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Go On Singing, But Sign Your Name: Orson Welles, the Unsigned Cathedral, and the Most Seductive Lie in “F for Fake”

Picture the man. He is past sixty, vast, wrapped in a black cape and a wide hat, and he has just spent an hour lying to your face on purpose. He told you at the start that for the next sixty minutes everything would be true, and you believed him, because the voice belongs to Orson Welles and that voice could sell you the deed to a bridge. Then the hour ran out, and in the last seventeen minutes he spun a whole story about a young woman, her grandfather, and twenty-two forged Picassos, walking you through it as documented fact before turning to the camera to admit he had been, in his own phrase, lying his head off. The film is “F for Fake,” from 1973. With the trick still warm, Welles plants himself in front of Chartres Cathedral, goes quiet and grave and beautiful, and delivers the line everyone carries away: maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.

Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much. Orson Welles, “F for Fake” (1973)

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Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

Ischia is Burning book cover, topographic map design with crimson title and CLASSIFIED stamp

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Beautiful Numbness: The Book I Have Been Writing for Fifty Years

Every book has a birthday, but not every book has a conception date. Some books arrive late and fast, fully formed, demanding to be transcribed before they vanish. The Last Living American White Male was like that. Others accumulate across decades, assembling themselves in the background of a life, borrowing material from every stage and every failure and every standing ovation until the writer finally sits down and discovers that the book has already been written in the margins of everything else. Beautiful Numbness: Art, Sedation, and Twenty-Five Centuries of the Standing Ovation is that kind of book. It was conceived when I was ten years old. It has taken me more than half a century to deliver it. It is now available as a Kindle ebook, a paperback, and a free PDF download from David Boles Books.

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Predators, Children and Sexual Prevarication

Children are some of the most vulnerable in society. They are trusting by default and unaware by necessity of nature. Popular culture and the Arts are filled with the sexual exploitation of, and the aggrieved results of, unattended children in peril with no one to protect their best interests except, oftentimes, their grooming predators.

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Three Eras of Preservation and the Scourge of Magnetic Tape

In the Modern Age of Entertainment, we have — so far — sustained Three Distinct Eras of performance preservation. The First Era was Film.  The Second Era was Magnetic Tape. The Third, and current, Era is Digital. The most cursed of all the Eras, is the misbegotten second — Magnetic Audiotape and Videotape — where performances were not actually preserved, they were only perpetuated to die!

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Waiting for the World to Wind You

There’s nothing quite like the ephemeral feeling of being alive, ahead, of the universe and realizing you can either wait for the world to catch up to you, or you can continue pressing forward, alone, into the future, and hope that leaps in technology and thinking and education will circle around and meet you in understanding tomorrow, today.

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A View of New York City from the Hoboken Waterfront

Janna and I had a delightful weekend in Hoboken, New Jersey.  Hoboken is a great city with a wonderful, intimate, small-town feel surrounded by massive urban areas like Jersey City and Newark and, of course, the center of the world — New York City — is right across the Hudson river.  Hoboken reminds us of our hometowns of Council Bluffs, Iowa and Lincoln, Nebraska.

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