Is Poetry Dead? Or, In The Age Of The Internet, Does It Offer Us What Nothing Else Can?

(By Lauren Wilcox, Washington Post, January 13, 2012)

There are few opportunities in today’s world for a private audience with a personal hero, but the last appearance of the poet W.S. Merwin as the country’s poet laureate was, for an unusual number of people, one of them. The appearance itself was a rare one: At 82 and living on a former pineapple plantation on Maui, Merwin was well past the stage of his life when he might have regularly stumped for poetry, if he was ever that sort of poet — which he was not. And he was a bit of a recluse.  But Merwin was slated for a rare double bill: In addition to giving a reading for the “closing of the literary season,” as the Library of Congress was advertising it, he would also be holding a book-signing. In front of a packed house in Coolidge Auditorium, Merwin spoke for nearly an hour, reading a few poems, including one of his about words yet to be written, which ends,“it could be that there’s only one word / and it’s all we need / it’s here in this pencil / every pencil in the world is like this.”

After the reading, as he took his place behind a desk on the top floor of the building’s Great Hall, the line was already forming. What happened there, between the poet and his acolytes, was curious. Merwin may be reclusive on principle, but in person he is magnetic — warm, intimate, irresistibly charming. He gazed up at each new face with fresh interest, as though at a long-lost friend.  And each person approached the desk with unconcealed reverence, as though at the end of a pilgrimage. What they wanted to tell him was always, in some way, about themselves: “You speak in my voice,” a woman said. “Your first book was published the year I was born,” another said. One woman asked him to dedicate a book to her friend’s dog, who had recently died; she read what he had written, and her eyes filled with tears.

An hour or so into the line, a man with a soft drawl told Merwin he appreciated his passion for preserving nature; he had been working to replant a family farm whose forests had been cut down. Merwin perked up. “What kinds of trees?” he asked.  “Mostly oaks and ashes,” the man said.  “I’ve had some old trees that have been good friends of mine,” Merwin said. Before him, the line stretched interminably. Well into the evening, the director of the Library of Congress’s Poetry and Literature Center gave Merwin the opportunity to bow out, but he declined. He had been sitting at the desk for two and a half hours by the time the last person left.

The idea that poetry is the deadest of the dying arts, an airless attic where overwrought metaphors go to dry up and drop their wings, is perennial. A 2003 column in Newsweek — “Poetry Is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?” — was bitterly and defensively refuted (mainly by poets), but it tapped a rich vein of suspicion nationwide that the last time poetry really mattered was long ago, perhaps sometime in the ’50s, when poets were literary celebrities and household names, and schoolchildren knew reams of verse by heart.  It’s true that the mid-20th century was a heyday of sorts for American poetry. Poets were published and reviewed in daily newspapers and general-interest magazines, and their book releases were significant events. The poetry scene that most people knew was made up of a few highly celebrated poets (with notable exceptions, usually white and male) writing a few kinds of poetry (“the raw and the cooked,” as Robert Lowell famously described it).

It’s also true that in the years since, that scene has all but disappeared. One significant change for poetry was that 50 years ago, universities were coming into their own, and they offered poetry a home. Poets who became professors found ready audiences and a decent living, and gradually, poetry’s center of gravity began to shift. The number of MFA programs, literary magazines and small presses exploded. It was, in its way, another heyday.  But it was also as Dana Gioia argued in his 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” increasingly isolated and invisible. Over the years, poetry’s connections to life outside the university began to atrophy. Poets were professors instead of insurance executives and doctors and housewives (as were Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Anne Sexton, respectively). They read and published for each other. In the hands of scholars, poetry lost its birthright as an art of the people and became the recondite province of tertiary education. “Though supported by a loyal coterie,” wrote Gioia, “poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.”

The void left in the general culture began to be filled by other forms: spoken-word poetry; the competitive performances called poetry slams; rap and singer-songwriters; the new popularity of the traditional form called cowboy poetry; open mikes at coffeehouses. The emphasis was largely on the spoken and sung, as well as elements such as rhyme and rhythm that print poetry often eschewed; subject matter was often fiercely political or personal. Some of this, like the work of spoken-word poets Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, was accepted into the canon, but the rest never really was.

Poetry began to cleave along the same lines as fine art does today: insiders and outsiders, academic and folk. Meanwhile, supporters of print poetry, fearful that it was being ignored — or worse, was no longer relevant — began prescribing it to the public like a tonic. In 1996, the Academy of American Poets designated April as National Poetry Month to provide booster-ish support; Poetry in Motion, an ongoing program by the Poetry Society of America and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, was begun in 1992 as a sort of an affirmative-action program for poems, foisting poems on the captive audiences riding mass transit.  And yet to say that poetry no longer matters is a gross misreading of the facts. The public has not been ignoring poetry. People are not standing in line for two and a half hours to shuffle their feet, speechless, in front of the nation’s elderly poet laureate because they believe that poetry is no longer relevant. They have simply been waiting for poetry to find its way.

On a recent weekday in Frances Harrington’s classroom at Hart Middle School in Anacostia, there was a steady volley of balled-up wads of paper into the corner trash cans and a constant mid-level clamor from the desks. The effect wasn’t disorder so much as uncontainable exuberance, which was shepherded by Alan King, one of Hart’s writers-in-residence, a big man with a gentle, shambling presence.  King teaches creative writing at Hart, in an after-school program called the D.C. Creative Writing Workshop as well as in some of the school’s English classes. He had asked the seventh- and eighth-graders of Harrington’s afternoon English class to read a poem called “Appetite,” by Tim Seibles, and use it as a model for a poem about their own cravings. “I have eaten the donuts, the plain-cake, / healthy, whole-wheat donuts,” the poem begins. “…I attacked without reason like a great / Afro-American shark finning the crowded / streets of America — my nappy dorsal / splitting the air, the pale victims / going down fast like Fig Newtons . . .”  “Okay, based on what we know about sharks, are they neat eaters or messy?” King asked the class, explaining the poet’s use of simile.  “Messy,” they chorused. The students hunched over sheets of notebook paper, frowning.

The program’s approach to creative writing is surprisingly traditional. It teaches poetry the way poetry has been taught for nearly a century, the way it is taught in MFA workshops across the country: by studying a poem and then writing one. The program’s teachers are published writers who either have or are working on degrees in creative writing. The best of the student work is published in the school’s literary journal, hArtworks.  If the work is sometimes challenging for the students, the program’s director Nancy Schwalb, who started the workshop in 2000, prefers that to the alternative. Schwalb originally created a competitive poetry slam league for middle-schoolers citywide, but she ended up dismantling it. Judging, she felt, was often a popularity contest that had the kids “relying on cuteness or humor” in their performances; more important, they weren’t learning to write.  “The focus on publishing their work, seeing their work in print, really encourages the kids to be more literary, to use more literary devices,” Schwalb says.

A blond-headed girl named Dajanik Brooks stood next to her desk and read her poem aloud. “I eat chips like a Pac-Man game. I crush on seeds like a trash truck.” There was a smattering of applause.  “Can I freestyle?” asked a boy named Myron Jones, hoping to riff aloud. He was rising restlessly up and down from his desk.  “If Mr. King says it’s okay,” Harrington said.  “I’m freestyling!” Myron said. “It’s going to be tight.”  “Okay, you’ve got some strong images there,” said King, as he looked over the shoulder of a boy in the back whose paper was almost entirely filled with writing.  “I get all strikes when I go bowling,” Myron offered, experimentally, from across the room.  Harrington walked over to King’s side. “How much more do you have to write?” she asked the boy.  “A little bit,” he said softly, without looking up. The eraser was chewed off his pencil.  “You can read what you have,” King said.  “I don’t want to read,” the boy said. He crooked his arm over the paper and began writing again, feverishly.

