I haven't done a song post in a while. "Lacking wit or originality" anymore as the expression goes, I offer with complete earnestness some of the tunes I have been firing up of late in idle moments.
Vance Joy--"Riptide"
I'll even start with a relatively contemporary one (2013). My eight year old son started taking guitar lessons last year, and this was the first song he learned to play that was recognizable. He has moved on from this and is actually pretty good for his age, but I have developed a fondness for this song whenever I hear it in the grocery store or wherever. Indeed I have come to think it's a great pop song, and I hear very little recent music that appeals at all. I like the retro style of the video as well.
Hugo Winterhalter--"Canadian Sunset"
Having paid some tribute to the current decade though, I have to retreat right away all the way back to 1954. The much-loved radio station I used to listen to on my drives around the old and lonely roads of New Hampshire before the entirety of its listenership with the exception of me finally died off was very strong in the neglected area of popular 50s era instrumentals, none of which I ever managed to learn the names of apart from a few movie themes. Even on satellite radio I cannot find a station that reliably plays these numbers. This one overall being my favorite I was able to track it down on the internet despite not knowing the title by trial and error. It evokes numerous images and memories for me, including my grandparents, lunch at old-fashioned roadside inns, the day after a snowstorm when the sun shines so brilliantly, the days when my oldest boys were little before they went to school and we went on day trips all over our area. A highly sentimental song.
Pat Boone--"Moody River"
Pat is a smarmy dork, but along with "Love Letters in the Sand", this belongs to my personal List of Shame, consisting of songs by crummy singers that I have always liked, though in the instance of the two Boone songs and the next one, I genuinely did not realize that the songs were performed by these inferior artists until I was past 40 years old! This also reminds me a lot of my grandparents, mainly of their dining room, into which the flicker and sounds of their television, which was always on, would eternally faintly penetrate from the adjacent living room with the sounds of programming such as this.
The Monkees--"A Little Bit You, A Little Bit Me"
Written by Neil Diamond as well for bonus schmaltz points, but a very catchy song. The Monkees in my childhood were one of those seemingly random phenomena that my father despised so vehemently that there was no question of ever admitting any aspect of their existence to have any possible redeeming quality whatsoever. This particular song somehow escaped my attention as being theirs until it turned up as part of the soundtrack on the video yearbook one of my children's classes put out.
Billy Joel--"Rosalinda's Eyes"
This one I knew all along was a Billy Joel song, so I have no excuse. I heard it at Rite Aid one afternoon when it was pitch dark at 4:30 and thought, this isn't that bad of a song, really. And this video is pretty cheerful.
Buddy Holly--"True Love Ways"
My current favorite Buddy Holly song. Wistful late 50s vintage Americana. Makes me think of leaning against a kitchen sink in front of a closed blind drinking a class of milk late at night after getting home from my last date with Phyllis before she called it off. Deep stuff.
Bob Welch--"Ebony Eyes"
Another forgotten song that seemed pretty great to me when I listened to it again, at least the first few times. Our society doesn't seem to be producing a lot of guys like Bob Welch, whether for good or ill. I would wager that he committed what would now be considered sexual harassment at some point in his life, though blissfully unaware of the fact, and thought of his actions as a "move" or something of that sort. The quality of the video is not great, but I recognize some of those late 70s type women whose mantra was something like "live fully in the moment now, become angry later". I don't know, the party looks fun comparative to what we can hope for in the present.
Jo Stafford--"Try to Remember the Kind of September"
Tribute video featuring the truly delectable Jeanne Crain and many of her wonderful underrated movies (Margie is an especial favorite). I don't necessarily want to be taken back, but I don't want to be taken completely away either.
Andy Williams--"Can't Get Used to Losing You"
Just because...To be honest there will be probably never be a hit song like this again.
Showing posts with label americana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label americana. Show all posts
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Sunday, May 03, 2015
Movies 1945-1949, One From Each Year
All the Kings' Men (1949)
I had read the book recently. Here is my report on that from my other blog. The movie version won the Best Picture Oscar in its year. It isn't bad, though it is definitely one of the weaker Best Picture choices of the 40s. I haven't seen a ton of 1949 movies so I don't know how strong a year it was overall, but The Third Man came out that year at least (in England anyway) and seems to have been the movie of that year, though it got very little attention from the Academy other than an award for best black & white cinematography in 1950, which is when it was released in the United States.
Back to All the Kings' Men, it is pretty faithful I think to the general spirit of the book, but it is lacking something in the way of power or anything else that would make it compelling in the way the great classics of its era are. It doesn't have any iconic stars or otherwise interesting movie figures of the time among its cast. The director was Robert Rossen, with whose other work I am not familiar, though other than The Hustler, which came out twelve years afterwards, none of his other titles are widely referenced in the day-to-day discussion of the history of cinema. The noir-ish aspects of the film, in keeping with the fashion of the time, are noted in most of the literature on the movie, but I cannot say that I found that these affected me one way or the other. My opinion on the character of Willie Stark, which I hinted at in my report on the book and mostly refers to that, is that he is the only person in the story who seems to exert any agency of his own, who is even able to respond aggressively to and not be completely destroyed by the threat of shame, or disgrace. It is hard to judge him as someone who assumed more power than it was his right to do, because he seems to be surrounded by people who are largely incapable of effectively exercising basic personal freedom, let alone direct institutions and events. Maybe it is a flaw in the story, that there is no opposing power, and certainly no moral counterpart, anywhere in it to contrast with Stark.
I have seen it noted that All the Kings' Men is the last adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to win the Best Picture Oscar. Since the Oscars were only about twenty years old in 1949, I figured it couldn't have happened that often, and indeed, Gone With the Wind was the only other instance of this happening. I had thought The Grapes of Wrath was a third, but it did not win the Best Picture Oscar. As I have noted elsewhere on this blog the prestige of the Pulitzer was higher among the general public at least prior to about 1960 than it is today, and there have actually been a number of Oscar-quality adaptations made among its winners, though more so in the early days of the award. Just looking down the list of winners, notable films were made of The Magnificent Ambersons, The Age of Innocence (albeit decades later), Alice Adams, Tales of the South Pacific, The Caine Mutiny, and To Kill a Mockingbird. In more recent years The Color Purple and The Hours seem to have gotten some Oscar attention, and a few of the other winners were at least adapted into major movies or television serials. But not really that many.
