Favorite Women of Art #15

Otto Bacher--Nude Outdoors (1893)

We haven't done one of these in a while. This girl reminds me of somebody I used to know. We'll call her J. Of course I did not know her like this. Otto Bacher was an American Impressionist. This painting is in Cleveland, which is supposed to be a truly world-class art museum. I admit I was looking through a bunch of art books looking for something to fit in with this series, but I waited to be spontaneously excited in fidelity to my current state of mind, and I am satisfied that is the case here..

I am having a devil of a time just getting onto this site lately, let alone actually writing. I had been able to get on a crippled version at work (hard to link, etc, but I could type at least) for a few weeks, now I can't even get in. My computer at home is dying, so it's a crapshoot whether I can even get on the internet at all without being instantly thrown off. I could go to another blogging site, and maybe I will have to if these problems aren't resolved, though I would hate to lose the continuity and ease of access to my vast archives. On the other hand, I could start a entirely different blog--Bourgeois Triumph, or I'm More Creative and Intellectually Alive Than All of the Other Writers on the Internet or something like that, with a revamped attitude and more vital content. I need to get my computers working at a 21st century level though. Is it time to invest in a tablet, just for my personal use? Seriously, I need to be able to reliably access and write on the sites that allow you to do those things, which I don't have, well, these last two days.

Brief Notes on Some Comments (James Baldwin)

My weekly posting.

I got a couple of comments this week. I don't get many comments--four so far this year, one in 2012 (and that all of seven words)--so it was a pretty momentous occasion. The commenter(s) didn't think much of something I wrote about James Baldwin five years ago. That is fine, I looked over what I wrote and while the introduction was a bit silly, the rest of the piece does not strike me as unreasonable or even disrespectful. In any event the criticisms directed at me were neither particularly coherent nor devastating. However, some of the things that were said interested me, and I wanted to briefly address them.

The childishness of my opinions was emphasized, twice in fact, though specific examples were not given. I don't feel childish when I am alone, but as this is the impression I make on most serious people above the age of seventeen or so, despite all that I have done to try to combat this shortcoming and give myself some gravitas over a period of many years, I must face the possibility that I don't have whatever quality people have that enables them to read and think out important things with perception and maturity. I must confess though, when I got bogged down writing this paragraph I cleared my head by watching a couple of numbers from On the Town on Youtube, which is not exactly an argument in favor of my having any kind of mind that is to be reckoned with.

The commenter accuses me of paying too much attention to what other critics have said about James Baldwin. I don't recall having ever read anything about James Baldwin. He is not at this point, and has not been for most of my reading life, someone who is talked about as a literary figure very much. Indeed, if I am coming to similar conclusions as other readers of a certain type, perhaps it speaks to something that is actually there. I do not deny that the man was courageous, or that he did not accomplish meaningful things in his life, or even that I did not like his first two books, Go Tell It On the Mountain, and Notes of a Native Son, both of which are well worth reading, though I do think Another Country was pretty bad. However, childish as I am, I have still read a thousand or so books in my life, most of them 'literary' in nature, and I also have spent a decent amount of time trying to write, and based on this experience, Baldwin displays some limitations as a writer that really jump out at you compared to other authors. Maybe these limitations are not important in the grand scheme of Baldwin's career, perhaps they are not even real, and I am blinded by certain biases related to my situation in life that have nothing to do with Baldwin's literary plan--I am not a scholar, after all. I am basically a person jotting down hasty impressions in a diary, or better, a journal. There is a way to do that well.

In my notes on Baldwin I was really thinking of him purely in a literary/artistic context and his place and relations in that universe, which is how I tend to perceive reality, interpret history, and so on. His status as a public figure or civil rights champion did not really factor much into what I was writing.

I am usually criticized for being over-reverent of authors. This is a change for me.

The writer pointed out that a number of black icons such as Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, etc, would probably not agree with my assessment of Baldwin, which, I might add, was not actually either bad or dismissive. It is hard for me to imagine a scenario where I could sit down with the likes of Malcolm X and Toni Morrison and say anything I genuinely believed or thought that would be enlightening or pleasing to them however.

The commenter closes by saying that I owe Baldwin (or maybe they really mean someone else) an apology. Do dumb readers whose offenses mainly consist of an inability to understand a celebrated (and dead) author's work even have the capability of insulting him? I don't think so. You have insulted your readers, if you have any, or teachers, or whomever, by wasting their time with falsehoods, and maybe you owe them an apology, which they can convey to Plato or James Joyce or Baldwin or whomever by understanding them even incrementally better than they did before. And can an inferior mind offer a legitimate apology to a great one anyway? Not really.

I am tired this week. I wanted to spend a little more time of this, but I have no concentration. I think I am more manic/bi-polar than I had realized. I notice that my moods and energy really swing back and forth. This week I am on a down cycle.

A Beautiful Chicago Mind

In which I briefly take on the back-to-back best picture Oscar winners from 2001-2002:

Chicago

It didn't appeal to me. Raunchy 1970s musicals are not my thing, though they have always been popular with some part of the public. Even at the time I felt this element of the popular culture of my early childhood to be mostly grotesque. This movie was made in 2002, so everything is flashier and more antiseptic than it would have been in the actual '70s, but the grating songs and attitude of the original show have carried over annoyingly enough.

It is strange, cold, loud, and jarring, and has an odd and very flat cast. None of the characters has any appeal or reality. There was a lot of emphasis in the special features on the prodigious amount of work that was put in by all of the talent involved, but so what? This is one of the more annoying trends of contemporary life, the self-congratulation and calling attention to how many grueling hours one is putting into one's craft; even if something worthwhile has been achieved, it either strikes one forcibly on the screen (as in some of the Werner Herzog movies) or in whatever its equivalent is in other fields of endeavor, or it fails to pique interest. I have spent probably four or five hours straining to write this post. I don't want it to appear that way, but if it does, it is an effect of my style or construction. I don't think it should be a point of emphasis in publicity though.

Hollywood loves this story--this is the 3rd or 4th version of it they have made, including 1942's Roxie Hart, which I noted having seen here a couple of years back. Nothing in either the premise or the execution ever seems to fire my imagination with regard to it.

All of the main female leads are within a year of my exact age, which exercises in numerology always interest me. Renee Zellweger was born 8 months before me in Texas; Catherine Zeta-Jones 3 months prior in Wales; and Queen Latifah (nee Dana Owens) was born two months after in Newark, New Jersey. None of them strike me as having much commonality of experience or worldview or culture with me, even at the most superficial levels. The Queen probably would be the closest of the three, both due to geographical and socio-economic proximity (her parents were a public school teacher and a cop, which is about the same level of society that I come from). The other two I have no read on at all. Emerson says of the artist, that she "...should pierce the soul; should command; should not sit aloof & circumambient merely, but should come & take me by the hand & lead me somewhither..." This is not what I experience when I see Renee Zellweger.

