1.26.2006

Oprah Makes Frey Confess

I just want to follow up on the James Frey story now that Oprah has made him confess on national television. Here are some excerpts from the latest story on this:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Author James Frey confessed to Oprah Winfrey on Thursday that he made up details about every character in his memoir "A Million Little Pieces" and the talk show host apologized to her viewers, saying she felt "duped."

At one point early in the interview Frey said he still viewed the work as a memoir, not a novel. By the show's end Winfrey made him admit he lied.

"This hasn't been a great day for me," he said. "I feel like I came here and I have been honest with you. I have, you know, essentially admitted to ..."

"Lying," Winfrey interrupted.

"To lying," he said. "It's not an easy thing to do in front of an audience full of people and a lot of others watching on TV. ... If I come out of this experience with anything it's being a better person and learning from my mistakes and making sure I don't repeat them."

Sitting with Frey in side-by-side easy chairs, Winfrey quizzed the author point-by-point about his book that described his drug-and-alcohol addiction and the people hurt by it.

"All the way through the book I altered details about every one of the characters," Frey said, to disguise true identities.

He spent two hours in jail, not 87 days, and the account of his breaking up with a woman who later committed suicide happened in a much shorter period of time, with their separation occurring while he was taking care of personal business in North Carolina, not while he was in jail, he said.

Asked if The Smoking Gun Web site, which first questioned the book, had accurately characterized the discrepancies, Frey said "I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate," adding they did "a good job."

Frey said he had developed an image of himself for the book as "being tougher than I was, badder than I was" as a "coping mechanism."

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1.20.2006

Open to Desire

I'm reading this excellent Buddhist/Psychology book by Mark Epstein, M.D. called "Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life" right now that I highly recommend. Here's a quick excerpt (p. 143 of hardcover):

"In 1912, Henri Matisse visted Morocco and was struck by the softness of the light there. It changed the way he approached painting. Trying to express the spirituality that he felt in that light, he began to remove many of the features that he would ordinarily have included on his canvas. Faces became impersonal, stripped of the attributes that gave them their individuality. Outlines of objects vanished and uninterrupted areas of pure color began to emerge. No Western painter had ever taken such liberties. It was a technique that came to be known as "less is more," and it allowed Matisse the freedom, warmth and exuberance that was to define his work."

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1.13.2006

Flashlight Empties Starbucks in SF

It turns out that Monday's pipe bomb scare at a Starbucks on Van Ness in San Francisco was really just a flashlight with corroded batteries, left in the bathroom by a 44-year-old guy who was later arrested for shoplifting at Circuit City. (Click title above for full story.) I used to live two blocks from the Starbucks where this incident occurred, so when the story first broke it caught my attention.

The original story was that police had evacuated the entire building and one police officer was quoted as saying the device, which they claimed to have defused, "would have caused damage if it exploded.'' I guess he should have said the device, "if it had been an actual bomb instead of a rusty flashlight, would have caused damage if it exploded." If he exploded, my little dog Pop-Eye would probably cause damage. Fortunately, he is not a flashlight either. I don't fault the police for doing their job, but this does point out something absurd about our current mindset.

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1.11.2006

James Frey--A Million Lies?!

I will admit that I've been following this James Frey story quite closely for a number of reasons. He is the author of the book "A Million Little Pieces" that Oprah Winfrey helped put on the bestseller list. His book is a memoir, but The Smoking Gun website recently exposed many of his claims or stories in the book as clearly being "untruths." I happen to believe that a memoir should stick as close to the truth as the author can reasonably recall, and that it is the author's full responsibility to be as honest as possible at all times. In other words, this guy deserves to be raked over the coals, taken to the cleaners, tarred and feathered, (insert additional cliches).

The New York Times has published a number of articles on this subject. I read the entire (and extremely lengthy) article on The Smoking Gun site a few days ago, too. One of Frey's claims in the book is that he spent three months in prison, when it turns out he really only spent about five hours behind bars (or at least no more than 24 hours). I would personally say that this is a pretty flagrant lie. Even someone with a relatively bad memory would know whether they spent three months or five hours in prison. There's a significant difference. He also said he drove his car into a cop who was standing on a sidewalk and then incited a riot, neither of which really seems to have happened.

Basically, I think this guy is just a sick con artist trying to stroke his own ego and get rich in the process. He calls his website "Big Jim Industries." Somebody gave me a copy of his book a while ago because I went through some similar experiences in my youth (I even spent one night in jail, which it turns out might have been longer than Frey truthfully spent himself).

I started reading his book once, but I could never get past the opening page. Here's why--he starts by describing himself as being in the back of an airplane and feeling his face. This is when he discovers, "My front four teeth are gone. I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut." He also discovers that his clothes are covered in "spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood." He calls over a flight attendant who tells him, "a Doctor and two men" brought him onto the plane. Would a doctor really put a patient with four front teeth missing, a hole in his cheek, and a newly broken nose on a plane and just leave him there unattended, apparently with no bandages or treatment of any kind? Wouldn't a "hole in my cheek" cause a ton of blood and scare the crap out of the other passengers? If I was a pilot, I sure wouldn't let a guy in that shape board my aircraft. It is a dramatic opening, but it doesn't seem plausible in the real world.