The Search (1948)
A fairly difficult to find choice--it is available on DVD from Warner Brothers as part of a Classics series, but I had to buy it to get it--this stars Montgomery Clift in what I believe was his debut as an American soldier in postwar Germany who takes in a ragged, uncommunicative child, one of the legions of displaced and orphaned children who were all over Europe in those years and attempts to nurse him back to a state of some trust in humanity and ability to participate in civilization. At the same time the child's mother, a concentration camp survivor, is crisscrossing central Europe on foot in desperate hope of finding the boy alive. It is quite good, and I am surprised it is not better known and celebrated. It acknowledges the existence of what was a very serious issue at the time in the mass displacement of people in Europe. Granted, the Czechs and Hungarians and other eastern nationalities, assuming they returned to their countries of origin, which I think was still taken to be the ideal scenario in 1948, would be going right back to another politically repressive situation, though perhaps the extent and the permanent nature of this in some of the countries with more traditional ties to the West was not yet clearly discerned in the immediate aftermath of the war. Clift, whom I did not like all that much in the other two films I have seen him in, A Place in the Sun and Judgment at Nuremberg (also, oddly enough, set in a bombed out landscape in postwar Germany), is much better here. Apparently he had not imbibed the teachings and philosophical outlook of the Method so fully yet. The director was Fred Zinnemann, who would go on to direct a number of famous movies over the next thirty years, including A Man For All Seasons. Zinnemann, who was Jewish, was, like many of the golden age Hollywood directors, born in Austria-Hungary, in the part that is now Poland, and went to university in Vienna before leaving for Paris and eventually Hollywood. While this family of directors generally did not express a great deal of sentimental feeling for the country of their youths in their work, the European milieu depicted in this movie has a much more naturalistic feel about it, to the point of being unobtrusive, than Hollywood might have been thought capable of at this time. I suspect this was in large part the work of Zinnemann.
I need to remind myself to take the time to see this again someday, since there is a good chance it will never come up of itself in the course of events, but it does have some qualities about it that are important to understanding the character of the era, in my view.
Life With Father (1947)
Based on the once famous New Yorker stories by Clarence Day, Jr about his childhood as the son of a Wall Street mover and shaker in 1880s and 90s New York. The book is on one of my reading lists--the most ancient and politically naive one--though I probably won't get to it for a long time, if ever. The movie is interesting as a nostalgia piece looking back from the 40s to the 1880s, a time that has now receded too far out of the living memory even of people our oldest acquaintances may have known for us to have nostalgia for. I believe the Days are supposed to have lived on either Park or Madison Avenue, and the street, at least as depicted in the film, was a wide, blissfully uncrowded boulevard along which trolley cars and orderly carriages passed leisurely, lined with handsome and spacious but comparatively low rising (three or four storeys, tops) mansions, though without much in the way of shady tree cover. Of course New York in the 1880s was never really so sedate or orderly as it is made to be in this movie, though if this idea of it came from the book I will grant that it probably gave some sensation of that kind to the memoirist in his youthful goings about, perhaps for reasons peculiar to himself, though the tone he hit on in his writings did resonate with many readers. I am willing to trust people's memories of their experiences rather than what I might think their memories of those experiences should have been.
Compared to what we read of families similarly situated in contemporary New York City, the Day children seem to lead an almost blissfully unharried and carefree existence. Day, Sr was certainly an energetic and hard-driving man, but he is not depicted as being manic or possessed nearly beyond the limits of recognizable human desire by the drive to succeed and make money and be number one and mold his sons into equally aggressive dominant men such as is the popular image of Wall Street brokers in our time. Of course this is almost certainly the nostalgia of 1947 seeping through the filmmaking.
The extremely prolific and apparently indefatigable Michael Curtiz directed this. William Powell and Irene Dunne were the attractive and substantial leads. The 15 year old Elizabeth Taylor appears at her most simpering as the teenage romantic interest of Day, Jr.
By the way, in case you couldn't tell, I did like this.
Peter and the Wolf (1946)
A fifteen or so minute cartoon, this one barely counts, but it did turn up on the list so I will put it in here. It didn't blow me away, but it is diverting for what it is. I am more favorably inclined to Disney's work in the 1940s and 50s than I am in other periods.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)
I have written previously that 1945 is my personal favorite year for movies, and this moving film about family life, childhood, school, death, the past, the immigrant experience during the great wave of the last century, all against the hyper-somber backdrop of the stub end of World War II that characterizes all of the movies of that year that I like so much, fits in with the rest of these. I had recently read this book, too, which impressed me as having much merit, particularly with regard to our collective memory of the details of what things and experiences in our past were like. Like any movie, this one had to leave a lot of significant incidents and developments and characters out, but on the whole it is a good adaptation of the basic aspects of the story, and it is even better I think as a movie than it is as an adaptation. This was the directorial debut of Elia Kazan and the atmosphere and the development of the major characters and the way they inhabit the movie are its strong points. The ending is a much truncated version of what happened in the book, doubtless done to not be left with an ending in nothing is resolved or seems to be progressing for the better, but the movie really did not need to be tied up this way. In this it is similar to Life With Father, which operated on an even thinner plotline that was not all that essential to such interest as the film possessed.
