One of the many advantages of spending a few weeks abroad (see below) is that you don’t see any American news. The house we were staying in had French satellite TV and we saw plenty of news about America, courtesy BBC World and CNN International (no Al Jazeera English, sorry to say), but it was not always front and center. The fires in Greece beat the floods in the midwest, though both got their due, and on CNNI there was that palpable frustration you see on television when a tropical storm like Dean does not develop into a full-blown hurricane. “Tropical Depression” says it all.

International news networks, of course, cover the news from a more international perspective, meaning there is not one end of the telescope to see the world through but many. The US is still the proverbial fat man in the bathtub as far as economics go (I caught a very lively roundtable discussion on BBC about why hedge funds matter and how the mortgage crisis could roil the financial waters ’round the globe) but politically the sense that the Bush administration is a star in Nova is everywhere. It is hard not to look at each new resignation, each bellicose speech, as one of its death throes. News of its decline was deemed important, and speculation about what impact it would have on next year’s presidential election was also keen.

So it was depressing (if not tropically so) to get home Monday and tune into Anderson Cooper’s 10 pm news show (which is called 360 but tends to present a perspective that, degree wise, is more like 90) on American CNN and learn that Alberto Gonzalez had resigned — 22 minutes into the broadcast. Talk about burying the lead. Cooper wasn’t hosting that night; the lamentable Soledad O’Brien (who has done more for the smirk-as-default-expression than Deborah Norville in her hey day) was filling in for him, but given Cooper’s recent track record, he would have gone with the same lead story: Michael Vick’s guilty plea and apology.

Let me be the last to say that Michael Vick is a bad man, and I think that anyone who abuses and kills animals should meet a similar fate (surely someone has suggested that he literally be thrown to the dogs: Vick vs. the Pack! we could all bet on the outcome). But 22 minutes of coverage, at the top of the hour, with much of it given over to a cheesy uninformative “investigation” of dogfighting in America? Yes, I’m sure CNN is giving its viewers what they want but given the role of the attorney general in defending the president’s right to spy and torture, and the historical, Watergate like nature of his resignation, shouldn’t someone at the network have made the call that the story deserved better placement? How about a compromise: lead with Vick and his apology if you insist (don’t forget to find Jesus, Mike!) — but then turn to the little matter of the wheels coming off the Bushmobile, and come back later with your lame “in depth coverage” of dogfights?

What happened to the idea that the people deciding what was news had some moral responsibility to give the public something other than what they want? I know, I know: it’s a naive question when a network like CNN is owned by Time Warner and the people in charge are businessmen before they are journalists and their first responsibility is to their shareholders, and giving people plenty of scary black athletes and their killer dogs is as natural to them as giving your kid Cocoa Puffs for dinner. But there is another way to do things, folks. You only have to cross the pond to see it — and believe me, the BBC is only too happy to serve up dead Diana news (for this Friday, the tenth anniversary, the network has opted to rerun her entire funeral).

Now at least, thanks to Republican Senator Larry Craig we have a story we can all agree on. Kids like it because it features men having sex in public bathrooms (as my daughter said when she caught a glimpse of the news last night: “Ewww!”) while grownups can enjoy yet another fatal blow to the GOP mastodon. Thanks to Keith Olbermann for pointing out that Fox News, in covering the scandal, neglected to mention Craig’s party affiliation. The hypocritical, homophobic right wing senator has been a vehement opponent of gay marriage, gays in the military and sexual deviance of any sort. As the senator himself said at the beginning of his denial, “Thank you all for coming out today.”

We just came back from two weeks in the south of France & I am experiencing that mix of emotions I always have after any time abroad. We had done a house exchange with a family in the little village of Cadenet, about a half an hour from Aix-en-Provence and I had a good idea of what I was getting into. Peggy and I had traveled some of those same roads before 18 years ago, sans fille, and had even had one of those perfect moments in the nearby village of Bonnieux. Back then a perfect moment included a bottle of wine and that work-free quiet of the Provencal afternoon. But again, that was before kids and before I quit drinking.

I did not miss the wine (much) and the non-alcoholic beer is better and more accessible there. The quiet is still on tap: the town (pop. 4000) grinds to a complete halt from about 12-2 and Wednesday people take off as well, just because they’re French and they feel like it. You need to adjust your schedule accordingly: if you want a baguette with your lunch, you better get down to one of the village’s four boulangeries before the baker quits for lunch. As our friend Veronique says about the day-to-day French rhythms, in which work takes a back seat to just about everything else, “It forces you to have a life.”