Now in its 12th year, the program is a fixture at Hart; Schwalb has had to open it to students at Ballou High School, just up the road, so that kids could continue to attend after leaving middle school. At any given time, the club has at least as many members as Hart’s football team. That the students have latched onto poetry so devotedly remains, for Schwalb, a mystery. In part, she thinks, poetry provides intellectual challenges that the kids crave — she recalls a class that once became obsessed with the word “languid” and deployed it unsparingly: “Everything was languid that year.” And in part, she thinks, poetry makes a place for an inward focus. To read poetry is to access a vast archive of research on the human condition. To write it is to join the conversation, to find ways of speaking to oneself and to others, and the kids at Hart need it as much as anyone.

About a third of the club’s members are referred there by the school’s social worker “after being thrown out of everything else,” Schwalb says. As it turns out, they are the ones most likely to stay. James Tindle, now 18, was first referred by the social worker at age 11, when he was “one of the bad kids,” he says. “I was always out on the street.” When he joined the writing club, “Everything that I thought I wanted to do with my life changed. I found poetry, I found singing, I found acting, I found dancing.  “This one room changed everything,” he says. “The streets were nothing.”  And then there is the work itself. It is not spoken-word, though it might share some of the same roots. Nor is it a rote imitation of contemporary poetry. Instead, it is something new in the canon: the intersection of poetry’s two disparate worlds.

The richest of the student writing at Hart takes the voices and stories of the writers and the conventions of their teachers and makes something that is bigger than either. It seizes age-old literary devices and shouts through them. It tells harrowing stories with language that is glitteringly surreal (“My real name is midnight”) and bluntly of this world (“We know things, being young / you not gonna understand.”). A poem like “Get Your Elbow Off the Table,” by middle-schooler Davon Ford, has the immediacy and clout of raw speech but a deft command of that speech as poetry. (It begins, “I was raised by get your elbow / off the table, don’t never say you’re / not able, get dat money real faithful / type of family.”) Writing club students routinely sweep citywide print-poetry competitions: This year, 10 of the 40 winners of the Parkmont Poetry Contest were from Hart or Ballou. As much as the kids need poetry, it seems, so does poetry need the kids at Hart.  There was a knot of students waiting by the locked door of the writing club room by the time Schwalb and King arrived at 3 p.m. When everyone was settled, King assigned readers for the day’s poem, an ode to urban summers called “The Block Hydrant,” by Bryan C. Murray. “From this shopping cart, I sell icicles: / to overheated jungle-gymers / who don’t know “please” / just Gimme a ice …”

The readers delivered the stanzas at a clip. A boy named Rashad Rosenboro made a show of ignoring them, putting on a pair of headphones and fiddling with an electronic device. By the time King assigned the afternoon’s work, a poem on “dealing with the heat,” Rashad had entered into a silent, almost invisible battle with another boy, Joshua Dunsmore, who was sitting next to him.  Schwalb read a poem by one of the students, Aaron Williams, about going for a swim, titled “The Burning.” “The heat has mugged my joy,” it concluded. “I feel lightheaded, navigate / to the promised land. / Now I am set adrift.” Aaron covered his face with his backpack while she read.  Schwalb exclaimed when she had finished. “Aaron, it’s like coming in first in the thousand meter!”  “I run the sixteen-hundred,” Aaron said.

Suddenly, there was a scuffle in the corner: Rashad had thrown a punch at Joshua. In the electric slow motion that followed, King removed Rashad from his desk and began to march him across the room to the door. Joshua, a grim smile on his face, accompanied the pair in lockstep, his hands balled into fists, until they reached the door and Joshua let them pass.  When the room was calm again, Schwalb went from student to student, collecting poems and encouraging people to read. Somehow, without ever having appeared to lift a pencil, Rashad had written a poem, which he had left on his desk.

Dang it’s hot!
It’s so hot outside
I don’t know what to do
I wanna go to Alaska
What’s the point I need to die any way
How many people feel like me
I wish I can see these people
How many times have you heard people say what I say—
Can you find my soul?
No you can’t, under all this heat

When Rashad was allowed to return, King walked over to his desk. “That was a good line in your poem, Rashad, that last line was really good,” he said, leaning over him.  Rashad flicked his hand as though swatting a fly. “Shush,” he said, staring past King. “Shush.”  What is happening at Hart Middle School is also what is happening, on a larger scale, around town. The District is particularly well-placed for such a movement. It has always had its luminaries: Whitman, of course, who worked for a time in the Attorney General’s Office; Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Maxine Kumin, who each spent time in town as poet laureate, when that post required a year in Washington. But to an unusual extent, poetry here has lived in the community at large, where small gatherings — of writers, readers, listeners — have tended their own flames. The scene flared up in the 1920s (the Harlem Renaissance had a branch here) and exploded in the 1970s (with a wave of new publications and groups such as Dupont Circle’s Mass Transit poets) and again in the 1990s, as spoken-word poetry and open mikes proliferated.

Today, the varieties are legion. If mid-20th-century poetry was a kind of poetic oligopoly, with a few dominant voices, then poetry today is an open market, where people come to test the value of their wares. There are reading series and workshops for the avant garde, for traditionalists, for social activism and marginalized voices. There is Sulu DC for performance arts of the Asian American Pacific Islanders, Subcontinental Drift for the South Asian American community, Crescent Moon Nights for Muslim poets, and the weekly open mikes at Busboys and Poets.

The drawback to this pluralism is that it can be hard to hear any one voice above the rest. Quantity does not equal quality, of course. And the scene is so fractured, with so many small journals and venues, that the best voices may go unheard by a wider audience. “Poetry today has many different constituencies,” says poet Michael Collier, who teaches at the University of Maryland. “This makes it incredibly vibrant, but it also makes it difficult to describe, and to cohere.” With fewer gates come fewer gatekeepers — the reliable publishers and reviewers who select the best for the rest to read. To the reading public, this can make the scene impenetrable, or simply invisible.  But this “ferment,” as District poet Kim Roberts calls what is happening in the scene today, also encourages a cross-pollination of forms — the traditional with the radical, the formal with the ordinary — is new for contemporary poetry. Whatever this new poetry’s politics or its background or its concerns, that crossbreeding is its strength.

One of the hardest-working redoubts of this movement is the Federal Poets, founded in 1944 for workers for the federal government and has been meeting ever since (members no longer have to work for the government). The group, whose original participants wrote mostly purply, rhyming verse on such subjects as the weather, or dessert, is now an unclassifiable mix of subjects and styles. Some of its members have backgrounds in writing, but others don’t. Most members have been attending meetings for years and some for decades.

On a Saturday afternoon, a dozen members convened for their monthly workshop at the West End Public Library. On this day, the first poem to be workshopped was “Tangerine,” by Michelle Seaman, a prospective member who wore her grayish-brown hair in pigtails. A tango class was practicing in the room next door, and at intervals the tinny strains of the bandoneon came wavering through the wall. Seaman read the poem, a wistful rumination on childhood’s losses, in a sighing singsong that seemed to temporarily hypnotize the room. “Loraxes, each of us, speaking / for the trees. Our little fists raised / in defense of thin-branched chokecherry…”

There was a short pause when she finished, and then the group descended on the poem like a swarm of locusts.  “Loraxes, define,” said Dean Blehert, a lean, bearded man who had joined the workshop in 1983, and who for 30 years wrote and distributed Deanotations, a broadsheet of his poetry, to subscribers worldwide.  “He’s the little character that speaks for the trees,” said Seaman, referring to the Dr. Seuss book “The Lorax.”

“Maybe it needs another stanza to kind of feel out the brother,” said Don Illich, in glasses and a T-shirt with the Chevrolet logo on it, who at 38 was one of the youngest in the room. “Where is he, what is he doing?”  “I see it as a fairly simple poem,” said Blehert after a moment, “and that’s its strength and weakness. The weakness is its fairly obvious message. I don’t know that filling it up with biography is going to do it.”  “Thank you, everybody,” Seaman said. It was her second visit to the workshop. At three visits, she would become a member, and there were muttered allusions to the hazing she would likely undergo the next time.

