(Not) Another Trip Down Memory Lane

A few tunes to tide over my own impatience and inner fan till later in the week.

What am I listening to these days to accompany my wallowing in self-pity various energetic initiatives rooted in my manifold passions that promise to further increase the success and influence I already enjoy among my fellow men? I'm so behind the times even my lapses into melancholy have to look back to 1961 to find expression:

While we are still back in the 60s, how did I miss this all these years? Even with the whole history of music and entertainment just about sitting in a box on your desk, it is difficult to stumble upon the kinds of things you want if you haven't heard of them before or have forgotten about them. There is a large amount of randomness in this way, and increasingly time spent searching for something entertaining or otherwise of pleasing interest is squandered as reliably as panning for treasure on the beach. But then occasionally you find something that for whatever reason you like. In the world that I was born into--mid-Atlantic, urban, ethnic Catholic, in my case straddling the line between the traditional working class and the bottom rungs of the professional classes--approximations of these chicks would have been my dating pool. I doubt I would have done very well even if this demographic had not been exploded and such husks of it as survived fractions of the social pools that seemed to exist prior to my being born. I don't want to give the impression that I want to force anyone to return to the kind of social universe where most people had to associate exclusively with their 'own kind'. But as someone who has not interacted socially with any group of which I feel a part in many, many years, I am fascinated that I might ever have been born into and naturally absorbed and integrated into one that was distinct and ready-made. This is probably not how it works, unless you are too stupid or devoid of personality to be of interest to anybody dynamic; but this is how it looked to me to work among my older Philadelphia relatives, though I never saw them enough to move easily in that society myself, for my father, his own relatively prestigious place in it secured, spent most of my childhood determined to avoid it and its rituals and institutions as much as he possibly could.

Speaking of dating pools...people from places like Texas sputter and guffaw and act incredulous when you try to explain this to them, but when you go to high school in a liberal-tinged city in New England, this is more or less what the attractive girls look like, and yes, you learn, or become acclimated to liking that look.

Back to the 60s, or maybe the 50s, though I think the early 60s. I've been getting a little more into Elvis lately. Not overboard, just a song here or there, especially some the ones that aren't totally played out. This apparently was an old song when he did it, with previous versions by Mahalia Jackson, among others. Mahalia Jackson's version is doubtless better, but having listened to it I think I'll need to work up to it, to whatever extent that is possible with a soul that is doggedly mediocre (at best). Right now I actually prefer Elvis's less soaring rendition.

I heard this song on the radio the other day. I had never had any idea what the title was or who the group was--they are like the 5th Dimension, but obviously they aren't--and the only lyrics I could decipher clearly enough to go with were "Can you dig it baby" which  did not seem to me enough to distinguish it in a search from a thousand other songs, but actually that phrase brings you right to this song, the title of which is 'Grazin' in the Grass' which anybody who listens to the song should be able to pick out as a major line, but somehow I was unable to nail this down.

As a mildly amusing sideline I'm trying to remember some of the most pretentious videos of the 80s. I'm pretty certain this one is going to be #1, even though my investigations have barely gotten under way.

This one is close for the opening sequence ('Au revoir, Terence...au revoir, Terence...au revoir, Terence') alone, though there is a touch of humorous flair in its outrageousness that redeems it a little. By the way, did you know that Terence Trent D'Arby is now known as Sananda Maitreya. Me neither. I don't see how the new name is an improvement on the old one, but then I wouldn't, would I? Joking aside, this guy had a pretty good look going on back in the day. This is what we had to compete against in the 80s. Everybody is a fat slob and/or a geek nowadays.

I'm just on a roll now. Let's take it back a little (because to me 1987 is practically current). Shep & the Limelights. Good song from 1961.

Doubtless right about now everybody is wondering, "Where are the Lennon Sisters?" Have no fear, I wouldn't leave them out. This festive clip from the occasion of the show's being on the road in Chicago is from '63, when Dianne was out on her 4-year motherhood-induced hiatus, but we still have Peggy at the top of her game. Of the four, she was probably the conventionally best-looking and most thoroughly feminine, the best singer, the nicest, and she even has the easiest and most athletic motion when tossing a fake snowball. In short, she was a really a catch.

I like these outfits (from '67) and Dianne looks extra great here. Peggy is lovely too, as always, though I believe she had just had a baby not long before. Hardcore 60s music fans will probably assert that they are butchering a classic song by a real artist. Their approach to mainstream 60s pop songs is definitely...different, but--they are so very, very good in their presentation and sticking to their established musical personality no matter what, and I am so fully taken in by them that I don't even get what the problem could be.

Hopefully I will have the next post up within a few days.
  