A Beautiful Mind

This I liked, naturally. Who doesn't like movies set in the Princeton and MIT math departments in the 1940s and 50s? I'd like to know, and then have something done about it. This was one of the last films I ever saw in the theater, the night before my wife went into labor with our first baby. I enjoyed it well enough at that time too. I cannot put myself on a limb and say it is Great, because what I liked about it was the nostalgia and the evocation of high-intellect environments as I like to imagine they are, and in this it felt like the movie was flattering me rather than dealing with its own more interesting or serious subject and saying to the likes of me, "Try and figure out what it is actually about; though you can't", which would have been a lot better. When I saw it in 2002 I identified more readily with the genius mathematicians and Ivy Leaguers and Nobel Prize Winners. I confidently thought this was my natural crowd, more or less. Now of course I recognize that world and experience of life as it really is, hopelessly remote.

As long as we are on the theme of women who were born in 1969-70, we should talk about Jennifer Connelly. I will get the juvenile stuff out of the way first. Back around 1988 Jennifer Connelly--at that time her name was frequently preceded by the modifier 'pneumatic' in the press--starred in a movie called Some Girls, in which a typical schmoe college student, who somehow happens to be going out with her, or thinks he is, comes to stay with (and get worked over by) her artistic, rich, beautiful and sexually sophisticated family at their chateau in Quebec over Christmas break. I watched this at about 2 in the morning at the home of a friend of mine after an evening of revelry. This friend was a man who could juggle 3 women at a time and keep their energies turned to hating their rivals and figuring out how to eliminate them rather than directing any anger towards him. You are probably wondering why, if he was so cool, he was hanging out with with me at all, let alone watching movies with me on cable TV at 2 in the morning. It's a good question. For whatever reason, this guy found me amusing. Also, he usually took care of his seductions quite early in the evening, especially if one of his reliables showed up. He would excuse himself for a minute to go and banter with the newly arrived guest, all very casual and deliberate, though it did not take long for him to absorb the attention of his target and force whatever other people were present to wander off. He would then manage to maneuver the girl into a private room under some pretense and within 20 minutes the job would be done. We would then see the girl running out of the house in tears at having yet again succumbed so easily, and a couple of minutes afterwards our friend would rejoin us by the bar in a state of feigned agitation, as if he were angry at himself (or even us) for his own weakness. But in reality, the tension was off (for him), and he was freed up to revel with his male friends for the rest of the night. But back to Jennifer Connelly, at the conclusion of Some Girls, much of which involves the actress in question running around in a black bra tormenting the supposed boyfriend, with no intention of giving up the goods, my friend the stud turned and said, "Surrender, I think I am traumatized for life". If that was his reaction, you can only imagine what mine must have been.

Jennifer Connelly was born in the Catskills and grew up partly in Brooklyn Heights and partly in Woodstock, New York. She attended arts schools. Her father was Northern European Catholic (Irish-Norwegian) and her mother was Jewish, a combination I have frequently noticed to have produced dynamic results. Her parents appear to have been affluent, though not plutocrats. She attended Yale for a couple of years--if I had gone there I would have been in her class--and then transferred to Stanford for a while, but she returned to films before getting any degrees. All of this obviously makes her progressive/educated upper middle class East Coast to her core. She is definitely representative of a type in my generation that I was always trying hard to like because, in the first place, if you have any identification with this artsy-liberal-semi-intellectual east coast crowd, there are not very many alternatives, and secondly, because these women had the kinds of attitudes and personalities that were, for lack of a better word, 'approved', by whoever it was that determined what the women our age ought to be like, and what we ought to look for in them. The problem of course was that while these women were adequate, indeed more than adequate, a quantitative improvement in outlook and ambition and educational achievement over prior generations, too many males were not, and this mismatch of qualities and excellences between boys and girls drained much of the fun out of social life in that era. Jennifer Connelly is both an extreme example of this, and a walking bundle of contradictions. Her entire bearing in interviews and so forth, especially now (at late as 1995 she was still coming off as more a flakey-artsy rather than serious-professional artsy, which transformation she underwent sometime between the above date and 2001) speaks of someone who came of age socially in an environment with a critical dearth of adequately developed men compared to herself. Yet at the same time that she makes statements such as not respecting women who use flirtatious behavior to catch the attention of  males and get something that they want, the bulk of the roles in her career have been as a girlfriend/ supportive wife or unabashed object of not particularly sophisticated lust. Though perhaps I am seeing the wrong movies...

Contemporary Bonus

Over the course of the summer, I had the opportunity to spend time with people outside my immediate family. Sometimes movies were watched. These gatherings were largely made up of people who not do not want to watch Celine and Julie Go Boating, ever, so I happened to see a couple of fairly recent films that I wanted to briefly comment on, Cedar Rapids and Crazy Stupid Love. These were both middling to occasionally amusing Hollywood product. They shared several common themes with other recent run of the mill movies I had seen, which, as I rarely watch up to date movies, indicated to me that these similarities must represent real trends. I have already labored too long on this post, so I will simply list what I think these trends are, and perhaps I will elaborate at a later time:

1. The earnest and totally naive 30-something male character from the upper midwest. Characteristics: goofy, usually a virgin, wholly unironic, has little knowledge of the world beyond the 30 mile radius around his hometown in northern Minnesota. Basically a modern-day version of Dostoevsky's Idiot, only completely infantile and holly devoid of spiritual depth. Variations appear in: Lars & the Real Girl, Cedar Rapids. Fargo. What is the cause for the proliferation of this type? Fatigue with the cynicism of modern society, though I believe having the characters be male is a cipher for film producers' real desire, which is for the possibility/return of sweetness & innocence in women. They dare not express that openly though.

2. The Business Conference set at a hotel as a place for respectable middle class adults to be free to engage in wild behavior. Variations appear in Cedar Rapids, Up in the Air. What is the cause of this? Respectable middle aged Americans are so bored and desperate to have fun while at the same time avenues in which this is even a plausible fantasy are becoming more and more restricted. The fact that the Business Conference seems to be emerging as an adult fantasy where people imagine they might be able to meet and get away with having sex with a stranger is all you need to know about the kind of desperation that is afoot in the land. See point #5 also, which is related.

3. The group of unrelated, single professional friends who have often just met coming together to rescue/ intervene on behalf of a member of the group in trouble. Variations appear in: about 5,000 movies, though I date the trend as a grand theme of modern popular cinema to Four Weddings and a Funeral. This obviously speaks to the desperation of people, especially single urban professional people, for the camaraderie that is lacking from their lives.

4. The part of the player in Crazy Stupid Love appears to have been both shamelessly cribbed in whole from the game/pick up artist bloggers such as Roissy in D.C, and intended as satire. It didn't work as satire.

5. Sexual desperation of middle class 40-somethings. Yes, this is a constant theme of world history. Still, in Crazy Stupid Love, the main character's wife announces she wants to separate from him for a while, during which time he meets the player, who teaches him how to dress and talk to women, has one night stands with 8 attractive younger women he picks up in bars, makes his kids' teenage babysitter fall in love with him and take naked pictures of herself to send to him, before finally getting back with his wife at the end. The writers of this movie obviously realized that their fantasies and internet reading pretty much constituted the entirety of their mental activity at this point, so why not combine them and make a movie out of it?

6. The other notable things about these movies is how little there is at stake in them, because everyone is so atomized. It doesn't matter if Steve Carell gets back with his wife or what happens to his children other than to himself. In films such as The Best Years of Our Lives or It's a Wonderful Life the future of the whole society is seen to hinge on people's marital choices and their ability to cope with changes in society and so on. I suspect this is one of the reasons why so many modern movies, especially those aimed at mainstream audience, seem so thin and pointless. But I really have to go, and can't elaborate on this any more...

