Movies 1942-1950

Love them and extol them as my favorite era in cinematic history though I do, I actually have not even seen that many of the classic films of these years. Today's group includes three I had never heard of previously and another that I had confused with something else. So I was pretty excited at the likelihood of discovering at least one unsuspected pleasure in the bunch, which kinds of pleasant surprises of course grow more infrequent with the inexorable advance of age.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

This is the one I had confused, thinking of Blackboard Jungle, the famous film about 50s juvenile delinquents who came to school chewing gum, flashing switchblades, and generally not bearing a mindset conducive to effective learning (Thank goodness we have gotten those problems under control). The one is a film noir directed by the legendary John Huston, with whose work however I am just beginning to become acquainted. Indeed I am just starting to distinguish his career from that of fellow legend (and John) John Ford, with whose work I am even less familiar, though the latter's legend is if anything even bigger at the highest levels of cinephilia than Huston's is--doubtless at this very moment some avant-garde Japanese director with pink hair that I have never heard of is declaring with complete sincerity that John Ford is one of the major influences on his work. Back to Huston, last year I watched and reported briefly on The African Queen, which came out the year after this, and which I was entertained but not much absorbed by. Some years ago I saw 1948's Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which I remember, albeit hazily, as more substantial, and probably great. I also saw his 1987 version of Joyce's The Dead even more years ago, which at the time however did not strike me as adding anything to the original story. My feelings on The Asphalt Jungle are again somewhat mixed--I have yet to make that connection with Huston's peculiar vision, or genius, that makes one an especially devoted admirer.

As noted, The Asphalt Jungle is another film noir, of which genre we have been on a bit of a run these past few years. Huston also made The Maltese Falcon and Key Largo, which I have not seen but which I take to be in the film noir spirit, though as they featured actors who were A-list stars at the time and had bigger budgets and promotion they are sometimes not included among the classic B-movie, harshly lit, ugly mug strain of classic film noir. This one had lots of ugly mugs and no established superstars (though it did feature several people who later on became stars, including, most notably, Marilyn Monroe), so it is often considered the most purely noir picture Huston made. Film noir story arcs all being largely the same, the style, characterization, idiosyncratic plot elements, sex appeal of the women, etc, etc, of this family of movies are especially important. These elements in Asphalt Jungle are not terrible, but they are not on the level of Double Indemnity or The Third Man, both of which have more evocative settings and sophisticated characters (and consequently dialogue), somewhat more developed criminal schemes, more interesting clothes and other props, as well as (to me) more appealing women. Of course both of those screenplays were written by celebrated literary authors (Raymond Chandler and Graham Green), a connection I had previously failed to make, and the significance of which clearly shows in these instances.
I have written before that I am not the greatest Marilyn Monroe fan who ever lived. She plays what most people would think of as a prototype Marilyn Monroe character in this movie. She is 23 or 24 here, and even I her detractor grant that she is eminently squeezable. There is nothing else in her persona here that particularly excites me however. The humor and warmth that she allegedly brought to her later celebrated roles is yet in evidence. She and the other main female character, played by Jean Hagen, are perhaps illustrative of a general transition in the depiction of womanhood as the 40s moved into the 50s, certainly in the realm of film noir. Both of the women in this are rather passive, weak and stupid compared to their mid-40s noir counterparts, either the famed femme fatales, who were hard, scheming, usually unsentimental agents of destruction, or, if they were virtuous, intelligent and forceful enough to assert their personalities with some effect against the evil that threatens to engulf them on all sides. The change I am describing is probably exaggerated here--from what I have seen and heard of Huston, he was a man's man whose genius did not lie in his depictions of women or male/female relations--but I most people have always sensed that something of the sort did broadly occur.

Sterling Hayden, who I just saw recently further on in his career in The Godfather (he's the Irish cop who gets it in the Italian restaurant), was the lead in this. He was six foot five, which is unusually tall for a movie star. He's not one of my favorites either. It's not clear whether he is really kind of dense, or if he just got assigned to play a lot of dense characters. In any event, he played them perhaps a little more literally densely than was called for.

There is a trope in the movie that each of the characters in on the heist has a weakness that ultimately leads directly to his downfall. I thought this was a rather hokey element that didn't really add anything to the movie, especially the Sam Jaffe character, who is the mastermind of the operation but is supposed to be an incurable old lecher who gets mesmerized watching a girl dancing to a jukebox in the kind of roadside tavern I am always searching for in my own travels and ending up shuffling into Friendly's twenty minutes before closing time after several fruitless hours of searching. I am coming off as down on the movie, but it has its good points, and it is fun to talk about. It did not grab me as great however.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

I am going a little out of order due to the way the pictures arranged themselves in the loading.

There is a considerable amount of awesomeness in the myriad parts of this movie, which, if they do not perfectly cohere into a completely staggering whole, still make for a uniquely great film after a manner. This was made in the midst of the war and is nominally a propaganda movie, but it is more sophisticated than the usual specimens of that genre. Colonel Blimp was a newspaper caricature which was supposed to represent the chauvinistic, tiger-hunting, war and empire-loving, intellectually obtuse, conservative element of society whose attitudes were relics of the increasingly remote Victorian era--i.e., he was not conceived with flattery in mind. The irrepressible, up to date, and rather brilliant filmmaking duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, whose work I am encountering for the first time, decided to make this restless and generally likeable (at least to people with some affection for the old British ruling classes), though frequently clueless creature the hero of their wartime epic; and it worked. The story, after a jazzy opening sequence in the (1943) present which is repeated and clarified at the end of the movie, finds the aged though still commisioned Colonel Blimp (who actually is a general and is named Clive Candy in the film) in the Turkish bath at his London club, where in the midst of a tussle with a young whippersnapper who has come to play a prank on him, we are transported back to the same scene 40 years earlier, when Blimp is a dashing young officer. Colonel Blimp, by the way, is played by the superb actor Roger Livesey, who was apparently a last second replacement for Laurence Olivier. Olivier's presence is not missed, which should give an idea of how good Roger Livesey is. We then follow Blimp/Candy through the ensuing forty years, which include numerous scenes of interest including a rollicking beer hall and a duel in imperial Germany, an abbey in World War I France, a dinner party at Blimp's house in 1919 with a (now) ridiculous gallery of pompous guests with important titles, and a visit to the underground bunker housing the BBC's wartime studios. Gaps, or, as Christopher Fry more elegantly put it in one of the bonus materials, lacunae, in the story, usually the periods between wars, are marked by a striking device which is remarked upon by every commentator on the film, in which the heads of the victims of Blimp's hunting expeditions throughout the British Empire appear, following the sound of a rifle shot, mounted upon the wall in his study, accompanied by a placard with the name of the country and the year of the kill. The study was actually looking like a pretty cool place to hang out by the latter stages of the movie.

This is a Criterion Collection film, and as such features a pretty good commentary, by Martin Scorcese and Michael Powell, the director of the picture himself. Powell died in 1990 at age 84, so his portion was evidently recorded some time back. He sounds quite aged in it. Scorcese's part is a little too film geekish for me, but Powell's is most enjoyable. Though he refers to his origins as middle class several times in the course of the monologue, he comes across as one of those old timers who was deeply educated and immersed in the European art tradition from an early age--perhaps that is an upper middle class signifier. While there is some technical movie directing talk, he also talks a lot about his Savile Row tailor, the fashions in ladies' hats through the early part of the 20th century, the etiquette of duelling in Germany, and things like that. When discussing actors, he noted that Deborah Kerr (pronounced "car") was intelligent, which was unusual in that profession. He did not say this in a perjorative way however, as we have being accustomed to take such statements, but as if there were numerous qualities of equal value that a good actor, or a good person, could possess. He clearly held the abilities of Richard Livesey, to whom he attributed the quality of unusual honesty, in high regard, though he did not praise him as intelligent, this the more pointedly as the discussion of his honesty came within five minutes of the comment about actors generally not being intelligent. There is a part at the end where he lucidly explains the impressiveness with which the Austrian actor and refugee from Nazism Anton Walbrook--I can't believe he wasn't intelligent--carries off a long speech, in English, a foreign language for him and in a different tradition, which makes Scorcese's and all contemporary people's gushings and conversation on interesting matters seem utterly inarticulate.

This movie was made in gorgeous Technicolor. On one of my old posts I wrote that I had never seen a British film in color prior to 1965 or so, and was only aware of the 1951 festival-commissioned The Magic Box, which for some reason is not available in North America, as having been shot in it. Evidently British Technicolor films constitute an entire genre of cinephile fetishism. Scorcese, in the most interesting observation he made on the movie, noted that British Technicolor films were widely considered more beautiful than Hollywood's offerings of the same, because the muting effects of the continually overcast English light made for a more delicate and striking effect, and after seeing this, I am inclined to believe him. Why don't they make movies in Technicolor anymore? Is it expensive? Because when done well, it looks better than whatever kind of color treatment is usually used now.

