Lipstick, and The Princess Bride, among other films) are parents very involved in their Eden church. Ann Pierce plays their neighbor. Bonnie Hunt is a woman, Grace, who lives in Asheville and is haunted by a decision made when she was seventeen; and Michael Learned plays her mother.

Kip Pardue seemed familiar to me, though I couldn’t recall seeing him in a film. He is boyish, blond, blue-eyed, slim, and his casual candor and gentleness create authenticity and a quiet eroticism. His character Mark is willing to barter his body for accommodations, something that says much about what he has been through in the years since he left his family home; and he is lucky to meet George, someone of genuine kindness, and George’s masculinity and almost brooding thoughtfulness prevent that kindness from seeming pity, smarm, or weakness. I hope to see Pardue in other things; he’s further proof that not all beauty is shallow. I know now—thanks to the ever resourceful Internet Movie Database—that I recognized him from his modeling work for Abercrombie & Fitch. The Atlanta-born Pardue played football at Yale, before getting his economics degree and working as a model; and he has appeared in the films But I’m a Cheerleader, Remember the Titans, The Rules of Attraction, Thirteen, and Imaginary Heroes. In Loggerheads, he is a recognizable personality type—a man who has a childlike quality despite his years, something that can be charming or dismaying; and when we learn his character is ill he becomes an archetype.

The silences in Loggerheads allow one to sense the years-long doubt and pain that haunt its characters. Their conversations—with their evasive pleasantness, their small-town judgements, and their sudden shots of feeling—are also representative. Tess Harper as Elizabeth has nurturing instincts she allows her husband Robert, the minister played by Sarandon, to curtail; and she also has her own censoring impulses—she reacts badly to a nude statue belonging to her neighbor, Ann Pierce’s Ruth, who knows more about Elizabeth and Robert’s life, and their absent adopted son, than they might guess. Bonnie Hunt’s Grace is a woman increasingly unnerved by her own regret and need to resolve her past, and find the son she abandoned, with feelings that cause her to ignore professional and social inhibitions; and Michael Learned as her mother is a woman who wants to be loving and intelligent, but whose caution can look a lot like dishonesty and insensitivity. The women hurt, but they communicate and gain a chance at healing and wisdom.

The film, towards the end, seems a little too repetitive regarding adoptive parents whose homophobia exiles a son and a woman haunted by giving away her child, but, predominately, a concentration and a tone and a thought are created and conveyed that make the film one of the most valuable films of the last year. This is a film about an America that exists; and there’s no question about why the film was made. The respect and care its director, Tim Kirkman, has for his people are apparent from the beginning of the film and continues until its end.

Whereas the sexuality in Loggerheads is discernible and discussed it is discreet, and that is not the case with 9 Songs, 3 Dancing Slaves, and Cote D’Azur, which are more in-your-face. The film 9 Songs, a pornographic treatment of a relationship between a young woman and man, with rock music concert interludes by bands such as The Dandy Warhols and Franz Ferdinand, is one of the ugliest films I have ever seen. Kieran O’Brien is Matt and Margo Stilley is Lisa, and their characters have little but physical compatibility; and months after seeing the film I only recall that O’Brien’s cock is large and Stilley has small breasts and opened her legs and showed us her pussy and that O’Brien and Stilley actually fucked on film. The film is a disappointment from a director such as Winterbottom, whose films—Jude, Wonderland, The Claim I love—have been intelligent and imaginative and very well-made and well-peopled, the opposite of 9 Songs. 3 Dancing Slaves, written by Christophe Honore and Gael Morel, and directed by Gael Morel, is also a frustrating and unsatisfying film. It is about three brothers, one of whom has been in jail and comes out and tries to make a decent life, and he is played by Stephane Rideau (The Wild Reeds, Come Undone) and he gives an assured, vivid performance as the oldest brother, Christophe. Nicolas Cazale is Marc, the next oldest or middle brother; and his character is a moving sculpture of muscular aggression and stupidity. Marc wants his older brother to take on men who have insulted Marc, though that would get Christophe in trouble and possibly put him back in jail. Olivier, the youngest brother, played by Thomas Dumerchez, becomes sexually involved with Hicham, a young male played by Salim Kechiouche, whose performance as Hicham is relaxed and convincing. The film’s title refers to the brothers and also to an old choreographed form of fighting the boys Olivier and Hicham do. Unfortunately, the director Gael Morel does not suggest that his knowledge of life or the world is much greater than his characters; and there is a cynicism in how the superb tanned body of Nicolas Cazale is presented or exploited (there is a scene of him naked before a mirror), and in the younger brother’s cavalier discarding of his friend Hicham.