The family at the center of this story is an Irish-German union, much like my own family, with both parents being the first generation born in America--and it was emphasized in the book that theirs was the only household Francie knew of in their neighborhood where both parents were actually American born. Despite their status as citizens and immersion in the culture and language of the United States since birth, Johnny and Katie Nolan had not gotten very far by 1912. Johnny of course was fairly hopeless, at least in economic terms, though a highly lovable guy. The circumstance of Katie's being German-descended does not play into my theory of the peculiarity of Irish romance, in which, comparative to more traditionally prosperous peoples, the long term career prospects of a potential husband do seem to be regularly taken into consideration. I feel myself to be in certain ways something of a modern day version of Johnny Nolan, only minus the charm. I suppose one could say minus the alcoholism also, but it is only the greater effectiveness of social control exerted on modern men that prevents me from following that mode of life, as I remain greatly attracted to it. The other characteristics--the inability to perceive the world and my place in it realistically, the endless empty promises to improve myself, the natural inclination toward squalor with regard to living arrangements--are there.
One of the other parts of this story that I relate to is the episode where Francie desires to transfer to a more beautiful and dignified-looking school without knowing much else more about it, since I did the same thing when I lived in Maine. I was not supposed to go to the school I went to, the one that was built in 1924 and had busts of famous white male giants of literature and history lining the hallways and a venerable history as perhaps the premier large public school in the state, but when I saw it I became consumed by a desire to go there as if it were owed me as the natural end of my development to that point to go to such a school, and it was arranged that I was able to go there, and I loved it dearly the whole time I was there, though it is hard to explain why, because in terms of the other students it was just a regular public school, I did not have any very close friends, and when I go back for my reunions most of the people don't remember who I am, and some of them act almost perturbed at my being there, as if I am crashing a party where I really don't belong. But at the time the atmosphere, not merely of the school but of the equally antique neighborhood and city around it, gave me something that I desperately needed to imbibe the air of, even if I was unable to make any very deep connection with it. I have not pushed for very much in my life, but I have a couple of times when it comes to schools. I was determined as well to go to a particular kind of college--residential, preferably somewhat old, average test scores above a certain level, an atmosphere of study that was acceptably masculine without being reactionary or arch-conservative, though this last I would not have been able to articulate in such terms at the time--and I was pretty dogged at not getting pushed into the community college, taking computer classes route that well-meaning people were trying to steer me towards and getting to go to the kind of place I wanted in the end, even though I guess most people would say, given my subsequent career, that the wisdom of those who advised community college has been vindicated.
Dorothy McGuire, who plays Katie, has a lovely voice, and is the easy choice for the honor of favorite 40s girl/woman for this set of reports from that era.
I had read the book recently. Here is my report on that from my other blog. The movie version won the Best Picture Oscar in its year. It isn't bad, though it is definitely one of the weaker Best Picture choices of the 40s. I haven't seen a ton of 1949 movies so I don't know how strong a year it was overall, but The Third Man came out that year at least (in England anyway) and seems to have been the movie of that year, though it got very little attention from the Academy other than an award for best black & white cinematography in 1950, which is when it was released in the United States.
Back to All the Kings' Men, it is pretty faithful I think to the general spirit of the book, but it is lacking something in the way of power or anything else that would make it compelling in the way the great classics of its era are. It doesn't have any iconic stars or otherwise interesting movie figures of the time among its cast. The director was Robert Rossen, with whose other work I am not familiar, though other than The Hustler, which came out twelve years afterwards, none of his other titles are widely referenced in the day-to-day discussion of the history of cinema. The noir-ish aspects of the film, in keeping with the fashion of the time, are noted in most of the literature on the movie, but I cannot say that I found that these affected me one way or the other. My opinion on the character of Willie Stark, which I hinted at in my report on the book and mostly refers to that, is that he is the only person in the story who seems to exert any agency of his own, who is even able to respond aggressively to and not be completely destroyed by the threat of shame, or disgrace. It is hard to judge him as someone who assumed more power than it was his right to do, because he seems to be surrounded by people who are largely incapable of effectively exercising basic personal freedom, let alone direct institutions and events. Maybe it is a flaw in the story, that there is no opposing power, and certainly no moral counterpart, anywhere in it to contrast with Stark.
I have seen it noted that All the Kings' Men is the last adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to win the Best Picture Oscar. Since the Oscars were only about twenty years old in 1949, I figured it couldn't have happened that often, and indeed, Gone With the Wind was the only other instance of this happening. I had thought The Grapes of Wrath was a third, but it did not win the Best Picture Oscar. As I have noted elsewhere on this blog the prestige of the Pulitzer was higher among the general public at least prior to about 1960 than it is today, and there have actually been a number of Oscar-quality adaptations made among its winners, though more so in the early days of the award. Just looking down the list of winners, notable films were made of The Magnificent Ambersons, The Age of Innocence (albeit decades later), Alice Adams, Tales of the South Pacific, The Caine Mutiny, and To Kill a Mockingbird. In more recent years The Color Purple and The Hours seem to have gotten some Oscar attention, and a few of the other winners were at least adapted into major movies or television serials. But not really that many.
The Search (1948)
A fairly difficult to find choice--it is available on DVD from Warner Brothers as part of a Classics series, but I had to buy it to get it--this stars Montgomery Clift in what I believe was his debut as an American soldier in postwar Germany who takes in a ragged, uncommunicative child, one of the legions of displaced and orphaned children who were all over Europe in those years and attempts to nurse him back to a state of some trust in humanity and ability to participate in civilization. At the same time the child's mother, a concentration camp survivor, is crisscrossing central Europe on foot in desperate hope of finding the boy alive. It is quite good, and I am surprised it is not better known and celebrated. It acknowledges the existence of what was a very serious issue at the time in the mass displacement of people in Europe. Granted, the Czechs and Hungarians and other eastern nationalities, assuming they returned to their countries of origin, which I think was still taken to be the ideal scenario in 1948, would be going right back to another politically repressive situation, though perhaps the extent and the permanent nature of this in some of the countries with more traditional ties to the West was not yet clearly discerned in the immediate aftermath of the war. Clift, whom I did not like all that much in the other two films I have seen him in, A Place in the Sun and Judgment at Nuremberg (also, oddly enough, set in a bombed out landscape in postwar Germany), is much better here. Apparently he had not imbibed the teachings and philosophical outlook of the Method so fully yet. The director was Fred Zinnemann, who would go on to direct a number of famous movies over the next thirty years, including A Man For All Seasons. Zinnemann, who was Jewish, was, like many of the golden age Hollywood directors, born in Austria-Hungary, in the part that is now Poland, and went to university in Vienna before leaving for Paris and eventually Hollywood. While this family of directors generally did not express a great deal of sentimental feeling for the country of their youths in their work, the European milieu depicted in this movie has a much more naturalistic feel about it, to the point of being unobtrusive, than Hollywood might have been thought capable of at this time. I suspect this was in large part the work of Zinnemann.
