COOPER OVER A BARREL.

        The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art,     one of the nation’s finest art and engineering schools, is no longer unique. Starting in fall 2014, Cooper Union, as it’s known, will break a tradition of over one hundred years and start charging tuition. The good news is that the extra income will allow the school to “survive and thrive” according to its president, Dr. Jamshed Bharucha (a name with overtones of Sukkoth, but I doubt it.) The bad news is, well, there’s a lot of bad news.

Imagine the student body you can attract with a college education that is, essentially, free. Now, imagine the kind of faculty that attracts and the level of instruction it permits. Especially if you limit yourself to three subjects: art, architecture and engineering. That’s been the reality of Cooper Union for more than a century. Charging tuition will change all that.

First, the quality of the student body plummets because you are competing with every other college in the nation. A difficult task made harder by being a small, urban school that doesn’t even offer some of the things other schools brag about. Then, standards of faculty and instruction will follow it down like roped-together climbers falling off Mt. Everest.

What happened? How did charging tuition become necessary? You would think that owning the land under The Chrysler Building (among others) would insure a comfortable level of income. It helps. What doesn’t help is borrowing $175 million to invest in Wall Street. In light of the most recent financial crisis, that’s like getting your first package of heroin free or saying, “Grandma, what big ears you have.” 

It’s too late now. What’s done is done. Is there some way to limit the damage? Cooper Union wisely hired   a management consultant to consider the alternatives. Their advice was an across-the-board tuition hike, but only 25% of what constitutes a full scholarship. That way, the school is still an out-sized bargain. What are the chances that the trustees and Dr. Bharucha took that advice? Not a prayer - or barucha in hebrew. The new plan calls for students with means to pay $20,000 a year while needy students pay nothing. I’m sure their goal was to preserve part of Cooper Union’s tuition-free heritage. What they’ve achieved is an arrangement that’s ancien regime in its exploitation. All the students who willingly pay tuition are unwillingly subsidizing the others. That should make for cordial relations. It also gives new meaning to the word, “Upperclassman.”

KILLING PEOPLE WITH PAPER BULLETS.

        Yesterday in Washington, D.C., the only criminal class native to  America went on a rampage. The U.S. Senate voted against expanding background checks to include gun purchases made on-line and at gun shows. They also refused to ban high-capacity ammunition clips and to renew the ban on civilians owning assault rifles. Thus, keeping the flow  of weapons to criminals, terrorists and deranged people open and unimpeded. The vote didn’t follow party or gender lines. Four Democrats crossed the aisle as did four women senators. What’s more, they did it in the presence of their former colleague, Gabrielle Giffords, still suffering from being shot in the head two years ago and the parents of children murdered at Newtown Elementary School four months ago. Mark Twain wrote, “There’s no native American criminal class except Congress.” In their vote yesterday, the U.S. Senate proved both him correct and President Obama, who said, “It’s a pretty shameful day for Washington.” America should recoil in disgust.

Filming the Great Gatsby: A Classic Blunder UPDATE.

         In my blog post of 3/18/12, I mention four reasons why I think film versions of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald are doomed to fail: a stupid plot and weak characters that would embarrass most writers, great American themes that would humble them and a glorious written style that demands an equally glorious visual analog. In the current (May) issue of Town and Country magazine, Francis Ford Coppola adds a fifth reason why the 1974 version starring Robert Redford was so dull, pretentious and completely unmemorable: himself.

         Between filming The Godfather and releasing it, Mr. Coppola needed money and wasn’t sure his mafia movie would succeed. So, he agreed to rewrite (completely) the screenplay for The Great Gatsby. It took him two weeks. It should have taken longer.

The now famous director and screenwriter doesn’t criticize the film, nor does the magazine – although Town and Country does use the wonderfully ambiguous term “resonant” to describe it. In this very short piece, Coppola doesn’t go into detail about anything except what he considers to be his major contribution: adding a dialogue-heavy scene between Gatsby and the woman he idolizes, Daisy Buchanan. I give him credit for realizing something was missing, but dialogue? Okay. As legions of Godfather fans know, Coppola’s dialogue can be pretty good. He didn’t, however, replace it with his own. Instead, he stole it from Fitzgerald’s short stories. I don’t mind stealing, either, but doing it right takes as much time as outright creation and – by his own admission – Coppola was in a rush. So, in his zeal to take the money and run, he overlooks the two biggest reasons why you should never steal dialogue from Fitzgerald’s short stories. First, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” ain’t knocking Gatsby or Tender is the Night off the shelf. Second, the poetic style that made F. Scott Fitzgerald famous is absent in his dialogue. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good dialogue, but only because it’s faithful to the empty and superficial people he wrote about.

         So many people are involved in making a movie – any movie – that no one bears complete responsibility for the results. Even the list of major contributors is long. Thus, when someone as obviously talented as Francis Ford Coppola claims sole credit for writing the screenplay - creating the very structure - for an inert mass like the 1974 The Great Gatsby, there’s only one thing we can do. Give it to him.

WAR FINDS ANDY HARDY.

NEW YORK, April 2 – As I write this, a state of war might exist between North Korea and the United States. Or it might not. A state of something definitely exists. Maybe. It’s up to a twenty-eight-year-old man who dresses like Mao and looks like he sings soprano in the Vatican choir. It’s up to Kim Jung-un.

            The average man in his late twenties is impulsive enough without having absolute power over twenty-five million people. Give him enough nuclear weapons to blow the Earth off its axis and you can expect some serious acting out. That seems to be the case with the Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jung-un. We can’t be sure, though. Why?

            First, it’s always been difficult, if not impossible, to get news out of North Korea.The only reports that get out are the ones they want you to know. (Although “news” and “reports” may be setting the bar high for something that, on occasion, looks like a cheap video game.) Second, this may be an American thing, but Mr. Kim is not a glad-handing, baby-kissing politician. He doesn’t invite you in. So, it’s very unlikely he’ll reveal anything personal. Finally, I’ll go out on a limb and say that if you reach the age of twenty-eight and still look like a Pyongyang paperboy, you’ve probably been teased all your life. That doesn’t automatically make you a Korean Carrie (Karaoke?)but it’s not a recipe for being wholesome and integrated, either.

            So, how does the U.S. deal with a world leader whose politics go back to the Cold War, but whose appearance conjures up MGM musicals? Are we Betsy Booth (Judy Garland) to his Andy Hardy (Mickey Rooney) or does John Kerry look enough like Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone) to give him wise advice and fatherly guidance? Stay tuned.