Other films past—Leos Carax’s Pola X, Wayne Wang’s The Center of the World, Patrice Chereau’s Intimacy, and Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell (I saw only the first two)—have attempted to present nudity and explicit sex in cinema, though that does not always equal eroticism, an aesthetic of sensuality, an evocation of sexual pleasure. Michael Winterbottom (9 Songs) may have been bored—like various viewers—by the dim dishonesty of the sex scenes in many films—careful, restrained, suggestive but imprecise—but the difference between one’s own experience of sex and sex on film is that while individuals can think anything and feel love, anger, sadness, need, and fetishsize particular acts—kissing, rubbing, intercourse, oral sex—the camera can best capture and present acts and is much less good at presenting motive, insight, choice while sex occurs. To capture the consciousness involved in sex would produce a new kind of sexuality in cinema, possibly beyond the realm of traditional acting but also beyond pornography. Sex can be serious but there is something grim about the hydraulics we are shown in films such as 9 Songs: the acts look too close to duty, just as nudity can seem a cheap enticement, as in 3 Dancing Slaves. One can watch such scenes and long for another world.

In Cote D’Azur, the landscape of a light blue sky above a high hill, and a valley and village below, is instantly welcoming; and the film, written and directed by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, who together previously directed Adventures of Felix, is an amusing French comedy about family and sexuality. On vacation, a daughter dallies with her motorcycle-riding lover; and a son and his gay friend, who is infatuated with him, discover the limits of their relationship; and a mother is trailed by her city lover; and a father is reacquainted with someone from his own past. Stability is challenged by pleasure, and morality is given a liberal berth (one is aware of morality, but negotiates it according to mind, pleasure, taste)—and there are moments of stress, of confusion and pain, and despite a few surprises, some expected affirmations occur in the end. I thought the best performances were given by the actors playing the son and the mother, Romain Torres and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi. Slender, with short hair, and sensible and sensual, she is not a typical mother figure, and she is aroused by what she perceives as desire for her. He, with a cherubic face but knowing eyes and long dark hair and an accepting attitude, is a child of a new day.

The Island and 2046 also posit a new day, one in the future. The Island was directed by Michael Bay, and 2046 by Wong Kar-Wai. The Island is about clones that are created and told they inhabit a safe North American facility in a mostly destroyed world, and that if they win a periodic lottery they’ll go to an island paradise. They are actually groomed as organ donors for well-paying clients of the facility, and the lottery means death. The film stars Ewan McGregor, a Scot who went to drama school in London and appeared in Being Human, Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, The Pillow Book, Brassed Off, Velvet Goldmine, Moulin Rouge, Down with Love, Young Adam, Big Fish, and various hard-to-watch Star Wars movies. He was funny in Trainspotting, stylish and seductive in The Pillow Book, and funny, stylish, seductive, and wild in Velvet Goldmine and often good in the many other films he’s made. In The Island, McGregor gets to play the clone of a sex-driven rich Scotsman, giving the Scot a self-satirizing sparkle. His co-star Scarlett Johansson, who looks, well, immaculate, in white, and innocent and sensuous, is transformed from trusting and fragile to, near the end, determined and forceful, but she made a stronger dramatic impression in her other films, which include North, Manny & Lo, The Horse Whisperer, Ghost World, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Lost in Translation, Girl with a Pearl Earring, A Love Song for Bobby Long, and In Good Company. I liked the look of the film, especially what we see at the beginning, and also the contrast between the facility’s clean, modern (futuristic?) main rooms and its utility area, full of grime and rust. Steve Buscemi, as a technician, works in that utility area and also roams topside; and he’s funny—and his sympathy for McGregor’s clone character and his wariness add nuance. The film’s message is not original, but it’s still relevant: it warns us not to lose morality in the quest for science, money, or a long life. The film 2046 is, in parts, inventive, dense, and interesting, and it is also, in parts, adrift, dull, and with inconsistent emotional engagement: the film focuses on a writer and his women, and the writer composes a science fiction narrative, involving loneliness, lust, and android women, that we see enacted. The film stars Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Li Gong (usually referred to as Gong Li with last name first), Ziyi Zhang, Maggie Cheung, all gods of international cinema, though the film can make one doubt their power. Ziyi Zhang was the most impressive and persuasive of the actors to me, but she is also given too many self-abasing scenes, as a woman with an unrequited crush on the leading man (he has sex with her but refuses to love her in the film’s use of the “I love someone who loves someone else” scenario). I found the film disappointing, as it seemed more like a tableau than a story, more like a ritual than a drama.