Wisconsin! Part One of That

After crossing the Mackinac Bridge we drove across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and entered Wisconsin at the town of Marinette, which is north of Green Bay. I read somewhere in the course of my researches for this trip that the rectangle between Duluth, the Twin Cities, Green Bay, The Mackinac Bridge and the Canadian Border is the largest swathe of territory in the lower 48 unsullied by any interstate highways. What I saw of Wisconsin, I liked. I could even imagine myself living there fairly contentedly if I had to, which is not a sense that I get most places. Culturally, the German/Scandinavian/Polish vibe is not alien to me, as my grandparents on my mothers' side were of this stock, and one thing I do lament about New England is the dearth of beer gardens and places to get schnitzel and sauerkraut and liverwurst and all of that sort of food which I like and used to eat quite a bit in my childhood in Pennsylvania. This is purely hypothetical of course, as I don't have the level of career that would justify such a dramatic move, besides which I doubt my wife and children would ever consent to go beyond the borders of New Hampshire or maybe Vermont, if indeed they would even consider leaving our house. I also self-identify as an East Coast person, the northeast in particular, as even though I moved around quite a bit in my youth I have always lived in the U.S. 1/I-95 Maine to D.C. corridor and I still respond to its particular rhythms and manners and such whenever I recognize them. But still, maybe growing up in Wisconsin would have been better for me...    

1. Entering Marinette, Through the Windshield. Taken by my oldest son. The camera was too slow to catch the "Welcome to Wisconsin" sign, but this makes something of a similar effect.

2. Gas Station, Waupun. About an hour east of Madison (?) Note the nearly treeless prairie in the background.

3. Along US 151 Going to Madison. The place definitely has a distinct look. I will add here, probably not for the last time as it was the dominant feature of our time there, that this trip took place in July in the midst of a drought and a brutal heat wave, and without air conditioning in my car, to boot. The temperature at the instant of all these outdoor pictures was no lower than 97, and usually was 98 or 99. It was grueling.

4. More Sample Roadside Views. The extreme heat and the length of this day's drive (approximately 9 hours) aside, the roads in Wisconsin are pleasant to drive on for the most part. This is a U.S. highway rather than an interstate, so there are occasional crossing roads, but it is four lanes and you still go fast, and it's old and more connected to the life around it than the interstates, although Wisconsin had some decent ones of those too: 39/90/94 from Wisconsin Dells to Madison was a nice drive. There are a lot of four lane high speed old U.S. highways, which tend to be scenic and enjoyable as long as the road isn't in too bad of shape, which is usually the case in Pennsylvania. Similar routes in the East would be U.S. 301 on the eastern shore of Maryland, and some of the old parkways in New York, like the Taconic State.

5. Daughter, Holding Up Well. For being trapped in the car all day in biblical heat (I actually don't remember how hot it was in the Bible, but I always imagine it as being often rather toasty).

6. I Couldn't Decide Between the Two Daughter Pictures, So I am Including Them Both.

7. The Parking Lot at Little Norway, Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. Odd as it may sound, Little Norway was the germ of the whole trip, being this year's lucky selection from the 1966 Encyclopedia's family vacation recommendations. This is a small sight that, going at as leisurely a pace as possible, stopping multiple times for drinks and ice creams, and scouring every display in the gift shop, it is hard to stretch into a three hour outing, so it sounds slightly ludicrous to say that this was the purpose of our going all the way to Wisconsin, and it wasn't. That said, once we were there I would have been disappointed if we hadn't gone to see it. Here is their website, by the way.

8. Getting in Touch Simultaneously With Our Feminine Side and Our Viking Side. In the gift shop. You get taken on a guided tour around the place, and as we had to wait for a half-hour or so for that and it was 99 degrees out, we hung out inside for a while. The tour was actually very enjoyable. The place is old-fashioned, privately owned and maintained by the same family since the 1920s. There are no iPad guides or any kind of computer things. An actual person, in our case a very pleasant young lady, who admitted however to being of German rather than Norwegian descent, takes you around to all the buildings and points out dusty artifacts and tells stories about them. I hadn't realized how much I had lost, and how I missed that sort of leisurely interaction with other humans.  

9. Boys on the Steps of the Stave Church. Built in Norway for the Norway Exhibition at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and acquired by the museum in the 30s. This is the only building that was brought to the museum from outside, and it is stuffed full of souvenirs and tools and weapons and furniture and things like that. The other buildings were built by the immigrant farmer who settled the land way back when as a shrine to the homeland.

10. View of the Upper Part of the Imitation Stave Church. All of the encyclopedia's recommendations for sights to see in Wisconsin are rather odd in their decided unspectacular-ness. For one thing there are only four places listed; most states have around six to eight, and the big western states with lots of national parks often have ten or more. Those four sights were Little Norway, Devil's Lake State Park near Baraboo, which we also went to, the world's largest grain elevator in Superior, which is way up at the northwestern tip of the state adjacent to Duluth, Minnesota--I am not sure if this site even exists anymore, as I was unable to find anything referring to it on the internet--and Wisconsin's first state capital historic site, which was about an hour west of where we stayed, getting near the Iowa border, and which looks like a pretty modest site as well, as it seems to consist of two old clapboard buildings sitting in the middle of the prairie. But as I say, we really did have a good time. My children are quite good about doing this retro kind of stuff to this point, they make an honest effort to enjoy themselves and get something out of it. Maybe this is because we don't hang out with other people, who are cool and involved the whole cool modern lifestyle, or maybe it is just our personalities, and we can't adapt to or thrive in our actual present environment. 