The group worked through several relatively straightforward descriptive poems, poems conceived around a single notion and its ostensible poeticness — a cave full of prehistoric paintings, for example, or an old bluesman in his shack — fussing with the mechanics of hyperbole and the effects of imagery. The day’s last poem was by Doug Wilkinson, who has a lanky guy in navy corduroys, with a boyish face and graying hair. Wilkinson’s route to poetry had been, even by Federal Poets standards, circuitous. He had grown up in the San Fernando Valley, in a household that was, he said, “against education.” His father, who ran a furniture refinishing business with Wilkinson’s uncle, felt that “men should work; that was what was appropriate.”

Wilkinson’s parents declined to send him to college, so after graduating from high school in 1974, he began working his way through with a series of odd jobs that included transporting diseased body parts for doctors in Hollywood and making artificial trees. (At one point, he needed his mother’s signature on a financial aid form; she refused. “I want to write a poem about that,” he told me, “but I haven’t figured out how to do it without sounding like I’m crying.”) Then, when Wilkinson was 27, his father died, leaving him and his brothers each $60,000, which Wilkinson promptly used to enroll in school full time.

Wilkinson’s studies were a search for what he calls, slightly self-deprecatingly, “the big answer.” “I took everything I could find with ‘religion’ in the title,” he says. “The anthropology of religion, religion and society, the history of religion.” He discovered philosophy when, in a course called “World’s Great Religions,” a student asked which religion was true, and the professor told him that that was a question for philosophers. For 20 years, Wilkinson steered a course through various higher-learning institutions, studying philosophy and religion. He began, and then left, a Ph.D. program in spirituality at Catholic University and a master’s program in Hinduism at American University. For a time, he thought he would become a monk.

But no matter what he studied, “I never found the big answers,” he says. Working as a bookseller, he began to read poetry. He assembled a collection of poems that had an element of spirituality or that grappled with the questions that dogged him. He wrote a poem after breaking up with his girlfriend. He began to think that poetry was the sort of methodology, applicable to life’s unknowables, that he had been trying to find; “a way of thinking.” He joined the Federal Poets and began writing regularly.  Wilkinson’s relationship to poetry has a devotional aspect to it. He keeps with him a folder of his 25 favorite religious poems, arranged in order of importance; the order occasionally changes. No. 5 is “Tasting Heaven” by Robert Bly; No. 3 is “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver, which ends, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

To support himself these days, Wilkinson is a driving instructor and sells books on the Internet. The demand is mostly for textbooks. In the 10 years he has been selling, no one has ever bought a book of poetry.  The poem that Wilkinson brought to the workshop was called “An Explanation.”

When I was fourteen, my brother
sprayed Windex into my eyes
and then laughed. Time froze
and a supernatural being
who looked just like a human being
pulled me aside and told me
that I had a choice
between being blinded but loved by my father
and retaining my vision.
I chose, and time began again,
and I didn’t remember the supernatural being
or the choice, and I ran
and told my father what my brother
did, and my father got mad at me
and told me that I needed
to get along better with my brother.

The group seemed underwhelmed by the poem. “Doug comes up with really interesting scenarios, but it just feels flat,” Don Illich said. “The father saying you just need to get along better ...” He trailed off.  “Maybe the brother could shoot a water pistol in your eyes,” someone suggested.  “Well, Windex is pretty good,” said Blehert, and there was a brief discussion about whether that would actually blind you. Blehert stared at his copy of the poem. “The indication is, if you retain your vision, you won’t be loved,” he said thoughtfully.  “Maybe look for a twist that matches the quality of your other twists,” someone suggested.  Wilkinson was sitting very still in his chair at the end of the table. “None of what you have said — is what was meant — by the title,” he said slowly.

There was an expectant pause. “The choice that the supernatural being gave him is the explanation — for why his father — did not love him.” The room considered this for a moment, and then someone realized it was nearly 5 o’clock, and people began to collect their papers and push back their chairs.  Outside it was warm, and the sun was slanting across the sidewalks. Wilkinson and Illich and other members of the group retired, as they often do, to the Greek restaurant around the corner, where they crowded into adjacent tables to wind down the afternoon. They talked about writing, but they talked about other things, too. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/is-poetry-dead-or-in-the-age-of-the-internet-does-it-offer-us-what-nothing-else-can/2011/10/27/gIQAEghXtP_story.html

Tough Pricing Questions, Tougher Answers

(By Richard Turen, Travel Weekly, April 19, 2012)

Is it my imagination, or are the questions getting more difficult? Are consumers peppering us with test questions that require better responses than the industry standbys that served us well, lo these many years?  Of course they are. Our clients spend hours reading online reviews and hearing tales of our demise. But there are some voices out there, newly awakened, who still think we have value. They're suggesting that consumers take us for a test ride before making any commitment.  Here are a few consumer questions travel sellers have to deal with every day, plus snippets of the responses they might hear from better agents I've interviewed over the years.

Some of these responses are tough, almost guerrilla marketing in nature. I don't agree with all of these approaches; some of them are based on half-truths. But they're examples of how some of the most successful agents handle these tough questions. I do believe we've been fighting well-armed price predators with feathers. If you believe it's time to lock and load, that you're at war with commodity travel marketers, consider what follows a blueprint for battle:

Why should I use your services when I can book directly?

You're going to be charged for my services whether you use them or not. My fee is built into the cost of your travel product. If you book direct, the supplier simply pockets the commission, and you get nothing in return.

If you use my services, on the other hand, you have an advocate. You represent one booking to a supplier; I represent dozens, and my consortium represents many more. We have volume clout. You have none.

I am a caring consultant who will be with you every step of the way, beginning with the special documentation I'll send you. Book with Henry Headset and you're just computer data.

It sounds like I get no price benefits with you vs. booking direct. Why is that?

Suppliers set the value on the products they sell. They don't appreciate it when a seller demeans their product by selling it for less. So, yes, we will both have the same prices. But our agency has negotiated exclusive benefits for our clients, so our package will make you feel good about your purchase. It's always going to be in your financial interest to use our services.

Why should I book now? What happens if the price goes down later?

There are three key reasons to book now. First, early bookings guarantee a space on the tour date or in the cruise cabin category you want, with the best possible placement. There are preferred cabin locations in virtually every cruise category, and it is in your interest to reserve your space now.

The second reason has to do with marketing. Tour operators and cruise lines are reluctant to give those who book last better pricing than those who were willing to commit early. They hate having to go back to those already committed to paying one price to tell them they can now pay less. So the odds are that the earlier you book, the better the pricing.

An even better reason is that, sure, budget travel suppliers are constantly changing their prices. But we don't sell them. We look for price integrity before we will agree to represent a travel product. Thus, the tour operators and cruise lines allow us to automatically qualify you for any new marketing discounts. We guarantee price protection, so you have no worries.

After I called you, I called a discount travel agency and found that their price for exactly the same cruise was $450 per person less than your quote. $900 is a big difference. Will you match it?

We appreciate the opportunity to respond. Our relationship with [the supplier] is extremely close, and we can match the offer. However, we'll need a copy of the cruise line guest invoice. No price is legitimate if it doesn't have the imprint of the cruise line on the fare quote or a confirmation number. Once we receive your invoice with the lower price, we'll get back to you within 24 hours with a price match plus a gift for your time and trouble. If it's not a legitimate price, you at least will know that you were dealing with an unethical travel seller.

I'd like to book with you, but [fill in the blank]'s website offers a 5% rebate on any tour. Will you do the same?

You will typically pay more for your vacation in a year than you'll pay your physician, attorney or accountant. In those cases, would you choose the best professional or the one who offered you a rebate?

Tour companies hate rebaters, and you take some real risks by booking with one. Imagine being a guide on the first day of an upscale tour somewhere. As the guests mingle at the introductory cocktail party, one obnoxious couple lets everyone know that their travel agent was willing to work for practically nothing and rebated a good portion of her commission. Now the tour director has an unhappy group, some of whom might have been booked by one of the tour company's top-producing agencies. Tour companies have gone to court to prevent online rebating of their products.

