GENE PITNEY, AN EARLY FAVORITE

 

Gene Pitney's final curtain call came not with a cough or a stagger, but with a performance—rounded, complete, and received with a standing ovation in a Cardiff auditorium. The word used was “natural causes,” as if God Himself were a concert promoter with a fondness for showmanship, allowing the tenor to finish his set before drawing the velvet drapes. There’s a polite symmetry to it—no collapse on stage, no tortured final note bent grotesque by mortality. Just applause, quiet egress, then absence. His voice was pure architecture: each syllable a stair climbed with theatrical intent, each chorus an attic gable framed in steel and longing. Pitney sang of love in the way-stained glass renders saints—ornate, overwrought, and wondrous. The songs were simple. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. World ends. And yet beneath the corn syrup of the lyrics, there surged a man excavating feeling as if sorrow were a quarry and he the last willing laborer. In the Sixties, when music began its slow morph into rebellion and fuzz pedal aphorisms, Pitney was romanticism’s holdout—unashamed of strings, crescendos, and hearts bleeding into vinyl. “Town Without Pity,” “It Hurts To Be In Love,” “I’m Gonna Be Strong”—these weren’t mere tracks. They were sonatas of collapse, teenage Gothic, snapshots of pain that, through their excess, found strange dignity.I bought his records back then, amid my youthful pantheon of pop: The Four Seasons, tidy in their falsetto flights; Peter, Paul and Mary, solemn with their folk harmonies. These now feel like embroidered samplers on a Midwestern kitchen wall—nice, nostalgic, and devoid of heat. But Pitney? Pitney remained. A soft spot formed around his melodrama like a pearl around grit. In later years, when his name was spoken with smirking condescension, I found myself defending him—not out of loyalty, but recognition. The man had made banality soar. The Prince of Perfect Pitch, they called him, and rightly so. He turned pubescent emotionalism into operetta, and made the adolescent experience seem operatic, and perhaps holy.

Joni Mitchell’s Reckless Drift

People liked it when Joni Mitchell changed. She had always changed. The Hissing of Summer Lawns made sense in that way, as a kind of departure that didn’t feel like escape. It was praised, mostly. Artistic growth. Personal evolution. That sort of thing.Then Hejira came. It was less loved, but still understood. There were broader structures, jazz textures, lyrics that became less declarative. Mitchell was turning inward. That was the signal. The listener had to follow, or not.Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter is the sound of getting lost. Or staying lost. A double album that wanders. The songs are long, some more than ten minutes. There are chords struck and held, left hanging like unsent letters. She sings over them. Not quite melody. Not quite meditation. There is Jaco Pastorius. Wayne Shorter. John Guerin. Their job is to find shape in the murk. Sometimes they almost do.The lyrics are impressionistic. That word is polite. What they really are is scattered. Images with no center. Ideas that don’t argue, just drift past. The poet has rights, they’ll say. Poets can do anything. But this isn't poetry, not really. It is a kind of posture. An affect. Something performed.She touches on things that matter. Weariness. Freedom. Sex and age. But nothing connects. No hooks, no phrases you remember later. No way in. What she offers is not music in the usual sense. It’s art. That’s the claim. The capital-A kind. And the paradox is that she loses the craft in reaching for it.There was a time when she was precise. When she built songs that held. But now the line between artful and arty is crossed and blurred. She’s among those who’ve come to believe their importance entitles them to indulgence. Lennon. Yes. Others.It is not failure. But it is not connection, either.

NO LENNON AT THE STADIUM , 1973

 

He said it like a man who’d just seen God in a parking lot.

“Lennon’s going to be here!” he shouted, voice cracking with the kind of hope that only rock and roll or religion can summon. “I just heard it—John Lennon’s gonna be here. Hot damn!”

He jittered in his seat like a man with too much caffeine and not enough conviction, eyes darting between the Padres game and the stage that loomed like a concrete altar. “What inning is it? The ninth? How many more are there?”

