The Rubicon is a river in what is now northern Italy. In Roman times, it was illegal for any Roman general from the outlying areas to cross the Rubicon southward without first disbanding his army. Today, "crossing the Rubicon" has come to mean making an irrevocable decision from which there is no turning back.
I like a good spy story, so when American Movie Classics announced its new series, Rubicon, I decided to check it out. The first episode showed some intriguing possibilities, so after watching it, I decided to "cross the Rubicon" and commit myself to following the series.
The main character, Will Travers, is played by James Badge Dale, who was excellent as Private Robert Leckie in the award-winning HBO series The Pacific earlier this year. Travers works for the American Policy Institute (API), an intelligence analysis group that seems to be a front for the CIA or some other national security organization.
Things happen in that first episode. At the beginning, an older man, Thomas Rhumor (Harris Yulin in an uncredited cameo) finds a four-leaf clover next to some newspaper clippings on his desk and promptly decides to blow his brains out. Later that day, Will's boss, David Hadas (Peter Gerety), who is also Will's father-in-law, finds some disturbing similarities in the crossword puzzles of seven major newspapers. It isn't the first time that this has happened, and bad things usually happen when it occurs.
That night, Hadas unexpectedly gives his prized Norton motorcycle to Will. Earlier, he had given Will a note advising him to leave the area. Will calls Hadas, who promises to explain everything to Will the next morning at a clandestine meeting.
That meeting never happens. The next morning, Hadas is apparently killed in the crash of a subway train. But was it really him? There are clues that he may not have been on the train, so we are not sure. (Anyone who stands at the front of the lead car of a subway train as it enters a station surely must have a death wish, and Hadas didn't appear to be suicidal.) Hadas' boss, Kale Ingram (Arliss Howard), persuades Will to take over David's team.
The first episode presents lots of intriguing possibilities, threads, subplots and no doubt some red herrings, and has the makings of a good spy story. There's only one problem. these ideas aren't carried through very well, at least in the next nine episodes.
Nothing much happens in those episodes. The crossword-puzzle story line is left dangling. We have no more idea of what happened to David Halas than we did at the end of the second episode. Will begins to pick up traces of a conspiracy involving Thomas Rhumor, another man who committed suicide 20 years earlier after finding a four-leaf clover on his desk, and Truxton Spanger (Michael Cristopher), the head of API, but even after 10 episodes, we don't know much about it.
There's a subplot featuring Katherine Rhumor (Miranda Richardson), Thomas Rhumor's widow, who is trying to sort out the mystery of her husband's suicide. It seems that Thomas Rhumor was very secretive about many things in his life, but this fine actress is given far too little screen time in her role.
What we have is a story in which no one trusts anyone else and you don't know who are the "good guys" and who are the "bad guys." That's to be expected in a spy story, of course, but the characters are so thinly drawn that you don't really care. Secretaries spy on their bosses, under orders from higher-ups, then get fired when their bosses find out. Bad guys (at least I assume that they are bad guys) bug the apartments and offices of the good guys, the good guys find the bugs and destroy them, then the bad guys come back and plant new ones. Several of the main characters are being followed all of the time. Ho-hum.
Oh yes, Will and Katherine are threatened with termination in Episode 10, but up to this point, the most exciting thing that's happened is that Tanya MacGaffan (Loren Hodges), on of the members of Will's team, has failed a drug test and been forced into API's rehab program. You know the bit--we take care of our own, even if that sometimes means terminating one of our own.
Poor James Badge Dale. He went from a series in which all hell was breaking loose all of the time to one in which nothing ever seems to break loose ever. He seems as bored with the series as I've been. It must be like digging a foxhole and standing in it, waiting for the Japanese to storm your hill--for nine weeks.
If you want to see a film with a similar story line, watch 1975's Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in their prime and directed by Sydney Pollack, one of the best directors of his generation. It's a good film and it only takes two hours. And by the way, the villain is played by Max von Sydow, one of the best movie villains of his time. If you're in the mood for a series, try Smiley's People and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, starring Alec Guinness, who is always worth watching.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Why I Need to Write This Blog
In my previous entry, I wrote about my first editor, Ed Wall, who was a true role model for me. He is now 85 years old, and despite his serious ailments, he writes a blog that contains shining examples of good writing. Be sure to check it out at http://aepwall.blogspot.com/. He has inspired me to start my own blog.