Online rebaters clearly don't feel the tour is worth the brochure price, and thus they are unsupportive of the company. So, should there be problems while you're traveling, they will not be able to wield any influence on your behalf. You'd be working with an industry pariah, which is a real risk. Of course, our agency offers price protection. So just send us the quote and we'll bring it to the attention of the tour operator. If it is a legitimate price, we will match it.

Will I get a better price on my cruise from one of the large online discount sites?

They'd like you to believe you will, but most often you won't. Cruise lines simply do not want you to book their products online, because every online booking is thought to generate between 12 and 15 phone calls to the cruise line's reservations center; online bookers get little or no counseling about things like insurance options, safety issues, shore excursions, onboard dining options and reservations, pre and post arrangements and myriad other reservation issues.

What really gets the cruise lines upset is that they're paying the online travel agencies commissions, even though they're not doing their job. They would much prefer that you book with a professional travel consultant who can answer all your questions, not with some outsourced contractor in Mumbai.

We're price-checking at least four or five agencies and online brokers. We'll book with whichever offers the best quote. Will you send us your best price?

Of course not! We save our best rates for our most loyal clients, which is why we have such a high repeat factor and are successful.  If price is your sole criteria, you'll want to work with a part-timer doing agent work as a second job, with no industry standing. They'll rebate much of the 10% to 15% of the price that is their commission. I'd recommend that you first check them out with the Better Business Bureau.

If the very lowest price is not your only criteria, we suggest that you contact the first agent you invited to work on your vacation, because the truth is, all ethical travel agents get exactly the same rates on the tours and cruises they sell. Since the first agent has already spent time researching your request, we urge you to use her.

http://www.travelweekly.com/Richard-Turen/Tough-pricing-questions,-tougher-answers/?source=sharethis

Doing The Wrong Thing

Spike Lee’s Twitter Mistake
(By Alexandra Petri, Washington Post, March 29, 2012)

There are many problems with what happened Wednesday with filmmaker Spike Lee on Twitter. One problem was that what Spike Lee thought was the home address of George Zimmerman — the man who shot teenager Trayvon Martin — actually belonged to a couple in their seventies. The bigger problem was that he tweeted what he thought was the address of George Zimmerman to his 240,000-odd followers in the first place.  The expected happened after he sent the tweet out. Menacing calls. Menacing letters. Menacing envelopes with Taste The Rainbow printed on them. (I am not making this up.)  It makes you reflect on how creepy these candy slogans can be, if said with the right inflection.  Of course it’s a problem that someone lettered “TASTE THE RAINBOW” on an envelope and frightened a retired couple.

But even the right address would have been the wrong address.  What did Lee reasonably expect? That his followers were going to send the “Zimmerman residence” indignant letters? That they might ship him Edible Arrangements with passive-aggressive but politely-worded notes?  Of course not. Instead, people responded by becoming exactly the thing they were trying to punish: vigilantes, pursuing their own sense of right and wrong without regard to law or fact. Did nobody learn anything?   

The fact that it was an elderly couple and not the intended recipient just pointed up the wrongness of this whole situation more starkly. You can't just go around tweeting the addresses of people and subjecting them to the Twitter mob’s blunt justice. There is much to be angry about in the story of Trayvon Martin. But you can’t fix a wrong with another wrong.  I’m glad Lee apologized, tweeting, “Justice in court.” That’s where it has to happen. If only that thought had come sooner.  One injustice is more than enough.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/post/spike-lees-twitter-mistake/2012/03/29/gIQAKgujjS_blog.html

Hit Streaming Service Spotify Eyes U.S. Music Fans

(By Antony Bruno, Reuters, November 2, 2009)

MTV Urge ... Yahoo Music Unlimited ... Virgin Digital ... Since 2003 -- when iTunes launched in the United States -- all of these digital music services have come and gone, without challenging Apple's market dominance, despite the backing of resource-rich parent companies.  Add in all the startups that have crashed and burned in the same time period and it starts to look as if no service could ever rival iTunes' traction with customers and critics.  Until now.

The Sweden-based startup Spotify, launched for public access in October 2008, has momentum like no other digital music service of the last six years. It offers on-demand music streaming, in both free and premium services, and now claims to have more than 6 million users in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom, France and Spain. At one point it reported signing up new members at a rate of 50,000 per day, although that figure has fallen since September, when the service restricted its free version to invited guests in the United Kingdom.

Spotify has won high marks from reviewers for the ease with which it provides access to a catalog of more than 6 million tracks from majors and indies alike and the unobtrusive way it delivers advertising.  Spotify's recently launched mobile version -- available for the iPhone and Android-powered devices in Europe to premium subscribers who pay the equivalent of around $15 per month -- has won similar praise. Although Spotify doesn't comment on its fund-raising activity, it has reportedly won $50 million worth of backing from investors -- at a valuation of $250 million, an almost unheard-of sum for a music venture in today's stingy venture capital environment. The European service also has the full support of the major labels, which reportedly negotiated a collective 18 percent stake in the company.

Yet this momentum will be tested severely as the company prepares to enter the United States -- the No. 1 music market in the world -- with a launch expected either late this year or early next, depending on how fast it completes its negotiations with the majors.  "It's been talked about so much I don't think it can meet everyone's expectations," says Forrester Research analyst Sonal Gandhi. "If the Spotify experience can be as good as hyped, it has a lot of potential."  With negotiations ongoing, U.S. labels are reluctant to comment on the service. According to music industry sources, the labels are impressed with Spotify's achievements but want the service to start generating real revenue. To do so, it must take care not to let the usage model outpace the business model.

There are certainly early signs of success. In August, Per Sundin, managing director of Universal Music Sweden, told the Swedish press that his company now earns more revenue from Spotify than iTunes. But that's in Sweden, where the service was born and where iTunes doesn't have the dominant hold on the digital music market it does elsewhere.  "We've seen income from Spotify follow a steep growth curve since launch," says Paul Smernicki, director of digital and direct-to-consumer at Universal U.K.'s Polydor Records. "Excluding mobile, they are pretty high up the list as a revenue stream for us. But we're certainly not in the same position as Sweden."  Scott Cohen, the London-based founder/VP of international at the digital distribution and marketing company the Orchard, says Spotify is already boosting income for labels in two ways.

"First, the more tracks are streamed on Spotify the more downloads occur on other services," he says. "We are not seeing any cannibalization. Second, revenue streams from advertising have been steadily increasing and have overtaken many niche stores in Europe."  But the ad-supported free service alone can't generate the revenue Spotify needs to pay for the music it plays. The company reported a net loss of $4 million last year, and its decision to limit its free service in the United Kingdom to invited guests implies a high burn rate.  That means Spotify has to increase the number of users for its premium service. So far, however, music subscription services like Rhapsody and Napster haven't been able to reach a mass audience. In its most recent quarterly earnings report, RealNetworks said Rhapsody has about 750,000 subscribers. Napster had 700,000 subscribers when Best Buy acquired the company last year, but hasn't released updated figures since.

While Spotify plans to make mobile access a key element of its conversion strategy, the mobile music market has also yet to take off. Spotify has confirmed it will launch in the United States with a "slightly different model" than in Europe, although it has yet to disclose details.

THE AD-FUNDED MODEL

Calling Spotify a free ad-funded music streaming service would be accurate but unfair. The company has paying customers, but they number less than 10 percent of its user base, according to comments from CEO Daniel Ek at a recent London conference. And company executives say that's unlikely to change.  "We expect the large majority of our users to stay with free," says Gustav Soderstrom, who left his job as director of business development at Yahoo to join Spotify as its head of mobile. "We're monetizing it through ads and through selling downloads (through its partnership with 7digital), so it's a significant revenue source."