The city had been baited. KPRI, with all the subtlety of a carnival barker, had promised “the most significant musical event of the year.” A phrase so bloated with self-importance it practically begged to be deflated. Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band were the headliners, but the real draw—the unspoken seduction—was the possibility of Lennon. No one needed to say it. It was in the air, like ozone before a storm. Lennon would come. He had to. He’d played for the retarded children in Central Park. He’d sung for John Sinclair, the jailed poet-activist, and turned protest into melody. Surely he’d show up for San Diego’s sickle cell clinics. Surely.

 Jimmy Smith, “The Incredible,” took the stage first. Forty minutes of jazz noodling that circled itself like a dog chasing its tail. Smith, a man whose fingers had once inspired rock gods, now seemed to be playing for himself and a ghost audience that had long since moved on. He stitched together fragments of Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack, but the seams showed.

The crowd was restless. The stage towered fifty feet above them, a monolith of bad planning. Crew members loitered in front of the platform like bureaucrats at a revolution. The people craned their necks and squinted into the sun, and when they couldn’t see, they jeered.

Papa John Creach came next, electric violin in hand, backed by a band called Zulu that was tight but uninspired. The audience had already checked out. They played Frisbee on the baseball diamond. Someone ran the bases. Another slid into home. The music was background noise to a game of make-believe.

Creach saw it, laughed, and played on. He was a professional. He’d done this with Jefferson Airplane, with Hot Tuna. He knew the drill. But the crowd didn’t care. They were waiting for a Beatle.

“Where’s Lennon, goddammit?” someone growled.

The air was thick with catcalls and war whoops, the kind of primal noise that comes not from joy but from the slow boil of disappointment.

And then she came.

Yoko Ono, flanked by three bodyguards in black, walked to the mic like a priestess to the pyre. She wore white—pants, shirt, the whole ensemble—and raised her arms in greeting. The Plastic Ono Band struck up a beat, mechanical and methodical, and Yoko began to wail.

It wasn’t singing. It was something else. A high-pitched warble, raw and unfiltered, like chalk dragged across a blackboard in a hurricane.

“Hello, San Diego,” she said, peeking up from her lyric sheets. She spoke of expectations, of how the city was nicer than she’d imagined.

“Where’s John?” someone muttered behind me.

She introduced a song for her missing daughter, Kyoko. “Don’t worry Kyoko,” she shrieked, again and again, until the words lost meaning and became sound. Then came “Woman Power,” a feminist anthem with a Miles Davis groove and more of Yoko’s vocal acrobatics.

The exodus began.

People streamed toward the exits like ants from a burning hill.

“Let’s do a slow blues,” Yoko said.

She sat at the edge of the stage, hair falling over her face like a veil. She didn’t sing. She moaned. She sighed. She mimicked the rhythm with breathy theatrics, and midway through, she feigned an orgasm—gasping, writhing, a performance that felt less like art and more like a dare.

The song ended.

She stood.

“All right, see you later,” she said, and vanished.

No Lennon.

“Let’s hear it for Yoko in her first San Diego appearance,” someone announced.

“And her last,” came a voice behind me.

I turned and shook his hand.

---

Originally published in the San Diego Reader.

TONE DEAF WRITING SINKS ALL GOOD IDEAS

Ocean Vuong takes inspiration from the elegance of other writers and works hard to construct memorable, poetic sentences. Note here that the verb used is construct, not compose—the latter implies an effort of musicality, the work of a writer with an ear for euphony. The list of those who can do this effortlessly is long—Updike, Cheever, Baldwin, Nabokov, Abe, Toni Morrison—but the line of those who slave away to achieve it is infinitely longer.Vuong is by no means a horrible writer. In fact, there are stretches of fine detail and emotional nuance when he leaves the poet’s hat in the trunk of the car. I say “trunk of the car” to suggest that Vuong writes at his best when he stops trying to take the reader’s breath away with images that are clearly designed to do just that.The premise of the novel is certainly sound for a three-hankie literary sob-fest. The Emperor of Gladness follows a depressed 19-year-old college dropout named Hai who becomes the caretaker for an elderly widow, Grazina, suffering from dementia. They form an unlikely bond and find a sense of belonging in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut.