Deborah Kerr, best known among us for such 50s Hollywood classics as From Here to Eternity, The King and I, and An Affair to Remember, was, for lack of a better word--I am too tired to come up with one at the moment--a revelation to me in this movie. She played three different girls, one in 1902, one in 1918-19, and one in 1943. Her 1919 persona was pretty fetching--I like the style of that time too--but the 1943 version of her as Colonel Blimp's driver just about laid me out. It's the hair. There is no amount of exposure to 1943-44 women's hairstyles that is possible to weary me of them--and if you can believe it there are many creditable people who think those were the absolute worst years for women's hair in the whole 20th century!

One of the sites which had posted this picture noted that redheads look best in technicolor.

To further emphasize my point about the style and spirit of the babes of World War II (Anglo-American version) the women drivers employed by the British military have been much celebrated in literature and movies. One has to think they contributed not a little to the triumph. Perhaps I am exaggerating, but I feel like this is the 3rd or 4th time in the last few years I have come across this. The Pamela Flitton character in Anthony Powell, although not a sweetheart, entered the story as one of these drivers. She inspired fanatical, even insane, love in dozens of men, was vigorous, and certainly was not intimidated by the Nazis. I cannot remember any other examples right off hand--I believe Evelyn Waugh's characters in Brideshead were driven about by men, though of course Julia was a great motorer in the 20s. I will definitely be alert to it in the future.

Among the many delights of this film, there are a couple of brief sequences shot from a moving car on the real streets of 1943 London, the area around Hyde Park, Marble Arch, Berkeley Square, the street that runs along the north end of the park, which I believe is Bayswater (evidently this neighborhood was spared major bomb damage). If you have been reading about between-the-wars London, and especially this part of it, all your life, but have never seen any vintage color film of it, it is practically breathtaking. The traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, in the movie, is probably artificially much reduced from what it normally would have been, even in wartime, but the real reason the effect is so gorgeous of course is because of the absence of all the postwar architecture which mars and bludgeons the charm of most of the city now. If I could freeze architecture at any point in history and spend the prime years of my life in that environment, I would probably actually pick 1928, but 1943 would still be acceptable (John Ruskin would have gone with 1418).

This movie had the coveted weekend before Christmas slot on my schedule this year. It was a winner.

Letter to Three Wives (1949) This movie has an unorthodox construction and overall feel to it which are interesting though not exhilirating. It was directed by Joseph Mankewicz, whose hand we saw at work recently in another unorthodox picture, the later Sleuth, and who is probably best-known for All About Eve. I had not paid much attention to his career before, but I suppose I should be alert to him whenever he pops up from now on. The premise is that the three wives, who are all friends in the prosperous small city where they live, and not only they themselves are friends but their respective husbands are all friends with all the other wives and husbands as well though all are from disparate backgrounds and have widely disparate careers and interests, are spending Saturday chaperoning a bunch of girl scout types on an outing which requires an hour long ride each way in a ferry, after which they will all be meeting up with the husbands for some big dinner dance that is taking place at the country club. This apparently is how people lived at the time. As the boat is about to leave for the outing, a letter is delivered to the three wives as a group from a fourth woman, a glamorous type who also formed part of their social circle, informing them that she is running off with one of their husbands, the unlucky victim to learn her fate when she arrives at the club that night and her husband is nowhere to be found. Each of the wives in turn then flashes back to scenes from the marriage looking for clues/proofs as to whether her husband is more or less likely the scamp who is absconding. Some of these episodes are better than others. Kirk Douglas, at that time not well-known, has a rather ridiculous role as one of the husbands, a culture-loving but impecunious English teacher whose wife outearns him writing melodramas for the radio--the other two guys are a lawyer from an already wealthy family and the owner of a chain of successful department stores, so his ego is getting battered from all sides. He goes on a rant against the low quality of radio serials as opposed to Shakespeare and Mozart, which is rather bizarre in that this screenplay is certainly nearer in substance and ambition to a radio soap opera than it is to the tragedies of Aeschylus. The third episode, featuring the courtship and marriage of the furniture magnate, who is rich but rough-edged, with the equally rough-edged but socially ambitious stockroom girl who lives five feet from the railroad tracks, probably on the wrong side of them, is the best one.

This is the kind of movie where the man will be sitting in a chair reading the paper, on Saturday afternoon, wearing a tweed jacket and a tie, and his wife will come in and scream at him, "Aren't you going to get dressed? The company will be here in an hour."

I am going to talk about the actresses a little, because I like to do that.

Jeanne Crain is the most obviously my type, wholesome, All-American, still has good 40s hair even though the fashion was starting to change by '49. She is supposed to be from a farm in Kansas or somewhere is this movie--the other women have to teach her how to dress and put on make-up. Due to the stress of her new social condition for which she is unprepared, she tends to drink too much at the country club parties and make a wholly adorable spectacle of herself (This is bad?). Other Notable Roles: Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) & State Fair (1945). My Love Level: High. 9.89 or so. I would like to see a little more distinctive personality or mental acuity, but the way she played the drinking, I have to say, was a major turn-on.

Here we have Linda Darnell. She's the one who married the furniture store owner. I was not initially too excited about her but she does a good job in the movie and she grew on me a lot as being sexy, the way she talked and smoked, mannerisms, etc. I wonder whether actresses were coached more in these kinds of nuances more in the past or if they simply had more of these alluring qualities to begin with. This woman knew in what forms and dosage to dole them out. Other Notable Roles: My Darling Clementine, The Mark of Zorro (1940) My Love Level: Pretty high, but guarded. She's still got that tough exterior, and don't believe she won't use it. 7.93.

I don't have a picture of Ann Sothern, the third wife--Kirk Douglas's--in the film. She had a platinum dye job that made her look 10 years older than probably actually was. When the camera panned in you could tell that she still had good skin, a youthful glow in her eye, and a nice bosom. I don't remember much else specific about her voice or speech, though in the movie she was supposed to be the smart one of the group. Other Notable Roles: Panama Hattie? Crazy Mama? My Lovel Level: 7.24. Good-looking enough, but I need to see something more.

The love levels for Deborah Kerr in Blimp, by the way: 1902 Deborah--9.68. 1919 Deborah--9.90. 1943 Deborah--10.00.

Roxie Hart (1942) A short movie that was a remake of the 1927 silent farce Chicago! about a dancing girl who advances her career by pretending guilt in the murder of her husband's mistress and basking in the attendant publicity. The story has been successfully revived on at least one occasion since. I thought this version was essentially silly, though it was not a chore to get through and like most Hollywood productions from the 40s had some period touches, such as the scenes at the bar, the juke box, the setting for the courtroom scene, that were able to hold my peculiar interest. It had quite a cast. Ginger Rogers, in a non-dancing role, was the star, though without Fred she really is too brassy and low class for my liking. The great Adolphe Menjou, who was actually from Pittsburgh, puts in an appearance as Roxie Hart's celebrity lawyer. William Frawley, who went on achieve fame as Fred on I Love Lucy, plays the bartender. Phil Silvers, the TV personality of the 50s and 60s, is also among the players, though I don't really know who he is, the reruns of his TV show not having been in heavy rotation in my youth. The director is William Wellman, who, while he doesn't seem to be legendary, made a lot of films of which the titles are recognizable to me. As I have not seen any of them however, I will refrain from forming any kind of thesis about him until some future time.

The final shot, which involves a car with about seven children in it, in their 1942 kiddie outfits, none of them in car seats, several sitting in front and one sitting on the driver's lap, with the announcement that a bigger car will be needed next year--I thought it was charming.

Miscellenea #2

College Football Recap

A little late--the holidays, which in the early part of one's life are a two or even three week holiday, are now almost too busy to properly enjoy--but it has become a mini-tradition here at the site. Once again I did not actually watch any games, and I wouldn't be able to recognize any of the season's celebrated players if they came into my office to discuss the article, but then my review has not much to do with any actual play on the field, but with the various trends that struck me in paying cursory attention to the sport, mainly via radio and the internet, over the last 4 months.

1. This nonsense of playing numerous bowl games all the way to January 10th, including longtime New Year's staples such as the Sugar, Orange and Cotton bowls, causes me the sort of mild displeasure that I however fear repeated too many times will eventually take a toll on my continued enthusiasm for such aspects of life as I formerly enjoyed. The season should be completed by midnight on January 2nd (local time of wherever the last game is being played). Though I rarely watched them even when I had time, I associate the bowl season with the holidays and the festive atmosphere of the 2 or so weeks between December 15th and New Year's Day, after which this festive atmosphere is really over, and college football should be too. I also despise the slotting that they have now to determine the matchups, e.g., where the 7th place team from the Big 10 plays the 4th place team from the SEC West and all that. Can it get any lamer? And while we're at it, whatever happened to the Bluebonnet Bowl in Houston? That, along with the still existant Sun Bowl in El Paso at either end of strange and far-off Texas, were the 2 pillars of football on New's Year Eve, at least when it fell on a weekday.