For the first seven years of my career, I was a newspaper reporter and editor. This was followed by six years as editor of the alumni publication at The Catholic University of America. Those were very happy and successful years for me. I found that I was a good writer and photographer, and writing came very naturally to me. I even won a number of local and national awards for my work, and I got to know some of the best people in my field.
Unfortunately, Catholic University didn't pay very well and my family was growing, so I started to work for a series of research organizations, trade associations, and professional membership societies. These jobs provided very little opportunity for original writing or good photography. Instead, because the publications that I was editing were dependent on members for their content, I spent most of my time editing and attempting to salvage poorly-written content from bad writers.
I found that by being constantly exposed to bad writing, my own writing suffered and no longer came naturally to me. I suffered constantly from writer's block and when I finally managed to write, it was like pulling teeth and the results were very discouraging.
Lately, I have been specializing in proposal management, which does not leave much room for creativity. I do it because the work pays very well--about twice as much as non-technical writing and editing. I need the money badly but I get very little personal satisfaction out of the work. I do get some satisfaction when a proposal that I have managed helps my client to win the contract, but the satisfaction comes from knowing that I have helped to create or protect jobs for my client's employees. I've found that every company has decent, hard-working people who deserve my best effort.
My financial situation is such that I will have to work as long as I am physically able to do so. I have my share of medical problems. To complicate matters, I have suffered from chronic depression for the past 30 years, and there are many mornings when I have a hard time getting out of bed.
I'm writing this blog to protect my sanity and to give myself a reason to get out of bed on those difficult mornings when the depression has taken hold. I need to write about things that I care about, even if nobody reads my posts, and I need to prove to myself that I can still write well. The more that I write, the easier it will become. My physical problems pale in comparison to Ed's, so I've said to myself that if he can still write well and often, then I can too.
Ed, you taught us so much those many years ago at The Catholic Review. I want you to know that as far as this writer is concerned, you're still teaching us.
For the first seven years of my career, I was a newspaper reporter and editor. This was followed by six years as editor of the alumni publication at The Catholic University of America. Those were very happy and successful years for me. I found that I was a good writer and photographer, and writing came very naturally to me. I even won a number of local and national awards for my work, and I got to know some of the best people in my field.
Unfortunately, Catholic University didn't pay very well and my family was growing, so I started to work for a series of research organizations, trade associations, and professional membership societies. These jobs provided very little opportunity for original writing or good photography. Instead, because the publications that I was editing were dependent on members for their content, I spent most of my time editing and attempting to salvage poorly-written content from bad writers.
I found that by being constantly exposed to bad writing, my own writing suffered and no longer came naturally to me. I suffered constantly from writer's block and when I finally managed to write, it was like pulling teeth and the results were very discouraging.
Lately, I have been specializing in proposal management, which does not leave much room for creativity. I do it because the work pays very well--about twice as much as non-technical writing and editing. I need the money badly but I get very little personal satisfaction out of the work. I do get some satisfaction when a proposal that I have managed helps my client to win the contract, but the satisfaction comes from knowing that I have helped to create or protect jobs for my client's employees. I've found that every company has decent, hard-working people who deserve my best effort.
My financial situation is such that I will have to work as long as I am physically able to do so. I have my share of medical problems. To complicate matters, I have suffered from chronic depression for the past 30 years, and there are many mornings when I have a hard time getting out of bed.
I'm writing this blog to protect my sanity and to give myself a reason to get out of bed on those difficult mornings when the depression has taken hold. I need to write about things that I care about, even if nobody reads my posts, and I need to prove to myself that I can still write well. The more that I write, the easier it will become. My physical problems pale in comparison to Ed's, so I've said to myself that if he can still write well and often, then I can too.
Ed, you taught us so much those many years ago at The Catholic Review. I want you to know that as far as this writer is concerned, you're still teaching us.
Ed Wall: Still Teaching Us How to Write
There is a second inspiration for my blog--Ed Wall, my first editor and the best editor that a young reporter could ever hope to have. Most of what I know about good reporting and editing I learned from Ed. I can never repay him for all that he did for me, except to try to help other young people as they are starting out as writers and editors. I've tried to do this all of my life, in honor of Ed.
Arthur Edward Patrick Wall is 85 years old now and suffering from some serious disabilities, and yet he's still not just writing, but writing very well. Good journalistic writing has become a lost art. Just try slogging through the Washington Post on any given day. If you care about good writing, be sure to visit his blog, Wall's Paper, at http://aepwall.blogspot.com/.