I need to remind myself to take the time to see this again someday, since there is a good chance it will never come up of itself in the course of events, but it does have some qualities about it that are important to understanding the character of the era, in my view.
Life With Father (1947)
Based on the once famous New Yorker stories by Clarence Day, Jr about his childhood as the son of a Wall Street mover and shaker in 1880s and 90s New York. The book is on one of my reading lists--the most ancient and politically naive one--though I probably won't get to it for a long time, if ever. The movie is interesting as a nostalgia piece looking back from the 40s to the 1880s, a time that has now receded too far out of the living memory even of people our oldest acquaintances may have known for us to have nostalgia for. I believe the Days are supposed to have lived on either Park or Madison Avenue, and the street, at least as depicted in the film, was a wide, blissfully uncrowded boulevard along which trolley cars and orderly carriages passed leisurely, lined with handsome and spacious but comparatively low rising (three or four storeys, tops) mansions, though without much in the way of shady tree cover. Of course New York in the 1880s was never really so sedate or orderly as it is made to be in this movie, though if this idea of it came from the book I will grant that it probably gave some sensation of that kind to the memoirist in his youthful goings about, perhaps for reasons peculiar to himself, though the tone he hit on in his writings did resonate with many readers. I am willing to trust people's memories of their experiences rather than what I might think their memories of those experiences should have been.
Compared to what we read of families similarly situated in contemporary New York City, the Day children seem to lead an almost blissfully unharried and carefree existence. Day, Sr was certainly an energetic and hard-driving man, but he is not depicted as being manic or possessed nearly beyond the limits of recognizable human desire by the drive to succeed and make money and be number one and mold his sons into equally aggressive dominant men such as is the popular image of Wall Street brokers in our time. Of course this is almost certainly the nostalgia of 1947 seeping through the filmmaking.
The extremely prolific and apparently indefatigable Michael Curtiz directed this. William Powell and Irene Dunne were the attractive and substantial leads. The 15 year old Elizabeth Taylor appears at her most simpering as the teenage romantic interest of Day, Jr.
By the way, in case you couldn't tell, I did like this.
Peter and the Wolf (1946)
A fifteen or so minute cartoon, this one barely counts, but it did turn up on the list so I will put it in here. It didn't blow me away, but it is diverting for what it is. I am more favorably inclined to Disney's work in the 1940s and 50s than I am in other periods.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)
I have written previously that 1945 is my personal favorite year for movies, and this moving film about family life, childhood, school, death, the past, the immigrant experience during the great wave of the last century, all against the hyper-somber backdrop of the stub end of World War II that characterizes all of the movies of that year that I like so much, fits in with the rest of these. I had recently read this book, too, which impressed me as having much merit, particularly with regard to our collective memory of the details of what things and experiences in our past were like. Like any movie, this one had to leave a lot of significant incidents and developments and characters out, but on the whole it is a good adaptation of the basic aspects of the story, and it is even better I think as a movie than it is as an adaptation. This was the directorial debut of Elia Kazan and the atmosphere and the development of the major characters and the way they inhabit the movie are its strong points. The ending is a much truncated version of what happened in the book, doubtless done to not be left with an ending in nothing is resolved or seems to be progressing for the better, but the movie really did not need to be tied up this way. In this it is similar to Life With Father, which operated on an even thinner plotline that was not all that essential to such interest as the film possessed.
The family at the center of this story is an Irish-German union, much like my own family, with both parents being the first generation born in America--and it was emphasized in the book that theirs was the only household Francie knew of in their neighborhood where both parents were actually American born. Despite their status as citizens and immersion in the culture and language of the United States since birth, Johnny and Katie Nolan had not gotten very far by 1912. Johnny of course was fairly hopeless, at least in economic terms, though a highly lovable guy. The circumstance of Katie's being German-descended does not play into my theory of the peculiarity of Irish romance, in which, comparative to more traditionally prosperous peoples, the long term career prospects of a potential husband do seem to be regularly taken into consideration. I feel myself to be in certain ways something of a modern day version of Johnny Nolan, only minus the charm. I suppose one could say minus the alcoholism also, but it is only the greater effectiveness of social control exerted on modern men that prevents me from following that mode of life, as I remain greatly attracted to it. The other characteristics--the inability to perceive the world and my place in it realistically, the endless empty promises to improve myself, the natural inclination toward squalor with regard to living arrangements--are there.
One of the other parts of this story that I relate to is the episode where Francie desires to transfer to a more beautiful and dignified-looking school without knowing much else more about it, since I did the same thing when I lived in Maine. I was not supposed to go to the school I went to, the one that was built in 1924 and had busts of famous white male giants of literature and history lining the hallways and a venerable history as perhaps the premier large public school in the state, but when I saw it I became consumed by a desire to go there as if it were owed me as the natural end of my development to that point to go to such a school, and it was arranged that I was able to go there, and I loved it dearly the whole time I was there, though it is hard to explain why, because in terms of the other students it was just a regular public school, I did not have any very close friends, and when I go back for my reunions most of the people don't remember who I am, and some of them act almost perturbed at my being there, as if I am crashing a party where I really don't belong. But at the time the atmosphere, not merely of the school but of the equally antique neighborhood and city around it, gave me something that I desperately needed to imbibe the air of, even if I was unable to make any very deep connection with it. I have not pushed for very much in my life, but I have a couple of times when it comes to schools. I was determined as well to go to a particular kind of college--residential, preferably somewhat old, average test scores above a certain level, an atmosphere of study that was acceptably masculine without being reactionary or arch-conservative, though this last I would not have been able to articulate in such terms at the time--and I was pretty dogged at not getting pushed into the community college, taking computer classes route that well-meaning people were trying to steer me towards and getting to go to the kind of place I wanted in the end, even though I guess most people would say, given my subsequent career, that the wisdom of those who advised community college has been vindicated.