2. It would be nice if the northeastern schools could be a little more competitive on the national level, though most people in these parts who follow the sport believe that all of the top southern teams, and a fair number of the lousy ones, cheat shamelessly and don't even make a pretense of offering their players even any trappings of an education, which absolves us from being too much chagrined by their superiority in football.

3. Another really bad trend is the fervor for firing coaches who are actually pretty good because they aren't contending for the national title. Two schools in the east which I thought were fairly sensible, West Virginia and Maryland, just did this. West Virginia's coach was 28-11 over 3 years--a winning percentage over .700, which traditionally has been enough to at least stay employed--when he was sent packing, and Maryland's coach, though evidently not a spectacular enough recruiter, seems to have been regarded as an intelligent and sound teacher of the game, which is the kind of person who I feel like used to be appreciated a little bit more in this society, especially by universities, though perhaps I am deluded. He was also coming off an 8-4 season. No one wants these days to come off as espousing mediocrity, which is being ever redefined, if not upwards, at least so as to encompass more and more people who would formerly have been regarded as generally competent and successful, but churning through even coaches who post decent records every 3-5 years because the program is not in the top 5, or top 10 nationally, seems like a foolish policy at most places, given that nearly all the colleges that are in the top 10 in football are, or quickly become, more or less insane in the pursuit or maintenance of this success, and to my mind usually lose a considerable portion of their institutional dignity in the process.

4. My favorite team, Penn State, on the other hand, had a decidedly mediocre year, going 7-6, 4-4 in the league, and being essentially non-competitive whenever they played anybody who was remotely good. In recent years they have been treading water by usually beating the teams that are worse than they are--a bad loss to Illinois this year was an exception to this general rule--while they have not won a game in which they were a substantial underdog in years--maybe not since they have joined the Big 10. The recent collapse of Michigan to the bottom ranks of the league has been a godsend, though on the other hand Iowa seems to have replaced them for the time being as a team that Penn State is no longer well-coached enough to beat.

Though Joe Paterno is now 84 and obviously is not a front rank coach anymore, I am glad that his situation is still being handled with some delicacy, though really how much longer can they let him go on? About 10 years ago--maybe 2002-03, when he was merely 75-76--the team went 4-8 and 3-9 in back to back seasons, and he survived that, which no one else could have done--and which I doubt even he would have been able to do had the climate been what it is now--and he still survives, and the team has come back to winning fairly consistently, and even has won the Big 10 twice, which level of success I have extolled elsewhere as such that supporters of teams should find acceptable provided the character of the program does not detract too terribly from the that of the university overall, which at Penn State has for the most part I believe been the case. However I can't help but think once he got into his mid-70s that they kept letting him stay on figuring it will only be another 2-3 years and then he'll retire. It's already been 10, and I'm sure they're still thinking there's no way he's going to want to be out there in 3 years when he's 87. We'll see. Nonetheless I will miss him when he finally does go. I have no doubt can be and has been ornery over the years, and probably let drop some hint that he knows and believes that football is ultimately more important than academics, but I have always sensed that he belongs to an distant enough generation that he has some conception of what a university's ideal mission really consists of, and may even actually believe people such as English and history professors have some value and are entitled to a certain amount of respect, even from football coaches. Perhaps the Nick Sabans and Jimmy Johnsons of the world have something of this attitude and conception and I impugn them unfairly, though their way of expressing their feelings does not make them entirely clear. And really, how could they? Big time coaches get paid millions of dollars a year, and if they do really well generate even more, while history and philosophy departments barely bother to hire full time scholars and pay them a respectable wage anymore. I know the basketball coach at Duke, Kryszewski, projects himself as respecting scholarship, though I think what he respects and wishes to align himself with, like most contemporary successful people, tends towards outward proofs of success and importance on something approaching his own scale, which is natural in the environment in which he moves, and has been moving for the last 25 years. So much of the society has adopted this corporate mentality of interpreting and measuring one's own life and that of other people that we have largely come to take it for granted as the natural order of the world. But there was much of our national life where this was not always the case, or at least not entirely the case, and due in great part to the current circumstances, will be so again in the foreseeable future.

5. I was rooting for Boise State to make it into the championship game, though I never believed the system would allow them to get in unless about ten unlikely stumbles by other teams gave the voters as well as the computers no other option. The fervency of the outrage from various fan bases--mainly in the SEC it seemed--regarding their being ranked #3 much of the season and seemingly threatening to qualify for the title was ridiculous. People need to lighten up. They were a good story, they've only been pretty much killing everyone one who they can get to play them for about 10 years (their record since 2002 is 106-12), and they have earned the chance to play in some meaningful big games to show what they can do. One of the knocks against them is that they wouldn't be able to endure the grind of a major conference schedule. First of all, none of the major leagues is going to invite them in--believe me, they would accept the invitation--so holding this circumstance against them, while it may be true, seems an invalid reason for excluding them from championship consideration if they continue to go 13-0, 12-1 every year and beat their opponents by an average score of 50-7. They tried to upgrade their conference this year and all of the decent teams in it (TCU, BYU, Utah) promptly left. I think they would have been an above .500 team in the Pac-10 or Big-12 most of the last few years--they have acquitted themselves well against some of the better teams in the BCS conferences during that time, and their home field would be an uncomfortable trip even for the power schools with the exception of historical level juggernauts, like some of the USC teams of the mid-2000s or some of the more explosive Oklahoma teams. I think they could even go .500 in the SEC, certainly this year, though of course there is no reason why they would ever be in the SEC, seeing as they are in Idaho. No, the recruiting base is not as deep, and they do not have access to as many blue chip prospects. But the regional nature of the sport--that the team from Idaho with all the players nobody has ever heard of turns out to be pretty good after all--is one of the things that makes it interesting.

I have much more miscellenea than this, though seeing as it has taken 5 days to get this out, I will save the rest for future posts. There is always time and opportunity for that, and if what I have to say on these subjects is insignificant next week, then it would have been just as insignificant today, and better off not done.

I do promise that this will be my last sports topic for a while. I am burned out on it. I used to wonder if somehow my life could not be wholly complete if the Philadelphia Eagles never won the Super Bowl, but I think it's time to start approaching my plans for the remainder of my time here under the assumption that that is not going to happen, and to seek the meaning and wholeness that this looked to event was supposed to convey to one of the voids in my spiritual development elsewhere.

John Keats Tourism Extravaganza

Part I: London

John Keats was born in a house approximately at this site, 85 Moorgate, slightly northeast of St Paul's Cathedral. His father had, I believe, a kind of stable there which was his business. The plaque is placed quite high up on the building that is there now, as you can see, and it was hard to get a picture of it with my amateur photography skills that would be readable (as was the case with the Pope plaque).

The ground floor of the building of the Keats birthplace site was at the time, and perhaps still is, a slightly more swanky than ordinary pub/restaurant. At the time (this was in '96) it was way too expensive for me to be tempted to go in, even for just a drink. The beer was around 4 or 5 pounds a pint, which was a fortune in those days, and the meals started at around 14 or 15, which came out to $20-22, which would still be almost a special occasion for me now.

This picture of me is pretty unflattering. When you're already 26 and hitting Europe for basically the 1st time with any degree of having a clue of what you are doing, you've got to bring more game and purpose to the excursion than this figure in the photograph is demonstrating.

The one consolation is that the picture of Keats is perhaps even more ridiculous and a disservice to the dignity of its subject.

I thought I should throw in another London picture while we are in the neighborhood, as we are soon departing. I never made it to the main Keats attraction in town, the Georgian house up in Hampstead where he lived for a time as a young man while active as a poet, and which is now a museum dedicated to him.

Part 2: Rome

As much as I love Britain, and could much more easily live there than in Italy, there is nothing like visiting the latter for a holiday, at least in the off-season. Just looking at these rather pedestrian pictures calls up in the memory myriad ideas and images, of light, of air, of ancient times, of medieval times, of fairly recent but no less irrevocably lost times, of things believed in and held dear that were solid and palpable there but lost or forgotten in the course of 'regular' existence.

Keats died in the pink house in the rear that is being helpfully pointed out by this handsome girl, which abuts the famous Spanish Steps. There is now a small museum dedicated to Keats and Shelley, and to a lesser extent other English poets with a connection to Italy, on the second floor.

In case you like to read the inscriptions on the sides of buildings--some people do. How about the Baroque scrolling on those windows?