Ed came into my life in 1965. I had left the Catholic seminary (two years before I would have been ordained a priest) and been hired as a reporter for The Catholic Review in Baltimore, Maryland. The editor who hired me left three weeks later and Ed replaced him. He left an important position with the Honolulu Advertiser, and those of us on the staff wondered why he would leave Hawaii for Baltimore of all places. It turned out that Ed was a convert to Catholicism and wanted to give something back to the Church.
Most of us on the editorial staff were a bunch of twenty-somethings who were still wet behind the ears. Besides myself, there was Bobby Keller, Dennis Henderson and his brother Gordon, and Gerry Parsigian. Tom Lorsung, our news editor, was a few years older than us, and was married with young children.
Finally there was Eddie Kearns, the city editor. Eddie was about 55 years old and had been with the paper since high school. Eddie edited the back-of-the-paper stuff, such as announcements from the parishes about events such as spaghetti dinners, bull roasts, and crab feasts. How he managed to keep from being bored to tears, I'll never know. I'll also never know what he thought about the changes that Ed Wall brought to the paper because Eddie kept his own counsel about such matters. But we never had to worry about the back of the paper.
This was during the waning days of the hot-type era, when type was cast, one line at a time, on Linotype machines, dropped into a metal form called a chase, and eventually molded into metal pages, which were mounted on a rotary press. The paper was printed on Thursdays, and the entire staff would spend all day at the print shop, proofreading galleys of type, double-checking corrected lines of type as they were inserted into the metal form, and performing a last-minute check when the first papers started coming off the press.
We were all hungry to learn as much as we could from Ed, and he never brushed us off. He also seemed to understand that we were all greeenhorns and would make mistakes from time to time. I never heard him utter a cruel or unkind word to anyone on the staff. He was--and still is--a true gentleman.
We would all go out to lunch at a deli near the print shop and start asking him questions. Later, as we were waiting for the first copies to come off the press, we would ask him even more questions. How did he manage to accomplish a certain goal? What was the direction in which he was trying to take the paper? Why can't we be more like the Delmarva Dialog, a liberal, groundbreaking Catholic paper in nearby Wilmington, Delaware?
In answer to that last question, Ed told us that he intended to move The Catholic Review in that same direction, but that he intended to do so in an orderly way over the next two years. Two years later, The Catholic Review had become one of the most-respected Catholic papers in the United States and the Delmarva Dialog was nearly bankrupt.
In 1968 the editor who had hired me for The Catholic Review took over the Delmarva Dialog and I went there to work for him. Under his editorship, the paper continued to hemorrhage money. After I did a short stint with the News-Journal papers in Wilmington, Ed took me back.
The thing about Ed Wall was that he was not a "Catholic newspaperman" like most of the others at the time, but rather, a newspaperman who happened to edit a Catholic paper. He gave us all good assignments and the opportunity to write about subjects that mattered to us. I wrote about the plight of migrant workers on the Eastern Shore. Dennis Henderson wrote an excellent series of articles on motorcycle safety. Practically no other Catholic newspaper of the time was doing these things.
He was also very competitive--a newspaperman first and foremost. He particularly liked to scoop the Catholic Standard, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Washington--which wasn't very hard to do.
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council, which dragged the Catholic Church into the 20th Century, was in full swing in Rome. Monsignor Joseph Gallagher, the Executive Editor of The Catholic Review, was also the editor of the English-language translations of the council documents and was in Rome while the council was in session.
Ed was determined that The Review would be the first publication in the United States to publish the translations. When they were all completed, Monsignor Gallagher found a friendly airline pilot who flew them overnight into Friendship Airport in Baltimore. Tom Lorsung, our news editor, met the plane at 7:30 the next morning and brought them to Baltimore. The Review published them over a period of time.
When I came back to the paper in 1970, Ed assigned me to cover the Maryland governor's office and General Assembly on a full-time basis, the type of assignment that no other Catholic paper was doing at that time. The state capitol is in Annapolis, which is within the Archdiocese of Washington.
In 1971 there were two major pieces of legislation coming up in which the Archdioceses of Baltimore and Washington had a strong interest--legalization of abortion and state aid to private education. There I was, sitting with reporters from the Sun papers in Baltimore and reporters from Baltimore radio and television stations--but no reporter from the Catholic Standard.
Supporters of the education bill had lobbied the governor, Marvin Mandel, to support the legislation in 1970, which was a gubernatorial election year in Maryland. Mandel, who was Jewish, asked them to hold off until the next year, when he promised to support the bill.
True to his word, when the bill came up before the House of Delegates in 1971, Mandel pulled out all the stops in support of it. People from his office came out of the woodwork to lobby the delegates.