11. The Little Norway Trail. The layout is kind of reminiscent of a European park or campground, I think.

12. The Food Storehouse. You may note how the grass is all brown and dried up from the drought. If you go to their website in all the pictures the place is lush and green. I actually think there is something about our pictures--it must be the crispness of the light--which looks better.

13. The Spring House. 

14. Happy Campers. No doubt just glad to be out with father getting introduced to America. Besides, if they thought this was hot, how are they going to deal when we go to Big Bend and Arizona and Death Valley and Vegas in some future July.

Happily there was a little lake not too far from this fine attraction, and we were able to get in some swimming before heading back to our historic farmhouse for dinner. All of this still to come...

A Few Brief Notes on Rock Concerts

Rock concerts were a big deal among my age-peers when I was younger, but I hardly took part in this area of the culture. I can only remember going to two events that might have qualified--that is, that involved somewhat famous performers and cost what would have been more than a nominal fee at the time (probably $12-20--I cannot imagine I would, or could, ever have spent anything more than that at the time)--and I had an awful time at both of them. I was invited by a group of my high school friends to tag along with them to see George Thoroughgood at the Portland Civic Center in 1987 or '88. The main things I recall about this show was that all the songs sounded exactly the same in the concert as they did on record, that every single song had a guitar solo and a saxophone solo at exactly the same juncture as all the other sounds, and that of the entire crowd, which looked to me to be close to the arena's capacity, which is listed as 6,733, I counted exactly three women, and they were very far away from us. It was this last circumstance of being packed in a hot space with thousands of exclusively and mostly adult men that made the evening so unpleasant. The music I could have handled in a different setting, such as a bar, but as it was it was more like being in prison, or the navy. Some of us moderns are not as accustomed to such extreme segregation from the opposite sex as our forbears were, and thus the effects of its unpleasantness are perhaps more immediately jolting.

The second concert was during spring break of my freshman year of college in March, 1991, at some club in New York City, the name of which is lost to my memory. The group was Fugazi, about whom I knew essentially nothing--indeed, I kept referring to them in conversation as Fuzzaboo before I could keep the name straight in my head--but I was vaguely aware that they were well-known and well-regarded among people whose lives revolved around music and bands, of which there were a fair number in the circles about the edge of which I  hovered at the time. But I would never have thought it was my place to go to one of their shows except that I happened to be on a road trip with my closest friend who also happened to be cool and attractive, and he thought that was what we should do, so that's what we planned to do. I cannot recall whether it was when we were on our way to buy the tickets, or just after, that my cool friend ran into one of his old girlfriends on the street. After a few minutes' desultory conversation he announced that he was going to go off with his friend for a few hours but would meet up with us at the show that evening. Needless to say we did not see him again until we were all back at school the next week. His departure left the company attending the concert as me and a second guy who was also totally inept at dealing with women and assertive men, and a third friend who could manage for himself well enough in these areas but was not so able as to cover for and elevate the rest of us to the necessary social plane at which the concert would have been enjoyable, which our missing friend could have done. The evening proceeded predictably dismally. The concert was another sausagefest, if not quite as extreme as the 5,000 to 3 ratio at the George Thoroughgood event. I would put the male portion of the crowd at about 92%, and I don't remember the few women who were there being of the type to cause me much excitement, which took some doing, or perhaps un-doing would be the more appropriate word, in those days. The opening act was the Deviators from Brooklyn--this was long before Brooklyn became the East Coast's 'it' destination for liberal arts graduates that we know it as today. As far as I could tell, they were as good as Fugazi, though that didn't seem to me to be saying much--more manic and paying more lip service to traditional pop tunefulness anyway. During the main concert a fight broke out near the stage, which prompted the lead singer to rebuke the combatants with "Why don't you use some of that energy to escape from the f**king system?" You can imagine the disappointment with which this day, which at one point, with the prospect of going to a hardcore music show in New York City in the evening, had seemed to promise a multitude of hopes I had long been living for coming to some degree of fruition, closed upon me.

I am not going to count the time John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, of mid-80s Eddie and the Cruisers fame, turned out to be the entertainment at the Concord, N.H. Summer Market Days Festival.

The potentially great lost concerts of my youth? There weren't many. In the summers of '87 and '88, or maybe it was '88 and '89, The Who and the Rolling Stones came to Foxboro (Mass, near Boston, for our overseas audience) as part of their football stadium world mega-tours, and both times groups of my friends, or at least people I knew, went down to the concerts, but they didn't invite me to go. It's not like I was heartbroken--since I never had any great concert memories, I would just as soon go to a bar and hear the records on the jukebox--but I regret missing any opportunity to bond over shared fun, which other people often have. One thing that strikes me as funny about these concerts now is how both of these groups were considered by many serious music fans at the time as absolute dinosaur acts that were abandoning whatever dignity they had left by taking the stage. Of course most of the primary actors weren't much older than their mid-40s at the time, the members of the Who especially in 1987 would have only been 42-43 years old on average, yet their famous 'Hope I die before I get old' lyric was already being used as a punchline. Nowadays there are guys that age who still think they're going to break into the business. I remember Tina Turner was 50 (which would make her about 75 now--jeez) and at least the way the music press presented it, there had never been anyone so aged performing rock music up to that point in history. Today of course the average age of the typical regional rock festival musician is about 63...this is one of those underlying characteristics of different time periods that can slip by unnoticed but is probably more important than is acknowledged.