Inside the museum. There isn't much to it--I do remember that they had a supposed lock of Milton's hair, of all things (it was blond). I liked it though. It looked like it might be a good place to meet people, if you were the kind of person who met strangers in foreign countries and went on to socialize with them. A class of students from Cambridge and their professor dropped in the day we were there and this gentleman gave an impromptu lively and erudite talk on the last days of Keats. The Italian employees of the museum were also quite knowledgeable as well as engaging. I realize now that they were probably bitter underemployed Phds making $900 a month or something. The frustration and despair of the underemployed in Italy is not immediately palpable to the outside observer because everyone still dresses so well and knows how to groom themselves. Even the beggars wear sweaters, corduroys, hats, shoes, etc that clearly were once pretty stylish.

The other room in the museum, this being the actual one where the poet died.

A short ride on the subway--one could walk too, if he wanted, it would probably take about an hour--brings us again to the Protestant Cemetery, which we revisited previously in our tribute to Shelley. Keats is commemorated not only by his grave but by this likeness accompanied by some lines of (English) verse, which I believe may be by Oscar Wilde. I think you can read them if you enlarge the picture, but if you can't I will transcribe them later.

Keats's grave is on the left. Like Shelley, he is buried together with a devoted friend and caretaker of his literary legacy who long outlived him, named Joseph Severn. The pyramid of Gaius Cestius is visible in the background.

Keats's somewhat hard to read grave, on which his name famously does not appear, as he was evidently still brooding about some cruel reviews of his poems and being a failure in general, sentiments I can certainly relate to, preferring to be identified as 'one whose name was writ in water'.

One of Rome's innumerable and famed legions of stray cats, in the Protestant Cemetery, where one of the old sheds is loaded with packages of cat food that is set out for them in a space back by the pyramid. I'm worried that I put this picture up with the Shelley Rome photos as well. If I did, I am going to take it down. Maybe. This cat looked like a younger version of the one we had at the time, who has since died (he was 16), right down to the tuft of white fur on the gullet.

I often think that that there is no purpose or utilitarian value in my ever going back to Europe, especially its great cities, even if economic and environmental circumstances allow for it, and probably there is not, but it still stirs memories of exhiliration even to look at the pictures of these places, and the modest communion with the legacy of the Great Historical and Cultural figures of Europe, however superficially understood and experienced they must necessarily be (comparatively) by someone like me. I think I would still like to try to go back some time, maybe with various of the children? It still obviously has meaning to me.

John Keats, Endymion (1818)

Long, not wholly successful pastoral romantic mini-epic, apparently conceived as a more ambitious work than the execution proved it to be. Keats's miracle year of course was the next year, 1819, so the significance of Endymion, which was pulverized by the critics upon its first appearance, mortally wounding, some claim, the sensitive poet, lies largely in its relation to the more celebrated poems which very closely followed upon it rather than strictly on its own merits. It has a famous opening: "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:/Its loveliness increases; it will never/Pass into nothingness," etc. It is skillful, perhaps overly dreamy, the narrative is difficult to follow and conceive of as a whole. It is neither a solid world that is created therein, nor a vivid (living) one. The quest is not heroic enough, the observation not exquisite enough, for a work of high power. That Keats did go on to become, for a period lasting about 8 months or so anyway, a legitimately great poet at a very young age, would not, I think, have been anticipated by anyone reading this. He was 22 when this was published, and while there is evidence of some talent, he had not yet figured out either how to curb his exuberance, to hone in on specificities rather than abstractions of thought and feeling, or to measure and frame sensations and experiences at something approximating their real value. Most potential writers of course fail to get a handle on these secrets before that exuberance, and the greater part of whatever talent they may have had, have been exhausted or have abandoned them. The poem above all is a celebration of a comfortable, soft and idle life that appeals to many well-intentioned but misguided young people of a romantic bent. I was such a young person myself; I hated working and thought it would be the height of living to loll about in cafes and bars until 3am every night, get up at eleven, take a walk in a European-type city or go to the cinema or some art gallery in the afternoon, write in the evenings, go out for dinner and an evening of revelry around 9. Women of course, but bohemian-style affairs, numerous and of short duration. Other observations:

Beauty compensates for everything ("despondence...the inhuman dearth/Of noble natures...the gloomy days...all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways").

The idea of "binding", boundaries and the like, applied to bodies, souls, realms of the firmament, etc, is repeated numerous times in the poem.

Notes on selected lines: The languidness!--So lush. So romantic. So unreal.--A pleasant, good verse, if a bit airy.--Lovely images, but what do they mean?--In images luxuriant like a rococo painting.

This rhyme drew a laugh: "Aye, even as dead still as a marble man/Frozen in that old tale Arabian." Endymion himself is being referred to here.

The introduction of the Endymion character was confusing to me. I am pretty sure I missed something.

We are helped to see better. One of reasons for reading pastoral poetry.

These lines drew both a laugh and a reminiscence of Spenser:

"There hollow sounds arous'd me, and I sighed
To faint once more by looking on my bliss--
I was distracted; madly did I kiss
The wooing arms which held me, and did give
My eyes at once to death..."

This recalled the verse in the Faerie Queene where the idle men wallowing in sensualism have their eyes--or perhaps it was even their brains?--devoured through the eye sockets by the sirens who have lured them to their current sybaritic pass. The image obviously left an impression on me.

Hard to get a sense of what is happening (previously introduced characters that I had entirely forgotten are re-entering the narrative, etc).

These lines I find rather endearing:

"...although 'tis understood
The mere commingling of passionate breath,
Produce more than our searching witnesseth:
What I know not: but who, of men, can tell
That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell
To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail,
The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale,
The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones,
The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones,
Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet
If human souls did never kiss and greet?"

I do not know that I can share this view of the nature of existence, but I do think the sentiment has a deal of beauty in it.

Not an alpha male sentiment, and therein, perhaps, the crux of the poem's overall problem:

"...O that she would take my voews,
And breathe them sighingly among the boughs,
To sue her gentle ears for whose fair head,
Daily, I pluck sweet flowerets from their bed,
And weave them dyingly--send honey-whispers
Round every leaf, that all those gentle lispers
May sigh my love onto her pitying!"

Miscellenea (Part 1)

Christmas Shopping

My half-hearted efforts to support local businesses in my Christmas shopping this year largely failed. I am not used to the kind of personal interaction that involves bantering with salespeople, and especially thinking of them as authorities on their various lines of goods to whose expertise I should appeal in making purchasing decisions. This is doubtless emblematic of wider cultural decline, but such habits of sociability need to be cultivated, and if a long grown person has never been forced to practice them, he isn't going to have them. Then of course the gradations of most products above a certain level of obvious cheapness are of little interest to me. I am usually more than content with a good of middling quality. Then other of these small business-people are shockingly bad salesmen. I went into an independent hobby store on Main Street which had not been open long determined to buy my 8-year old son an old-fashioned kind of model ship that you build yourself. I was the only person in the store, which immediately made me a sitting duck for the proprieter, who looked to be of that school of people who spent most of the time between age 14 and 22 playing Dungeons and Dragons or some such thing. I was poking around among the modest selection of model kits on display and he yelled from behind the counter "Can I help you?" I replied no and continued poking around, apparently unconvincingly, because thirty seconds later he demanded to know the age of the person for whom I was shopping. I reluctlantly answered this question. "I don't really have anything here for eight-year olds." Well, I guess that was that, wasn't it? The brown-haired girl working the cash register at Michael's craft store did not interrogate me about my purchases (though I might not have minded so much if she had) when I was driven there to get the thing I wanted.

I have similar difficulties shopping at my local independent bookstore, though it is pleasant and has an adequate selection. The owner however is just a bit smug for my liking. His literary taste as far as I can discern runs towards displays of cleverness, the more extreme and inaccessible the better, and antagonism to almost anything that might have a chance of genuinely appealing to any mind that could easily be tarred by the label 'conventional'. He is one of those tiresome individuals who seems to genuinely believe he has managed to escape mind-enslavement by the mass media and the ruling establishment (I should add that he went to Harvard, so he probably considers himself part of the ruling establishment even though he runs a small bookstore cafe in New Hampshire as opposed to a New York investment brokerage or whatever they are called) while everyone else has not. Buying a volume of Camus or, God forbid, one of the old New Yorker writers from this guy gets a smirk that struggles to contain itself from bursting into laughter. Weightier, or at least cleverer and less utterly cliched stuff, Gogol, say, or Mann or Thomas Pynchon, merits more of a raised eyebrow and a looking over, presumably to gauge one's capability of seriously taking on such a work. People who buy The Da Vinci Code? Given that his expectations of the local customer base appear to be pretty low, I assume he must have reached a comfort level with this class of patron. And besides, he has to pay his bills, right?

My wife, who apparently presents herself to educated people as one of their own kind in a way that seems to be beyond my ability to project, I should note gets along much better with this gentleman. He even cracks knowing jokes to her. One Christmas, while buying an installment of a popular children's series for one of our nephews, he quipped to her in a tired monotone, "Another victim of Lemony Snicket. Truly a series of unfortunate events." One wonders how long he had been waiting to break out that line...