Dorothy McGuire, who plays Katie, has a lovely voice, and is the easy choice for the honor of favorite 40s girl/woman for this set of reports from that era.
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Some Pictures From the Summer (Part 1)
These are not all in order. I had to go through over 1,000 pictures from three different cameras for a decidedly limited number of people who are going to look at them, so it won't bother me if they are not arranged perfectly.
Tallulah Gorge State Park, Georgia.
This was this year's vacation spot determiner from the 1960s encyclopedia. The state park as currently organized seems to date only from the 1990s or so. Like the rest of society, the leisure opportunities at Tallulah Gorge are increasingly bifurcated between expert level rock climbing and walking along smooth paved footpaths to a series of marked and designated views. There were steps at various points leading down into the gorge, but the danger/warning signs posted at the beginnings of these descents were so dire that they scared us off of going down them, though my older children were interested in doing so. Near the end of our visit I came to a vantage where I could see down to the chain footbridge that crossed the gorge and it looked like there were plenty of ordinary fitness level tourists and other visitors walking across it, so I think we probably could have gone down. They have a good museum there too.
The place was beautiful, though due to having all of the children with us we only walked on one side of the gorge and did not go down into it at all, so for my own sake I felt that I did not commune with the nature very closely--the park is not very wild if you follow the designated paths. I was not psychologically prepared for that.
There was another site from the 1960s encyclopedia's family recommendations that I attempted to see on the way south--Elephant Rock in Talleyville, Delaware, just north of Wilmington. I couldn't find it however. One assumes it is still there, though other than my encyclopedia the only reference to it I have found to it anywhere is from a guide book from 1976 that is on the internet. This gave a pretty precise location, being presumably on US route 202 3.5 miles from the Pennsylvania border on the left side driving south. However I did not see any rock that looked like an elephant at this general spot, but a string of shopping centers and then a suburban housing development. Perhaps the rock was dynamited to clear the way for this real estate. I am going to be going that way again soon, so maybe I will try to find out what's going on with this once vaunted and now apparently unknown attraction.
The two younger children on the beach at Wells, Maine. We went to a campground there for four days in August. While I do like to see other parts of the country, summer in New England is special too, and I don't want us to miss out on those experiences either.
On the trolleybus in Wells. The two little ones are getting a lot of face time so far. They still smile for the camera, I guess
Our campsite in Virginia, with #s 1, 2 & 5.
Representation of Smokey the Bear at the visitors' center for Anna Ruby Falls in the Chattahoochee National Forest, which is adjacent to Helen and Unicoi State Park.
There are actually two falls facing each other at about a 45 degree angle. This is also a very beautiful walk, but again the path is paved and perfectly maintained and the walk is only about 0.4 miles, so it is as if all the work has been done for you. Our trails in New England, even the most popular ones, are not quite so completely streamlined for the convenience of visitors.
#2, back in Helen.
I would come back to this place sometime, to eat some German food and see what the bar scene is like. Even though it is in Georgia, it is in the northern part, at the edge of the Appalachian mountains, and it feels more like Gatlinburg and the Smokies than your Flannery O'Connor/Ray Charles idea of Georgia.
Back in Helen at the pancake house (which was adorned outside in the Heidiesque manner). This is the reclusive, camera shy child #3.
Child #2's collection of patches from the trip. On the way home we drove up through Smoky Mountains National Park (where we have gone twice on vacation--pictures somewhere on the site) and stopped at the visitors' center on the North Carolina side so he could get that patch.
Really on the way home now, looking at New York City from I-287 in Brooklyn.
We only went to Atlanta for the day, which really ended up being about six hours, and we only saw two things. I had never been there before. My impression was much more positive than I was expecting. Having lived my entire life basically in the Northeast (north of D.C.), the rest of the country, other than a few obvious cities such as Chicago and the great cities of the Pacific coast, really is portrayed in a very negative light. My ideas of Atlanta were that the traffic was biblically horrific, that the downtown was nothing but an endless stretch of hotels, parking garages and highways, and completely devoid of people, and that any structure that had character or predated the 1970s was compulsively torn down to make way for some garish corporate enterprise, So I was pleasantly surprised to find that it really did not differ all that much in its general feel from being in most of our northeastern cities on a weekday, that there were people out, and busy shops and restaurants on Peachtree Street, and that there were a few pockets (such as the area around the State House) that evoked something of the sense of the charm that many people do associate with the South, notwithstanding the ugly truths of history that you are always aware of lying behind it. It probably helped that I had the good luck to be there on an 83 degree day in July with no humidity. I would like to go back to Atlanta now too. There is actually quite a lot to see and do there. It is a major city now.
Tallulah Gorge State Park, Georgia.
This was this year's vacation spot determiner from the 1960s encyclopedia. The state park as currently organized seems to date only from the 1990s or so. Like the rest of society, the leisure opportunities at Tallulah Gorge are increasingly bifurcated between expert level rock climbing and walking along smooth paved footpaths to a series of marked and designated views. There were steps at various points leading down into the gorge, but the danger/warning signs posted at the beginnings of these descents were so dire that they scared us off of going down them, though my older children were interested in doing so. Near the end of our visit I came to a vantage where I could see down to the chain footbridge that crossed the gorge and it looked like there were plenty of ordinary fitness level tourists and other visitors walking across it, so I think we probably could have gone down. They have a good museum there too.