When I was 19 or 20, this would have been around '89 or '90--it was before I had even started college--I accompanied my grandmother to visit some friends of hers who had a house near the beach at Wildwood, New Jersey. I wandered down to the boardwalk by myself after dinner and I don't even remember how it happened, but lo and behold somehow I ended up sitting on a park bench talking to a couple of pretty attractive (and probably, now that I think of it, Catholic) girls from Cinnaminson, Jennifer and Mary Ann. No, we did not repair to the nearest hotel for a threesome or anything like that, though who knows, maybe we could have, since they, or rather Jennifer, for Mary Ann was more of the quiet and accommodating type, sat there and talked to me about must have been a lot of nonsense--where they were going to college, what they liked to do in Philadelphia, that sort of thing--for the better part of an hour, as though they had nothing better to do. I remember that the Cure was coming to Philadelphia sometime in the autumn and they were excited about that and planning on going and they told me I should go too. I was too stupid to remember to ask them to clarify if they meant I should come with them or if I should just go by myself and watch the concert unmolested by any kind of company or other social interaction because the Cure was just that awesome. I think I said something along the lines of  "Oh yes, I'll have to look into it" or similar rubbish. Eventually they obviously had to get up and leave and go home or find a party or whatever. A blown opportunity? I think so. Any missed opportunity with a New Jersey girl is one you're going to wish you had back. One funny thing was when I went to St John's there was a guy from Cinnaminson who knew exactly who they were, had gone to high school with them, and even claimed to be best friends with them, so I had some hope that maybe we'd all party together or something over Christmas vacation, but none of that ever came to fruition.

Oh, and I didn't make it to the Cure concert either.

Based on very limited testimony from my very limited personal acquaintance, my impression is that the best show in that era centering around 1990 to go to both for male/female ratio and general opportunity for interacting with women was Depeche Mode. Women around my age apparently loved them. Yes, of course they loved the guys in the group more than they would love you, but it's not like there weren't plenty of girls left over after the band took its pick for the evening, and such disappointment is more easily overcome in an atmosphere of overall high spirits, which my sources say prevailed at this concert.
  

Salvatore's Rhenish Trifles

I'm going to get back to trying to write real articles someday. The time I have to do anything is curtailed ever more, but this must be getting close to its peak. Someday I will wake up and actually have hours and days on end stretching out before me in which I can scribble away to my heart's desire. But I probably won't want to by then because I'll be too told and I'll have even less to say than I do now. Though maybe I will be able to pick up something of the habit of dispassionate reflection again, which I have not been able to indulge in for some years now. 

These are more Michigan pictures, from the other day (and a half) on which we did not go to Mackinac Island.

1. Miniature Golf Sign and (nearly empty) Parking Lot, With Lake Huron in the Background, Mackinaw City. Mackinaw City is kind of a sad tourist city--most honest guidebooks describe it as the place where all the people stay who can't afford to stay on the island. I probably could have coughed up enough to stay on the island but I actually didn't have any choice, since we didn't know we were going there definitely until about two weeks beforehand, by which time everything in a remotely reasonable price range on the island (i.e., less than $250) was booked up. Mackinaw City for some reason does not have a proper grocery store (just a dinky IGA) or any pharmacy at all, which I don't understand. You have to go a good 30 miles away to find those things, and if you have to go at night the trip is in complete darkness, because no one lives up there at all. Northern Michigan almost makes Vermont look populated. At least towns with a streetlight or two are somewhat closer together in the Green Mountain State. 

2. Golf. My children don't play properly or keep accurate score. I don't know whether this means anything. Like most modern parents, whenever my children do not immediately do something the exact way they are supposed to, nor immediately show promise of excellence to boot, I panic and assume they are doomed, if not absolutely to prison, than at least a lifetime of social ostracism and inability to ever have any hope of vocation or self-support.

3. Bathhouse/Snack Bar at Petoskey State Park, on Lake Michigan. Lower Peninsula, about 30 miles west of Mackinaw City. The beach was in an attractive spot, and I thought the shapes on this building looked interesting enough to take a picture of it (there was, for the record, also a good-looking college girl working at the counter, which gives any place a kind of instant respectability that it may otherwise have lacked). The town of Petoskey, which we did not make it into, is one of the places where Ernest Hemingway's family used to vacation when he was a kid, and of course Michigan features in many of his short stories. "Up in Michigan"--I just read it in the bathroom, it's only five pages long.