So far, no ad-funded service has been able to turn a profit from advertising and download revenue alone. Which is why Spotify doesn't intend to. Using the "freemium" model, the company hopes to convert a portion of its free user base to the premium tier.  The free Spotify service could be seen as a customer acquisition play -- and perhaps not the most expensive one out there. Napster once estimated its customer acquisition cost at $100 per user, due to all the advertising needed to explain its subscription model.  "It makes the (customer acquisition) process easier than (it would be) if you start with no users," Soderstrom says. "You have to put a lot of marketing dollars into getting users' attention to even consider signing up. We don't have to do that."

Free access to any song on demand is powerful bait and Spotify offers what amounts to an indefinite trial period. Rhapsody and Napster usually limit their trial periods to about a week, after which users either need to pay or use only 30-second samples. (Rhapsody allows non-paying users to stream 25 free songs per month.) That may not be enough time to get users hooked on the access model.  Despite the popularity of Spotify's free tier in Europe, Rhapsody America VP of business management Neil Smith doubts it will roll out the same way stateside.

"The reason Spotify blew up so big and so fast was it was free," he says. "That model isn't going to happen in the U.S. anytime soon, maybe ever. The U.S. is the market where the labels make all their money. They can't afford to have a service that doesn't generate substantial revenue suck up all the usage. If it was $15 (per month) out of the gate, it wouldn't have a million users. Once you take the free piece away, we compete pretty well." So Spotify will have to ensure its ad-supported service remains worthwhile and not degrade it in order to push users to the paid version. Devaluing the free service would risk losing users, which in turn would threaten its function as a customer acquisition tool as well as limit any hopes of generating revenue from it.

THE SUBSCRIPTION MODEL

For all the hype Spotify gets for the popularity of its free tier, there's no guarantee it can match that success as a paid service.  Until its mobile option launched, Spotify's premium tier only offered the elimination of ads -- which weren't very intrusive to begin with -- and slightly better audio quality. The iPhone and Android apps add portability to that mix, but it's still not much different in price or function to portable subscription offers from Rhapsody and Napster.  "The value proposition of subscription has to change," Forrester's Gandhi says. "There has to be ownership. There has to be something besides just renting music."  Gandhi specifically points to subscription plans that allow users to keep a certain number of songs per month, such as the five tracks Napster gives away as part of its $5-per-month streaming plan and Zune's 10 free downloads.

Another option comes from Pali Capital analyst Richard Greenfield, who recently suggested that mobile operators and Internet service providers should bundle the Spotify premium service into their data plans. The idea of bundling is nothing new, but Spotify's ability to synch content across the different platforms makes it a more viable option.  Soderstrom says Spotify would consider such options, but only if they weren't exclusive.

THE MOBILE MODEL

Spotify is hanging its hopes of converting free users to paid users on the mobile application. But it doesn't want to position itself as a mobile service.  "I wouldn't say Spotify is a mobile service first," Soderstrom says. "You're going to do the majority of your browsing and discovery on your desktop, at least for some time. But if you want to use Spotify as your primary music service, then you're going to need the mobile option."  Previous portable subscription options required transferring tracks from desktop to portable device, which users needed to synch with an online service at least once per month to refresh the licenses. Services were based on digital rights management technology from Microsoft that had a reputation for being unreliable--and the dominance of the iPod had made them irrelevant.

Spotify gets around this by using mobile phones to stream the music rather than download it. Since mobile networks are notoriously unreliable, it created a way to temporarily cache more than 3,000 songs on supporting mobile phones, without using the 10 GB of storage normally required to do so--although users must still connect to Spotify every 30 days to verify their premium subscriber status.  

Mobile options have already paid huge dividends for music services like Slacker, Pandora and Clear Channel's iheartradio. Pandora, for example, says more than 45,000 of the 65,000 new registrations it gets every day come from its various mobile apps.  "Our future is going to be more mobile-centric than I had even thought, and sooner," Pandora founder Tim Westergren says.

But those are free applications. Rhapsody beat Spotify to the U.S. market with an iPhone app that lets users paying $15 per month stream any song from the service's catalog as well as their playlists and Internet radio stations, but to date it doesn't have a local caching option.  The U.S. mobile music market is also much tougher than that of Europe, where Spotify launched its mobile service in early September. According to a Forrester Research study, 27 percent of U.K. mobile subscribers with Internet access use their phone to play music at least monthly. In the United States, that figure is only 10 percent. U.S. mobile operators and labels alike hope Spotify will help goose these figures.  "There's definitely potential there," says one mobile operator. "I think we'll get the typical technology hype curve -- lots of hype going into market, pause and then either decline or hype again based on reality. Spotify has a chance to be a big deal."

THE EUROPEAN MODEL

Spotify's European success is impressive, but the U.S. market can be more competitive -- and more fickle.  "Spotify has a good chance of success in the States if they can make the right distribution partnerships," the Orchard's Cohen says. "But it will require a different strategy than in Europe."  And a win stateside would do much more than just cement Spotify as a legitimate player in the global digital music game. It will finally broaden the digital music market beyond iTunes and add a new usage model beyond track sales.  "Spotify is not the first streaming service in the world, just like iTunes wasn't the first digital download store," Cohen says. "What it does that is so special is make a fairly complex model seem easy to execute. They have a great team running the company and I wouldn't bet against them."

And while other U.S. music industry sources remain only cautiously optimistic, Spotify has confidence.  "There are certainly more music services in the U.S. than there are in Europe," Soderstrom says. "So, yes, it's more competitive. But I still think we have a better experience and a better offer. We wouldn't do it if we thought we were going to lose."

Oscar Saves The Day For Grown-Up Movies

(By Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, February 24, 2012)

Wanna know a secret? I’ve never cared much about the Oscars.  When I began writing about movies for a living, covering the Academy Awards and its attendant hoopla was always the least interesting part of my job — as I once joked to an editor, I wrote all year for free, but got paid to watch the Oscars. Like so many cine-snooty movie snobs, I dismissed them as celebrations of the hopelessly middlebrow (“Forrest Gump” over “Pulp Fiction”? Really?), a hypocritical exercise in self-congratulation and Hollywood’s longest, slickest advertisement for itself.

Okay, I still think those things are true. And, along with other complainers this year, I agree that the 2012 race is pretty ho-hum. The jaunty silent, black-and-white movie “The Artist” is all but guaranteed to soft-shoe its way to snagging the big awards. Most of its fellow nominees are movies mired in safe, snuggly nostalgia for times gone by, both cinematic and real-world.  But seen through another lens, this year’s race offers a degree of hope, not just for the Academy Awards but for the movie industry in general. And the best of the nominated films exemplify why, in recent years, I’ve come to value the Oscars — not for rewarding artistic merit (they do so only occasionally) or an index of the zeitgeist (“Crash” over “Brokeback Mountain”? Really?), but for their role in preserving a kind of movie that might otherwise cease to exist.

Of all the endangered species in Hollywood, perhaps the most overlooked might be the adult drama — the kind of mid-budget, modestly scaled, smartly written movie that seemed to be so common in the 1970s. Back then, the genre was typified by taut, no-nonsense films like “Chinatown” and “All the President’s Men.” Their present-day analogs are “Michael Clayton” or “The Social Network” — smart, stylish movies geared toward grown-ups that, were it not for the Oscars, would be less likely to find purchase in Hollywood’s current business model.

That model, more than ever, is defined by two kinds of movies. At one end are the “tent-pole movies,” blockbusters geared toward teens that cost a fortune to make and market, but are guaranteed to make their money back because they’re known quantities among the young audiences Hollywood caters to like the world’s most indulgent helicopter parent.  At the other end of the economic matrix live the micro-budgeted guerilla indies, which cost a nickel to make, get scooped up at a festival and go on to make a healthy if not spectacular profit, if only because they cost so little to produce and market.