I went through something like this myself once, only it was just a badly swollen right eye and some glass in my forehead (from the windshield of my car). A police officer took me to a clinic where a doctor treated my wounds first, and then I was escorted to jail. They sure as heck didn't put me on an airplane. It just makes no sense. I'm surprised Oprah thought this was such a great book. She should go back to choosing the classics like Faulkner.

Of course it is easy for me to say all of this now that the guy has already been exposed. It also turns out that his original manuscript was rejected by 17 publishers when he tried to publish it as fiction. Then Nan Talese's house picked it up as long as it could be published as a "memoir." So in a way I can see how it happened. He was just a struggling writer trying to earn a living, and he probably assumed that even if it did get published, it would never get so much attention, and therefore he would never be exposed as a liar and a fraud. Whoops.

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1.05.2006

Helena Norberg-Hodge, Founder of ISEC

Tonight in Berkeley my sitting meditation group had a guest speaker--Helena Norberg-Hodge, who founded the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC). Her talk was eye-opening. She is trying to educate people all over the world on the damage globalization is doing to local farming communities and the environment, and she is asking us to wake up to the fact that those who really benefit from globalization are the largest corporations and largest banks in the world. Here is a link to a great article and interview with Norberg-Hodge entitled "Global Warning:"

http://www.unitedearth.com.au/HNHinterview.html

Some of the things Norberg-Hodge stressed in her talk tonight included: deregulization is bad on the global level because it only benefits the large corporations; we need to push for no more redundant trade of food staples like milk, meat, butter, etc. because it is ridiculous to export these items and then turn around and import the same items for our own consumption--it's a complete waste of energy resources, especially when you consider that many of these items have to be refrigerated; we must buy local produce and stop supporting such "well-traveled" produce; and we must start developing and using renewable energy sources like hydro-electric power and solar power instead of oil-based energy sources or nuclear energy sources.

Here's a quote from an article she wrote:*

"Governments are forced into competition with one another for the favors of corporate vagabonds and try to lure them with low labor costs, lax environmental regulations and substantial subsidies. Instead of ‘free trade’, a careful policy of using tariffs to regulate the import of goods which could be produced locally would be in the best interests of the majority. Such ‘protectionism’ is not aimed at fellow citizens in other countries; rather, it is a way of safeguarding local culture, jobs and resources against the excessive power of the corporations."

*from this site: http://www.newint.org/issue282/endpiece.htm

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1.02.2006

Movies, Movies

It's been raining so much in the San Francisco Bay Area lately that I've been having flashbacks of the 8 years I lived in Seattle. The rain has chased me into the local movie theaters more frequently than usual. I've now seen most of the big ones that will be talked about at Oscar time. Here's my quick rundown:

Go see "The Squid and the Whale" because Jeff Daniels gives an amazing performance and so do both boys who play his sons. Skip "King Kong" if you don't mind never seeing it on the big screen, although Jack Black is fun to watch and the ape is pretty well-done. I enjoyed it in the way I enjoy an occasional roller coaster ride in Orlando, but it is not the best way I can think of to spend three hours of your life (although I would kill to spend three hours of my life with the real Naomi Watts, don't get me wrong). Peter Jackson's ego got the best of him when it came to editing time, too. Some of the lines and scenes he left in the movie are laughable. I enjoyed "Syriana" although I couldn't tell you what the hell happened in it. Matt Damon's character is really mind-boggling. George Clooney isn't bad in it though.

"Brokeback Mountain" made my eyes leak. In fact, it was very, very good, although the opening scene felt too stiff and unlikely to me (where neither of our two main characters talks to each other in the parking lot even though nobody else is around). I loved "Capote" although it also kind of gives you the creeps if you really think about what's going on. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is officially my favorite actor, I'd say. Catherine Keener does a nice job, too. I even saw "Chronicles of Narnia" although it didn't do that much for me. Skip it unless you are 12 years old. It starts off with a lot of promise but gets worse and worse as it goes along. I enjoyed "Walk the Line" about Johnny Cash. Reese Witherspoon will no doubt be nominated for an Oscar. It is a classic Hollywood biopic--almost too reminiscent of "Ray" about Ray Charles from last year. Maybe it's about fame more than anything else, or fame and addiction.

And here's my big revelation of the moment--"Memoirs of a Geisha" is better than the critics would lead you to believe. I hated to go to the bathroom during it because I didn't want to miss a single frame. Having said that, the last 15 minutes were a sudden slide downhill. I loved Kôji Yakusho (from the original "Shall We Dance?") as the warp-faced character Nobu in the film. He is a truly great actor. I love Gong Li, too, but she overdoes it a bit in this role as a Joan Crawford type in a kimono. It isn't a perfect film, but it is engrossing and worth seeing.

That's it for now. Happy NEw Year!

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