Far too often, however, Vuong gums up the narrative flow with sentences that are incongruous—sometimes even ridiculous—howlers that make you swallow hard, like you’ve bitten into something too bitter or too sweet. Lines like “I know, it’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter” or “Our hands empty except for our hands” are examples of poetic overreach. These images, similes, and allusions often feel absurdly strained and tonelessly incongruous. They add nothing to the storyline—no irony, no momentum, no mystery, and no real connection to the emotional core of the suffering being portrayed.I finished the book in fits and starts, forcing my way past the roadblocks of these inept poeticisms. There was no joy in Mudville after closing the final page. Vuong clearly wants to be a good writer—perhaps even a great one—but that will be difficult unless he develops a sharper sense of what works in his prose and what doesn’t. Composing means paying attention to how well the words come together to form an effective whole. Vuong has the raw talent, but he needs to learn when to let the poetry serve the story, not smother it.

THE SILENCE by Don DeLillo

 

The worst thing that could happen to all of us, at times, seems less like a nuclear holocaust that would render the planet a charred cinder than all of us being cast into our own self-designed hells. What if we had to talk to each other and depend on the function of collective wisdom and planning just to exist another day? What if the lights went out, the internet went blank, planes fell from the sky, and there were no distractions to mummify our individual sense of terror?Don DeLillo’s 2020  novel The Silence tells the story of five people gathered in a Manhattan apartment on Super Bowl Sunday in 2022, when a sudden, unexplained global event causes all digital technology to cease functioning. As usual, DeLillo stays in the world he knows and has chronicled so well over the decades—that of privileged white Americans relying on their powers of rationalization to convince themselves that things are fine and normal, even as the various systems that gave them affluence in the first place—finance, science, political skullduggery, technology, college-level obfuscation—fall apart and cease to operate. It might be said that DeLillo’s fictions have always been about the failure of belief systems that once seemed to explain and define the universe his characters inhabit. Just as the advances in science, philosophy, capitalism, ideology, and the rest en masse replaced the gods and became the de facto religious beliefs of the modern era, DeLillo highlights the death of these old-new gods. He shows how individual and collective dedication to various beliefs about how things *should* be leaves us clueless, comic, full of dread—doubling down on convictions that no longer convince anyone, at the core of their being, that anything is fixed in place.The Silence is that tale again, in brief—a terse and lyrical ode to a world that has literally run down, suddenly and seemingly permanently without the power to fuel our commerce and distractions. It is a comedy written on a philosopher’s sketchpad, a setup for a joke that just ends—no punchline. It makes you think, What the hell just happened?—which is the point. I’m inclined to think that’s the wrong question. Rather, we might ask: How long have we been walking in our sleep, earbuds connected to cell phones playing music we don’t even like? Has it all been white noise, in all things? Something worth asking—and a book worth reading from a great American novelist.

 

A MASTERPIECE FROM JOHN CHEEVER

 
The Wapshot Chronicle  is John Cheever's first novel, published in 1957, and it is a timeless masterpiece of expressing the sorrow, the pity and the tragicomic of middle class life .  The titular family consists of eccentrics, all pursuing their varied and impulse driven distractions. The novel follows Leander Wapshot, an aging patriarch and ferryboat pilot in the fictional New England town of St. Botolphs, as he grapples with his eccentric family and fading relevance. His sons, Moses and Coverly, leave home to seek purpose in a world that seems increasingly absurd and disjointed. Moses navigates a series of romantic misadventures and professional aimlessness, while Coverly wrestles with existential confusion and sexual identity. Their cousin Honora, a wealthy and domineering matriarch, exerts control over the family’s finances and future. Through their missteps and revelations.  All such activities show to be vanities and the characters, despite vague assertions and protests from time to time of declaring themselves fully motivated citizens, show themselves to be a rudderless lot, a family in decline, each in their own way sensing that a veil has lifted and the illusion of their own normality is evaporating , but who still maintain that all is fine with their oddball takes on reality. Cheever has one of the greatest, if not the greatest prose styles of his generation, an elegant tone that guides savvy and sympathetic sentences , with an anonymous narrator that never reveals his or her hand, keeping matters in the third person, showing intimate knowledge of the lives of this family and their ideas as such, but withholds any outright suggestions as to how anything resolves . He wordsmithery is a marvel of elegant brevity with  just enough detail, his treatment of seasonal light is brilliant conveyed. Also on display is a sad ruthlessness in how he leads the reader toward the inevitable. The effect is comic, but the laughs are not slapstick but more like a melancholic jolt of recognition, as a reader’s own experience realizes the folly our gathering of the generationally related have embarked on.

