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Watching Obama orate, speechifying with flair and gospel tinged repetition, I see the suckers lining up. What has he really done that prepares him for the presidency or, for that matter, what has Hillary done that prepares her for that office. By the time one runs for the presidency, the truer aspects of character are debrided, and what is left is husk. Americans “hunger” for change, they also hunger for more — of anything. We have gone beyond the Gilded-Age, for we are now saturated in the fats of excess. We are Roman. It is essentially the old saw that says society is corrupt — an antique truism, ever pertinent. The real task as I see it is not to be blind; what is the old and valid adage — “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” The conditioning in this society, in all societies, is monumental. The bricks of this campaign are troweled on with bullshit. I hear no attempt to cut through the American brie and say what has to be said — to wit, the betrayal of our fellow Americans in New Orleans; the mortgage frauds perpetuated by banks; the constitutional violation of our rights under this abysmal administration — no, we get Obama, sallying forth on his donkey, revivifying bromides. He couldn’t “change” my water filter. At this time in my life I struggle real hard from becoming numb and from being soiled.

And so we will end up with someone, makes no difference, in my eyes. McCain who publically rather than individually — and privately – raising the flag of his better days in the Hanoi Hilton — again, no shame; Hillary latently displaying how she has mastered the old stud, and Obama riding on music, sound and fury signifying nothing.

And so it goes, as Vonnegut would sign off.

It is almost 5 AM and inhibitions are loosened, time to fulminate. In 1972 Nixon won handedly over George McGovern, a real war hero, a man, as time has proven, of not inconsiderable integrity. I had grown up with Tricky Dicky during the Fifties, and I was just stunned that this nation put him into office. We are such poor judges of character. A psychopath became President and there are enough learned articles about Nixon to sustain that DSM III diagnosis. Here was Nixon walking beaches fully clothed down to his buttoned cuffs; the always moist upper lip; that deathly pallor; the jerky and robotic movments of his body; the creepy artificiality of how he went about greeting people, the high intelligence suffused with paranoia. Watergate opened his inner sluice gates to defamation of minorities and personalities. And so we projected upon him power and strength, only to be deceived by our own inability to observe. At that time I quite consciously chose to remove myself from the fray. I now look upon the political process as a grotesque public entertainment.

We came upon one asshole after another. Reagan was a marionette, a Pirandello figure, who with props and aides presented himself as presidential; in fact, he was living off a script. We laud this mannequin. Whenever I’m in a urinal and there is a faded rubber mat that says “Say no to drugs,” I give it an extra dousing. Nancy’s manta, who used to be high for extended periods of time. Read her daughter’s books.

And then the Clintons, he dipping his cigar into something other than brandy, Hillary forgiving him (really) and how they are now merged to give us more of Arkansas sleaze. They are both without shame. She is a monstrous enabler. I feel that one day we will read that Chelsea threw herself off a roof. And if she doesn’t she is grossly impacted.

And we as a nation go along, make Hillary a senator of New York. no less; the sophisticates lose their brains over this carpetbagger, this corporate attorney with little of value. Observe her, not her looks, and odd vestments, but through the eyes and flesh and you see and hear a skull clackety-claking its jaws.  We have no shame in this country; we don’t understand it nor are we are parented to experience reasonable shame, as an inhibitor of poor actions.

Obama is the next black hope, a riderless horse, fluttering pennants and trite slogans about change. This country doesn’t change. It muddles through. I sense he feels he has air beneath him and he will fly. Perhaps. I saw through JFK’s puffery as well, giving Bobbie Marilyn after he was done with her. And Obama has the endorsement of Ted Kennedy who left a young woman to die in a sunken car but managed to get out and spend a day rehearsing his story. He never apologized to the family. So Obama accepts his endorsement. Oh, Oh, Obama the slide begins.

And a word or two about McCain. Do you observe that his left side seems awkward or arthritic? Do you observe his body language which reminds me of a hungry resident at an assisted living home? I feel he has several illnesses that will be revealed later in the campaign; he is frail heading into deeper fragility. But the ambition to be president is like hot sperm running up a penis.

The best line I have ever heard about Romney’s background as a Mormon was from Twain who said after reading “The Book Of Mormon,” that it was “chloroform in print.” And Huckabee selling his evangelism as politics, thank you Elmer Gantry, as slick as the minister in “There Will Be Blood.”

The more one can step back, the more that one can see the tomfoolery for what it is, the more one gets a sense of despair. It only makes me, not you, dig my heels into the dirt, gather my loved ones about me, do what I have to do if possible, realizing that American optimism is ultimately vomit. It has no credence in reality.

What is America today? Recent pictures of Katrina trailers loaded with formaldehyde and issued to the homeless just underlines the essential rot just beneath the surface. In “Easy Rider,” made 40 years ago, Captain America, Jack Nicholson, sitting around a fire with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, says with a wispy sadness, words to this effect, “You know, this used to be a great country.” And now?