Red Eye and Flightplan seem like films seen many times before. They are very much films of yesterday in terms of plot and suspense, and yet they could make regular air-travelers think twice about taking planes. They offer thrilling performances by their leads, Rachel McAdams in Red Eye and Jodie Foster in Flightplan, though neither is an important film, and both are more than a little preposterous. Surprisingly, Red Eye is more soundly constructed. The centrality of women as heroes is the most innovative aspect of these films. In Wes Craven’s Red Eye, a hotel manager’s access to room assignments is used to attempt a high level political assassination; and in Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan an aircraft designer’s knowledge and reputation are used to cover a financial crime and act of terrorism. McAdams is the hotel manager, Foster the aircraft designer; and the women fight to regain command of self and situation. Two usually sensitive actors—Cillian Murphy in Red Eye, Peter Sarsgaard in Flightplan—are used as antagonists in the films, possibly assuming they could bring ambiguous depth to thin roles. I suppose it’s good for actors to show their range, but I hope I won’t have the opportunity to watch much more of that kind of thing (I’d rather see intelligent and sensitive actors play intelligent and sensitive men), but that questionable use of talent is likely in fantastical plots.

Books, more often than film, are situated in worlds one might recognize or believe as real. After I heard Louise Erdrich read from The Painted Drum, about a part-Ojibwe woman whose grief for father and sister resonates when she stumbles on a memorial drum, a force in a world of heritage and living community, and E. L. Doctorow read from The March, about William Tecumseh Sherman’s chaotic American nineteenth-century Civil War march with his troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, the authors reading on different evenings at the Union Square Barnes & Noble, I thought that they were keeping open the possibility of work, of art, that actually has something to do with real history and real lives—real emotions, real thoughts—rather than fantasy and the commodities we are encouraged to buy in order to come closer to turning our lives into fantasies. Films such as Junebug, Loggerheads, and Thumbsucker seem to be making that same attempt: our need for survival, connection, knowledge, meaning, pleasure, and happiness are acknowledged and supported. Thumbsucker, directed by Mike Mills based on a novel by Walter Kirn, is about suburbia and a boy with a childish habit that infuriates his father; and his thumbsucking habit is a sign of the boy’s adolescence: he’s growing older, without growing up, and requires more nurturing and guidance. His parents seem strangely distracted, and surprised that he is as old as he is (and that they are as old as they are). Justin’s habit is mirrored by the habits, even addictions, of the other characters. Lou Taylor Pucci plays Justin, and Pucci is a young, promising actor, and his character’s insecurity, intelligence, laziness, and moodiness are easy to read on his face and in his posture. Vince D’Onofrio play’s Justin’s father Mike Cobb, a distant, tough father, Keanu Reeves is Justin’s dentist, and an advocate of the spiritual view, and Vince Vaughn is Justin’s encouraging teacher, Mr. Geary. Tilda Swinton, an actress I’ve liked in Edward II, Orlando, Wittgenstein, The Deep End, Constantine, and Broken Flowers, plays Justin’s mother Audrey, and I found her conception of the character problematic and her performance uneven. The mother is at first so gone on a soap opera actor she seems an idiot, then after her son’s medicine-aided success in school, she’s inspired to get involved with a branch of nursing that requires creative imagination and psychological insight—and she is good at it. When her son remarks on how extraordinary she is, it’s clear she’s supposed to be a figure of dynamic character and sensuality. Swinton has conviction but not vigor, and she is merely motherly and professional rather than charming or sensual: she does not seem to enjoy moving, seeing, or touching, and she does not seem brilliant. There was only one scene—after the boy is accepted to an out-of-town school—that captured the mother’s beauty and significant intimacy and intensity between mother and son. The strongest exchanges in the film are between Lou Pucci’s Justin and his young friends, and between Justin and Vince Vaughn’s Mr. Geary, and possibly between Justin and his dentist, played Keanu Reeves.