The bill was scheduled to come up for a vote in the House on a Thursday--deadline day for The Catholic Review. The day before, I wrote three stories, each exactly 20 inches long. 1--The bill passes. 2--The bill fails. 3--The vote came too late for our deadline. For the first two, I even got my sources to give me quotes both ways.
This was long before cell phones came on the scene. Somehow or other, we managed to get a landline phone to my seat in Annapolis. Things were moving slowly in the House of Delegates that day, and as the afternoon session started, the bill still hadn't come up for a vote. It seemed that every 15 minutes, Ed would call me on the phone and ask for an update. As it got later in the day, I could hear the tension in his voice building. He could have taken the easy way out and used the "too late for our deadline" story, but it would have killed him to do this. Fortunately, the bill came up for a vote--and passed--just in time to make the paper.
I'm so glad that Ed is writing his blog and showing us some shining examples of good journalism and captivating writing. Ed, to quote from Mr. Spock of Star Trek: May you live long and prosper.
Arthur Edward Patrick Wall is 85 years old now and suffering from some serious disabilities, and yet he's still not just writing, but writing very well. Good journalistic writing has become a lost art. Just try slogging through the Washington Post on any given day. If you care about good writing, be sure to visit his blog, Wall's Paper, at http://aepwall.blogspot.com/.
Ed came into my life in 1965. I had left the Catholic seminary (two years before I would have been ordained a priest) and been hired as a reporter for The Catholic Review in Baltimore, Maryland. The editor who hired me left three weeks later and Ed replaced him. He left an important position with the Honolulu Advertiser, and those of us on the staff wondered why he would leave Hawaii for Baltimore of all places. It turned out that Ed was a convert to Catholicism and wanted to give something back to the Church.
Most of us on the editorial staff were a bunch of twenty-somethings who were still wet behind the ears. Besides myself, there was Bobby Keller, Dennis Henderson and his brother Gordon, and Gerry Parsigian. Tom Lorsung, our news editor, was a few years older than us, and was married with young children.
Finally there was Eddie Kearns, the city editor. Eddie was about 55 years old and had been with the paper since high school. Eddie edited the back-of-the-paper stuff, such as announcements from the parishes about events such as spaghetti dinners, bull roasts, and crab feasts. How he managed to keep from being bored to tears, I'll never know. I'll also never know what he thought about the changes that Ed Wall brought to the paper because Eddie kept his own counsel about such matters. But we never had to worry about the back of the paper.
This was during the waning days of the hot-type era, when type was cast, one line at a time, on Linotype machines, dropped into a metal form called a chase, and eventually molded into metal pages, which were mounted on a rotary press. The paper was printed on Thursdays, and the entire staff would spend all day at the print shop, proofreading galleys of type, double-checking corrected lines of type as they were inserted into the metal form, and performing a last-minute check when the first papers started coming off the press.
We were all hungry to learn as much as we could from Ed, and he never brushed us off. He also seemed to understand that we were all greeenhorns and would make mistakes from time to time. I never heard him utter a cruel or unkind word to anyone on the staff. He was--and still is--a true gentleman.
We would all go out to lunch at a deli near the print shop and start asking him questions. Later, as we were waiting for the first copies to come off the press, we would ask him even more questions. How did he manage to accomplish a certain goal? What was the direction in which he was trying to take the paper? Why can't we be more like the Delmarva Dialog, a liberal, groundbreaking Catholic paper in nearby Wilmington, Delaware?
In answer to that last question, Ed told us that he intended to move The Catholic Review in that same direction, but that he intended to do so in an orderly way over the next two years. Two years later, The Catholic Review had become one of the most-respected Catholic papers in the United States and the Delmarva Dialog was nearly bankrupt.
In 1968 the editor who had hired me for The Catholic Review took over the Delmarva Dialog and I went there to work for him. Under his editorship, the paper continued to hemorrhage money. After I did a short stint with the News-Journal papers in Wilmington, Ed took me back.
The thing about Ed Wall was that he was not a "Catholic newspaperman" like most of the others at the time, but rather, a newspaperman who happened to edit a Catholic paper. He gave us all good assignments and the opportunity to write about subjects that mattered to us. I wrote about the plight of migrant workers on the Eastern Shore. Dennis Henderson wrote an excellent series of articles on motorcycle safety. Practically no other Catholic newspaper of the time was doing these things.
He was also very competitive--a newspaperman first and foremost. He particularly liked to scoop the Catholic Standard, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Washington--which wasn't very hard to do.