SOBRIETY GETS THE HEAT TO THE MEAT

 

So in the nineties I was in a men's intimacy group, a bunch of sober guys who wanted to talk about personal matters, issues, conflictions and compulsions with other sober men on a level much deeper and more personal than what offer up at a standard AA meeting. So this fellow, an alcohol treatment counselor ironically, had just finished a very long monologue on his sexual hang-ups, with a good number of side trips through other subjects that managed to be both gamy and banal, and when he stopped talking, the rest of us rose from our seats, chairs, the two sofas that were crammed in this studio apartment . So this fellow from South Oakland , whose apartment it happened to be, had a TV set hooked up to a VHS player, and a lone, unmarked cassette laying on top of it.

"Let's TAKE A BREAK AND RELAX, FELLAS."

So the guy from South Oakland grabbed the cassette and shoved it into the video player. So then the fellow from treatment with the curated sexual hang-ups looked up to the screen . Then you could nearly hear his jaw drop. Imagine a rusty creak, a loud , rasping scrape of severely oxidized metal.

Porn stars flashed on the TV screen, wherein guys in seventies porn mustaches were putting their engorged presences anywhere the actresses would allow. Mod Squad music, cheesy fuzz tone guitars and Farfisa fantasias, poured from the TV's tinny speaker. "Yeah" Mr.South Oakland muttered,"Get that, hit that, fug, this is the stuff…" The room filled with cigar smoke and reeked of coffee left on the burner too long, as both porn movies and comatose confessions of sexual impropriety filled the room.

FROM WONDERFULLY VAGUE BUT EVOCATIVE TO MUMBLING AND MUDDLED

Greil Marcus has a gift for crafting poetic, wide-ranging essays that explore rock and pop music, popular culture, and the unexpected intersections between songs and the historical forces that shape our lives. At his best, Marcus opens our eyes—urging us to listen more closely, to dig into the motivations of artists, and to sharpen our senses in a quixotic hope of nudging humanity toward some kind of upgrade.  His finest work remains Lipstick Traces, a 1989 doorstop of a book that ambitiously surveys what its subtitle calls the “Secret History” of the 20th century. Marcus argues—though never too directly—that the century’s art movements formed scattered, often chaotic pockets of resistance to the numbing status quo. These movements, whether intentional or accidental, pushed back against a system designed to keep industrial populations distracted and docile while the powerful consolidated wealth.  For Marcus, it’s all connected: surrealism, cubism, Russian cinema, Cabaret Voltaire, blues, bebop, Coltrane, Elvis, the Sex Pistols, Bob Dylan. Lipstick Traces is a whirlwind of baroque poetics and intellectual hyperbole. It doesn’t offer firm conclusions so much as it suggests, hints, and gestures toward meaning. Like Ken Burns with a sharper edge, Marcus assembles a dazzling collage of names, dates, and trends, then lets the implications hang in the air, unresolved. He writes as though perched outside of history, watching the ambitions and failures of brilliant men and women unfold. The result is part prose poem, part critical impressionism—a book that invites readers to construct their own narrative from the fragments he presents.Years later, Folk Music  arrives in the same style: a Burnsian drift through five essential Bob Dylan songs, from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Murder Most Foul.” But this time, the magic falters. Without a clear thesis or guiding argument, the book feels like a compressed mashup of dates, names, songs, controversies, and half-remembered cultural moments. The connective tissue is thin, and the absence of a coherent line of inquiry robs the book of momentum or purpose.Marcus has written five other books on Dylan—many of them insightful, often beautifully written. But Folk Music reads like a retread, as if he’s run out of fresh things to say about the former Mr. Zimmerman. It’s hasty, clumsily structured, riddled with awkward transitions. At times, it resembles the ramblings of a once-brilliant mind hoping that if it keeps talking long enough, something profound might emerge. This time, it doesn’t.