Big Fun

When I had my holiday we went up to the White Mountains and stayed in a hotel there for a couple of days. We indulged in the usual amusements there, and hiked up a modest mountain, and went to a state park with a lake that we hadn't been to before, and for the most part everyone was satisfied. At night after the children fell asleep we drank, though not to any level approaching excess, and put on the television. We do not have cable at home, so that is a novelty for us.  The first night there was program about a Mormon who had four wives and about twenty children which did not explain how he managed to afford them all, followed by one about Amish twenty-somethings let loose to party and find out important things about life in Los Angeles. I spent a lot of time glancing at brochures and those books of advertisements they have in hotel rooms in tourist areas while these were on. The second night I returned from getting ice and saw Fernando Rey on the screen, in his prime, sitting down as usual to a well-set table in a wonderfully cut suit of old European clothing in a perfectly handsome but not overstylized movie I had never seen before.

I: What is going on? I thought you hated this guy?

She replied with an enigmatic shrug.

I could not figure out what the movie was for the life of me. I knew it had to be a Bunuel movie. Convention was clearly being mocked even though everyone's clothes, drinks, manners, speech and collection of abilities were of a perfection that only the highest reaches of pre-war continental European society could attain. And then Catherine Deneuve appeared (with medium-brownish hair). It was not Belle de Jour, was it? (Not a Bunuel movie, though I could not remember at the time). But they were speaking Spanish, and to my amateur eye it looked like they were in Spain besides. Does Catherine Deneuve speak Spanish? No, her lips didn't match the words. It was dubbed. But why would the Turner Classic Movies channel be showing a movie dubbed into Spanish with English subtitles? It made no sense. But this was still during the Franco regime, and wasn't Bunuel kicked out of the country after Viridiana? But wait, Fernando Rey just insulted a priest. It's obviously a Bunuel movie. Did they film it in France, though they were speaking Spanish? Catherine Deneuve's lover is an impoverished but extraordinarily handsome artist. She falls ill and has to have her leg amputated...still nothing is telling me what movie this is. A sordid past obviously exists between her and Fernando Rey, dating back to when she was a schoolgirl. The sets and clothes and streetscapes in this movie are amazing...But where in Spain does it snow and get cold like this? In the mountains, sure, but what cities are in the mountains? I am thrown off again. Some surrealist touches, but not like his most famous movies. Catherine Deneuve marries Fernando Rey but denies him sex and affection. The movie ends with Fernando in bed, apparently dying from poison. It's "Un Film de Luis Bunuel". They still don't tell us what the movie is...

My Wife: I hope she didn't poison all those other men (who had been having dinner with Fernando Rey).

Other comments of hers included observations of the stylish clothing worn by the Spanish men, and a speculation that the amputation of Catherine Deneuve's leg was faked in the movie, though for what purpose I cannot remember. The only betrayal of her former animosity towards these principals came when during a dream sequence when a painted wooden likeness of Fernando Rey's head, detached from any body, was swinging in place of a bell, of which image she disapproved ("I know this is supposed to be funny"). On the whole though, I think she enjoyed herself.

So when we got home (no I-phone or traveling laptop for me) I quickly was able to discover that this movie was Tristana, which was made in Spain--the street scenes were shot in Toledo, which was of course the home of El Greco and as far as the tourist trade is concerned is kind of the Florence of Spain--and was released to much acclaim in 1970, the year I was born. It both seems like a 1970 movie, and at the same time it seems incredible that anything about the world was like what was in this movie at any time that I was alive. Yet Spain was deep in that time warp that the political and cultural and economic stagnation imposed by the regime had produced at the time, and Fernando Rey and especially Bunuel, along with doubtless many other people associated with the movie, were products of a very different culture and upbringing than essentially anybody who is alive and occupying any kind of prominent place in the world today has.

This is my second day in a row of putting up a hurried post. I don't think it will become a habit, but the Emerson I've been reading has for some reason made me want to get back into writing more. I still don't think he is an original or especially great writer, but his journals do give a sense of engagement that I find to be lacking in my own life. He is not brilliant, but he is observant, and he attempts to examine his views and reactions to things in an honest manner. Also of course he lives near me--his house is a little more than an hour from me--and while the towns, other than a few old landmarks, have for the most part nothing recognizable to a modern person, obviously the mountains and rivers and flowers and trees and animals that he writes about are well known to me, and this probably has had some effect on my desire to write more. Though you would not know it from this blog, there were about ten years where I wrote nearly every day for three or four hours. I may not have much to show for this effort, but I did achieve a certain fluency and sense of composition that I have, to my genuine astonishment, lost over the last six or seven years. Since I have not learned how to do anything else in the meanwhile and since the earlier practice provided me with a sense of purpose, however ridiculous it may have been, that I lack now, I think I will try to get back into some regular routine, with very rough postings for a while...  

What I Did Today

The details are mostly family stuff, surprise, surprise. I woke up at 8:23. My daughter, evidently worn out from our outing to Quechee Gorge on Sunday, slept late. The air was getting more humid. Some children and their mother were coming over at one o'clock, so the primary activity of the day would be cleaning.

I had a mini bagel and an English muffin. I must improve my breakfasts, eat less bread. When school starts and everyone is out of the house I will try to become organized in this. Weighed 223 lbs today. This is the least I have been in several years, mostly I have run 225-230 and last year I got as high as 235 at which point I reluctantly gave up soda. Am now on a pendulum from 220-225. I am 6'3", so I would probably look good at 210 or 215, not that anyone cares, but it is a game.

Put away laundry, did dishes, cut grass, did various other tasks. Not really worth having people come to the house, requires hours and hours of preparation. Topics of thought included wondering why so many hip-pish, modern educated people like Nate Silver--his analyses strike me as soulless and not very interesting--topics for blog posts, trying to determine if I held actual opinions about anything, or if I had been reduced to mere feeling, the usual thoughts about whether I could ever have been a professional/had the potential to have a lot of money doing anything. It seems less and less possible that I could have done it as the years go by, the knowledge and development required seem to have to be poured into the brain in its formative stages.

The guests arrived. I was unshowered and dirty, excused myself. Had a roast beef, swiss cheese and mayonnaise sandwich on a bulky roll, and a glass of orange juice. No mail came. Took daughter up to play in hot attic. Looked around at neglected objects, thought of taking pictures and making a facebook album about them.

Went to work. For dinner had lemon haddock and spinach, with a cup of Buffalo chicken soup, from which I had to extract at least 15 carrots. Work was dull, and my brain largely rotted. Did manage to read 23 pages of Emerson's Journals in slow moments. Enjoying better than other Emerson I have read, though the sense that any of it is meaningful is intermittent, as is the case with most of life (the format did inspire this post though). Wrote this post. Going to store to buy milk, then home. May watch last 45 minutes of a film and read a little before bed. Probably more of the same tomorrow, though I need a haircut.

Some Very Generic Pictures of What I Did This Summer

Putting pictures up is really too much work at times, at least when you have to do it at 1 a.m. Hardly any of them ever turn out to be much good, and I can't even find half of the sets I am looking for right now. But I am too far gone into the process to shut it down and too tired and hurried to find the rest, so I will put up a characteristically half-buttocked post.