In the middle of these two extremes are movies that cost much more than a nickel to make, but have no pre-sold niche markets to exploit. What’s more, nowadays they’re increasingly competing for audiences with, of all things, television: Not only does the adult drama’s core audience prefer to wait for the DVD or video-on-demand download, but they have better choices on TV itself. Why put up with parking-garage chicken fights, bad expensive popcorn and texting teenagers at the mall when you can watch your TiVo’ed episode of “The Good Wife” from the quiet safety of your couch?

All of these factors have contributed to making quality, sophisticated grown-up movies a risky proposition in Hollywood, where it can cost almost $100 million these days to create, advertise and promote a piece of product. And this is where the Oscars — with all their hype, sequins and bad production numbers — swoop in to improbably save the day.  “Awards season has become an in­cred­ibly critical, essential element in marketing these films,” Variety Executive Editor Steven Gaydos told me last week, adding that, with films no longer afforded the luxury of staying in theaters for weeks on end to build word-of-mouth, the Oscars have become “the world’s most cost-effective way of marketing drama.”

That strategy begins in the fall, when many studios launch their films at festivals in Telluride, Venice and Toronto. There, critics and bloggers begin the buzz about which directors, actors and films might be awards contenders, with word-of-mouth building once they begin to bestow their own honors and 10-best lists. As the movies begin to appear in theaters, filmmaking guilds begin to hand out their own kudos, lending yet more inevitability to movies deemed Oscar sure-things. Between the Golden Globes and the announcement of Oscar nominees in January, what began as a little-movies-that-could suddenly seem to be everywhere, as people make a mental note to see what all the fuss is about.

Studios pay dearly to help the buzz along, of course, and the escalating arms race of Oscar campaigning has led some industry insiders to call for a freeze. Citing Sony’s Oscar push for “The Social Network” — which cost a reported $7 million to $10 million — former agent and manager Gavin Polone recently complained that “the cost of two Oscar campaigns could comfortably fund the total production budget for a movie like ‘Drive’ or ‘Midnight in Paris.’ ” Magnolia Pictures President Eamonn Bowles agreed, adding that the awards-season strategy is largely based on myth. “There are, of course, instances where winning the Academy Award unlocks a film’s economic potential,” he said. “But the reality is that the vast majority never recoup or come close to recouping the amounts spent on trying to win the award.”  Still, some films have recouped with a vengeance: Last year, “The King’s Speech,” which cost a paltry $15 million to make, went on to earn just south of $400 million at the box office; “Slumdog Millionaire” enjoyed a similar Oscar “bump,” going on to earn more than $300 million worldwide.

With visions of such Oscar-season Cinderellas dancing in their heads, studio executives might be more willing to greenlight projects that otherwise wouldn’t fit neatly into their spreadsheets. And even if they don’t reap the regal financial rewards on a par with “The King’s Speech,” they acquire something more priceless: prestige. When “The Descendants” and its star George Clooney won at the Golden Globes in January, “the first person to shake Clooney’s hand was Rupert Murdoch,” says Hollywood Reporter Oscar columnist Scott Feinberg, referring to the chairman of the media conglomerate that owns the small studio that released the movie.  Awards, Feinberg says, “appeal to the egos of the studio chiefs and the studio executives. . . . In some ways it wipes the stain off what they do the rest of the year.”

No one has proved savvier at husbanding the Oscar’s marketing and reputation-burnishing resources than Harvey Weinstein, who perfected his strategy by steering “Shakespeare in Love” to best picture victory in 1999 (beating out “Saving Private Ryan,” no less.) It was Weinstein who figured out how to make a movie about a stuttering king with no big stars a must-see cultural event, and who cannily picked up “The Artist” at Cannes last year, predicting that a pastiche of Hollywood tropes about an actor feeling pinched between changing technology and a tough economy would be catnip to the academy’s voting members — most of whom are actors feeling pinched between changing technology and a tough economy.

It looks like Weinstein’s calculation will pay off again this year. But where “The Artist” qualifies as something of a high-end novelty film, at least three other nominees — “The Descendants,” “Moneyball” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” — exemplify precisely the kind of intelligent, mid-range movies that stand to benefit from Oscar-season awareness. That synergy worked particularly well last year, when “The King’s Speech” was nominated alongside “The Social Network,” “Black Swan,” “The Fighter” and “True Grit.”

All of those movies were made for modest budgets and all were modestly to stunningly profitable, thanks in large part to the added visibility provided by their Oscar campaigns. Surely the movies would have been made even if the Oscars didn’t exist. But they would not have been as successful, making it less likely that studios would greenlight similar projects down the road. “They’re critic-driven and execution-dependent,” Gaydos says of the adult drama niche. “And they’re the most risky films to finance today. Anything that makes them less risky or more viable — such as [an awards season] when they can be celebrated and marketed for a very reasonable amount of money — is good.”  As if to prove that point, Weinstein announced last week that he’s planted yet another seedling: Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts will begin filming “August: Osage County” — an adaptation of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play — this fall.  Which positions it perfectly for an Oscar run in 2014.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/essay-oscar-saves-the-day-for-grown-up-movies/2012/02/15/gIQAhdjsXR_print.html

Why Every Woman Should Celebrate Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue

I don't dare comment on this article because it would be a no-win situation no matter what I said but I think it is an interesting point of view being made here.

(Keli Goff, Loop21.com, February 21, 2012)

Can swimsuit models actually help girls develop healthier body images?   Each year, shortly after we have made and already begun to break our New Year's resolutions, Americans become captivated by sports' most competitive contest. No I am not referring to the Super Bowl, but the contest for who will grace the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.   Landing the cover is supposed to be the equivalent of winning the Super Bowl of the modeling world (or something like that), credited with launching, or at least elevating, the careers of some of modeling's most famous and enduring names, among them Christie Brinkley and Tyra Banks. While it's arguable that it elicits very different reactions from men and women, with the New York Times describing it as "the dream book of adolescent males and the bane of feminists," I'm one feminist who believes that there's a lot for women to celebrate about the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

This year's cover girl is Kate Upton, who before receiving the honor was best known for appearing on youtube doing the "Dougie." (If you are scratching your head asking, "What's the Dougie?" click here.) Now she's known as the next big thing. And I do mean big. Upton is not your typical model. Though her official weight is hard to pin down, there have been endless references to her "curves" which, let's face it, usually means cup size when referring to models, actresses and whatever it is that Kim Kardashian allegedly does for a living. But not in Upton's case. As one friend said refreshingly of Upton 'She's not your typical model... She will eat anything." Lengthy profiles in outlets like the Times and the Daily Mail have chronicled her management team's, seemingly uphill battle to establish her and her ample assets, in modeling's incredibly shrinking world, where a size 4 makes you chubby and a size 10 makes you borderline plus size.

Some of the vitriol aimed at Upton -- much of it by women no less -- reinforces the notion that even in the non-high fashion world of swimsuit and lingerie modeling, there is little tolerance for bodies that dare to look -- gasp! -- healthy and not borderline skeletal. Speaking of Upton, who has already drawn comparisons to legendary curvy (all over) beauties like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, Sophia Neophitou, who helps cast the Victoria's Secret runway show said "We would never use" someone like Upton, describing her looks as comparable to those of the half-naked "glamour" models popular in European tabloids.  Underneath photos of Upton at her model heaviest -- which was still thinner than most of us -- anonymous commenters referred to her as a "cow." (No, I'm not joking.) Her own agent at A-list firm IMG has said that colleagues were initially against signing her, owing to her non-traditional look.