(An early review of a Dixie Dregs concert at San Diego State University, 1979, originally published in the UCSD Daily Guardian).

 Progressive rock—once a bold experiment in stretching the boundaries of popular music—has largely faded into a relic of its own ambition. What began as an earnest attempt to fuse rock with classical complexity and conceptual depth often collapsed under the weight of its own excess. Bands like Kansas and Styx, with their theatrical bombast and overwrought arrangements, helped steer the genre into a cul-de-sac of self-importance. Today, prog survives mostly as a niche curiosity, more admired for its audacity than its relevance—less a living movement than a museum piece, endlessly referencing itself. Right? Am I right? 

Hardly.

While progressive or “art rock” is often marred by overwrought theatrics and uneven execution, some bands continue to uphold a high standard of musicianship and creativity. Chief among them is America’s own Dixie Dregs, whose May 2 concert at SDSU’s Montezuma Hall was a striking reminder that this genre, when approached with discipline and imagination, still has something vital to offer.

The performance demonstrated that five musicians—guitarist Steve Morse, bassist Andy West, drummer Rod Morgenstein, keyboardist T. Lavitz, and violinist Allen Sloan—can reinvigorate a form many have dismissed as obsolete. Their music didn’t just impress; it engaged, challenged, and ultimately reaffirmed the value of instrumental rock when it’s crafted with purpose.

What sets the Dregs apart isn’t just their technical command—though they possess that in abundance—but their commitment to structure and clarity. Where many progressive and fusion acts rely on flashy displays to mask thin ideas, the Dregs, guided by Morse’s compositional vision, achieve a rare sense of cohesion. Their pieces unfold with logic and momentum, allowing their virtuosity to serve the music rather than distract from it.

Drawing from a wide spectrum of influences—classical, jazz fusion, funk, hard rock, and bluegrass—the Dregs don’t settle for superficial genre-blending. Instead, they weave these elements into intricate, interlocking arrangements that feel deliberate and unified. Their music avoids the disjointedness that plagues lesser acts and, refreshingly, sidesteps the burden of clumsy lyrics altogether.

Steve Morse stands out as one of the most distinctive voices in modern guitar. His playing blends the precision of Julian Bream, the agility of Roy Clark, the intensity of John McLaughlin, and the tonal inventiveness of early Jeff Beck. His solos are unpredictable yet coherent, moving fluidly through classical harmonies, rock dynamics, rapid-fire runs, and country-inflected phrasing—all executed with astonishing clarity and control. Among his contemporaries, only Allen Holdsworth rivals him in technical depth.

Yet Morse doesn’t dominate the spotlight. He shares it generously, allowing his bandmates to contribute equally to the group’s dynamic interplay. West and Morgenstein form a rhythm section that’s both agile and grounded, handling the band’s complex shifts with precision. Lavitz and Sloan, meanwhile, match Morse’s energy with their own inventive flourishes. Their exchanges—at times reminiscent of the Mahavishnu Orchestra—are full of momentum and wit, building to moments of exhilarating intensity.The Dixie Dregs aren’t preserving a relic—they’re redefining what progressive rock can be. Their music is intelligent, skillful, and deeply attuned to what makes instrumental rock compelling. For a taste of their vision, listen to _Night of the Living Dregs_ (Capricorn) or their latest, _Dregs of the Earth_ (Arista).