“There Will Be Blood” has proven a vexing movie for me; my simple test for almost anything literary or cinematic is that it moves me on many different levels, somehow touches my soul. I have concluded that the film is great but like “Citizen Kane” has a coldness to it, although the furnace/sled ending and Hermann’s music forever roasted in me primally — the loss, the abandonment, the agonies of memory forever left to the self and unknown to the world. Sheer heart-rending.

 Watching Daniel Day-Lewis is like watching a slide into third, legs outstretched, spikes high, going for the bag. Everything else is obliterated in that one move; this may be an example in which the actor destroys all else by his intensity and in so doing left this moviegoer untouched. By seeing this cyclonic fury pass by one is stunned, but much of the characterological environment is left unsensed.  Paul Dano, who plays a lubricious minister, is a scoundrel of the first order, a religious scoundrel which makes him more than corrupt. Soothed in the liquids of his own hypocrisies and seen by Daniel Plainview for the creep he is, he is the one character who comes out of the celluloid to meet you; in the last and devastating scene he is intimately involved as well. It is hard to play a scene against the tornadic Day-Lewis, but he holds up.

And let me share an association (perhaps a curiously apt one) I have been experiencing about the final showdown. When Day-Lewis is in a two-shot with Dano, raging and fulminating, I thought of the Alien series, especially the scenes where the predator is inches from Sigourney Weaver’s face.  Jaws open, acidic brews, and fumes and a tongue-tail just itching to spew out, I felt Day-Lewis had that audacious creature-human power as he unleased invective against Dano. And the attentive moviegoer saw drool slip down the side of his mouth and fall away.

 We are presented with a force that has no history; we hear something about Plainview’s past as a young person, not much. We are told the givens, and asked to finish the theorem by ourselves. I suppose I am saying that that the performance eats up the picture and this is a fault. And what are we to extract from all this sound and fury signifiying nothing?

Plainview experiences betrayal, commits murder, has the distrust of a paranoid, the empathy of a gnat, the guile of a Barnum, the capacity as a parent to destroy a chiild’s psychological innards, a whole panoply of disfigurements. Shrewd and completely self-serving, he is a towering Shakespearean character of dynamic force and presence — what a stew! Alas, he still, at least for me, doesn’t grab my soul. It is a conundrum.

I will not reveal the last line of the movie, for it has several meanings to it. The genius of the film is that we do not see Plainview’s face. Damn! Perhaps that was a mistake. We watch and are spent. I have no more to say, but I will come back to touch up this oil. I didn’t relish spending time in the theater with a full-screen cobra hissing at me, fascinating, frightening, and very exhausting.

Since I saw him first in “My Left Foot,” Daniel Day-Lewis has become my favorite actor, Al Pacino a close second. DeNiro is fading fast as he has lost his sure-footing at least in my eyes these past ten years. I recall Olivier’s comment that a good or great actor does it all with his eyes, and his admonition to us is to watch the eyes. I’ve been doing that for some time now and Daniel says quite a bit with his eyes. He does not act, the style of Tracy and Stewart is just different; Brando had it but his sloth turns me off. The only actress who grabs me with her eyes is Helen Mirren, take a gander at her in “Excaliber” and the recent role as Elizabeth II.

“There Will Be blood” has overtones of “Citizen Kane,” the tycoon who gives up love for American greed and ambition; the striving for material wealth at the cost of close relationships — or the sacrifice of them; like Kane who is sold by his mother to the banker, Thatcher, thus abandoned, is revealed here between Daniel Plainview and his “son,” H.W. Day-Lewis puts on a voice quite similar to John Huston and he never misses a beat of that husky and seductive growl. Brando and Olivier were masters of technique, but Day-Lewis goes beyond that; it is more than inhabiting the role. He simply is the role he is in, an incarnation if you will. I cannot think of any other actor who could be Daniel Plainview. It is his for all time, mesmerizing.

I have the feeling that there were not too many takes in some of these scenes, although I do not know. In one scene, the last one, you actually see drool come out of Day-Lewis’s mouth as he is spent in verbal rage — how many times do you do that. I have the feeling that Anderson just let Day-Lewis do it, for he had such a grasp on the character he was portraying.

I also feel that Day-Lewis may be difficult to live with, for on certain levels, as in this movie, we cannot grasp his intent or motive. It just explodes. As a spouse, how much intensity can you abide?

More on Daniel Day-Lewis as I think through the film. Of course, he will not get the oscar. 

I believe this was the first movie I ever saw as a human being; vaguely, as I recall it, for I saw it in the 40s, a series of episodes in time, from the American Revolution…to…I cannot remember. As we grow older, as we age, the past in a cliche sense becomes starkly clearer — think of Bernstein in “Citizen Kane” talking about the young girl with the white parasol that he saw decades ago and still thinks about her. It is an instinctual imprint, is it not? very primal, and I like primal.