4. The Lake. A Day at the Beach. Hemingway. What do I think of him? He seems pitiless, which is a useful trait, though oddly rare in American writers, or at least good ones. And his style, with its seeming bluntness--though it is not really blunt, it is more like broad strokes that evoke more dimensions of atmosphere and character than is common in such a style--it really is a form of Cubism translated to writing, though Joyce is too, in a different way. And I do think he is important. With Americans, the question is always "How deep? How close to any essential question of life? Is his language, his philosophy of the sort to be part of the foundation of a great national culture?" I don't have a sense of what the right answers to these questions would be for anybody anymore?

5. Entrance to Motel, Mackinaw City. I think this was an America's Best Inn or something like that. Not great obviously but not bad. Three beds in the room. Very cheap. It had a good pool. Family accommodation.

6. The Breakfast Room. This was an island in the middle of the parking lot. The breakfast was not too good. Among other problems the attendant was the sort of unpleasant soul who flew into a rage if you did anything impertinent like say, ask if there was any more packets of butter when the basket was empty. My wife, who has no tolerance for such behavior whether it comes from above or below on the social scale, refused to go down after the first day, but I of course could not stay away.

7. Over the Bridge, and Zipping Along Lake Michigan's North Shore Now. 

A short (one minute) film of the beach at Petoskey. Nothing much happens in it, but it strikes me as having an impressionistic quality such as I like. Since putting up these kinds of movies seems to be easy I think I want to try to occasionally make some short videos for the site. I don't think people will want to watch or listen to me droning on about anything for 15 minutes (while slouched at my desk unshowered and clad exclusively in underwear) but there are things I can try to do to adopt an internet film persona.

The annual book meme is out where you turn to page 52 of some book and read the 5th sentence. I like to do this with my own book(s), to see how they compare with real books. The selection from Volume 1 is taken from dialogue and is fairly pedestrian: "We had it at home." Volume 2's however is a much more characteristic offering: "She happened to smile right at Erlsegaard as she said this, for it had taken but a few seconds for her to pick him out as the man present who was and always would be hopelessly in love with her, even assuming he had just seen her for the first time that instant."

How about the picks from some other books? Hemingway's Short Stories: "'The marvelous thing is that it's painless,' he said." From "The Snows of Kilimanjaro".

The Anatomy of Melancholy: "Never so much cause of laughter as now, never so many fools and madmen."

Rick Steves' Spain: "You'll raft the river of Barcelonan life past a grand opera house, elegant cafes, retread prostitutes, brazen pickpockets, power-dressing con men, artists, street mimes, an outdoor bird market, great shopping, and people looking to charge more for a shoeshine than what you paid for the shoes." Wow.

King Rat: "When Larkin saw it he smiled through his pain."

Lonely Planet Spain: "It's not that other cities don't have these things." Talking about Madrid. I am not going to Spain any time soon, by the way. That is just where I want to go at the moment so I have a bunch of guidebooks for it sitting on my desk.

Chariots of Fire

This was probably my favorite movie when I was a teenager. I know that I said it was in writing on at least one occasion, though this was more an instance of its being what occurred to me at the moment than the result of long and careful meditation. I don't know how many times I saw it--I would guess within the bounds of four and eight--and even at that age I was exposed to enough criticism to be aware that there was a substantial portion of the intelligent population that immediately recognized it as rubbish. I remember one particularly dismissive reviewer calling it a tribute to the human spirit inspired by Barry Manilow (Here is the actual quote, along with a number of other cold assessments I still remember from that increasingly distant time). Such assured evisceration, especially when combined with the suggestion of a tirelessly combative edginess, always makes an impression on me, for such attitude and clear perception are perhaps what I have always most desperately needed, but have never been able to develop. In spite of these persuasive denunciations, and my increased awareness of the lies and false assurances that the movie continues to put over on unreflective audiences, I find that I still like it. These lies and false assurances were certainly of a nature that I had a pointed hunger for in my adolescence, and doubtless still do now, for in matters of taste nothing ever comes to any kind of resolution with me, and thus I never 'move on' from even the most childish affections.