We brought Franny and her cousin Sally (both 14, going on 17) and they got right into it: Each afternoon that we were not exploring any of the more famous, ruin-studded local towns, the girls found what there was of local street life: other teens looking for diversions in a town fairly free of them. What they did was hang out together in cafes & talk & flirt, using what little French and English they shared. The girls were motivated to learn more French, as many girls have been upon visiting France, and the French predilection for PDAs (no, not those damned hand held work handcuffs, but public displays of affection) is still much in evidence.

Though we had internet access in our maison (an old farmhouse just above the town, with ceilings so low I felt like I was visiting Bilbo), I chose not to blog about while I was there: too much like work. Also, there seems to be something about the Provencal soujourn that brings out the worst in writers. I thought Peter Mayle was tiresome until I attempted to read Yvone Lenard’s risible Magic of Provence. I found even MFK Fisher’s Two Towns in Provence tough sledding, sprinkled as it is with fairy dust and commas. There is something about the Mediterannean pace of life there that makes even good writers lose their edge and melt like camembert in the afernoon sun.

Of course you could blame the locals, who for all I know are putting on an act for the benefit of the tourists. After settling on a boulangerie (the French take their bread very seriously — one place had already gone out of business for not being up to snuff — and the the girls practically lived on baguettes) I practiced my baby-talk French on our guy, who was happy to correct me.

“Pains au chocolah,” he corrected me. “In English you go up at the end of a sentence, while in French you go down. When you are done, it is finished. Like in love.”

That’s the kind of line you expect a French baker to lay on you, and maybe in French it really all does go back to romance. That part I like about the French. My mixed feelings had more to do with our return. The surly US customs people seem determined to make you reconsider your citizenship, and upon unloading the luggage at home I confronted a fellow pissing in the sidewalk across the street.

Why I bothered to confront him I couldn’t say. “Do you really have to do that here?” I said. “I live on this block and it stinks up the street.”

“Sorry, man, I live on this block too,” he lied. “But I just couldn’t hold it, you know?”

At which point one of young men from the projects down the street chimed in: “You can piss anywhere you like!”

“Yeah,” said the offending party. “What’s your problem, man? I can piss anywhere I like!”

Liberte. Egalite. Fraternite — Brooklyn style.

I was late to learn that Sam Mendes is directing a film adaptation of Richard Yates’ 1960 suburban noir novel, Revolutionary Road, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and I’m still trying to be optimistic about the outcome. “Optimism” is not a word one associates with Yates; his stories were so bleak, so rife with defeat and self-delusion and alcoholism that it is small wonder that Hollywood has not tackled him sooner. Unhappy endings often win Oscars — just look at Mendes’ own American Beauty — but they need stars to get the green light. Hence Winslet (who has reportedly wanted to make a movie of RR for years) and DiCaprio, together for the first time since Titanic.

The success of American Beauty (which, like RR, ends with a downer of a death) might seem like a good sign — that was another vision of stagnant suburbia and the dark passions that lie beneath its surface. But that film (written by Alan Ball, who went on to create Six Feet Under for HBO) was all surface itself. Kevin Spacey made us believe in lonely Lester Burnham, the dad with a thing for a high school girl, but the rest of the characters were pretty one-dimensional and Ball’s critique of suburban life was rather shrill and simplistic — in a very sixties kind of way.

What gives Revolutionary Road its staying power is its complexity, and the complicity of the characters in their fate. Frank and April Wheeler have moved to the suburbs of NY and hate themselves for it. They know better, damn it, they’re artists yearning to breathe free (he’s meant to be an author, instead of writing ad copy; she could have been a star on the stage, she believes). They have heard the distant bongos of beat cullture, probably read Henry Miller and want to go live in Paris — but instead of fleeing the air-conditioned nightmare they turn the temperature down. It’s the birth of the New Frontier but they’re not going anywhere. Imagine if the Dick Van Dyke Show had been written by Ibsen and you get the idea.

A few women have told me that they believe April Wheeler is one of the best female characters written by a man in modern literature, and as Blake Bailey noted in his excellent Yates bio, A Tragic Honesty, it was a too-close-for-comfort portrait of Yates’s first wife. He was a keen observer of human nature (as well as a bipolar drunk) and she never forgave him, even though April appears as the more sympathetic character and Frank (a dead ringer for Yates) comes off as the coward.