While admiring the technical competence and topical diversity of many contemporary films, such as Thumbsucker, I sometimes wonder if I have missed too many of the great films of yesterday: I still haven’t seen the work of Eisenstein. I have not seen more than clips of Birth of a Nation or M. I know Dreyer’s work only by reputation. I do like the opportunity to see older films, and did see a couple of them recently in public film screenings: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in New York’s Bryant Park, near the end of summer, and Camille, a favorite of mine that I hadn’t seen in years, screened in the early fall at Scandinavia House, two films of old Hollywood featuring beautiful women. The first, directed by Mike Nichols based on Edward Albee’s play, is about a bad marriage and takes place in the world of academia, and features Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, with George Segal and Sandy Dennis; and the second, George Cukor’s treatment of a story by Alexandre Dumas (screenplay by three writers, Zoe Akins, Frances Marion, and James Hilton), is about a farm girl turned great courtesan who becomes involved with a young man, and features Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor. Elizabeth Taylor, who in youth had the beauty of an erotic dream, has yet seemed earthbound—money, power, and sex seemed as real to her, and as real in her to us, as her skin and the ground she walks on; whereas Garbo, the lady of ambiguities and contradictions, ethereal and sensual, intellectual and intuitive, feminine and masculine, graceful and direct, has a presence that seems at once whole and abstract. Garbo’s characters always seemed actor (active agent) and interpreter, as if they understood everything—the other characters, the story (people, the world)—at least as well as we do. Each woman is beautiful, but Elizabeth Taylor’s is a beauty of the flesh and Garbo’s is a spiritual beauty. Elizabeth Taylor is sometimes filmed in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as if she was a force of nature—akin to a hurricane or tornado, an unpredictable and dangerous woman. (I have reservations about the misogyny and vulgarity of that view, but I cannot say that it misunderstands her.) It is believable that in Camille Garbo is amused—rather than frustrated in selfishness or greed—when she realizes that the young man she is attracted to is not the rich man she thought him, and believable when she has decided to give him up for his sake and she adopts a cold attitude that requires great effort, or that when deeply ill she sees and is drawn to accept a last hope for happiness before, taking a last breath, realizing the hope is not real, and taking a last—almost funny—look at her still imperceptive, still romantic lover. Garbo was called a complete reason for going to the movies by film essayist Pauline Kael, and for years Garbo has seemed to me to be an ideal film presence, for reasons that have less to do with acting than with being.