To address first off some of the more common criticisms, namely that the movie plays loose with the historical facts, that it pretends to be critical of the British ruling establishment of the 1920s and the society they lorded over while offering one of the most highly romanticized depictions of it ever to appear on celluloid, and that any depiction of this odious world as at all attractive is offensive to anyone with the most modestly developed moral sensibility, I have to admit that none of these objections has much resonance with me. Most of the alterations to the historical record are decidedly minor and were made in the service of telling a more interesting story. This has only been done thousands of times in biographical dramas and literary works dating back to The Iliad and the Book of Genesis. I suppose it could be argued that the ready availability to writers of much more accurate historical records in modern times renders the practice of expanding liberally from a basic framework in dramatic works archaic, though I think over-adherence to the exact record in small matters is to miss the point of art; though in the case of Chariots of Fire, and probably most movies, most of the critical disapproval in this area is really aimed at the unpalatable (to the critic) aesthetic or political attitude in the service of which the alteration was made. With regard to the second point, it is true that such criticisms of upper class attitudes as are to be found in the movie have more of the air of an intra-fraternal disagreement than an assault from a representative of the legitimately aggrieved. That is the personality of the movie. The two main characters are highly talented and strong-willed, what used to be referred to as 'coming' men. They are certainly developed enough in character, and the society in which they are operating tolerant and flexible enough, that it is impossible they would be entirely crushed by it. The movie depicts a lovely world whose most infuriating quality is not only that not everyone who wants badly to partake of it is able to, but, even more damning, that being left out they are usually unable to reproduce anything resembling its attractive qualities on their own. In a sense the movie serves as a reminder, though I think a pretty gentle one, that some people really are winners, really do make the most of their opportunities and talents, achieve goals and develop into accomplished people who contribute in a positive manner to the character of their society. Though on the other hand perhaps part of the offense is that the movie gives a misleading impression of the glamour of upper class life and the apparent ease, even effortlessness with which the heights of success can be attained, which is one of the primary characteristics distinguishing the second-rate from the first-rate. Nothing that happens in the movie--holding one's one against the snooty elite at Cambridge, leading a serious Christian life that manages to be both noble and unimpeachable, winning gold medals at the Olympics--is presented in a way that seems, or is, inaccessible to the typical middle class audience member, and therein is the film's primary failure, and the reason it cannot hold the interest of sophisticated people who operate at a world class level in at least one area of life (though usually once you attain that status in one pursuit, the difficulty of mastering others appears to be considerably reduced). Great things are hard, they are rare, their secrets are frustrating and obscure. To give the impression that they are otherwise is to misrepresent such real value to the human race as they have. And above all else, the person of middling intelligence and accomplishment must know this, if he is to avoid being an even greater buffoon than he already is.

All that acknowledged, whenever I come back to thinking about the actual film it seems to me to have something in it more than a bunch of pretty but empty gestures designed to manipulate the anglophilic and conservative tendencies of half-educated people. There is a good deal in it that suggests how to live a more vital life, how to maximize one's potential, what kind of people to seek out and surround oneself with, if possible, how to offer something to society on your own behalf. The movie covers a short time in the early part of much longer lives of two dead and, were it not for this movie, largely forgotten men who lived now close to a century ago, culminating in a pair of races that lasted 10 and 47 seconds, respectively, but every life depicted in any detail in the film is presented as purposeful and worth having lived, and I have always found that very reassuring, even though by the standards of the most rigorous modern thought this is almost certainly a lie.

Some footage of the real Liddell and Abrahams in their gold-medal winning races in 1924:

I haven't been able to make the case for it that I wanted to, but I also think a week is enough time to put into the effort.  

You Don't Even Want to Know What This Post is About

The Right Stuff (1983)

I had not seen this previously. I confess to finding it passably entertaining. Americans in the pursuit of grand and heroic achievements. For an almost 30 year old movie, it looks as though it could have come out last week, which suggests that it has been more influential than is usually acknowledged. Its narrative language, its fastidious concern with clothing and interior design, its reliance on cultural iconography, its attitude towards history, that is with fitting characters within the historical framework rather than having the historical setting serving as a background or added interest, are in line with what is still prevalent today. Its stylized depiction of the 50s is very much the same 50s we have all come to know and love over the intervening thirty years, though it is a departure from the usual way that decade had been presented theretofore. This has doubtless been a reflection of the prevalent zeitgeist, which is often skeptical of the possibility of autonomy and is obsessed with institutional power, media manipulation, the engines of bureaucracy and the like.

The early astronauts, it is noted in passing in the film, for all their remarkable efforts and sacrifices and risks, were not paid anything beyond their normal modest military salaries. Nor does it seem to have been much of an issue.

I've never read the book by the famous author Tom Wolfe, nor any of his other books. He is considered a great, or at least important writer by some people--with himself, it seems, often occupying the vanguard of this faction--though the official intelligentsia does its best to tamper any encroachment of this strident enthusiasm into those areas of literary taste over which it wields the most influence. Excerpts from Wolfe's books and interviews frequently appear in the popular press. He does come across to me as more pleased with himself than most of his purported insights, satire, iconoclasm, and so forth, would merit. I know he has been industrious and successful, and that cannot be taken away from him.Still, he does strike me as for the most part tiresome and not particularly revelatory. Given the theme of the movie I was anticipating a more obnoxious, in-your-face brand of machismo to be ascendant in it, but for the most part the swagger was depicted as contributing to healthy competition among men of near equal strength in the pursuit of noble ends, which even I do not have a problem with. Any such totally inferior contenders as were destroyed, dismissed and humiliated in the course of this process were left out of the film; I think this was for the best.

There was a actress in this I took a liking to, named Pamela Reed--that's a kind of name I like too--who played one of the wives. I think she has been in a lot of TV-movie type things over the years. I don't like any of the photographs of her that I could put up here though. She may be one of those people who looks better in motion.

My sixth-grade teacher claimed to be Chuck Yeager's cousin. This is not apropos of anything, since I don't know how tight their connection was or what, if any, similar qualities she benefited from. She was kind of the tough old broad type, and she did not favor me, as most of my early teachers did, so I did not like her. Obviously, seeing that Chuck Yeager was her cousin, she could probably tell I was not made of the good sort of stuff that the film celebrates. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, was from New Hampshire, though that is not mentioned in the movie. I only note this because it is very unusual for anybody born and bred in New Hampshire (or Maine, or Vermont), to attain elite status in any nationally or internationally hypercompetitive field, especially one involving any extreme degree of physicality. (Chuck Yeager was from West Virginia, which is also, nowadays at least, an unusual place of origin for world class talent.)