Winslet, who is wonderful even in bad movies, already grappled with suburban angst in Little Children and may save Mendes’s movie from a counterfeit ending. It would certainly have surprised Yates, who met his share of bullshit artitsts of the Hollywood variety (when he was not being institutionalized) and liked to keep his expectations low. I interviewed him in 1990; he was living beside a bike shop in Westwood in the most barren apartment I have ever seen. Years of hard living had taket their toll; though in his sixties then he appeared at least 20 years older, and the walk up the stairs to a fancy restaurant nearby just about killed him.

His reputation was obscure then; my editors at California magazine had never heard of him, and they were well-read people. Yates was working on a novel that drew on his experiences as a speechwriter for then attorney general Robert Kennedy, in the early sixties but, characteristically, he’d been unimpresssed by RFK and unconvinced of his love of mankind. The book was unfinished when he died a few years later, just as the interest in Hollywood in his fiction never bore fruit — at least in his lifetime. My impression was that he was a real gentleman beneath the shabby exterior and that you would find plenty of stickers from hell on his suitcase, if it hadn’t been stolen at the luggage carousel.

My editors held the story I wrote, by the way, looking for some kind of hook. Then the magazine went out of business — a very Yatesian ending.

Just when we were grappling with the news of Bergman’s death, we got hit with Antonioni. I think Godard must be in his basement wearing a bicycle helmet — though as the recently re-released Pierrot le Fou reminded us, no man is really safe if he wants to blow himself up.

Serious film critics (unlike me) are no doubt hard at work on big long Sunday section thumbsuckers about the death of the serious European cinema of the fifties and sixties, and the landscape does seem a lot emptier with the absence of those Janus Films stars. Those were men who set out to ask, if not answer, life’s big questions, using cinema as both brush and canvas, and while you can see their influence everywhere,it’s hard to say who their legitimate heirs might be. (I know Tarantino likes to name-check Godard and others, but let’s not be L-7.)

Not that I understood much of what Antonioni was on about. I remember watching L’Aventura the first time and thinking: what the hell? Where’d the girl go? How come no one cares anymore? Before realizing that the meaninglessness of her disappearance was the point (if there was one) and that real art was sometimes difficult and unsatisfying, that it asked things of you mere entertainment wasn’t meant to. I liked Blowup better, partly because I liked the Yardbirds (and naked girls) and it was in English and seemed to have a mystery too…until that also didn’t matter. “Do you?” the filmmaker seemed to be asking.

Antonioni’s most famous explosion was that of a beautiful house in the desert that ends the seriously silly Zabriskie Point. Watch it now and see if you’re not moved. It’s a real explosion, not some CGI crapola, with Bruce Willis flying backwards and landing on his feet — close one! Hollywood blows up stuff all the time and it’s not supposed to mean anything. You still walk out of the theater as they play some lame rock song and the couples clinch. The difference was that Antonioni meant it to not mean anything, or that’s what I think. He’s not going to say anything to the contrary.

Yesterday brought the news of the deaths of two great sports figures: former 49ers coach Bill Walsh and Swedish director Ingmar Bergman.

“Who’d Bergman play for?” I hear you ask, your mouth full of cracklin’ pork rinds. “The Swedenborg Angels?” No, the sometimes dyspeptic director was playing a deeper game, certainly in the Seventh Seal where a medieval knight, played by Max von Sydow, challenges Death to a game of chess. Those of you who don’t think of chess as a sport clearly haven’t played with Death, who plays for keeps.

More people know this image better than they know the film, given its vintage (1957) and American tastes, which run to less existential fare. In fact most filmgoers today probably know the iconic scene more through its parodies, the most memorable being Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey in which the time-traveling teens challenge Death to games of Battleship and Clue and beat him five out of seven. Yes, way.

As anyone living in San Francisco during the Niners’ glory days can tell you, the greatest team in football history snatched victory from the jaws of defeat a number of times themselves — thanks in no small part to the classy, reserved Walsh. The team rose from the dead numerous times under his tutelage, most famously in the 1982 AFC championship game against Dallas, with The Catch.

I was driving a cab the evening of that game and by the time I was out there on the streets, the city was in a state of delirium. Every fare talked of nothing but Dwight Clark’s superb reception — or was it Joe Montana’s divine pass? “Do you really think he knew where he was throwing that ball?” a Cowboys fan asked me, rather belligerently. The town was full of them – they were “America’s Team” — they were used to winning and liked to visit away games and strut around in their Stetson hats and fur-lined coats, acting like Nazis in Paris.

History proved that he did: Joe kept making no-look, eyes-in-the-back-of-head passes like that for the rest of his career, and Clark caught quite a few of them. Walsh put those players in motion and had the faith in his men to let them make miracles. That day all I could do was savor the expression on that Texan’s face. He looked like Death had given him a melvin.