I was on vacation for much of the last 3 weeks. I was off for twelve days, then had 3 days of work, and then was off another 5. I liked this arrangement, though I only was able to get it this year due to a fluke which required me to rearrange my original vacation schedule, and I probably would not be able to get it if I asked for it straightaway. This is the way the world works. We didn't take a big trip this year, but we did go away for a couple of overnight stays in standard tourist hotels, and we went to Vermont for a few days and  took some other day trips. Some of the day trips were literary related, and I put some of those pictures up on my even more rarely updated and lightly read (if one can imagine such a thing) Vacation blog.

I have gone to Maine four different times so far this summer. The first was for my class reunion back in June, which I wrote about a few posts back. On the second occasion we went to Wells Beach to visit some relatives who go there every summer and stay in an RV park, though they are probably the most affluent people in the family, and could go to Paris and put up at the George V Hotel for a month if they wanted to.

1. Running Around the IV Park. The place is popular with French Canadians, who are a big presence in many of the less-celebrated Maine coastal towns.

2. Wells Beach in the Evening. I was going for the moon here. There is no excuse for shoddy photography, but do bear in mind that I am often trying to shoot pictures at the same time that I am keeping an eye on numerous little children who are running around in all directions, and of course getting them to hold still, or even remain in the frame for a picture is practically impossible.

3. Ice Cream at High Tide. This is actually the head of a staircase leading down to the beach. At this time there was no beach, and the water was crashing nearly halfway up the steps.

The Wells trip was on the Sunday before my actual vacation started. When that came we went to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park for a couple of days. Even though I lived in Maine for several years, and have lived in northern New England almost half my life now, this was the first time I had ever been there. It's the sort of place I should have been going to for a weekend every year, or at least every other year. It seems to have a most salutary effect on one's state of mind, at least such a mind as is in the state to which mine has diminished. The town of Bar Harbor is so sugary as to be in danger of inducing mental toothache. At night especially, when it is lit up, it looks like a 1940s movie set of the perfect American town that supposedly never existed. On the whole the contrast of the class of tourist at Bar Harbor/Acadia to the class of tourist at Gatlinburg/Smoky Mountains National Park--which I also enjoy visiting, and am surprised more people from the northeast never bother to venture down to see, I should add--is quite remarkable. On one of the hikes in Acadia I was in the proximity of a late 20ish couple for about 20 minutes whose conversation the entire time concerned gourmet cheeses. There were a large number of obviously gay men in town, which is decidedly not the case in Gatlinburg, and a substantial portion of the tourists, even those wearing t-shirts and shorts and other casual vacation-wear, gave off an air of being expensively dressed and educated.

4. This is Along one of the Trails up Cadillac Mountain in Acadia. The Acadia pictures are not very good, and I did not even remember to bring the camera with me when I went to town. There was a book shop there whose storefront and window display were of such calculated and effective tweeness that I can't help suspecting a line may have been crossed.

This trail was the hard trail by the way. There was no parking at the easy trail. The smaller children, and, on the last leg of the ascent, your author, were not able to maintain a uniform happiness throughout.

5. View From the Mountain. I believe down towards the town of Bar Harbor, and across to the mainland.

6. We Are Actually On the Wrong Path Here. We were trying to get to the famous Sand Beach here. We found it eventually. It was pouring rain at this point, and all through our time at the beach, and everybody was so soaked and grouchy that I thought we were going to have to give it up and go home. We were on a one way loop road around the park however, so we drove for a little bit, until we came to the next famous site, by which time it had miraculously stopped raining. So we decided to give the trip another chance.

7. I Think This is Called Otter Point. This is all on the main road/itinerary of the park. Since it was our first time here, and we had all the children with us, I figured it was best to stick to the established highlights. This place we actually had to ourself for a good half-hour. If we are able to return regularly I have no doubt we will make it out to some of the islands and other remote parts of the park that have no restaurants or other tourist services and that hardly anyone therefore goes to.

8. My Daughter at Otter Point. To be honest she looks rather strange here. The color is hyperbright. 

9. This is on a hike near Manchester, Vermont. We did this in the afternoon after the picnic lunch in Stratton that you can see on the other site. It was a typically beautiful Vermont hike.

10. The View From Prospect Rock, Which is the Object of the Hike. The mountain in the distance is Mt Equinox, which is a mountain of some renown that we were at the top of a few years ago. There is an abandonded hotel on its summit that you can see from the ridge, though I am not sure if you can make it out in the picture. Evidently staying in mountaintop hotels has gone out of fashion, as there are several of them that are abandoned or altered into something else around the region, including atop Mt Washington.

11. Oldest Son at Prospect Rock, a Strong and Sturdy 11 year old. Certainly when compared with myself at the same age.

There are still other days to be relived. I will probably find those and put them on at some point.

Sad Songs I Am Listening To, Many By People Who Are Now Dead

I had forgotten about this guy...

This particular style of singing, with its exaggerated, but still in a certain sense somewhat earnest, affectation of passion and a soul in torment, has never really been imitated satisfyingly in the English-speaking world. I guess some soul singers go for this effect, but I generally don't like them. I suspect this is because I feel like everything about their performance is ultimately about them more than about me, which puts a different spin on the affectations. Julio Iglesias, who has sold 38 million records, slept with 5,000 women, driven the best cars and drunk the best wine and hung out in the most beautiful places in the world for the last 50 years and seemingly enjoyed every second of it, is decidedly not singing for or about himself, at least the way other people do. His job, for which he has a great instinct, is to use his talents and gifts for showmanship to express the passion and torment of others in a more pleasing and entertaining way than they are able to do themselves. Highly gifted entertainers grasp this without needing it spelled out for them.  

I generally find this group annoying, but I heard this song somewhere the other day--already I can't remember where--and it struck me as poignant. So I've been listening to it for the last few days. I still don't like any of the other Talking Heads songs that I know. This band was wildly important to a lot of people just a few years older than I am; by the time I was at the age where one is deeply susceptible to pop music whatever emotional power they exerted over young people seemed to be in decline, and it never made much of an impression on me. But for a brief time they really got to people.

I have to admit I think this is a great song. In fact I like quite a bit of Zooey Deschanel and the rest of her group's pop music. I did not want to succumb to the too-obvious charms of this woman, and for a long while I did not allow myself to do so, but she kept after me with a persistence that I found both touching and admirable; indeed I was almost flattered by her seemingly perverse determination to please me and bring happiness into my life, on which point most female celebrities of the moment doggedly maintain they will never stoop to do if they can help it.

While we are on the subject of performer's instincts as far as how to approach/deliver a song and present oneself as a vessel through which to articulate a more palatable version of your audience's sense of the world, hers are as good certainly as any mainstream pop star currently out there that I am aware of. She is filling a (presumably lucrative) niche in the popular culture that seems rather obviously to have been screaming to be filled, but that no one else seems to have had the right combination of instinct, personality, type of brain development (I suspect she is pretty smart by most standards outside the realms of professional mathematics and science) and connection to this particular corner of the culture to fill.

I haven't gone back to the 40s for a while. This first song was referenced in a short story I read ("Lost in the Funhouse" by John Barth--the mother sings a verse from it while they are in the car on the way to Ocean City on Independence day in 1943). The other selections here kind of followed from that. I like the voice of this singer Kitty Kallen here, whom I had never heard of previously. She was a serious looker too.