Entre Nous (1983)

Written and directed by a woman (Diane Kurys), and based on her own memoir, about a pair of friends who  reject the stifling bourgeois life of 1950s France which, as artists are fond of reminding us, was a pretty staid and rigid period in that country's social history, in contrast with our usual image of a land awash in sophisticated and hedonistic intrigue from one end to the other. This started well, and for the first half I thought we might be getting somewhere interesting, but I didn't like how the movie played out. The Isabelle Huppert character and that of her husband I did not think developed in a way consistent with what I came to expect through the first half of the movie. The husband especially got an unnecessarily bad rap. It is perhaps true that she never loved him, though it is not clear to me why she should never have liked him, or felt any loyalty to him. The presentation of him is that he is not especially cultured or sensitive, but he is not a weakling. He runs a prosperous business--a garage, which I guess has prolish connotations, which obviously we are intended to feel sympathy with his put upon wife about. He is very personable socially, and can get along with other men. He is certainly a doting father by the standards of 1950s France that I have heard about. He also by marrying her in the first place saved her from going to Auschwitz--granted they did not know each other and he doubtless only made the offer because he found her pretty. But her character as developed was not especially dynamic or so blatantly superior to his that one felt she had a good reason for abandoning him and breaking up their family to take up with her unstable female artist friend. Also the Isabelle Huppert  husband character begins to act in violent and inappropriate ways, presumably to show she is justified in leaving him, which are however completely inconsistent with everything else we are shown about this man in the movie. So in my opinion there is that weakness in it.

Chariots of Fire (1981)

Perhaps the ultimate false nostalgia movie, though I do love it. I am going to give it its own post to sort out all the middlebrow traps I know are coming at me from the beginning of the picture, and my powerlessness to avoid falling into them.

Jaws (1975)

I had never seen Jaws until the other day, because I am a wuss and I didn't want to be scared. I grew up well acquainted with the tales of theatergoers having to run out into the lobby and vomit during the middle of the film and of grown men who were terrified to climb into bathtubs for several years after seeing the movie and my reaction was always, Do I need this in my life? Thus I was disheartened when this legendary film turned up on my list. As I plowed inexorably back towards the 70s I began to dread its approach. Finally it arrived in the mail. My wife assured me there was no pressing need for me to watch this movie. Yes, but the sanctity of my system...and also the experts it seemed had slowly begun, in recent years, to treat it not merely as a historically important summer blockbuster but worthy of respect as a work of art. The New Yorker just published such a piece within the last few weeks. My trusty video guide had rated it 5 stars. Everybody and his grandmother has seen it twenty times, and it was even, to my admitted astonishment, rated PG, so how bad could it possibly be? Everything seemed to be indicating that I ought to see it. I was ready.

The good news was that it was not as terrifying as I expected. Obviously we have become accustomed to much higher degrees of gruesomeness since 1975. Most of the scariness comes from the anticipation of something about to happen in an alarming, terrifying and unforeseeable way that however does not come about most of the time; this is I think a trademark technique of Steven Spielberg's, though in middle age I find it rather tiresome.

The promotion of this as a great movie is a stretch. There is nothing about it that I can discern that would be interesting to a intelligent person above the age of about twelve, and there aren't even any pretty girls in it, though the main character's (too little seen) wife is decidedly MILFy in the best way. The recent critical reassessments in the direction of greater praise strike me as similar to the arguments put forth for A Hard Day's Night being in fact underrated as work of cinema. Both of these films were monuments of popular culture, made a lot of people in the entertainment industry rich on a scale that evidently is difficult to duplicate, emotionally if not in terms of strict cold finance, nowadays, they remind both writers and Hollywood players of a certain age of the golden years of life, when work was joyous, the world overflowed with 19 year old white girls in memory more beautiful and gettable than what it offers now, substance abuse was socially acceptable anyplace anybody would want to be, art mattered, money was not the be all and end all of every aspect of existence...but let's not get carried away. Also the mechanical shark, which Spielberg and other people have admitted they never achieved perfect mastery, looks really fake. All my swaggering aside, had I seen the movie as a 16 year old in the summer of '75, I'm sure I would have screamed in terror and run out of the theater with my high cut shorts soaked through, and guaranteed myself at least two more long years without getting a sniff of the wild 70s free love raging all around me, putting all my hope into College...