Mid-Atlantic Excursion

I went down to Pennsylvania for a couple of days over the Christmas holiday. I don't stay long, because my family gets on my nerves--I probably would not go at all except that my wife, with her exquisitely attuned sense of propriety, thinks it is important--but I enjoy the trip at least. The way down, although 3 days had passed since the not-especially-big snowstorm which somehow managed to cripple that part of the country for several days, took 11 and half hours--that would be 4 hours from Concord to around Milford, CT, which is normal, and 7 1/2 more from there to Philadelphia, which is excessive. The roads in the New York area were essentially immobilized. After inching along for more than an hour to get over the bridge into New Jersey my children claimed to be dying of the need to use the bathroom, so I got off the highway in that jungle that is Ridgefield/Passaic and could not get back out of that local traffic for another hour after that. I usually have a pretty good tolerance for highway traffic, but getting stuck on local roads is a soul-sapper. "This part of the country has become unliveable" I declared. My children wanted pancakes, so we had dinner at the IHOP in Watchung. My own dinner was terrible, but everybody else--even the wife!--enjoyed their food a great deal, so I was satisfied. Also the decor of the restaurant struck me as being very New Jersey somehow, which pleased me. It had these forlorn yet half-festive cardboard and crepe-paper Christmas decorations hung up, which reminded me of something my grandmother would have had, and the likes of which I never see, or least never notice, in New England. Also the place was huge, open, and nearly empty except for a handful of scraggly families, which gave it a further poignancy.

The fiasco which the snow produced in that region however does not bode well for the ongoing functionality of this society. This was not a major snowstorm by any stretch of the imagination, and 3 and 4 days later, with the sun out and the temperature rising to nearly 40 degrees, I passed by an incredible number of still unplowed sidestreets. Even worse, I had the opportunity to pass or drive behind a number of plows and salt trucks, and whoever was driving them frequently gave the impression that they had received faulty training in how to use the devices on their vehicles. One salt truck I got behind in New York on the way home--by which day the need for any more salt on the highway was long past, anyway--was conducting itself in an especially odd manner, shooting its supply of salt upwards so that it came raining down on the hoods and windshields of the cars around it, which I have never seen a truck do in New England to quite so extreme an extent, though I have lived there for many years at this point.

I have reached the age where whenever I go back to the old neighborhood--neighborhood in this instance incorporating an area 20 or 30 square miles in size--I wonder how many more times I will ever be back. Lately I have still been going down 3-4 times a year, though many of those occasions are a stopover on the way to somewhere else. However, my mother is likely moving within the year out of her house that has been in the family since 1957 (ed--as of June 2011, this has been put off to at least of couple of years further into the future), and while she won't totally leave the region (one hopes), there is talk of moving 10 or 20 or 30 miles out of Philadelphia--she is about 2 blocks out of it now--and those places do not have the same associations obviously as the Cheltenham/Abington neighborhood does. My relatives will probably live a great many years yet, but perhaps I will cease to have so much cause or desire to visit them. I took care to go to a hoagie restaurant that dates back to my childhood--such places (that date back so far) now are grown rare--and had a cheesesteak with a side order of cheese fries, that horrible delight of old times, the number of which such meals I have remaining to me surely dwindling to a low number now. Indeed, like Dick Clark I feel it incumbent now to stay up until midnight on New Year's Eve, as I sense that any year could be the last one, and, despite the essential absurdity of the holiday and the letdown when everyone abandons the party and goes to bed at 12:15 or so-- is the excitement of any other event so rapidly exhausted?--I still enjoy the day in a kind of morose way.

I have more miscellaneous subjects but I think I will save those for another post.

Penultimate Calendar Year Post

Dear Loyal Readership,

I am going to start another one after I publish this which will be dated 2010, but it is unlikely I will finish that before a week is out, especially as I will be away from a computer, or at least will not be near one in any capacity of composition, for the next few days.

I need not tell you that 2010 was not a banner year for either my writing or thinking abilities. My skill in each of these areas continues to deteriorate, as in the former, or grow more confused, as in the latter at an ever more precipitous pace. A great part of it, I know, is the incessant demands and toll which work, lack of sleep, endless domestic tasks and the multitude of people who now live with me make and have taken upon my concentration--even now I have someone jabbering at me as I try to dash off this note. A few hours of quiet with a rested and calm mind... these last few years, too, my mind is always as if hopped up, anxious, unable to see or arrange its thoughts quite clearly--I never foresaw this happening to me either.

I have kept up to the extent I have here because--like many of my countrymen, I should add--I am sick with the idea of being a certain kind of person that I increasingly have no claim on being, and it has proven very difficult for me to let that go entirely, though rationally I am all but resigned to this truth.

I thus look for 2011--what, as I will be 41, the historical record indicates should be the year I attain the pinnacle of my powers as a writer--to be an even slower and less lucid year at Bourgeois Surrender than any we have had yet. I thank you for your support and hope you have found and will continue to find such mild amusement and diversion in these pages as you seek and as most of us need from time to time.

Yours sincerely,

The Editor

Annual Holiday (Bad) Music Post: Old Girl Singer Special

I received my college alumni magazine in the mail today, a quarterly reminder of my neverending failure to live up to the college ideal, with regard to seriousness of any kind especially, but also in the total failure to absorb any of the life skills you are evidently supposed to learn there, which all of the successful alumni put to work in the realms of high-level business, scholarship and international relations every day. I had already started this frivolous post when this low-gloss rebuke (black and white photography only) arrived, so I anticipate I will continue on in a chastened tone.

I won't be able to set a new posting record this year, nor even get to 100 posts. Perhaps the blog is beginning to gradually wind down, and within two to three years might be expected even to finally die altogether. When you study the lives of successful people in arts and letters one of the most striking patterns in many instances is how quickly they move on not merely from particular projects and organs but from entire major phases of their careers in order to be constantly tackling new ground. No blog should last longer than 18 months probably, let alone five years.

I am only in love with about half the singers featured here. It was the atmosphere--of slightly melancholy or slightly embittered sweetness--that I sought.

The Poni-Tails "Born Too Late".

I heard this on the radio about two weeks ago pulling away from the drive through window at Dunkin' Donuts and thought it had a poignancy on several levels that transcended its simple message and orchestration. Clearly I was influenced by the uninspired nature of the setting. I couldn't find any movie footage of the girls. I put in the video of the record cover because they all look relatively adorable, especially the one on the bottom, who I think qualifies as dreamy.

Contrary to what appearances may suggest, I do not wish that the 50s had continued on forever. That would have been intolerable even to me, though I probably would have been willing to cling to it a little longer than most others. I do believe a lot of things would have been more enjoyable to do in that era that perhaps they are now--playing organized sports and living in Paris are two that come immediately to mind--and that many of the new directions that society chose to go in were obviously not great improvements on what had been before--but I do not wish that time had stopped, rather that its changes had been managed and implemented in a different and perhaps less wholly destructive and more deeply vivifying spirit .


Shelley Fabares--"Johnny Angel".

Glancing over the comment sections of Youtube music videos one cannot help noticing the varying characters of the commenting bodies which congregate around different artists. Opera and jazz are especially fertile ground for the snobs, many of whom I find enviable in their ferocity and contempt. Notable performers and interpreters of others' works, or in the case of many rock guitar legends, their own largely obscure catalogues, naturally provoke heated arguments about technique. International pop superstars inspire thousands of inane comments, largely from people in countries where English is not widely understood. A few groups like The Who seem to have hit the sweet spot of fandom; their commenters are funny, positive, apparently freed from the burden of snobbery. Smiths/Morrissey commenters try to take after this school, but most are unfortunately incapable of keeping the pitiful memories of their lonely, unloved youths to themselves.

Shelley Fabares is a figure not of artistic interest so much as romantic projection. All the males want to marry her, and a significant number of the females sound as if they would like to see her eyes clawed out. This indicates that she possesses some quality that touches a tender spot in the general masculine breast, and a sore one in its feminine counterpart. One may observe in these fora that is acceptable for men to declare the perfection of other feminine celebrities such Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn, presumably as any ordinary man is unlikely to have much contact with anyone remotely like them, let alone marry such a person. They are harmless in that instance, and besides embody many qualities that contemporary women either see themselves as either already possessing to some extent or that are at least acceptable to aspire to. None of this applies to Shelley Fabares, a sweet-natured cutie pie teenager who is the kind of girlfriend the average long term virginal middle class boy dreams of having from age 15 until he achieves some sense of full initiation as a sexual being, which in some instances can last forever, and whose type, presumably, continues to symbolize an active and real as opposed to theoretical ideal in the unenlightened male mind. This must be criticized and exposed to shame and approbation, and the disapproval of it expressed, I suppose, though it will do no good.

