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John Stahle is a New York freelance writer, editor, and book designer:
--editor and publisher of a successful literary/art print quarterly (click here)
--self-published author of two books (click here)
--paid articles published regularly at AssociatedContent.com and Helium.com
--paid editing of daily web content at DemandStudios.com
--writing to order for NYC nonprofits
--co-moderator of a writing workshop, 2005-2008
--sample book designs, click here
Contact John at jstahle[at]nyc.rr.com
WRITING SAMPLE 1: MOVIE REVIEW
In a dark bedroom in 1931, two boys are supposed to be asleep. One isn’t. With a flashlight, he’s reading the latest pulp fiction for kids: adventure, without consequences, certainly without tragedy, action that kids dream about.
Across the room, his brother wakes up from a nightmare. That evening their family attended an Irish wake at the big house of their father’s boss, a warm, funny old man who taught them how to play with loaded dice. During speeches, the dead man’s drunken brother starts to blame this boss for the death and is quickly hustled outside by the boys’ father.
Now, in the dark, the younger son is filled with questions, but his brother just wants to return to the blameless world of pure adventure under his flashlight. But later, these questions begin to bother the older boy too: just what does my father do, and what does his boss do?
After a film debut as precocious as American Beauty, Sam Mendes now offers Road to Perdition, an austere meditation on gangster life punctuated only here and there with violence—from a distance or without sound. Some critics were disappointed: what kind of gangster film is this slow, this quiet? But they had in mind the wrong gangster film. There are two types, and we can finger them: Godfather One and Godfather Two.
In Coppola’s first version, the best known in a long line dating from Warner Brothers, Jimmy Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson, crime is the original sin, the wrong turning driven by factors others rose above. Criminality itself is the source of conflict and the results are operatic, passionate, violent. But, as many in Godfather One pointed out, these benchmarks are all bad for business.
Real gangsterism is embodied in Godfather Two: crime is the given, not the source of conflict. Either you do it properly, dispassionately, quietly, like any business, or you do it improperly, with a hot-headed absence of thought that creates chaos and invites public attention. Proper gangsterism seeks the shadows, to suppress or ignore the disadvantages of being illegitimate, a distinction gangsters laugh at anyway, knowing first-hand how easily corrupted legitimate businesses are. Along this path, issues of procedure and treachery pop up daily: they are the sources of conflict, the problems to be resolved.
“Crime” is an illusion. To the gangster, resorting to crime is just an expression of impatience. Rather than develop a product and beg the public to buy it, gangsters tap into cash flows already known to all, and if that tapflow is obstructed, the guilty meet fist or bullet, not the law.
Road to Perdition is Godfather Two: concerned with procedure. Those who want to understand it should first rent the Coen Brothers’ 1990 film Miller’s Crossing, one of their least-credited efforts. On these distinguished shoulders Sam Mendes built Road. Miller’s Crossing shows the same Irish gangsters, at the same time, dealing with similar issues, in the same slow, thoughtful way; it too was misunderstood in its day, the subject of yawns, not plaudits.
In Road the story centers on two father-son relationships. The local gangster, played by Paul Newman, comes out of Godfather Two, competent and careful. But his son is worse than the oldest son in Godfather One: hot-headed, incompetent, disloyal, treacherous, very bad for business. At a meeting to consider new business options, the son hears his father draw the line: “We screw people after work, there’s no reason to screw them at work.” Of these scruples the son is contemptuous: he wants everything he can get, as quickly as he can get it, using whatever means appeal to him. When this creates exactly the chaos his father dreads, the son reminds everyone, I am the future of this business. How true! The father should have killed or neutralized him long ago, but he can’t. He considers himself no better or stronger than his son, just smart enough to listen and think first. That the son regards this as weakness not wisdom is just true enough to stay the father’s hand.
By contrast, there is the loyal hit man, taken in as an orphan and groomed for the family business by the elder gangster. He is played by Tom Hanks, a perfect bit of casting. Mendes wants us to remember all the nice guys Hanks played as we watch his character develop. For this hit man, crime is the original sin, the wrong turning, and for him all conflict issues from it. But having made that choice, he pays back with reliable and dispassionate service, never going overboard for the thrill of it, never failing to apply wisdom and scruple in his employer’s service. That wisdom ordains that his two sons hear nothing about his work, that they make their own life choices well free of his. One night, driven by his brother’s questions in their dark bedroom, Hanks’ elder son breaches that firewall and sees the gangster’s son settle a negotiation too impatiently.