In a time to come, Gwyneth Paltrow, the star of Proof, may be more than a celebrity or well-regarded actress: she may be a legend. Proof, a film directed by John Madden based on David Auburn’s play, is about the difficulty of identifying and verifying evidence as it focuses on a disturbed and ill—crazy—elder male mathematician, Robert, and his relationship to his mathematician daughter, Catherine, who has taken over his primary care, and become herself alienated from ordinary life and emotionally fragile, and the serious work they attempted together. When the father dies, a young male math scholar, Hal, and also Catherine’s successful lawyer sister, Claire, arrive; the first, Hal, to review the father’s journals for publishable work and the second, Claire, to help with the funeral, settle the estate, and take care of her prickly sister Catherine. When Catherine reveals to Hal a journal with a solution to a math problem, questions regarding authorship (father’s or daughter’s), and personal trust, come into play. What is the proof for either? Gwyneth Paltrow is almost too effective as the depressed daughter, grieving for the father for whom she sacrificed her studies. She has the melancholy single-mindedness of actual depression; and her most complex moment in Proof may be when she cries while she and Hal make love; and her happiest moment, soon betrayed by Hal’s disbelief, is when she decides to show Hal what had been her secret. I had not been impressed by Paltrow in Emma, but thought she had a few good moments—looking up, fully aware (I think after sex)—in A Perfect Murder, and, of course, she was shining, shy and sly, and sympathetic in Shakespeare in Love (also directed by Madden); however, I thought she was perfect in The Talented Mr. Ripley, moving from being welcoming to suspicious to bitter. (I regret missing Paltrow in Possession and Sylvia.) Anthony Hopkins, as the father, projected confidence and delusion. Jake Gyllenhaal, boyish, sweet, open, is affecting as Hal. I liked Hope Davis a lot as a healthy woman, Claire, whose common sense can be seen as nurturing and wise or insensitive and obtuse. However, necessary Hope Davis’s character is—in a way, she represents the normal world—the film belongs to Paltrow.

I recall now reading that Gwyneth Paltrow wanted to be involved with the concert program Live 8, which took place on sites around the planet, and was intended to draw attention to poverty and the need to end it. The role of the actor in social critique was a theme of an early October conversation between Roger Guenveur Smith and Kelvin Shawn Sealey, after Guenveur Smith’s reading from a work-in-progress at City College’s Aaron Davis Hall. Guenveur Smith has appeared in Do the Right Thing, Get on The Bus, Eve’s Bayou, Deep Cover, King of New York, and Baby Boy, among other productions, including a solo stage and film performance in A Huey P. Newton Story. (He said he wanted Newton to speak in his own words, and thought of his own work as jazz acting.) With Iraq and hurricane Katrina touchstones for many, Guenveur Smith, reading from his planned theatrical work, with themes involving water, the environment and social issues, said, “It hurts me to see this western movie constantly rerun,” with its commercialization of pain, death, and war. Guenveur Smith mentioned Bob Marley and the I-Threes, August Wilson, Amiri Baraka, Frederick Douglass, and his own family and its Geechee (South Carolina) background and its motel. He called Charleston the place where the Civil War started and never ended. He wondered aloud if he had protested apartheid and stood for Mandela’s freedom so he himself could go to South Africa and be, as he was, in a Steven Seagal movie. He talked about hurricane Katrina’s effect on Louisiana, and the proposal to put some of its victims in an aquatic stadium. When in conversation with Kevin Sealey, Roger Guenveur Smith acknowledged that he has been involved with history, but that nostalgia did not interest him, and that he thought part of his responsibility was to be able to pass history and a contemporary understanding on in a coherent, useful fashion, evoking the here and now, to young people. I think George Clooney, one of the producers of Good Night, and Good Luck, might agree.