I occasionally used to watch the reruns of the Donna Reed show myself for a short period when I was in 8th/ 9th/10th grade, during some idle period between sports seasons or during the summer, wasting time that could have been employed to many better purposes. I was exceedingly weak emotionally however and had, if not an insatiable, a least a need every day or two, for a dose of romance, meaning at that time a vision of pretty girls. Sometimes television would be the only way to get it.


Lesley Gore--"You Don't Own Me"

The onetime "Cutie-Pie From Tenafly"--not too surprising really when you look at this video--came out as a lesbian in 2005. This is nothing to the point, other than to note that if I gone to school with somebody like this, kind of sad and not glamorously pretty, though not aggressively unfeminine either, I would have assumed the cause was her inability to get the kind of boyfriend she wanted. This is how I interpreted the world at that time. I suppose I know better now, if only tangentially. I like the naturalism of this clip. Is it me, or do people in documentary footage from the 1960s and 70s look more like actual human beings than people ever seem to now?


Brenda Lee--"I Want to Be Wanted"

"Little Miss Dynamite". Maybe they haven't stopped giving singers catchy nicknames. Maybe I'm just not keeping up.

This is one of my favorite songs of the 60s.


Dianne Lennon--"What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?"

In which the equal parts lovely and quietly severe Dianne gets stood up by her date for the big night only to be rescued from a night wallowing in self-pity at home by the smartly-uniformed Western Union boy. The thought that this might ever have been even a remotely plausible fantasy demonstrates how dramatically social life has changed in the last 40 years or so.

I never had much fun on New Year's Eve. It's a badly conceived evening, in that its focus is around a point of time which seems to distract everyone from the usual progression of a festive evening. I wonder if there oughn't to be a new tradition, make it a night to go on a date, preferably with someone you've never been on a date with before but always wanted to go out with. That would be a lot more fun for most people than what happens now anyway. Maybe they could bring back old-fashioned dances too. The cultural shift from well-organized dances with dance cards and at least somewhat less worry that all the girls you like are in danger of being carried off by some studly rival for a session of ravishing at any time to the current scene where dancing with a girl means having to gyrate around in her general area and hope that she doesn't immediately leave the floor, while perhaps more efficient, was especially brutal for people like me in their formative years.


Madonna--"True Blue"

Best Madonna song ever.

Movies 1968-1972: The Godfather and If...

As these are both iconic movies of a popular era in the cinema, I am going to assume that everyone already knows everything about them, and only give my own impressions as a potential means of sharing in the lively communal experience which popular art sometimes inspires.

I am not sure if I had ever actually sat down and watched the original Godfather straight through from beginning to end, but if I had, it was a long time ago, when my attention would have been directed primarily on the violence and not on the kinds of things I pay attention to now. Of course all of the famous scenes and lines and Lucca Brazzi and Moe Green references I recognized and anticipated, these having become ubiquitous in the culture during the ensuing 38 years, and I knew the basic structure of the narrative, but the movie otherwise had not made much of an impression on me because I was not able to get beyond all the murders which struck me in my tender naivete as pointless and callously portrayed. In my more developed maturity I realize that underworld murders are anything but pointless, that in fact they are more significant actions and assertions of humanity than anything that ever happens in bourgeois life, and, more specific to the movie, that the murders themselves in any kind of moral sense are not its focal point anyway, the stylization of them is. The murder scenes are thrillingly and to a certain extent even beautifully conceived, but there is nothing very real about them. Effective stylization in movies however is almost always more interesting than realistic depictions of life seem to be, and has always constituted their main appeal, whether in the mindless-popular-entertainment or challenging-the-complacent-intellect model.

The script and plot construction are Hollywood golden age (i.e. the 30s and 40s) classical. It coheres, each scene builds relentlessly upon those that have come before it towards its climaxes (the various murder scenes), the pace never flags or meanders, and the story is executed in a manner that at times both exquisite and grandiose. This all looks obvious and simple to do up on the screen, but you rarely come across it in recent movies as pleasingly smooth as here--I often wonder if people are too sophisticated and over-conscious to even do simple but affecting artistic work anymore. Of course I am humoring myself when I do this, as there are doubtless plenty of great artists at work in our own time; I seem to be incapable of taking pleasure in almost all of them however, so I am dissatisfied with the direction of the "culture".

Though the movie doesn't always feel like it takes place in the 1940s, it does in places a decent job of evoking that era emotionally. I especially like the shots of the department stores with the Christmas music playing in the background, and the murder scenes in the Italian restaurant, the Jones Beach toll booths, and the department store revolving door confirm to a great extent the feelings of love and comfort with which we have often associated these places but have never quite known how to express. I almost believe that if people could be assured that their murder would take place in a picturesque setting, with them presenting well in fine clothes or an elegant car, that they would be much less fearful of the potential crime.

It is difficult for me to comprehend how highly this movie is regarded by people for whom the film business and life are not disparate entities. I knew it had crept into the top 10 of the prestigious Sight and Sound poll of top critics and directors that is taken exactly every ten years (the last was in 2002), which is probably the most highly regarded such ranking due to the people involved in it. I hadn't realized that it had bolted nearly all the way to the top. The Godfather (together with Part II) ranked 4th in the critics poll, behind only Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and The Rules of the Game, and was the most recent film to crack the list, which like most such lists favors the real (old) classics. In the directors' poll it came in second, behind only Citizen Kane. (Note--in 1992 it made its first appearance in the directors' poll, at #6, and did not appear at all on the critics' poll, which at that time still filled half of its top ten with films from 1941 or earlier). I agree that it is a classic but I'm not sure it's that classic. There is still something about it which strikes me as fundamentally too shallow to merit that high of a rank. Obviously the generation that was young and most impressionable in 1972 has completely ascended to the chair of authority. I suspect it will score high again in the 2012 poll but begin to drop again by 2022, if anybody still cares about movies by then, which they probably will. Of course one can only shudder to imagine what kinds of movies the authorities of my generation will be voting for...

Among the film's more notable achievements is making the viewer feel at selected moments that Diane Keaton might actually be kind of pretty as well as a sympathetic person (I hadn't caught before that her character is supposed to be from New Hampshire, by the way--Ha!), which no filmmaker I am aware of has succeeded in doing since.

This is the first of the big 70s Hollywood movies I have seen, or re-seen, since I read the big sex drugs and rock and roll history of the era last year. Of course there are hundreds and thousands of books and essays on the subject, but I had never actually read any of them, so I really do find myself looking at it in a new way. Coppola came across as being the most natural as well as largest talent of that group, at least from 1968-75 or so, after which his career, according to accepted opinion, never approached these early heights again, to the point where by the 90s he was doing John Grisham adaptations for hire. I haven't seen these later films, so I don't how true this is, though it seems odd to me that even if his writing ability lost some of its edge, that the artistic sensibility and instinct so evident here would have abandoned him so completely. As far as the material being inferior, lots of great movies from the 40s and 50s, including pretty much the entire film noir genre, were adaptations of crummy pulp novels and magazine stories, so there is no reason to believe a good director couldn't make an interesting film out of a Grisham story. The Godfather itself is considered as a book to be not of the best quality (although numerous of the unlettered among my youthful acquaintance asserted that the book was far superior to the film, which would really call into question the ultimate profundity of any movie experience in comparison to the traditional high arts). Of course he has gone on to make millions more dollars on the side selling fine wines and cigars. I've tried some of his wine. The word that comes foremost to mind is clean--no residue, and a kind of oddly streamlined, uniform taste. The Pinot Grigio Bianco is the best of his line that I have had. It is very good.

Coppola's ego grew even more insufferable than it already had been for the several years between the success of the Godfather movies and the debacle into which the multiple-years-and-several-hundred-million-dollar-production of Apocalypse Now degenerated.

My favorite Coppola story is that while filming Apocalypse Now on location in the Phillipines some elaborate sets costing millions of dollars were in the process of being constructed near the beach when some lower level employee on the production blurted out the question "Why are we doing this? Monsoon season is starting in a month." To which Coppola replied, "What are you, a fucking weatherman?" You can guess what happened next.

I am no great technical critic of actors, and everybody and his grandmother has already felt compelled to offer the world their opinions on this, but it just further emphasizes that the surrealism-tinged awesomeness of Marlon Brando in this movie can hardly be overstated.