Going to have a bit of a Harry James fest here. This is another one that always puts me in a positive mood, no matter how far down into the existential abyss I am gazing. Terrific song.

Kitty Kallen again on another old favorite. Girl could sing.

This is a singer named Francey Lane, whom I find to have an interesting face, in that it looks to me more like the face of a woman born in the 1960s or 1970s than the 1920s. This clip (in which she sings while ironing dollar bills) is from a 1951 TV and is only one of two videos of her I have found, and the only one in which she sings.




The only other Francey Lane video I can find, evidently from the same TV program as she is wearing the same dress and interesting headpiece as in the other one. Here she is merely serenaded with a classic by future talk show host and game show producer Merv Griffin, who like so many of us got our start in the business as a singer.

Biographical information on Francey Lane is scant on the internet, but it seems she had something of a career on the fringes of real mainstream success, without ever really breaking through. Her name turns up in various projects or promotions dating from 1945 to 1956. Besides this TV appearance in '51 she appeared in two short movies as a singer ('45 & '52). She is probably most identified as a singer with the Johnny Long Orchestra. They put out a release of "Winter Wonderland" (1947) and an album of "College Favorites" (undated), at least. In 1949 Francey Lane had a hit song called "Easy Does It" and appeared on the cover of TV Guide. There are at least four different "busty" vintage promotional photos of her available for sale online. By 1953 she was posing with her arms and shoulders and neck covered up and was apparently heading her own orchestra. By '56 she was apparently still hanging on in the game (and was back to posing in strapless gowns) but her hair has been cut and the smile is forced and it isn't the same old Francey Lane I have taken such an interest in.

1946-1949 Movie Post

I have been on vacation, hence the delay in posts. For any secret regular readers out there.

On the Town (1949)

This movie is quite silly, it doesn't have any songs that I am particularly taken with, one of its three leading women is decidedly ugly, and one of its other leading women has something too all around weird about her for me to warm up to. One will imagine that I am now going to say that I like it anyway, but that would not be wholly accurate; however, I do like certain things about it, and it was painless to get through, though it should not have been. In addition to all of its bombast and effort, it had a lot of that real, unconscious postwar optimism that is so infectious, and the like of which someone my age has never known. There is the sense, for example, that New York really does in a way belong to all of "us" who have any feeling for it, and that when we are young and energetic it is reasonable that we should go there, for a time at least, and test ourselves and engage with the life to be found there, and that if we do this, a more interesting version of our lives should happen for us, even if at 27 or 32 or 38 or 45 our time and usefulness in the life of the city has run its course and we have to vacate the premises to let a new wave of energetic people take our places. Like many musicals from this period, the movie allows its audience the conceit that life, or at least life as presented in it, is full of fun, romance, new experiences, new and like-minded compadres and all of the other things ordinary boring people daydream about endlessly but rarely get to experience. There are variations on this attitude throughout the history of Hollywood especially, but they were able to most consistently, organically, and spontaneously achieve it in the way I am thinking of in those first few years after the war.  

Frank Sinatra's role in this is odd to the modern viewer in that he had not quite become Himself yet. He's surprisingly small and scrawny, and is not the commanding superman-type presence among the other actors that one would expect from his later iconic status and "My Way" reputation. He is pretty much one of the group here. His character is also the least worldly among the males, and he ends up with the least attractive, indeed nearly mannish woman, which is also a departure from type.

I watched this the night before Esther Williams died, which was a coincidence, since Gene Kelly, Sinatra, and Betty Garrett, who are all in this, had teamed up with her the previous year in Take Me Out to the Ball Game. The double play combination of "O'Brien to Ryan to Goldberg" in that film was a reminder of those heady days, so short-lived that maybe they only ever existed in my imagination, when it looked like Catholics, especially the Irish and Italians, and Jews might be teaming up for some desirable cultural or social purpose, before the American Catholic population fell apart as a substantial force in society starting in the late 1960s.

For some reason I had not known this movie was in color before this viewing. I had always imagined it in black and white.

Oliver Twist (1948)

Solid British version, directed by David Lean, who is widely regarded, on the strength of this and 1946's Great Expectations, which I have not seen, to be the best cinematic interpreter of Dickens. The movie is handsome, well-acted, and the story well-told. Only one time did I notice I missed one of the numbers from the later musical version of the story:

The depiction of Fagin, played by Alec Guinness, has been controversial for being obnoxiously anti-semitic. Guinness wears an enormous hook nose, which has been usually explained away by observing that this is how the character was drawn in the famous illustrations that accompanied the book, which the filmmakers tried to adhere to as closely as possible. Guinness also plays the character with a lisp, which I am pretty certain is manifest through the dialogue in the story, which anyway does not in itself suggest Jewishness to me. I suppose there are other negative Jewish stereotypes written into the character, though if you were not already aware of them I doubt you would make the connection from what is given in the movie. The dialogue and idiosyncracies of the character are overall extremely well-written and well-acted. I cannot really convince myself that this is not in general true. Fagin, at least as played by Alec Guinness, who really demonstrates considerable acting talent here, is the most vivid, verbally interesting character in the film. Do the stereotyping and prejudice detract tremendously from the story? One may feel it should, but that is not the same thing as feeling that it does. Most characters in Dickens are caricatures of one kind or another with one dominant aspect that is developed to a greater degree. Fagin in this sense probably is more roundly developed than the run of characters in Dickens's books, though the author committed a major faux pas by investing the caricature here with insulting traits associated negatively with ethnicity rather than personal qualities or education level or class origins, which modern people are generally more willing to tolerate (though many pure and dogged souls, God bless them, will not). This story does present particular problems for the person who would rather avoid these kinds of unarguable arguments because the character in question is a good and more than usually interesting literary or cinematic character, in the sense of what he says and does in driving the story along.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

Much-praised film noir that I had some anticipation to see because in addition of course to being a fanatic of this period I did not know what to expect at all. It wasn't bad but it didn't seem to me to be quite the classic it is made out to be either. As in a lot of these noirs, the premise is rather clumsy, and the film is dependent on other elements--atmosphere, dialogue, compelling performers/characters--to have anything to say to me, and none of that really happened here, apart from the scene where Lana Turner's lawyer gets her to spill out and sign the confession that turns out not to be official so that she would get it out of her system--that part was good. Of the two leads, Lana Turner was considered one of the absolute bombshells of the age at the time, and she is what she is, but I cannot say I find her all that fascinating; and the male star, John Garfield, I have to admit I had never heard of before this movie, though there was a short documentary about him included in the extras that made the claim that he was a huge star for about ten years from the late 30s to the late 40s, before getting called before the un-American activities committee and not naming names, shortly after which (1952) he died of a heart attack at the age of 39. He sounds like an interesting guy--he was an important stage actor in one of the major movements of the serious theater during the 30s--but I can't say he drew me in to him in this movie either.

The book on which the movie was based was written by James M Cain, who was also the author of Double Indemnity. Cain's father was on the faculty of St John's College Annapolis, and the author was born in the Paca-Carroll house on campus where the family lived. This building is now a dormitory, though so renovated as to be quite modern on the inside.     