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council, which dragged the Catholic Church into the 20th Century, was in full swing in Rome. Monsignor Joseph Gallagher, the Executive Editor of The Catholic Review, was also the editor of the English-language translations of the council documents and was in Rome while the council was in session.
Ed was determined that The Review would be the first publication in the United States to publish the translations. When they were all completed, Monsignor Gallagher found a friendly airline pilot who flew them overnight into Friendship Airport in Baltimore. Tom Lorsung, our news editor, met the plane at 7:30 the next morning and brought them to Baltimore. The Review published them over a period of time.
When I came back to the paper in 1970, Ed assigned me to cover the Maryland governor's office and General Assembly on a full-time basis, the type of assignment that no other Catholic paper was doing at that time. The state capitol is in Annapolis, which is within the Archdiocese of Washington.
In 1971 there were two major pieces of legislation coming up in which the Archdioceses of Baltimore and Washington had a strong interest--legalization of abortion and state aid to private education. There I was, sitting with reporters from the Sun papers in Baltimore and reporters from Baltimore radio and television stations--but no reporter from the Catholic Standard.
Supporters of the education bill had lobbied the governor, Marvin Mandel, to support the legislation in 1970, which was a gubernatorial election year in Maryland. Mandel, who was Jewish, asked them to hold off until the next year, when he promised to support the bill.
True to his word, when the bill came up before the House of Delegates in 1971, Mandel pulled out all the stops in support of it. People from his office came out of the woodwork to lobby the delegates.
The bill was scheduled to come up for a vote in the House on a Thursday--deadline day for The Catholic Review. The day before, I wrote three stories, each exactly 20 inches long. 1--The bill passes. 2--The bill fails. 3--The vote came too late for our deadline. For the first two, I even got my sources to give me quotes both ways.
This was long before cell phones came on the scene. Somehow or other, we managed to get a landline phone to my seat in Annapolis. Things were moving slowly in the House of Delegates that day, and as the afternoon session started, the bill still hadn't come up for a vote. It seemed that every 15 minutes, Ed would call me on the phone and ask for an update. As it got later in the day, I could hear the tension in his voice building. He could have taken the easy way out and used the "too late for our deadline" story, but it would have killed him to do this. Fortunately, the bill came up for a vote--and passed--just in time to make the paper.
I'm so glad that Ed is writing his blog and showing us some shining examples of good journalism and captivating writing. Ed, to quote from Mr. Spock of Star Trek: May you live long and prosper.
Friday, September 24, 2010
In memory of Carol Castronouvo
Early this year, I lost a dear friend, Carol Castronuovo, to cancer. Carol was a wonderful conversationalist and very well-read. We had a common interest in film and music and she would tell me about the books that she was reading. I learned so much from her. We used to talk for hours on end about anything and everything.
So many times since her passing, I have thought about something or seen something, said to myself "I ought to share this with Carol," and started to reach for the phone. Then something brings me up short and I realize that she isn't there for me to call anymore. I never realized how important she was to me and my life.
Carol is the inspiration for this blog. I'm 69 years of age as I start to write it, and I have a long memory and hopefully the wisdom and perspective to go along with it. When I started out as a newspaper reporter in 1965, and was writing news stories and features about subjects that were very important to me, I was enthralled by the fact that my writing was reaching many thousands of people. I really felt that I could make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, many things went wrong in my life, and that dream was shattered.
This is my way of trying to rekindle that spirit of having something worthwhile to say and hopefully reaching a large number of people, at least over time. Carol, this one's for you. I know that you are up there listening, and I hope that someday we will once again be able to share our conversations. I miss you, and so does Stripes.
So many times since her passing, I have thought about something or seen something, said to myself "I ought to share this with Carol," and started to reach for the phone. Then something brings me up short and I realize that she isn't there for me to call anymore. I never realized how important she was to me and my life.
Carol is the inspiration for this blog. I'm 69 years of age as I start to write it, and I have a long memory and hopefully the wisdom and perspective to go along with it. When I started out as a newspaper reporter in 1965, and was writing news stories and features about subjects that were very important to me, I was enthralled by the fact that my writing was reaching many thousands of people. I really felt that I could make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, many things went wrong in my life, and that dream was shattered.
This is my way of trying to rekindle that spirit of having something worthwhile to say and hopefully reaching a large number of people, at least over time. Carol, this one's for you. I know that you are up there listening, and I hope that someday we will once again be able to share our conversations. I miss you, and so does Stripes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)