Upton's triumph comes at an interesting time in the fashion world. Katie Halchishick, a former plus-size model, recently launched Natural Model Management. The agency specializes in models who are not plus-size or underweight but a healthy 6 to size 10. Halchishick was inspired after her own successful career as a plus-size model came to a screeching halt when she began dating a personal trainer and lost fifty pounds, and subsequently ended up losing most of her clients. Down to a healthy size 6 she found there were virtually zero opportunities for a model who was above a size 2 but below a size 14, a sentiment echoed by one of the few plus-size supermodels Crystal Renn.   Or should I say former plus-size supermodel? Renn, one of the few plus-size models to find mainstream success in high fashion magazines and with top designers, has struggled with the industry's mercurial weight specifications for years. She has openly discussed battling an eating disorder earlier in her career, but recently landed the ultimate validation that at her current weight, which is not stick-thin, but healthy, she looks absolutely fabulous. She appears alongside Kate Upton in the current issue of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Of the honor, Renn said, "I have been a double-zero to a 16 even, for a bit.... Now to settle at a [size] six or an eight, it's a really interesting place to be because there are very few sixes or eights." Her statement echoes those of one of the most famous supermodels ever. Cindy Crawford has expressed doubts that she, and some of her peers from the heyday of the "supermodel" in the 90's would have made it today, because most of them were a size 6.

And that's why I, speaking as a woman and a feminist, am actually a big fan of Sports Illustrated including its swimsuit issue. While the rest of the modeling world has increasingly celebrated body types that look like a 16-year-old girl's head placed on top of a 13-year-old boy's body, Sports Illustrated has continuously celebrated healthy female bodies. Before the eye-rolling begins, yes, I know that many of those bodies have had a lot more in common with Pamela Anderson than, say, Serena Williams, but Sports Illustrated has also featured a number of beautiful, healthy-looking female athletes in the swimsuit issue, along with a number of male athletes and their beautiful, healthy-looking wives. Some of my favorite photos over the years have featured these women, who don't look like supermodels, but do look beautiful, healthy, happy and like real people. Not some ridiculous, undernourished, overly airbrushed myth of what real people are supposed to look like.  

Based on responses from teen girls regarding questions about their body image, it's arguable the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue could end up having the positive impact on young girls that the Dove real women campaign tried, but some in the industry, believe failed to. The responses illustrate that while teen girls consider most models underweight, they consider themselves overweight. Yet they would still rather look like the images they see in popular culture because while models may be underweight, they also seem glamorous, or at least their lives do. The Dove Real Women campaign exuded a lot of things -- confidence among them -- but glamour it did not.  So maybe, just maybe, seeing real women looking, happy, healthy and glamorous, bikini and all, may send a message to some girls and women that you don't have to be underweight and unhealthy to live a great, or in the words of Sheila E., "Glamorous Life."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keli-goff/kate-upton-sports-illustrated-swimsuit-issue_b_1289959.html    &   http://loop21.com/topic/288

Five Favorite Films with Michael Biehn

I've always thought Michael Biehn was totally kick-ass and I'm disappointed he doesn't get more work.  He would make a great candidate for a Quentin Taratino resurrection or as one of the second tier crew members in a Mission Impossible movie.  His performance in The Abyss was terrific, to say nothing of The Terminator.  Can someone please find him a role worthy of what he can offer?

Five Favorite Films with Michael Biehn

(By Ryan Fujitani, Rotten Tomatoes, January11 2012)

It's one of life's great mysteries why Michael Biehn isn't a household name, considering he starred in some of the most iconic action films of the 1980s. If the picture doesn't trigger any memories for you, perhaps the name Kyle Reese will, as Biehn portrayed the original time traveler who helped to thwart a robot apocalypse in The Terminator. In fact, Biehn was a favorite of James Cameron, who tapped him twice more for the roles of Corporal Dwayne Hicks in Aliens and Lieutenant Coffey in The Abyss. But Biehn's accomplishments don't end there, as the underappreciated actor went on to work with William Friedkin, Michael Bay, and Robert Rodriguez and featured in films like Tombstone, Planet Terror, and The Rock, not to mention his extensive work on television.

This week, Biehn appears in The Divide, a bleak, post-apocalyptic psychological thriller helmed by Xavier Gens (Frontier(s)) and starring Lauren German, Milo Ventimiglia, and Rosanna Arquette. RT was fortunate enough to sit and chat with him, and we were spontaneously joined by his lovely wife, actress Jennifer Blanc-Biehn, who also has a brief cameo in the film. Biehn gave us his Five Favorite Films, then went on to talk about the mounting tensions on set, Xavier Gens's fluid, anything-goes directorial style, and his own first outing in the director's chair (The Victim, which was, in fact, picked up by Anchor Bay on the day of this interview). So, without further ado, here are Michael Biehn's Five Favorite Films!

1) Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976; 98% Tomatometer):  

The first film that really inspired me... When I came out to L.A. to be an actor, I wasn't really taking anything very seriously. I thought, maybe I'll be a model, I could do some modeling, or maybe some commercial acting or whatever, and I thought that would be a career. Then I saw Taxi Driver. Taxi Driver is a movie that changed my life and made me a serious actor. Scorsese and De Niro. I give credit for anything that I've ever done as an actor.

Were you impressed more by Scorsese's direction or De Niro's performance?

I think they go hand in hand. The whole movie, really. Harvey Keitel, even Scorsese in the back of the car. The whole thing is fantastic.

2) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975; 96% Tomatometer)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a movie that I just find flawless. Jack Nicholson... I just saw The Shining again the other day; he's so brilliant. He's such a brilliant actor, just unbelievable.

3) The Godfather/The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972/1974; 100%/98% Tomatometer): 

The Godfather. The Godfather Part II, mostly, but the two Godfathers. There's just something about those movies that I just find I can watch over and over again.

4) The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945; 100% Tomatometer): 

There's a movie called The Lost Weekend, which is about an alcoholic, and that's another favorite movie.

5) Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992; 96% Tomatometer) :  If I had to throw one more into the mix, I mean, there's so many great movies. Unforgiven. There's my last one right there. Unforgiven, I think, is the best Western ever.

Biehn continued on to mention a few other choices he could have gone with:

Michael Biehn: Now, having said that, too, I would also say the greatest horror movie -- we were talking about all these horror movies earlier -- is William Friedkin and The Exorcist. I also think he did the best buddy cop movie ever in The French Connection and, you know, the best car chase, and so on. And I got to work with Billy so that's kind of my group of films that I can watch over and over again. And funny enough, on the lighter side, on the fun side -- I call it the "bubblegum side" -- I like to watch The Buddy Holly Story. I love The Buddy Holly Story because Gary Busey is so brilliant in that movie. You know, he does all his own singing and all his own music and everything, and the rest of the movie is kind of thin, but his performance, I think, is brilliant.

I read somewhere that you were a big fan of Sean Penn...

MB: Sean Penn is, I think, maybe the greatest actor... Jack Lemmon is another great one. It's hard to say who's the best, but yeah, he's right up there in the top five actors of all time in my book. When he goes from playing Milk, and he plays that very thin, kind of light kind of character, you know, Harvey Milk, gay, the whole number, and plays him brilliantly, wins the Academy Award, and then you see him in Fair Game. All of a sudden you see this guy, he's got a f***in' gut, he's got three chins, glasses are down, the hair is out like this, and "Just because you yell louder than me, does that make you right?!" It's f***ing brilliant! Just incredible. I have so much respect for him.

I wanted to mention that because it seems like a lot of your favorite films are very much actor-driven and benefit a lot from really outstanding performances.

MB: Yeah, absolutely.

Well, let's talk about The Divide. Just to start at square one, can you tell us a little about how you came to be a part of this project?

Well, Xavier [Gens] called me up and wanted to know if I'd be interested in it. He sent the script, I read it. The script was okay, the character was okay.

So he called you specifically for the role of Mickey, the landlord.

MB: Yes, for Mickey. I asked him if I could make some changes. He was like, "Well, you can make any changes you want. You can do anything you want with the movie." So I said,"Okay, I'll do it."

So I got involved with the movie, and then I realized once I got up to Canada to shoot the movie that we were, as actors, able to do anything we wanted. Rewrite characters, rewrite scenes. So the Mickey that is in the script that I originally read bears no resemblance to this Mickey that we ended up putting on film. I wrote Mickey with Eron Sheean, and Eron was basically a writer who was on the set to help all the actors rewrite scenes that they weren't happy with or rewrite dialogue that they weren't happy with. I worked with Eron for a week or two; I would send him stuff, he would send it back, I would send it to him again. He finally said, "Michael, you just write it." So I basically created that character and wrote him and created the backstory of 9/11 and all that kind of stuff.