Departures, The Yakuza, Celine and Julie Go Boating

I would expect an even slower rate of posting in the future. They seem to have finally around to jamming up my ability to access this site at work, and it is virtually impossible for me to get anything done at home, since I have to share one computer with 4 and a half other people now, all of whom have work to do on it that rates a higher priority than my blog. I would just shut it down, but I find it useful for recording and dating some of my scattershot hobbies. My attempts at more expository pieces have never really worked here anyway.

I am getting behind on movies again, with six to comment on, so I will do two sets of three in this and a following post, one modern trio and one ancient, if we draw an artificial line demarking (demarcating--I checked my dictionary and they are variations on the same word) the modern period as beginning around 1970, though really I would put it more around 1980, with the 1965-1980 years serving as a kind of cinematic middle age.

Departures (2009) 

This was another Roger Ebert selection, though it did win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in its year, which in this era indicates that at least it probably won't be egregiously offensive to middlebrow taste. It's Japanese, and like almost all modern Japanese movies that achieve arthouse distribution in this country, it is about death. Indeed, the main character is a failed and disillusioned cellist who becomes an undertaker, which, like so many professions in Japan, is conscious of and honors its artist aspects. The popular impression, aided by films like this, is that the Japanese nation, symbolized by its ongoing anemic birthrate, declining population, workers who collapse and die on the factory floor of convulsions brought on by extreme stress, and growing numbers of adult men who refuse to come out of their childhood bedrooms, has largely lost its will to live in the modern world. An exorbitant number of the corpses represented in this movie were of attractive young people, women in particular. The protagonist is married, and cutely, as it were--being cute, if you're a woman, is I think trendier is Asia, particularly in the advanced economies, than it is among us--but his wife is not really sold on his new career and their new life out in the provinces, the husband decamping back to his mother's house (she is dead) from one of the big cities, probably Tokyo, after the collapse of his music career. I had the sense at the end that she was supposed to have gotten pregnant, but I don't really remember now. It was not that explicit, unless I nodded off for a moment. It is a quiet, low energy sort of movie. It is probably worth seeing if you are young, have a lot of time, and need to get a general sense of what Japan looks like and the kinds of things is expending its creative energies on. If you are older, and time is more precious, I think it can be safely skipped.

There was a setup in the plot for a cathartic emotional payoff, but this was relied on too much, considering that nowhere near enough had been invested in the setup. It did not come through.

The Yakuza (1975)

I didn't know what a yakuza was until a month ago, and now I feel like I see a news story on them every other day. They're Japanese gangsters, but they have a deep and complex code of honor that among other things requires you to cut your little finger off and offer it to someone if you have profound obligations to them that you cannot otherwise adequately repay. The movie is a Hollywood picture, directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Mitchum. It was an ambitious undertaking, but it did not really work for me. It is, as even Sydney Pollack admitted in the commentary, very much an artifact of its time, and, I would add, not in the best sense. Its predominant atmosphere was similar to that of the TV show Hawaii Five-O, and overall it very much plays up the whole 1970s idea of the Pacific Rim as a kind of futuristic vision, in which the ancient cultures of the Orient take on a remarkably Hawaiian and Southern Californian influenced character. The action scenes seem to me mostly ludicrous. Robert Mitchum is believable as a certain kind of tough guy in a conventional social or business situation, but coming into Japan as essentially a solo foreigner and taking out dozens of thoroughly trained and hardened native gangsters, particularly as a 50-something, is asking too much of one's credulity.

I posted this on Facebook already, but it amused me, so I will put it up again here. My wife's capsule review of this film was "Let's have some tea and cut our fingers off." That really about sums it up.

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

1974. What a year! My memories of it are naturally scant, and either elusive or melancholy. However, it is the first year I have any memory of at all, and I like to imagine that it was in this year that my intelligence peaked, at least comparative to other people my age, mainly because it appears to have have declined by this measurement almost every year since. In any case, my personal future looked more rosy and brilliant in 1974 than it ever managed to afterwards. So, after a fashion, so poignantly illustrated in this film, did modern France's. This is the backdrop against which I am going to attempt this review.

Celine and Julie Vont en Bateau, which, while interesting in some ways, is also three plus hours of the kind of artsy self-indulgence that only the French have truly mastered, and probably only truly appreciate, is regarded as the most accessible film, certainly from the earlier part of his career, of the director Jacques Rivette, who is usually identified as part of the Nouvelle Vague, but in many ways remained always too new to ever get pinned down enough and made a symbol of anything intelligible by some mass of cinemagoers, as occurred with Truffaut and even Godard, to a certain extent. His masterpiece, according to many, is the 1971 epic Out 1, which has only been screened one time in its original cut, ostensibly because it 12 hours and 40 minutes long (there is a 4 and a half hour version that is also rare, though it has been seen by a few more people than its parent, and is said to have a cult following). The plot of Celine and Julie is supposedly based on a couple of Henry James short stories. I don't know whether "The Turn of the Screw" is one of them or not, or whether it is even considered a short story; I suppose the movie had some elements that were reminiscent of that tale. It also would not surprise me if there were 20 Henry James short stories that were superficially alike. There are also acknowledged references to Alice in Wonderland, Proust, and Jean Cocteau. The Alice ones are not too obscure, and the influence of or obvious similarity to aspects of Proust did flicker through my mind, though I did not think much of it. The affinities with Cocteau I tended to see more as generic obscure French artist poses that are stock in trade in that country, without making a specific connection to Cocteau.

This is the 3rd highly acclaimed French movie in the 1974-1983 period I have seen in the last year that is not available on DVD in America (joining Madame Rosa and Entre Nous). Apparently from the commercial standpoint we have given up on this epoch of film history. Usually when this happens I will buy an old VHS tape on the internet but the tapes for Celine and Julie started at $45 so I had to watch it on Youtube, where somebody had fortunately uploaded a watchable version of whole movie, and with English subtitles too.

As I noted in the Madame Rosa note, people in 1970s French movies look fantastically healthy and almost absurdly natural, despite all of their seeming pretension and affectation in the realm of the intellect. The actresses who play Celine and Julie (Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier) do not seem like any spectacular beauties at first glance, especially with their ludicrous 1970s clothes and untamed hairstyles, but the effect of bodily health combined with mental engagement with the physical, living world around them creates a sense of vitality that is striking and impossible to ignore, especially Celine/Berto, who seems to me to have a glorious and almost perfectly realized beauty. There was another woman in the Henry James/Proust-like country house that they are transported to when they eat the candies that was quite extraordinarily beautiful as well--the blonde one. Of course you have a lot of leisure to examine the skin and figures and facial expressions of the actresses and actors in this movie because your attention is not diverted by an overabundance of action or plot, and there is a lot of repetition.

While the film itself is antagonistic to any emotion of sentimentality or even meaningful specificity of time and place apart from the realm of pure art and mind, its presentation, almost matter-of-fact for our purposes, of the Paris of 1974, its streets ruled by clanking Citroens and Peugeots, its sleepy little shops and languid afternoons in leafy parks and the library with its open windows on a hot day and wooden shelves and wooden files and wooden tables and rubber stamps and its garish and sweaty bohemian apartment with a panoramic view of the city and its (compared to today) scant evidence of oppressive Anglo-American and international capitalist infiltration of the culture, is among the main charms of the movie for me, especially as so much of the background impressionism in it hits at the exact points that have most strikingly been lost or are fading rapidly, but were especially central to a certain life and myth of Paris, particularly that I bought into. The whole '65-'75 period, which I tended to think of as fairly recent up until the last five years or so, when finally the accumulation of change made it suddenly appear to be quite long ago; and 1974 has never seemed as long ago as it does in this.  