As the sole witness, this boy must be killed. As he acts to save his son, Hanks becomes his own outlaw, for family reasons, stealing from his gangsters’ bank deposits to finance their flight. Critics complained that this son was played in a truculent, inexpressive way, but that’s what the story requires. As Hanks and his son argue and grow closer in flight, they release each other. The son becomes visibly expressive and happy, on the move, his questions about his father and his taste for adventure more than satisfied. (The film’s single finest moment occurs when the boy wakes up in the back seat after long hours driving through farmland and sees with wide eyes all of downtown Chicago around him.) But his father changes only inside: he does what he must with admirable calm and skill, surrendering his original sin to fate.
The wild card in this neat father/son parallel, played perfectly by Jude Law, is a creep, free of wisdom or scruple, who pursues Hanks. You will love this character’s debut: a feral Weegee who shoots either film or bullets as required. Hanks’ skill alerts him to this anarchic spirit when it first appears in his path, yet Law’s character remains throughout the one loose end that comes back to sting.
WRITING SAMPLE 2: WIND POWER IN OUR FUTURE
(Paid piece for AssociatedContent.com, 2008)
Wind Turbines Could Generate 20% of Our Total Energy Needs--if Old Transmission Grids Are Upgraded to Handle Them
Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens has a better idea. He read, two years ago, that Walter Cronkite looked out his Cape Cod window, saw new 300-foot wind turbines being installed on a sandbar several miles out in the Atlantic, where they would dominate his ocean view ever after, and promptly joined with neighbors to prevent more being built on his shoreline. "Nobody wants wind turbines on either coast," Pickens concluded to New York Times' reporter Deborah Solomon in August, 2008.
So Pickens, one of Texas' biggest oil and gas men, wants wind turbines installed where very few people would see or care about them: along a "wind corridor" stretching from western Texas directly north all the way to the Canadian border, capturing the howling year-round natural energy found in Nebraska, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Montana. This corridor alone, Pickens told the New York Times, could generate 15% of our country's electrical needs out of a total potential 20% that energy experts see coming from wind in the next generation.
In upstate New York, that future is already here, and the neighbors are fighting over it. In August, the New York Times reported that in counties near the Canadian border, where family farms bring in about $30,000 a year, just allowing 200-300 foot tall wind turbines to be installed on your land can increase your family's income by a third. This has sparked a modern gold rush. Members of town boards ignore howls over conflicts of interest: they negotiate private deals while voting to give the wind companies zoning variances and other goodies, accepting their hand-outs while doing so. Tax rolls pull in new six-figure pay-outs. Only those who object to the constant whoosh and hum of wind generation are disgruntled. "It's no worse than crickets," one supporter sniffed.
On the plains of Nebraska, a different story. A rancher with 1,800 acres happily turns over 50 of those acres to a wind farm and his cattle go on grazing around the turbines exactly as before. This rancher becomes fond of the whoosh-whooshing of the 130-foot blades, pearly white against the horizon. As more of these wind farms are set up on sparsely populated land, Nebraska officials begin to see as much as 10% of their state energy needs coming from this clean resource. And with so little to obstruct the wind across this flat land, experts say a Nebraska turbine can pump out 50% more energy than its counterpart in the hills of upstate New York.
Wind turbines are indeed simple, safe, and cheap, compared with hydroelectric dams, fossil fuel generation, or nuclear plants--easy to install, easy to maintain. Only solar power panels are simpler, and there are big plans now to turn over desert wasteland to solar generation. Hardware is not the problem, transmission is. The middle of nowhere, ideal for wind or solar power, is exactly where transmission lines are too primitive to handle new input. In upstate New York, efficient new wind farms must shut down for hours at a time whenever local grids become too congested. Promising new energy methods require a superhighway of transmission where what we have now is more like unpaved country roads. The decentralized nature of the system is also part of the problem. 200,000 miles of transmission lines have 500 owners, and states are always ready to block the federal Energy Department from stepping in to override local squabbling, as new laws allow the Feds to do. Electrical generation is growing four times faster today than our transmission infrastructure.
Wind power accounts for only 1% of our national energy now, but, helped by efficient hardware from new international combines like Spain's Iberdola S.A., that share could start rising smartly. The Energy Department wants wind power to contribute 20% of our national energy and is willing to spend $60 billion over the next decade on new transmission lines to help make that dream a reality.
SOURCES
Deborah Solomon, "In the Air: Questions for T. Boone Pickens," New York Times Sunday Magazine, August 3, 2008
Nicholas Confessore, "In Rural New York, Windmills Can Bring Whiff of Corruption," New York Times, August 18, 2008
Nicholas Confessore, "Deal to Double Wind Power in the State," New York Times, Sept. 4, 2008
Matthew L. Wald, "Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid's Limits," New York Times, August 27, 2008
Dan Barry, "In the Hills of Nebraska, Change Is On the Horitzon," New York Times, Aug. 4, 2008
"Wind turbines," Wikipedia, accessed August 2008