I know that after 16 the magic of movies no longer condensed on my soul as it did as a child. Movies can be dreadful but scenes can remain lithographed on one’s memory. Why is not the question to ask? It just is. I will ransack my mind and see if I can share with you what will never leave me.

In “Song of the South” James Baskett plays the “negro” hand who skips and hops up a crest with animated characters, brer rabbit, brer fox, with bluebirds flitting by, as the great, oscar-winning song, “Zippity–Do–Dah” is played. I walked out of that theater, at 8 or 9, completly and sweetly corrupted by that cheery and uplifting event. I recall how I almost slipped off my theater seat when the creature in “The Thing” punches his vegetable arm through a door, scaring me to death. I remember a movie in which stolid Fred MacMurray is injured and his horse saves him, Fred tying his arm to the stirrup and Smoky pulling him along. If you ask why these stay, my rejoinder is why are you wearing those socks today. Michael Rennie’s alien-like face was just perfect for “The Day the Earth Stood Still”; he pours diamonds into a young boy’s hand and explains it is the currency of his world. Delicious. Sabu flying on a carpet over Bagdad telling Prince Ahmad that he has done his duties and now he will be free; the adolescent emotion devoured my heart. The Genie in that movie as well as the monstrous battle between Sabu and a temple spider terrified and thrilled me. Kane whispering “Rosebud”; the last shot that Spielberg paid homage to in one of the Indiana Jones flics, and the Bernard Hermann music played dolefully as the camera slowly browses through the storage house, Kane’s things, ending up with the furnace and the Rosebud sled tossed into it, all corrosively, and memorably affected me. I often ask myself — sometimes clients, when in practice — what is my Rosebud? What would you, dear reader, choose to say as you last word before you enter the endless fray of the subatomic world?

I just got a 50 inch HDTV. Both my fiancee, what an odd word at my age, and my son, Jordan, 31, have urged me to make the purchase…so I have made merry. When Ben Hur makes his big move in the hippodrome, the chariot wheels brutally cross my bed. Films such as “Black Narcissus” (Michael Powell) come across vividly, and my childhood avatar, Sabu, plays a horny prince infatuated with the poor man’s Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Simmons. The psycho-sexual tones among the nuns is delicious as well as the repressed sexual hysteria. Remember Simmons in “The Big Country” and Lean’s “Great Expectations.” I am of a period and time some years before TV, the postwar years, in which movies ruled. I actually got in at a local theater for $.18 which we called the “Dumps.” Expensive movie going in Brighton Beach was at the Tuxedo or the Oceana, here paying $.25

In any case, I’d like to share some movie titles with you, whether 75 or 25. I turned my son on to the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix and he gave me Nirvana. So for you cineastes here is a selection for you to consider, some mild annotation, of course. “The Man in the White Suit, ” savage satire of capitalism with a delightful Alec Guinness; “Bitter Rice,” with Sylvano Mangano, with thighs to rub mustard on and devour; “The Red House,” a sleeper with Edward G. Robinson, loaded with Freudian sauce; the ending is an unreal performance by Emanuel; see his Wolf Larsen in “The Sea Wolfe,” amazing. Did you know he spoke 8 languages? “The Thing,” with James Arness as the monster; “The Song of the South,” which is difficult to come by in these politically correct times. The Zippity-doo-dah title song won an Oscar. I was delighted by that film as a child, but then I never knew Jackie Robinson was a “negro,” he was just Jackie. “The Search” directed by Zinneman and with an appealing Monty Clift, touched feelings of abandonment and loss in me as the young boy searched for his mother in postwar Europe. Lumet’s “The Pawnbroker,” in which Rod Steiger lost out for an Oscar to Lee Marvin in “Cat Ballou”, the assholes were in charge that year. Of course, “Citizen Kane,” which blew my neurons at the age of 8 or 9 in wonderful black and white. Did you know that “Rosebud” was Hearst’s name for Marion Davies’ clitoris?

Some more are just welling up in me. “The Thief of Bagdad,” probably the greatest screen fantasy ever, with June Duprez, John Justin and the greatest screen adolescent of all time, Sabu. I still have not recovered from that. Does anyone know if there is a good print of it? The thematic music is deliriously sinuous, Borodin on steroids.

I’ll stop here and say that I still feel that Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch,” is one of the greatest westerns ever made; that Roy Rogers made carnal love to Trigger; that Flash Gordon as portrayed by Buster Crabbe and Charles Middleton is forever fabulous, art deco action gone wild. And for those that appreciate great sets and great sci-fi, see “The Shape of Things to Come,” screenplay by H.G. Wells. Pay particular attention to the last exchange of dialogue at the end.

And this passionate spate is over.