Tower of London 2

Hopefully this will go quickly, as I am not as fired up to write about this book as I was last week. On the other hand, I have been having a lot of problems with computer 'errors' and so on in the field where you write these posts which is hindering my effort so far this week.

I am going to skip over a bunch of passages regarding architectural details of the tower, the inscriptions left on the walls by numerous of its doomed inmates, including the Duke of Northumberland, many of which can still be seen today, and numerous poignant thoughts that might effect a sensitive tourist while wondering the grounds, particularly at certain times of the day. I found them to be not unenjoyable, however.

On Lady Jane, preparing her soul for her imminent execution: "...anxious as she was to obtain the queen's forgiveness, she could not purchase it at the price of her salvation...", i.e., by renouncing Anglicanism for Rome. Not that it does not make perfect sense that the Church of England is the surest way to the Christian Heaven while there is no greater abomination to the same than professing adherence to the teaching of Catholicism.

p. 208, a prisoner thrown into a pit is devoured by rats in an especially gruesome scene. When I was in New York City in April, my unfortunate wife had a large and muscular rat brush against her leg as it rushed past while sitting on a bench in Central Park. It was, I gather, a feeling equally gross and disturbing, and I think it put a damper on the trip for her.

"Ever brooding upon the atrocious action he was about to commit, he succeeded in persuading himself, by that pernicious process of reasoning by which religious enthusiasts so often delude themselves into the commission of crime, that it was not only justifiable, but meritorious." Refers to a character who attempted to assassinate Queen Mary.

While Ainsworth was, at least as far as the most serious people are concerned, a failed author, he seems not to have been a failed person. The persona and mind that he reveals in his book are, if not unique or great, at least seem capable and worthy of participating in and appreciating many of the better aspects of human existence. Most people cannot even get to that level.

"In swordsmanship, horsemanship, and all matters connected with the business of war, he was, as may be supposed, eminently skilful." Sir Thomas Wyat of Allingham Castle in Kent, the son of the poet. A man worthy of emulation, by all appearances.

p. 282 "But that which imparted the almost angelic character to her features, was their expression of perfect purity, unalloyed by any taint of earth. What with her devotional observances, and her intellectual employments, the mind had completely asserted its dominion over the body; and her seraphic looks and beauty almost realised the Catholic notion of a saint." I was momentarily carried away with emotion, and scribbled in the margin: "Oh Lady Jane! How we wanted you at SJC and shall never get your like!"

The manipulations of manifold insidious Catholics were skillfully written, enough to make me hate them too.

"I know Elizabeth too well to believe for a moment she could abandon her faith". Lady Jane is beginning to resemble my wife in the extent of her dedication to defying popery.

"'My project once carried, and Philip united to Mary,' he muttered to himself, 'we will speedily cudgel these stubborn English bull-dogs into obedience.'" Sinister Renard!

The importance of romance in political affairs during aristocratic eras is beneficial for artistic plotting and themes.

On a related note, I always love it in this class of novels when people step out from behind the arras after eavesdropping on a secret and vital conversation. This trick is used on several occasions in this book. It provides some kind of dopamine rush, replenishing our sense that we are engaging with the mainstream of old European literature and history, which we like, and I suspect the author had enough sense to know this. This is why it is for me not bad to read such books as this on occasion.

"Her courage never for one instant forsook her, and her spirit and resolution sustained the wavering minds of her adherents." Queen Mary. This guy does like to suck up to royalty.

The scene where the giants/rebels are throwing their enemies off bridges and parading around with heads on stakes was rather gruesome.

It is all fun because we are so knowing where religion is concerned. And I am in that knowing group, whether I really want to be or not.

I'll have to check out making a visit to Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk, which received an odd personal plug in the middle of the headlong rush to the climax ("...still in the possession of his lineal descendant, the present Sir Henry Bedingfield, and one of the noblest mansions in the county"). I wonder what homage Ainsworth owed Sir Henry.

Oxburgh Hall is currently a National Trust affiliated property. 

"Renard followed, and beheld the fugitive speeding across the nave of Saint John's Chapel, and without regarding Wolfytt, who was lying on the floor, bleeding profusely, he continued the pursuit." Renard himself had set Wolfytt on the fugitive. Needless to say, Renard is the best character in the book.

"Here, besides the ill-fated and illustrious lady whose history forms the subject of this chronicle, was confined the lovely and, perhaps guiltless, Anne Boleyn." I like the "perhaps".

"'Do not question the purposes of the Unquestionable, Angela,' replied Jane, severely." I have to admit I have never liked this literary custom of chastising people who express sorrow over your imminent death for ostensibly religious reasons, especially when the person you are addressing is obviously simple-minded. If you are surrounded by your supposed philosopher friends, whom you have put to many rigorous tests for the purpose of rooting out mush-headedness over the years, a la Socrates, maybe that is a different story.

Though a less than stellar novel, it is still one of those books where it was a little sad when the characters' stories began to be wrapped up. Every somewhat personable book finished past a certain age--around 33 in my case--takes on the character of a bunch of mini-deaths, especially when you know you will never read them again. Of course this relates to all manner of other things, cities, restaurants, activities, as one's experiences with them clearly begin to wind down or perhaps are a one time occasion. I did not feel this way about things when I was in my 20s. I knew when I graduated from a school or had to return home from overseas that a certain part of my life was coming to an end, but I expected that other things equally important, and in which I would be more important than I had been theretofore, still awaited me. Needless to say I do not feel this anymore.

I end by giving you an excerpt from the charming song that the executioner sings:

"Queen Catherine Howard gave me a fee,--
A chain of gold--to die easily:
And her costly present she did not rue,
For I touched her head, and away it flew!"

Even though I have been to London 3 times in my hilarious life, I have never visited the Tower, which has a fearsome reputation for being expensive, crowded, and woefully uncool to boot, but I think if I ever go back I will have to confess my colossal unimaginativeness to the world and go see it.

Notes on the Class of '88

or cerchi se io

I went to my 25th high school reunion last weekend. Here are my impressions:

The self-consciously "smart" people--I would loosely define this group as the people who cared and thought very much about which good college they were going to go to, or in a few rebellious cases, which good college they were assiduously not going to go to--were largely absent. I would probably not have been considered to belong to this group of people, and certainly would not be now, but I would have liked to have seen more of them make an appearance. Those who had been most notable in their school days for partying constituted the dominant group in attendance. Most of these seem to still live in the area. I don't have a great rapport with most of the party people either. I was exceptionally immature in high school. Most of my real male friends were a year behind me; I suspect that even now it would be considered bad form for me to crash that reunion however. I did not have any real girl friends in school, but if any exist who would remember me with any degree of friendly feeling, they would have been two years behind me at least. This is not unusual, I don't think, and as such it shouldn't really matter that the girls exactly your own age never liked you that much; but somehow it always does.