An old friend of mine who was gifted in the ability to entice women to sleep with him used to be very generous with advice and other wisdom regarding such matters towards me and other of his especially hopeless acquaintance, doubtless knowing it would never be put to use in such a manner as to constitute a threat to his own supply of pleasure. "Timing, (Surrender), timing is everything" was one of his favorite mantras. We frequently see this to be the case as well in other sensually-oriented fields, such as the arts are, and rarely has a movie been more fortuitous in the timing of its release than If.... was in appearing upon the scene in 1968. As engaging and even remarkable of a movie as it often is, it is impossible to envision it, or even a modified version of it, being a big hit--which it seems to have been, in England, anyway--at any other time than when it happened to appear. In recent years it has often come to be referred to, even by some of its admirers, as the original school shooting movie, due to its notorious final scene, though in context it is pretty clearly intended to be an expression of the spirit of the 60s, over the top undoubtedly, and probably a little more zealously imagined than we would find appropriate nowadays, but it should be noted that the targets of the barrage at the end are not hapless middle class bystanders, but literal representatives of the British establishment, generals, bishops, headmasters and the like, who, it should also be observed, begin firing back once they realize what is going on, as much of the right wing commentariat declaims that they would readily do under similar circumstances if only they were ever present at them.

I first saw this movie at a screening of the college film society, rather early in my time there (even as recently as the early 90s this entailed getting a print on a traditional reel in a traditional can and running it through an actual traditional movie projector. I'm guessing these traditions have finally died out however by now). I'm pretty sure I had no idea what was going on in it at that time. This is a real art movie, meaning that the greater part of its charm is in the small details and instants of fleeting beauty that it is able to notice, set off against the darker overlying story. Evidently my younger self could neither appreciate the fineness of these details nor really grasp the general drift of the plot. This is kind of funny because there are a number of occasions where the school in the movie looks quite similar to my school at the time, the dormitories and the gym especially. At the time I probably imagined everybody's school had more or less of a similar character.

I want to emphasize again that this is a very beautiful film, made by people who, whatever their issues with British society, were not oblivious to a sense of the grandeur that still pervaded not only its countryside, but also its hidebound and increasingly outdated social institutions. When you flip around the TV channels now or watch film previews, a lot of the newer stuff out of Britain depicts as a rather horrid, almost dystopian place, full of gloomy, nightmarish cityscapes, ugly, crass people speaking in horrid accents, surveillance, impersonal computerized barriers and signs everywhere, crime. There is very little suggesting any connection to pre-1997 English culture or history, which even anti-establishment 80s rock bands like the Clash and the Smiths were fond of referencing when the opportunity presented itself.

Malcolm McDowell did a portion of the commentary on the Criterion DVD, which I found worth listening to. He has considerable charm, as well as a healthily modulated amount of jerkishness, and his anecdotes about the film, Lindsay Anderson, the 60s, Britain, the other actors, and so on, are a lot more interesting than the usual film commentary pablum. There were a number of themes introduced which had the effect of making me question where I had gone so horribly wrong in my life--Lindsay Anderson's intellect, which was apparently formidable as well as deeply though as if casually learned, was brought up several times by both commentators (the other was a British film historian), and McDowell mentioned going to I believe the art director's spread in Sussex or somewhere and being floored by the absolute perfection of development of this individual's taste, which reminded me that even today the world swarms with thousands of these perfect brilliant people who understand everything and know how to do anything and get paid handsomely for it while the other 99.9% of the population of the western world slides ever deeper into a state more degraded that of mere traditional barbarism or serfdom. But other than that I mostly found the commentary enjoyable.

Lindsay Anderson (the director of this movie, by the way) had something of an enigmatic career, never quite being part of the film establishment but never exactly being completely cut off from it either. I hadn't realized he had made 1987's The Whales of August, which featured a number of legendary performers who had not been seen in a while, including 1910s silent goddess Lillian Gish, then well into her 90s, in what I am pretty certain was her last film. I never saw this, but I remember my 11th and 12th grade French teacher's being excited about it, (Les Baleines d'Aout, he called it) and Lillian Gish's comeback. Of course no one in the class, including me, was able to share in his enthusiasm. He was an odd little man, probably retired now, as he seemed to me at the time to be older than father, in his mid-40s or so. Like a lot of the teachers at our school, he did make a good show of engaging with the life of the mind in a pre-new age sense, traveling, keeping up with the arts, seeking 'cultured' experiences of a vaguely European refinement. He had never been married, and doubtless people speculated about his preferences in sensual matters, though he did once bring a female date to the well-known restaurant (this was in Maine) where I worked as a dishwasher and occasional busboy. This lady was his age, and of a rather dumpy build, though she had dyed her hair a rather startling orange color and had all kinds of oversized bangles and necklaces and one of those massive bohemian dresses. Whatever their relationship was, I would be curious to know more about it now.


Contemporary Bonus: I saw Greenberg, inspired by this link from the Virtual Memories website, where it is described as the tale of a 40-year old man who finds himself totally at sea in the world of 2010, which the writer/critic indicated could easily describe himself. As it could certainly describe me as well as anyone I am aware of, the curiosity which the man who considers no one to be in sympathy with him feels at the suggestion that someone with a prominent bully pulpit overcame me, and I decided to see the movie.

Sadly, as with many movies made by or about people who are of my generation, my main reaction was one that I almost never have when watching movies from 1925 or even ones where Europeans at elegant dinner parties suddenly open fire on each other for no obvious reason, that of "Are people really like this?" I have always felt this where my age cohort was concerned. To the entertainments of 1978 my reaction was "Are other children really like this?" I had the same questions regarding the cinematic teenagers of 1985, as well as the casts of the entire oeuvre of Winona Ryder from 1989 to 1994. Part of the problem is that even when the characters are supposed to be losers (professionally, that is, or through an inability to kick substance abuse habits or maintain stable relationships, as opposed to simply being uncool) they invariably still have more friends, more sex and display cooler taste in music in the course of a 100 minute movie about the lowest period of their life than I was able to generate in the entirety of mine. Another issue for me is that with a few exceptions--I'll have to try to generate a list of these for a future post--nobody in a generation x movie ever displays any evidence via their actual speech of having anything even symptomatic of an aspiration for any kind of real education, let alone the possession, or partial possession of one--even when the characters are supposed to be geniuses! Maybe this is realistic, and obviously my mind is only vaguely informed by familiarity or awareness of any kind of deep learning or contemplation but still--vaguely is a lot more than nothing, enough that nothing no longer resonates as a possible foundation for any person with whom one might have anything in common.

This movie did remind me of something I had forgotten, which is that I never managed to make it to a party where cocaine was being actively imbibed (needless to say I also have managed never to take cocaine). Not that I ever really wanted to do cocaine, but I certainly wanted to be able to go to the kind of parties where people were doing it, because of course I imagined that you had to go to those kinds of parties just to see beautiful girls--it was a portal to the world where one could perhaps then begin to have a glimmer of hope of ever getting any of them.

Sorry about the sloppy ending. I have to end this post now or I may never get out of it.

Dylan Thomas--"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" (1952)

This seems like one that might draw in the seeking-help-with-homework crowd, so I'm giving myself the assignment of giving it my best imitation of an academic treatment.


To commence with some pedagogy that everyone at all familiar with the tradition, including doubtless the young lady in the photograph above, already knows: Dylan Thomas is considered by many literature experts to be the most "natural" poet of any quality who wrote in English during the whole of the 20th century. By natural it is meant, or at least I take it so, that his verses give the impression of arising very nearly out of the form and language of thought with which he ordinarily processed his perceptions of existence, similiar to the sense one detects in Burns or Blake or any number of Elizabethan poets. Personally I am not as confident in attributing this level of bard-hood to Dylan Thomas, though I have known or been exposed to several people, almost all a generation or two older than, whose understandings I consider worthy of regard, who were very enthusiastic about his gifts and achievements; so I do not discount that some aspect(s) of his particular world-view may not strike certain contemporary readers as being terribly profound or ingenious, which is a phase the fortunes of many renowned authors pass through 50-100 years or so after their heydays, as I have written about before.

Dylan Thomas is especially famous for the care with which he constructs his poems, so one should always be attentive to that in writing about him. "Do Not Go Gentle, etc..." has a basic simplicity that is reminiscent of Wordsworth both in sentiment and construction, so I am going to approach the way I would a Wordsworth poem.

There are six stanzas, the first five of which have three lines, and the last effectively the same, only with one final line that has already appeared three times in the poem (the "rage, rage" line) added for extra emphasis. The first and third lines in each stanza rhyme both with each other and with their correspondents in each of the other stanzas, and the middle line in each stanza rhymes the middle line in all of the other stanzas. In short, the entire poem operates on two rhyme-sounds, words that rhyme with "night" or words that rhyme with "day", the "day" rhymes being half the number of the "night" rhymes and bound in by them within each stanza. Of the 19 lines which constitute the poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night" is repeated four times, and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light is repeated the same number. Both lines appear in the first and last stanzas, and they alternate as the closing line in each of the middle four. Clearly they are the pillars of the poem, the other lines serving to play off or complement them, and while they appear to be saying largely the same thing they are in fact in opposition, which I will explain further below.