The place was beautiful, though due to having all of the children with us we only walked on one side of the gorge and did not go down into it at all, so for my own sake I felt that I did not commune with the nature very closely--the park is not very wild if you follow the designated paths. I was not psychologically prepared for that.
There was another site from the 1960s encyclopedia's family recommendations that I attempted to see on the way south--Elephant Rock in Talleyville, Delaware, just north of Wilmington. I couldn't find it however. One assumes it is still there, though other than my encyclopedia the only reference to it I have found to it anywhere is from a guide book from 1976 that is on the internet. This gave a pretty precise location, being presumably on US route 202 3.5 miles from the Pennsylvania border on the left side driving south. However I did not see any rock that looked like an elephant at this general spot, but a string of shopping centers and then a suburban housing development. Perhaps the rock was dynamited to clear the way for this real estate. I am going to be going that way again soon, so maybe I will try to find out what's going on with this once vaunted and now apparently unknown attraction.
This is back at home, just a regular afternoon. It's a happy picture. The two little ones are very photogenic, which is good, because in an overpopulated world in which resources are running out, 4th and 5th born children need to justify their existence in as many ways as possible.
The two younger children on the beach at Wells, Maine. We went to a campground there for four days in August. While I do like to see other parts of the country, summer in New England is special too, and I don't want us to miss out on those experiences either.
On the trolleybus in Wells. The two little ones are getting a lot of face time so far. They still smile for the camera, I guess
Now we are back in July on our southern trip. We camped on the way to Georgia in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest in western Virginia. This is a view from there.
Our campsite in Virginia, with #s 1, 2 & 5.
In Georgia we stayed in cabins in Unicoi State Park (a very beautiful park with great facilities and what appears to be a man-made lake), which is near the tourist town of Helen. Helen is famous for having all of its buildings being decorated in the Bavarian style. There are consequently numerous beer halls and German-themed restaurants, though unfortunately I did not get to sample any of these (having to feed five children numerous times a day away from home precludes all but a couple of restaurant outings on a week long vacation).
Representation of Smokey the Bear at the visitors' center for Anna Ruby Falls in the Chattahoochee National Forest, which is adjacent to Helen and Unicoi State Park.
There are actually two falls facing each other at about a 45 degree angle. This is also a very beautiful walk, but again the path is paved and perfectly maintained and the walk is only about 0.4 miles, so it is as if all the work has been done for you. Our trails in New England, even the most popular ones, are not quite so completely streamlined for the convenience of visitors.
#2, back in Helen.
I would come back to this place sometime, to eat some German food and see what the bar scene is like. Even though it is in Georgia, it is in the northern part, at the edge of the Appalachian mountains, and it feels more like Gatlinburg and the Smokies than your Flannery O'Connor/Ray Charles idea of Georgia.
Underneath the dome of the Georgia State House in Atlanta. This picture is out of order.
Back in Helen at the pancake house (which was adorned outside in the Heidiesque manner). This is the reclusive, camera shy child #3.
Child #2's collection of patches from the trip. On the way home we drove up through Smoky Mountains National Park (where we have gone twice on vacation--pictures somewhere on the site) and stopped at the visitors' center on the North Carolina side so he could get that patch.
Really on the way home now, looking at New York City from I-287 in Brooklyn.
Back in Atlanta, the group hanging out in some kind of southern tree that I can't think of the name of on the Georgia State House lawn.
We only went to Atlanta for the day, which really ended up being about six hours, and we only saw two things. I had never been there before. My impression was much more positive than I was expecting. Having lived my entire life basically in the Northeast (north of D.C.), the rest of the country, other than a few obvious cities such as Chicago and the great cities of the Pacific coast, really is portrayed in a very negative light. My ideas of Atlanta were that the traffic was biblically horrific, that the downtown was nothing but an endless stretch of hotels, parking garages and highways, and completely devoid of people, and that any structure that had character or predated the 1970s was compulsively torn down to make way for some garish corporate enterprise, So I was pleasantly surprised to find that it really did not differ all that much in its general feel from being in most of our northeastern cities on a weekday, that there were people out, and busy shops and restaurants on Peachtree Street, and that there were a few pockets (such as the area around the State House) that evoked something of the sense of the charm that many people do associate with the South, notwithstanding the ugly truths of history that you are always aware of lying behind it. It probably helped that I had the good luck to be there on an 83 degree day in July with no humidity. I would like to go back to Atlanta now too. There is actually quite a lot to see and do there. It is a major city now.
Last picture from Wells Beach. I will probably do another set of these at some point, as a few things got left out. It will probably be a month or two though.
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Some Very Generic Pictures of What I Did This Summer
Putting pictures up is really too much work at times, at least when you have to do it at 1 a.m. Hardly any of them ever turn out to be much good, and I can't even find half of the sets I am looking for right now. But I am too far gone into the process to shut it down and too tired and hurried to find the rest, so I will put up a characteristically half-buttocked post.
I was on vacation for much of the last 3 weeks. I was off for twelve days, then had 3 days of work, and then was off another 5. I liked this arrangement, though I only was able to get it this year due to a fluke which required me to rearrange my original vacation schedule, and I probably would not be able to get it if I asked for it straightaway. This is the way the world works. We didn't take a big trip this year, but we did go away for a couple of overnight stays in standard tourist hotels, and we went to Vermont for a few days and took some other day trips. Some of the day trips were literary related, and I put some of those pictures up on my even more rarely updated and lightly read (if one can imagine such a thing) Vacation blog.
I have gone to Maine four different times so far this summer. The first was for my class reunion back in June, which I wrote about a few posts back. On the second occasion we went to Wells Beach to visit some relatives who go there every summer and stay in an RV park, though they are probably the most affluent people in the family, and could go to Paris and put up at the George V Hotel for a month if they wanted to.
1. Running Around the IV Park. The place is popular with French Canadians, who are a big presence in many of the less-celebrated Maine coastal towns.