In Good Night, and Good Luck, journalist Edward R. Murrow and his producer Fred Friendly and their team investigate faulty national security judgements and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s slander of various people as Communists. David Strathairn plays a sharp, dark Murrow, cigarette-smoking, eloquent, principled, professional, far-seeing, also given to shared, puckish jokes with his co-worker and producer Fred Friendly, played by a chubby George Clooney. Friendly is a middle-manager type who obviously is deft enough to see and support a great effort, the kind of person without whom little achievement is possible—yet he’s not the type who is thought of as a star. Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson play the Wershbas, a couple who are married despite the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) forbidding marriage between employees. They listen to each other well, and seem like co-workers and companions, and there’s a fearful-funny kind of worry emanating from them regarding their rule-breaking. Frank Langella plays corporate king Bill Paley, giving the man a kind of majesty that can seem benevolent or sinister, depending on his decisions. (I wasn’t sure if Langella’s performance wasn’t too much, as most of the managers I’ve known had no mystique—they’ve been dumb, not deep, their only talent being for getting and holding power.) The seriousness of the film is balanced by the good-natured joking between Murrow and Friendly, and also by Murrow’s interview with Liberace, who lives with his mother and is asked about settling down—and Liberace does not say he hasn’t found a woman, but that he hasn’t found a mate, and he mentions that Princess Margaret is also free (it’s up to the viewer to decide if Liberace, who we now know to have been homosexual, is pointing out a similarity or saying that he might pursue a celebrity marriage). The jazz singer Dianne Reeves is both entertainment and artistic witness in Good Night, and Good Luck; in the film, she is a singer recording in the CBS building, and her singing scenes are interspersed between dramatic scenes and her songs are sometimes commentary, sometimes not —the soundtrack includes songs like “TV is the Thing This Year” and “One for My Baby”. Reeves is emblematic: black and female, she is a source of meaning and pleasure, but also marginal to the direct and specific actions and lives of the people we see, Murrow, Friendly, and McCarthy, whose actual filmed speeches and public commentary are used in this black-and-white film. The lesson of Good Night, and Good Luck is that if journalists do their jobs—report the facts, with evidence, context, and thought—they can inform and protect the liberties of citizens—such as freedom of speech and freedom of association—against those who want to curtail those liberties. It’s an irony that at the end, both McCarthy and Murrow, an unhinged conservative in Congress and an honest liberal in a broadcast network, each seen as a troublemaker by his institution, are sidelined, their power reduced. Good Night, and Good Luck, written by Grant Heslov and George Clooney, and directed by Clooney, is one of the most important American films of this year, 2005, and of recent years.

Before seeing Good Night, and Good Luck, I saw, in order of viewing, Be Cool, Guess Who, Kings and Queen, Monster-in-Law, The Island, 9 Songs, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Red Eye, 3 Dancing Slaves, Cote D’Azur, Proof, Camille, Thumbsucker, 2046, and Flightplan, and after seeing Good Night, and Good Luck, I saw Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death, and Elizabethtown and Loggerheads. I was still thinking of Good Night, and Good Luck, and the issues it raises about citizenship, political participation, and the importance of evidence and also free speech, on October 21, a day when I woke late but did work I actually cared about—writing and typing descriptions of Elizabethtown, Loggerheads, and then Good Night, and Good Luck, even as I wondered if anyone else would care about such work—before I broke off and saw a late-afternoon performance of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame at York College in Queens, then took the train to Manhattan and saw and heard New Paltz mayor Jason West speak about his book, Dare to Hope: Saving American Democracy, at Barnes & Noble in Chelsea. I was pleased that the small group of mostly young black students attending one of several performances of the Beckett play quickly picked up on Beckett’s wit—abstract, anthropological, lyric, physical, psychological, and sexual wit amid a linguistic exploration of extreme isolation, as I had presumed, possibly too often, that the appeal of rap music to the young had discouraged such appreciation of other language. (Rap music, with his rude lyrics, has been a tradition that frequently rejects expansive liberal thought, and shows suspicion for its more intelligent artists.) I was elated to go from the play out into the world, into Manhattan. Jason West, a young mayor known for marrying male couples, spoke about the public’s boredom with the two-party system, and the fact that alternatives exist in the world in practice and in theory and simply have to be identified and publicized. He, while speaking of creating small towns as sanctuaries of change, mentioned proportional representation, as one example of an alternative model, in which if a political party gets fifteen percent of the vote in an election it also gets fifteen percent of the governing seats. He also mentioned society’s changed attitudes toward homosexuals in the last decade as a sign of effective politics. The little gathering in attendance cheered at the end of his comments, and near me, a man, a late middle-age white man, said, “That’s disgusting—he sounds like a hippie.”