BOMBAST :APOCALYPSE NOW

 "...What I'm getting at is this: a native village is bombed and the bombs happen to be beautiful when they land. In fact, it would be odd if all that sudden destruction did not liberate some beauty. The form the bomb takes in its explosion may be...a picture of the potentialities (of the thing) it destroyed. So let us accept the idea that the bomb is beautiful..." ---Norman Mailer, 

 The quotation in question is classic Norman Mailer, circa 1963—an era when he often offered wild-eyed metaphors to drive home a point. To be fair, the passage is taken out of context from a dense, metaphysical discussion, and Mailer certainly wasn’t endorsing destruction for the sake of aesthetics. Yet the quote underscores a persistent issue of aesthetics, one that’s vividly present in Francis Ford Coppola’s *Apocalypse Now*. In many ways, Coppola seems to have embraced the idea that “the bomb is beautiful,” crafting a Vietnam War film brimming with explosions, firefights, and death—so visually arresting it could hang in a gallery. Its spectacle is breathtaking, but that very scale becomes its undoing, preventing *Apocalypse Now* from achieving the deeper film it aspired to be.

Coppola and screenwriter John Milius draw heavily from Joseph Conrad’s *Heart of Darkness*. The story centers on a CIA assassin named Willard (Martin Sheen), who, drowning in existential despair while holed up in a seedy Saigon hotel, is recruited for one last mission. His target: Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a brilliant Special Forces officer who’s gone rogue in Cambodia, establishing a cult-like kingdom in the jungle. Willard’s assignment—coldly phrased by command—as to “terminate his command,” sends him on a surreal journey upriver with a small patrol boat and crew. As in Conrad’s tale, the river voyage becomes a metaphor for descending into madness and cultural dislocation. The deeper they venture, the more rationality dissolves. The film unfolds more as a series of stylized set pieces than as a tightly woven narrative. A beach assault, led by a surfing-obsessed officer (Robert Duvall), is staged with ludicrous bravado in the midst of chaos. Later, a surreal USO show floats in on a game-show-lit barge, and a riverside Army outpost—bombed senseless—houses a platoon of shell-shocked soldiers firing at ghosts. The jungle slowly devours Willard’s crew as they drift further into absurdity and detachment. Rather than exploring themes through character or dialogue, Coppola leans into visual extravagance. The result: a film that loses grip on Conrad’s psychological and political critique. *Heart of Darkness* used plot and prose to evoke the horrors of imperialism, *Apocalypse Now* substitutes spectacle for coherence. 

At its best, the cinematography (courtesy of Vittorio Storaro) renders warfare with a haunting, sculptural beauty. But therein lies the issue—battle becomes an aestheticized experience, numbingly detached from blood, pain, or moral weight. Coppola’s Willard is a blank slate, conveying little emotion or transformation, which leaves the viewer distanced rather than absorbed. Even the climax, where Willard finally reaches Kurtz’s compound, falls flat. Brando, shrouded in shadows, mumbles cryptic musings on horror, judgment, and moral dualism—statements that lack coherence or impact. Kurtz, seemingly ready for death, offers himself to Willard, who kills him during a simultaneous ritual slaughter. The moment echoes Conrad’s “The horror! The horror!” but Coppola fails to translate its visceral terror to the screen. Efforts to tether the film back to Conrad—via narration written by journalist Michael Herr—are uneven. The voiceover swings wildly in tone, from literary to slang, often contradicting itself. In contrast, Conrad’s Marlow subtly evolves throughout the narrative, pulling the reader with him into darkness. Coppola’s Willard drifts unmoored. In the end, *Apocalypse Now* is worth seeing not for its insights, but for the sheer audacity of its vision. Coppola’s talent remains undeniable—films like *The Godfather* and *You’re a Big Boy Now* cement that. *Apocalypse Now* also benefits from standout performances: Martin Sheen is convincingly haunted, Robert Duvall is gloriously unhinged, and Dennis Hopper crafts a gonzo archetype of the wartime hippie. As for Brando, his Kurtz borders on parody—whether it’s willful defiance or minimalist genius is debatable, but the final scenes are undeniably inert. For all its noise and ambition, *Apocalypse Now* ultimately falters under the weight of its own spectacle. It’s a masterclass in cinematic technique, but a muddled meditation on meaning.