2. Wells Beach in the Evening. I was going for the moon here. There is no excuse for shoddy photography, but do bear in mind that I am often trying to shoot pictures at the same time that I am keeping an eye on numerous little children who are running around in all directions, and of course getting them to hold still, or even remain in the frame for a picture is practically impossible.
3. Ice Cream at High Tide. This is actually the head of a staircase leading down to the beach. At this time there was no beach, and the water was crashing nearly halfway up the steps.
The Wells trip was on the Sunday before my actual vacation started. When that came we went to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park for a couple of days. Even though I lived in Maine for several years, and have lived in northern New England almost half my life now, this was the first time I had ever been there. It's the sort of place I should have been going to for a weekend every year, or at least every other year. It seems to have a most salutary effect on one's state of mind, at least such a mind as is in the state to which mine has diminished. The town of Bar Harbor is so sugary as to be in danger of inducing mental toothache. At night especially, when it is lit up, it looks like a 1940s movie set of the perfect American town that supposedly never existed. On the whole the contrast of the class of tourist at Bar Harbor/Acadia to the class of tourist at Gatlinburg/Smoky Mountains National Park--which I also enjoy visiting, and am surprised more people from the northeast never bother to venture down to see, I should add--is quite remarkable. On one of the hikes in Acadia I was in the proximity of a late 20ish couple for about 20 minutes whose conversation the entire time concerned gourmet cheeses. There were a large number of obviously gay men in town, which is decidedly not the case in Gatlinburg, and a substantial portion of the tourists, even those wearing t-shirts and shorts and other casual vacation-wear, gave off an air of being expensively dressed and educated.
4. This is Along one of the Trails up Cadillac Mountain in Acadia. The Acadia pictures are not very good, and I did not even remember to bring the camera with me when I went to town. There was a book shop there whose storefront and window display were of such calculated and effective tweeness that I can't help suspecting a line may have been crossed.
This trail was the hard trail by the way. There was no parking at the easy trail. The smaller children, and, on the last leg of the ascent, your author, were not able to maintain a uniform happiness throughout.
5. View From the Mountain. I believe down towards the town of Bar Harbor, and across to the mainland.
6. We Are Actually On the Wrong Path Here. We were trying to get to the famous Sand Beach here. We found it eventually. It was pouring rain at this point, and all through our time at the beach, and everybody was so soaked and grouchy that I thought we were going to have to give it up and go home. We were on a one way loop road around the park however, so we drove for a little bit, until we came to the next famous site, by which time it had miraculously stopped raining. So we decided to give the trip another chance.
7. I Think This is Called Otter Point. This is all on the main road/itinerary of the park. Since it was our first time here, and we had all the children with us, I figured it was best to stick to the established highlights. This place we actually had to ourself for a good half-hour. If we are able to return regularly I have no doubt we will make it out to some of the islands and other remote parts of the park that have no restaurants or other tourist services and that hardly anyone therefore goes to.
8. My Daughter at Otter Point. To be honest she looks rather strange here. The color is hyperbright.
9. This is on a hike near Manchester, Vermont. We did this in the afternoon after the picnic lunch in Stratton that you can see on the other site. It was a typically beautiful Vermont hike.
10. The View From Prospect Rock, Which is the Object of the Hike. The mountain in the distance is Mt Equinox, which is a mountain of some renown that we were at the top of a few years ago. There is an abandonded hotel on its summit that you can see from the ridge, though I am not sure if you can make it out in the picture. Evidently staying in mountaintop hotels has gone out of fashion, as there are several of them that are abandoned or altered into something else around the region, including atop Mt Washington.
11. Oldest Son at Prospect Rock, a Strong and Sturdy 11 year old. Certainly when compared with myself at the same age.
There are still other days to be relived. I will probably find those and put them on at some point.
Monday, April 29, 2013
Some Maine Pictures (August 2012)
These are from a two day trip I took to Maine with my two older sons last summer. I have actually passed on putting up pictures from some other excursions I have taken lately, as they didn't lend themselves so readily to narrative.
Especially now that I only have so many years left of life, and the summer seems so short when one has to go to work every day, I try to pack in as many outings and trips during July and August as I can. By around the 10th of August however my wife has usually had enough of driving and dragging the younger children around everywhere and listening to their fighting, and doesn't want to go on any more complicated excursions than a last day or two at the mountains or the beach. I had four days off however, and as I was visibly restless at the prospect of spending them at home, it was decided that I would go somewhere and take the two older children if they wanted to come. It was sad at first that not everyone was coming, since I never go anywhere without the entire family, though once we got going I slowly acclimated myself to the unusual dynamic, and in truth not having all of the little ones opened up some possibilities, such as going to visit sites or restaurants, that we would not have had had they been there. Besides which, we were only staying away one night.
1. Backdoor Entry Into Maine. Most tourists and other visitors arrive in the state via the somewhat more glamorous Piscataqua River Bridge on I-95, or perhaps the US-1 Bridge nearby with its view of the elegant skyline and ships of Portsmouth. This is on US-202 passing from Rochester, New Hampshire into Berwick, a route I take sometimes if I am going to Portland and points further north. 202 is a rather unattractive road that goes past a lot of shabby auto repair and salvage yard type places, as well as the well-worn French-Canadian towns of Sanford and Biddeford, which I have some familiarity with as my high school teams used to play against these towns in my long-ago day.
2. We Stopped First in Portland For a Couple of Hours. Monument Square. You can't see it, but we are looking out from in front of the Public Library. Things have changed a lot in the nearly quarter of a century since I lived there, of course, as everywhere has. Life has gone on without me, and without missing me too much, which would not only have seemed impossible in 1987, but the thought of it would have broken my heart. I really felt at home there, and now it is like all of that is gone and a totally different city has been erected in its place.