As for other constructive elements, the pattern and setup of the six stanzas, as in many celebrated poems, is extraordinarily simple, rooted in an understanding of poetry as a primarily oral form that is intended to be memorized (and memorable). The first stanza gives the two main lines of the poem, as noted earlier, bracketing a succinct summation of its dominant theme. The middle four stanzas each introduce a category of men--wise, good, wild, grave--who are presented in various images of light and darkness ("dark is right", "crying how bright", "the sun in flight", "with blinding sight", etc), with the last lines alternating in repetition of the "gentle" and "rage" lines, all of which again assists greatly in memorization and the consequent internalization of the language and sense of the poem. All this is also very characteristic of many of Wordsworth's poems, which are well worth studying for their simplicity and economy in communicating an idea that is more wholly realized than at first appears He begins the last stanza by addressing "my father, there on the sad height,/Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray" before closing the poem with the repetition of the two lines that have contended with each through the whole of the poem. Knowing nothing of the biographical background of the poem, my impression would be that he is not referring exactly to his literal flesh and blood father here, but to a universal idea of, I would even call it a craving for, a father, an older, more experienced, wise, knowledgeable, etc, male human who serves as a model or guide that exists in the collective imagination of men even if they do not have fathers or fatherlike figures who are direct influences in their own lives.

With regard to the two main contending lines my inclination is to suspect that the suggestion is that "night" is apparently so overbearing and inevitable through most of the poem, but that the "light" which keeps insinuating and asserting itself up to the very last can and will be triumphant over it. Of course the reader must make of all this what he will.


As to my personal opinion of the poem, I am impressed with the construction of it--if people hold any positive views of poetry at all anymore, they probably think of it in terms of something that is above all memorable, and therefore fairly simple in its execution. A piece this concise, that also has a distinct narrative structure to it and a dramatic and insistent underlying sentiment that commands one's attention, is a significant achievement. It is at the moment probably what I find most interesting in Dylan Thomas. Separated from questions of poetic technique and sensibility I don't think that his particular ideas or thoughts on anything are very provocative or likely to change anyone's mind. But I'm falling asleep at the computer. I've got to move on.

Sports Old-Fogeyism, Part II

My God it takes me a long time to write even a single little post on nothing.


The 1977 NFC Divisional Playoffs. Minnesota Vikings vs. the Los Angeles Rams at the L.A. Coliseum. Rain and mud. The underdog Vikings, being in a state of general decline from their mid-70s peak, and playing without Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton, who had broken his leg a few weeks earlier, won 14-7. I remember watching this game live. I was seven years old, about a week shy of eight. It was the Saturday between Christmas and New Year's. My grandparents were having a cocktail party which in my memory was quite well attended, at least 15 people or so. Even if one had that many friends nowadays, he would be hard-pressed to get such a turnout on that weekend. The guests were almost all old full-blooded ethnic Lithuanians, and such they were not particularly riotous, though they all drank and smoked at least. An old great-uncle who had palled around with Babe Ruth in a former life was there, though he was on his last legs at that party, and was hooked up to an oxygen tank; I'm sure it was the last time I ever saw him. The game was on in the background--sporting events were always on in the background at such functions in my youth. I was excited because I was rarely allowed to watch the 4pm game at home. At age seven, I regarded this as something cool people who lived in more laid-back households got to do, even if I would not have been able to express it in this precise terminology.

Rewatching some of this game 33 years later, along with some other vintage footage that is up on Youtube, I cannot but say that I miss these old days of football, especially the media coverage of it--doubtless if I could remember 1961 or 1950 I would lament them even more, but '77 has become, in relation to the present, quaint enough to be lamented too. Yes, the players are inferior, extremely so in certain notable instances, but the atmosphere surrounding the '77 game looks a lot more fun. Though complained about at the time too, everything--the tickets, the stadiums, the salaries, the groundskeeping, the television contracts, the joie de vivre of the fans--has only become ever more expensive, more extravagant, more contrived and more deadly serious with the passing of time. In 1977 the players' bodies, the hype, the luxury, even the personality of the fans, were still somewhat in line with the scale of what I would regard as normal life. But I have written about all of this before...

The abysmal quality of the field in this game is unbelievable. It goes without saying that nobody involved with even serious high school football would submit to playing in this kind of muck nowadays--maybe some Class C schools in Maine wouldn't be able to see any other solution and just deal with it. Otherwise all the good coaches and players would be indignant, and the wannabes would feign it, hapless lower-level employees responsible for the upkeep of the field would be publicly berated or even fired. For a while there were still a few old-timer broadcasters still around--even John Madden to a certain extent made one of this group--who would have downplayed the complaints about playing on a muddy field with poor footing, but adherents of this attitude are almost all gone now.

The quarterback play in this game is atrocious by current standards. The Vikings backup QB, Bob Lee, who mercifully only had to throw about ten passes the entire game, literally does not look like he has a skill set much broader than mine when he tries to run around and throw the ball more than five yards downfield. The Rams QB, Pat Haden, who was a Rhodes Scholar and college standout at USC, was supposed to be better, a rising star even, but he stunk the joint out in this game too. Mentally soft, as legend has it, he would go on the next year to choke in an even more humiliating fashion in a 28-0 loss to the Cowboys in the NFC championship game in the southern California sunshine which effectively ended his career. While the field conditions made passing perhaps especially difficult in this game, watching footage from other games of the same period played in decent weather is to be no less struck by how amateurish the passing game is vis-a-vis today. In some ways it makes for a more exciting game, as the risk of an interception is considerably higher than it is now, and a successful long pass play takes on the character of something of a minor miracle.

The commentators on this broadcast are the legendary Vin Scully and some guy who sounds like he broke into the business on Hee Haw and whom I have no memory of ever hearing again after this game. I must confess that for most of my life I detested Vin Scully, though he is practically sainted nowadays as one of the two or three most intelligent and greatest sportscasters of all time. My youthful animosity towards him came about mainly due to his association with and clear favoritism for the Dodgers, who I hated, and, like many people on the east coast at that time, I loathed and feared everything that was too blatantly and proudly from California generally, the Golden State then being perceived to be the ascendant, dynamic place, while we, who had formerly been the center of American life, were in terminal decline. (I realize that many people of a certain age now regard New York in the 70s to have been culturally in a golden age as well, though as I was under the influence in those days of people who had partied there during the Gatsby era and not spent any significant time there at all since the 50s, my impression was that the age of Studio 54 and the burned out Bronx represented a significant comedown from that city's former grandeur). My opinion of Scully is coming around, mainly as the result of much thoughtful and heartfelt writing extolling him that I have read in the last few years, his marvelous poetic powers of description, the classical smoothness and fluency of his American English speech that elevates the experience of the game, his nightly providing the Los Angeles metropolitan area with not merely the binding quality of a shared experience, but something almost resembling a soul, which latter would be a most impressive accomplishment indeed. Also he is in his 80s now, the Dodgers have been a mediocre and insignificant team for the last 20 years, I have become something of an adult; all of which has tempered my erstwhile visceral dislike of the him, though I don't think I will ever become one of his more fervent admirers.

On the other hand, this game also features my all-time favorite football coach, and maybe my favorite coach in any sport, Bud Grant. There hasn't been anybody remotely as cool as this guy in football in decades. In a playoff game, on the road in a monsoon with an undermanned team, an ulcer-inducing scenario for the typical coach, Bud Grant is not yelling, pacing, scowling, stalking, looking worried, looking confused or otherwise making a spectacle of himself. With only the hood of his windbreaker being pulled up acknowledging the downpour he is standing in, his expression and body language convey both intelligence and unflappability, the sense being, 'I know what I'm doing and I very well may win this game; if I do lose this particular game however, the overall quality of my life, with which I am genuinely at peace (and within which I have developed certain important mental faculties to a degree sufficient to make an informed determination), will not be significantly affected'. Unlike say, Phil Jackson, who states all this more or less directly and therefore convinces one it is actually insincere, Bud Grant never expressed his philosophy, or much of anything else, directly. I am projecting based upon what I detect.

Another odd thing about watching game footage from the 70s is that the gap in 'athleticism' between black and white players appears smaller than in any other era--that is to say, the white players generally look like they belong on the field, and many of the clearly better players even on defense are white, and no one seems to consider this unusual yet. In the 60s, there were often only two or three black players on the field at any given time who, usually being elite talents, really stood out athletically (think Jim Brown or Gale Sayers running on the nearly all-white defenses of their era). In recent years the reverse has become true, especially on defense, where white players stand out noticeably, and are frequently perceived as doing so in a negative sense with regard to speed, strength, etc, even when this is not necessarily the case. But in the 70s there was almost a kind of equilibrium reached, where many white non-quarterbacks were athletically competitive with the top black players. This was also true, albeit to a lesser extent, in basketball.

I had wanted to do even more stuff but this post has to go to press. Ridiculous.