---

THE BOUNTY OF "BEING THERE"

 

With a flurry of hype preceding its debut in San Diego, it’s understandable why someone might approach director Hal Ashby’s new film, Being There, with a “show me” attitude usually limited to citizens of Missouri. The film, based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski (who also wrote the screenplay), had opened three months earlier in New York and Los Angeles, and the advance reports from taste-making critics sounded like a chorus singing the same old tune: Being There, they harmonized, was indeed a comic masterpiece—a work of art, proof that American filmmakers can make movies that do more than satisfy an audience’s urge for the cheap vicarious thrill. Feeling burned by what I thought was payola-influenced propaganda for Kramer vs. Kramer—and the irrational rush of national and local film writers to reaffirm the majority opinion—I expected a downright drag. The new TV campaign announced, “…this time the critics are unanimous.”  I approached Being There with my own case of “show me.”

Well—surprise. Being There is, in fact, a good film that gives the audience a rare dose of “something to think about” while supplying a constant stream of funny stuff. Even more surprising was Kosinski’s screenplay, with which he, to use an arcane adjective, miraculously salvages what worth there was in his weakest novel and retools it to fit the medium like a nut and bolt.Kosinski’s novel concerned the doings of a gardener with intellectual disabilities named Chance, whose worldview is limited to tending a garden and watching unwholesome amounts of TV. He’s forced to leave the only home he’s known when the old man who cared for him dies. Nattily dressed in a suit from the old man’s wardrobe, Chance meets Eve Rand, wife of Benjamin Rand—a dying multimillionaire industrialist and kingmaker courted by presidents, senators, and foreign dignitaries. Chance’s name is eventually misconstrued as  “Chauncey Gardiner.” When a Soviet ambassador recites his favorite Russian poet, Chance simply smiles and nods. His vague, uncertain replies—rooted in television and gardening metaphors—are mistaken by others as visionary truths. These desperate elites, hungry for a voice of optimism in a world of money, power, and deadpan cynicism, cling to his half-wit utterances as if they’re the insights of a poet.

Ashby must have had a long talk with Kosinski and given him some needed pointers. Gardener is taken to be a man of supreme taste and intellect. He impresses Benjamin enough to earn an introduction to the President. Asked what the country should do to stimulate economic “growth,” Chance draws from the only field he knows—gardening—and delivers a homily about strong roots and springtime renewal. From there, he’s catapulted into national celebrity. The President, enchanted by “Chauncey Gardiner’s” unique philosophical optimism, quotes him (with due credit) during a televised State of the Union speech. The President, impressed by "Chauncey Gardiner's" philosophical optimism, quotes him during a televised State of the Union speech. Chance attracts attention from a leading business magazine, appears on a talk show, is investigated by the CIA and FBI, and impresses a Soviet ambassador who thinks he is a genius.

Kosinski’s novel was a shaggy dog story. Once the punchline landed, readers had to wade through too many pages watching the same joke play out in minor variations. Kosinski, dealing with a genre—the comic novel—that didn’t suit him, couldn’t quite develop the premise. His real strength as a novelist lies in grim fatalism. His best characters—cast-iron, post-existential types brutalized by life—navigate bleak and violent encounters with an eerie grace. His prose, terse and distanced, has elevated novels like Steps, The Painted Bird, The Devil Tree, and Blind Date.

But in Being There, his detached tone left the humor dead on the page. Fortunately, Ashby coaxed him into adjusting that tone for the screen. The dialogue remains spare, but the lines carry greater weight. Ashby pulls powerful performances from his cast, bypassing Kosinski’s subtleties and translating them into broader comedy.

Peter Sellers, like Chance, is magical. Where the novel’s character was flat and abstract, Sellers brings him to life as a wide-eyed, well-meaning idiot savant—an uncomprehending soul riding the wave of events that lift him ever higher. Shirley MacLaine as Eve, Melvyn Douglas as Benjamin, and Jack Warden as the President all flesh out their roles with an unerring sense of closed-system gullibility. Ashby wisely avoids buffoonery. He has his actors treat their characters’ quirks as givens within everyday interaction. There’s a matter-of-factness about the film that I admire. Being There manages to be funny without descending into slapstick or drawing-room farce. This perspective reflects Kosinski's belief that life consists of random events—hence the name "Chance"—that influence the course of history in ways humans think they control.