3. We Decided to Take the Tour of Longfellow's Childhood Home, Which I Had Never Done Before. You can't see the house very well in any of my pictures, as the trees blocked any view with which my camera would have been able to fit the whole edifice in a single shot. This is both a literary site and a 1966 Encyclopedia state highlight for the whole family, so my motivations to go there could not have been much more primed. I enjoyed the tour, as I enjoy any experience now that involves human interaction without beeping or flashing lights on a screen, and the house is a worthy attraction, though I have to admit that if you only have time to visit one Longfellow house, the one he lived in as a successful poet and Harvard professor in Modern Languages on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Mass. is the livelier and more extravagant experience of the two. The Portland House is owned by the Maine Historical Society, which maintains an exhibit space in the visitors center next door, and they had a small but engaging exhibit on the history of the Central Maine Power Company which I also liked, as it recalled me to the "old" (pre-1990) times, of which I am grown so fond in the ruins of my middle age.
4. This is Supposed to be My Old High School (if the picture displays). I loved this place so much when I was there, but now it just looks like a building, albeit a somewhat nice one, that I have no connection to whatsoever. I don't feel like it belongs to anyone else either in the way that I perceived it as belonging to me and my schoolmates at the time. I had very romantic ideas about it, and about the whole city of Portland, that if they were not illusions, and I do not think that they were, wholly, have not carried through in the same characters at all to the present.
My 25th reunion is coming up in June. You may recall I didn't have an especially good time at the 20th and hardly anyone remembered me, but I am still considering going because I have so few opportunities anymore to get out without my children and go to a party where there is drinking and people dress up a little and that sort of thing. For this same reason I am going to my company's annual employee banquet in May, which I have never gone to. I think as long as I don't try to be overeager to ingratiate myself with people, can find something to wear which will be presentable without making me look awkward or not striking the right note, and can maintain extremely modest expectations, I think I could have a good time.
5. Boothbay Harbor. This was the primary destination. If you remember I noted in my account of my viewing of the movie Carousel, much of which had been filmed in this town, that I had never been there and that I ought to go sometime in the summer. That was the inspiration for the trip. The town didn't really strike me as looking like the one in the movie, and there were no references to the film anywhere in any of the local tourist literature. Not that I needed that, but it had informed my expectations, to a certain degree.
6. Photo-Op at the General Store. If you don't have a boat docked there or a vacation home that your family has been coming to for a hundred years, the town is kind of a walking around, shops and restaurants kind of deal. Pretty enough, but not substantially different from Kennebunkport or Ogunquit or York or some similar more upmarket Maine beach town, other that Boothbay Harbor is actually located on an inlet and there is not a beach right near it that I am aware of.
8. The Guys Were Able to Amuse Themselves For Several Hours By Walking Around the Docks. I am fortunate in that these older children at least are not helpless in the face of potential boredom, so long as they are kept fed.
9. This Picture Isn't Showing Up, But I Think it Was Supposed to Be Me at Dinner. Believe me, it is no great loss if it doesn't come out in the final post.
10. Dedication (Reversed?) on the Maine State Liberty Bell at the Capitol in Augusta. These 50 replica Liberty Bells were gifts, I believe from France, that were given to each of the states around 1950. I have developed a minor interest in seeking them out if I happen to be near a state capital (that is where most of them are located, but not all--the one for New Jersey, for example, I believe is in Perth Amboy) because the Maryland bell happens to be on the campus of my college, and though I did not take much notice of it there, when I began hanging around the state house in Concord, I noticed that the Liberty Bell they had on the front lawn was the same as the one at school, and this made for sentimental associations, and so on. So I think I have seen five of the bells to date, the others being Wisconsin and Connecticut. Of course I have also been to the actual Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. That is of no moment, but this paragraph seems incomplete without noting it.
I deleted my Liberty Bell picture in trying to fix the alignment of my paragraphs, which have gotten messed up. I am not at home so I can't put it in again at the moment. Maybe I will go back and do it later, or maybe I will put in a different Liberty Bell picture. But probably I will do neither.
11. James G Blaine House (Governor's Mansion), Augusta. James G Blaine was Maine's best hope, probably for all time, for having a president, being the Republican nominee in 1884 and losing to Grover Cleveland in a pretty close election. He actually was born and grew up in Pennsylvania, but his wife was from Maine, which is how he ended up there, though not because he was a layabout with nowhere else to go, but through his talent and the impressions he was able to make on important people on short acquaintance who made it worth his while to move his family there.
Apparently the governor actually lives there. There is an official governor's mansion in New Hampshire, but no governor has deigned to live in it in the entire time I have lived here. I don't know whether they use it at all for receptions or other grandiose affairs. I have never been invited to one in any event, and whenever I drive by it it looks as if it is just sitting there empty.
12. It Was Sunday, so the State House Was Closed. This was disappointing, as we are all fans of state houses, but unfortunately it could not be helped. I guess we were lucky that the Liberty Bell was outside, which is not always the case.
13. Looking Up at a Tree near the State House. It looks like a pine tree to me going by the bark but I am probably wrong.
14. Back in Boothbay Harbor. This is the Restaurant We Ate Lunch at the Second Day. They had lobster for $10 a head, which traditionally is cheap in a restaurant, though last year the lobster catch was supposedly abundant, so prices were low. I would have preferred to get something else as we also had lobster the night before but the boys were gung ho to have it again, and they wanted me to join them in this revelry, and I think to get the $10 deal you had to order 3 lobsters anyway, so lobster it was.
15. Inside the Restaurant. This would be in the cabin part of the ship I think.
16. Child #1 Getting His Crustacean. It looks like we got a pizza too. Interesting combination.
17. Tourist Trolley. Farewell to Boothbay Harbor. It is just far enough away and not possessed of any singularly compelling enough attractions that there is a good chance I won't make it back there again. I suspect it is the kind of place that if you make a connection to it when young, or come to it in adulthood as your first, or among your first, vivid experiences of a Maine seaside town in summer, that it will always retain some meaning for you. But as I already have several such places, and have for a long time, I was not evidently susceptible to this effect. Or perhaps I am too old and finished to receive such impressions anywhere anymore.
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