The class of '88 missed being part of the Tattoo Generation, if not by much. I did not see a single person who was sporting any visible ink, which is unusual in any social setting nowadays, and there were certainly those present who if they were ten, or even five years younger, you would scarcely be able to see much of their actual flesh by this point. If I remember accurately the trend of widespread tattooing really got rolling sometime around '96 or '97, which indicates to me that if you are able to make it to twenty-five without succumbing to this ridiculous temptation, you are not going to be easily seduced by it thereafter, even if you are an incurable knucklehead. Perhaps future generations will even consider us early 70s birth cohorts to be possessed of a certain old school elegance, as we will apparently be the last group of people for a long time to enter old age on the whole tattoo-free.

People born in the early '70s are also the last group to get through a lot of their formative experiences--school, college, early dating, early jobs, living abroad or otherwise away from home--before the technology explosion which has so altered people's relationships to information. Although being exclusively with people around your own age is common during one's school years and I suppose again in the nursing home, when you are 43 it is unusual to be somewhere where everyone else is exactly the same age as you. So while of course people had their i-phones with them and a few people pulled them out from time to time--mostly to read messages from their children--they were not ubiquitous, nor did they interfere with conversation, that I noticed. I even found another guy, indeed someone who had been a pretty good friend of mine, who hated phones and refused to carry one, which has not happened to me in a long time.

As I have very little to say for myself I appear to not be very social at these kinds of events and periodically have to go and sit down or step out on the balcony alone for a few minutes. Some people get the impression I am not having a good time; if asked I will usually say that if I really didn't have a good time at these reunions, I wouldn't come to them, though that is not exactly true. Other people I sense are annoyed or even, if not 'uncomfortable' (a loaded and increasingly unsatisfactory word nowadays), discomfited by my being there without any identifiable role or place in the proceedings. I do feel more and more after each of these reunions that maybe I shouldn't go anymore, no one really knows me, I don't look forward to having to try to explain who I am and what I have done with my life, and every brief exchange is a bit of an ordeal. On the other hand, I still want to keep up some connection with the old town and the school--I have not, to my mind, so far transcended them that the connection has ceased to be meaningful--and I also think that, if I am 43 and am uncomfortable telling other people what I am or do, maybe I need to go through more such ordeals, then perhaps sometime  something might happen that motivates to do something about this problem.

The most unpleasant conversation I had was with a woman to whom I had never spoken before. I think she was one of those discomfited by my general appearance of purposelessness and took it upon herself to question me about it. It went badly. There is a certain level of condescension with regard to social status, personality, intellect, general adult substantiality, etc, that I have grown accustomed to and can usually either maneuver around or at least dig in and hold fast at a certain point in a short conversation, but I was wholly unsuccessful in pressing any case for myself as a man possessed of even a modicum of human worth. Everything I tried to say to her questions about my life, she would not accept, but would want to know more precisely what I meant, and would proceed to call it what it really was. And of course all of her answers to my questions in return were unassailable, in part because I chose not to assail them, but really I could see no way to do so that would be seen as acceptable. I am sure she was a fairly miserable person, but it was quite established that I was nobody to suggest such a thing. It would have looked like an aggression on my part against a person to whom I must be crushed by a massive sense of inferiority. So I was in a bind. Because I said I worked in a hospital she kept threatening--under a veneer of politeness, of course--to introduce me to her husband, who was an attorney who specialized in hospitals so that we could talk together about the changes, the doom, as it were, that were coming to the industry--this really was vicious--but fortuitously we were interrupted at this point by the arrival of one of her old friends and I was able to slip away.

At that point, even though I had told myself beforehand that I was going to endure, as a kind of penance, whatever judgements, spoken or unspoken, were cast upon me, I did think for a few minutes that perhaps I really did have no business there, that my presence was offensive to people, and that I ought to go back to my hotel and call it a night. However, I decided to go back in the direction of the bar, which is so often curative in itself in such circumstances, and a couple of hail fellow well met types with whom I had drunk on a few occasions in the past assailed me, and I was brought back into the fold of conviviality once more.

You tend to talk to the most successful people at these kinds of things earlier in the evening, for a variety of reasons, one being that most successful people are by nature gregarious, and also because the obvious conversation opener at a class reunion is one's career, and people who have good ones are naturally more eager to have that conversation than those who don't. One such person had made a lot of money off four patents he had filed and was now involved in redeveloping old warehouses. He told us that "entrepreneurship is the number one way to achieve financial security; and number two is so far behind it doesn't even matter". I thought it was a good quote.

Later on I talked to a guy who was the manager of a strip club. I was a little taken aback, but it was a public school, so why shouldn't there be a strip club manager in the class? It isn't a glamorous life. Twelve hour workdays. The base pay is criminally low though I guess they make up for it with a cut of the tips ('I have strippers paying me. Am I a genius or what?') I had always thought of strip clubs from the purely business standpoint as quaint, fly-by-night deals, probably connected with the mob in waterfront cities, but for the most part, locally owned. The one this guy worked at was owned by a corporation based somewhere in the midwest. The person over him was a less than scintillatingly talented relative of the CEO's who, it was surmised, had been sent to Maine as a means of getting rid of him. I have heard this theory expressed before by people in this godforsaken part of the country, with regard to an incompetent but well-connected boss who has been shipped in from Dallas and has no understanding of our peculiar market and its conditions (i.e., raising prices in September). I wonder if there isn't something to it.

I had planned to leave as early as possible the next day because my two older sons were going away to camp, but I had left my car in a garage that, I had neglected to note, was locked up until noon on Sunday. So having a few hours to kick around Sunday morning and having skipped the breakfast at the hotel, I decided to have brunch at one of the numerous hipsterish eateries that have sprung up in town since my era. Having had a chance to survey a bunch of them on the mile walk from my hotel to the garage, I went back to the one which had had the most attractive liberals arts type girls sitting outside; though the original girls had gone by the time I got back, their replacements were no less pretty or liberal artsy. I don't where these girls/women came from, or why they decided to come to Portland. It is a well-situated town with lots of beautiful old buildings, but it had been that way for 200 hundred years without being known to attract good-looking and reasonably refined young women in any sizable numbers. Certainly it was not the case when I lived there. Anyway, despite all the lovelies sitting in the outdoor cafe area, it was 85 degrees and I was hung over, so I opted for an inside seat. At first I couldn't see anything but a bunch of low tables surrounded by sofas and I had a slight moment of panic; but they had a few tables set off in the corner for the odd traditionalist, and I gladly accepted one of those. I had a good view of the room, with its red and green crushed velvetlike sofas, its ceiling fans, its plant boxes and artwork and the front opened up to the street, its collection of eclectic dishes and glassware. I rarely have the opportunity to go to such places, and it seemed to me both gorgeous and decadent and even mildly sinister. It was full of the kinds of people I should have been friends with, as well as reminiscent of the blithe summer of 1914 or even the British Raj. I couldn't help thinking that surely in a few years something is going to happen that is going to sweep all of this away (What will happen to all of the pretty liberal arts girls?). Because I was hungover I was craving an ice cold Coke, but you can't get one of those at a place like this, so I had a mimosa and about four glasses of water. Thankfully they had a old-fashioned eggs, hash browns and english muffin plate on the menu. As the place reminded me of the Raj so much, I had to order my eggs poached, because that's how the British in India always have their eggs in the old novels, or at least that was my memory. The meal was a little heavy, given the heat of the day and my overall condition, but I think it was pretty good.

Here is the place, the Local 188 on Congress Street, across the street from the Longfellow statue.