It was a very exhilarating movie shoot because it's like nothing I've ever done before. It was completely like, you can do anything you want, you can improv anything you want, you can write anything you want, you can say anything you want in a scene. And the movie is the only movie I've done... In 35 years as an actor, I've never shot anything consecutively, day one, day two, day three, day four. So the script started out here, but all of a sudden, Michael Eklund's improvising, so now we're over here someplace. Then it went over here, and it just got crazy. Nobody kind of knew where they were headed or where their characters were headed; we were writing them as we went. I mean, Mickey was the antagonist in the script; he was the bad guy, he got it in the end. That was the original script. And Michael Eklund created his character out of nothing. There was no character there; there were four or five lines in the script, and Michael Eklund made that character come alive by improvising things and writing stuff and doing such interesting stuff.

Jennifer Blanc-Biehn: Xavier just couldn't handle it. Xavier was in love with it. He was like, "My God! More, more!" And Milo [Ventimiglia] too.

MB: Milo was so committed, and Rosanna [Arquette] was so committed, and Lauren [German]...

JBB: Lauren, and Ashton [Holmes], and Ivan. Ivan Gonzalez doesn't get mentioned but he's a ridiculously talented actor that lives in France. And Michael said it best when he said it takes a very talented actor to play a weak man.

I want to come back to that collaborative experience in just a bit, because I know you have a history of working with your directors in that way. But it's interesting that you essentially rewrote your character, and that he was originally intended to be the antagonist, because at first, you sort of hate Mickey because he's such a jerk. But as the film continues, you begin to sympathize with this plight; he's providing food and shelter for these ungrateful strangers who have invaded his private space and they're just...

MB: B****ing and moaning, yeah, and not listening to me when I tell them not to leave.

Well, it's interesting because by the end of the film, your character, Mickey, and maybe Lauren German's character to a degree, are the only ones who -- I don't want to say you remain unchanged, but you two are the only ones who don't go completely insane.

Well, I wanted the audience to think that I had changed, you know. The backstory on Mickey, which we created, was that he was a 9/11 survivor. He went into one of those buildings and when it came down on him and his team, and he was the only one left standing. So he ended up with PTSD, you know; his life falls apart and he starts drinking, loses his family, loses his job, gets paranoid, and turns into what he turns into, and that's who he is at the beginning of the movie. But because of what transpires during the movie, he ends up kind of finding his humanity again. So, towards the end of the movie, you know, you see him put that coat on Ivan's character, right, and when he goes out, he goes out kind of like... I tried to play him like he goes out with a kind of smile on his face, like, "This is the way my guys went out, and this is the way I want to go out, looking at the woman that I love." And that character transformed from being a prick, a selfish guy -- understandably so.

And that backstory is revealed pretty economically through just a short series of photos that Mickey keeps around...

JBB: Xavier felt that was enough to soften the character.

MB: Yeah, I mean, we shot the whole scene where it was all explained and everything. I shot a whole scene like that in The Terminator that was cut out, too, that I thought was going to be my big scene. And Sigourney [Weaver] shot a big scene in Aliens, too, that was her backstory with her daughter; that got cut out. That stuff gets cut out, but still there's remnants of that, and that stays with you. You don't need to be told every single detail.

Going back to the collaborative filmmaking process, I have a multi-tiered question for you. I'll start by asking what the filming conditions were like, in terms of the physicality of the set. Were you all really stuffed into a basement?

MB: Yes.

The reason I ask is because some of those scenes felt eerily real, and I have to wonder if the cramped space and the freedom to improvise made for some touchy situations. Was there a lot of tension on the set?

MB: Yes, there was a lot of tension. Yeah, yes, yes. People hated each other so much that the producers had to be called down constantly because actors were fighting because they thought other actors were trying to steal scenes from them. There was a lot of physicality on the scene, and some actors thought there was too much. Yeah, they hated each other. They hated each other.

I've worked with Friedkin, I've worked with Jim Cameron, I've worked with Michael Bay... I've worked with these guys, and there was more tension on this set than any other set that I've ever worked on in my life. And Xavier set it up that way, where he would bring an actor in -- it was going to be their big day -- and all of a sudden, he would start shooting something else, and that would piss off that actor, and he'd be mad at that actress, and this actress would be mad, etc. It was crazy. I thought it was going to get violent at times. It was really close.

That really comes through in the movie, because there are a couple of scenes when, as I was watching them, I pictured what it must have been like to be there as they were being filmed, and I think I would have been frightened. There's that scene when you're being tortured, and you guys are spitting at each other, and I remember thinking, "This anger feels genuine."

JBB: That was a genuine day. [laughs]

MB: [laughs] That was a genuine day. What's not even in there is, the way Michael was holding me, he was holding me like that because originally, he was standing behind me and I was hitting him like this [whips his head back repeatedly]. I hit him a couple times like that. He got a bloody nose, and you know... That was me and Michael. Me, Michael, and Milo would do anything.

You look at that movie, and you watch them try to bring Rosanna Arquette down those stairs. You watch that, and that's her fighting, biting, clawing, doing everything she can, and they shot that three or four times. Those are some committed actors. [laughs]

So what was it like working under that sort of directing style?

MB: Well, that directing style is something that will never happen to us again, because here in America, if you’re doing a TV show or something like that, and you go, "Listen, can I change this 'a' to a 'the?'" And it's, "Oh, we've got to check with the line producer." This was the most amazing, open, fun experience for an actor that I've ever been involved in.

You've worked with some legendary directors like William Friedkin and James Cameron, but you've also worked with newer talent like Robert Rodriguez and, with The Divide, Xavier Gens. Do you sense a noticeable difference between the two generations of filmmakers, between how things are done now and how they were done 30 years ago?

MB: I think every director's different. Every director's got his own style. I mean, when I directed, I basically just screamed for eight hours a day, twelve hours a day. "We gotta f***ing go, we gotta move! We gotta move! Shut the f*** up! We're shooting, we're shooting!" And other people like Ron Howard can just make a brilliant movie and be just as nice as can be. I think everybody's different. You look at Eastwood, you know; supposedly he's just as calm as a cucumber. You look at Cameron, and he's, you know, he's an intense guy, and Friedkin's an intense guy. Everybody's different.

You're actually one step ahead of me, because I was going to ask you about your directorial debut, The Victim, next.

MB: Yeah, I'm like a madman. [laughs] I was described by somebody who was on that set as a cross between a raging lunatic and something else.

Was it Robert Rodriguez who sort of gave you that extra push you needed to go ahead and move into directing?

MB: I guess it was... You know, Jim Cameron has always told me that I should try and be a director, or try directing. And Jim has said to me about Robert Rodriguez, "One of the brilliant things about Robert is that Robert just doesn't realize that he can't do something, and he just does it." He just goes for it, you kow? He doesn't care. He just goes for it; he doesn't care about anything. And when I worked with Robert, I got that from him. He just doesn't care what people think, you know? I do, but he doesn't, and I got that from him. And then, when I was shooting The Divide with Xavier, I saw a guy reading [Robert Rodriguez's book] Rebel Without a Crew, and I said to myself, "You know? F*** it, man, I'm just going to go do this." So that was kind of the genesis of me saying "I'm going to make a movie," and then boom, it was three weeks preproduction and twelve days shooting.

JBB: It was an original story by Reed Lackey; we wrote [the film] in three weeks. Lorna [Paul] and I and Ryan Honey put everybody together and we shot it in twelve days. It was a lot of fun.

What were your takeaways from working with the various directors you've collaborated with over the years?

MB: You know, truth, man. Story. You have to have a good story to tell; that's the most important thing. That's what Cameron always has. That's what Friedkin always has, or usually has. It's having a good story to tell, and telling it honestly, trying to be as honest as you can. That's really the best way I can describe it.

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