Baby Boomer Magic Moments: Besides the opening scene where a top-heavy blonde at a beach party spontaneously flings all her clothes off while running into the ocean, the big one of course is at the end when the World War II vet and survivor of the USS Indianapolis disaster who has spent his entire life dedicated to killing animals on the water gets his comeuppance for mocking Richard Dreyfuss's Phd by becoming Jaws's last meal. I'm going to cut them a little slack on this one, because the old salt also brought up the soft hands issue, which was a particular obsession of grandfather and numerous other old guys of his generation, where they would disparage the feminine hands of the younger men because of course they had not spent any good number of years, or not enough, doing manual labor to have that coarse effect. To me as a 10-year old I was anxious about growing up to have womanly hands though I was also anxious about there being an expectation I should be spending a considerable part of my youth slaving away on a farm or in some industrial place, because of course I did not really want to do that; but if you were 30 and had to listen to old guys constantly passing commentaries about the manliness of your hands, it must have been annoying as hell. In my grandfather's case, and that of most of his friends, while many of them grew up on farms and were in World War II, after they were about 23 they all worked in offices and lived the suburban lifestyle themselves. But I guess they still had their hands to prove that they had been serious men once, and you didn't. Anyway, having rough hands doesn't seem to confer much status in current society; at least I never hear anyone bringing it up anymore.     

Anatomy of Melancholy Part X

You have to know I would stop doing this if I could. Do you think I like being a figure of fun to real art people (by which I mean the general idea of my type)? Of course I do not. (And before it can be countered that I flatter myself that real art people could ever be bothered to give the likes of me any consideration at all, I do not even mean the people at the absolute heights of the creative life, but those who have managed to find employment as sort of the gatekeepers to that exalted world; professors, critics, agents, editors and people of that ilk. It is they who will find the greatest delight in thinking on my true station). Would I could think of anything else the successful execution of which could both be a possibility and a source of real contentment. I would take it up at once. How I envy  those people whose lives have an order, a purpose, a theme, a governing aesthetic about them. They may not always have a lot of sexual tension in their day-to-day lives but they probably could have even that if they made it a priority. For me, every positive thought or feeling ultimately has to emanate from my literary output and status, which have been themselves been scant in the most recent years. There is scarcely even any foundation left on which to attempt to reconstruct a man, should a master psychiatrist desire to do so.

This should be the last book report post for a while. I would stop doing those too--I am working to modify my notes on future reports--but as in most areas of my life, they form a kind of support from the greater world to my endeavors.

After examining symptoms and examples of love-melancholy in part IX, we have moved on now to possible cures, the easiest and most obvious of which is the possibility of your desires being fulfilled. "Petrarch, that had so magnified his Laura in several poems, when by the Pope's means she was offered onto him, would not accept of her." Doubtless because he knew himself, and knew he was not really man enough to fulfill her needs as a lover or a husband. If he had been, he obviously would have taken her for one or the other long before.

Another good cure recommended, provided you can swing it, is the old trick of stringing along two girls at once, as "he that goes from a good fire in cold weather is loath to depart from it, though in the next room there be a better which will refresh him as much..." Indeed! Of course in most instances the choice is not between two robust fires, but between kneeling and rubbing one's numb hands over a tiny space heater that it is hard to tell whether it is working or not or being confined to the unheated woodshed with a bed of straw and a dirty wool blanket that only covers about three quarters of your body. Though if you are a man who has some things to offer it is good advice.

Montaigne fans will be pleased to know that that master had a remedy of his own for this affliction, though it seems a rather odd one, as it involves seeing the object of one's love naked. It is not that this is not effective in certain circumstances, but it is usually not a practicable option for the class of men that would stand to benefit the most from its implementation. It is true that men who actually see a variety of naked women--in person and on the woman's eager volition with regard to the individual man's pleasure--on a regular basis are rarely the dupes of passion. But this level of experience unfortunately cannot be replicated beyond the top 10-15% or so of the male population.  

There is a long catalog of body parts and other endowments that would be used in the construction of the perfect woman, whom you would still tire of after a few years of being with. I liked the portion of the catalog that took a geographical turn: "...let her head be from Prague, paps out of Austria, belly from France, back from Brabant (Southern Netherlands & Northern Belgium; Antwerp, Brussels, Leuven), hands out of England, feet from Rhine, buttocks from Switzerland, let her have the Spanish gait, the Venetian tire (attire), Italian component and endowments..."

"I am to be married to-day, which sounds to me like saying, 'go home and hang yourself!'" This is quoted from a Roman author (Ter. And.--probably Terence someone or other, but I don't remember). I hate to pass up an ancient marriage joke. Here's another one: "...a mouse in a trap lives as merrily, we are in a purgatory some of us, if not hell itself."

Sample of Austrian beauties. This sort of view is what populates the typical evenings of a lot of guys'--most of those whose lives count for something I imagine--youthful travels on the continent. If I were not for various forms of media, I probably would never have been aware that life existed in such a form anywhere. And as it is, I know very little of what goes on in such scenes; such glimpses as are occasionally afforded those of us on the outside of this heaven that is the possession of a potent sensualism are usually astounding enough to crush the spirit for several days afterwards.

"...Pope Gregory, when he saw 6,000 skulls and bones of his infants taken out of a fishpond near a nunnery, thereupon retracted that decree of priests' marriages, which was the cause of such a slaughter, was much grieved at it, and purged himself by repentance." This shocking--on account of the extremely high number of corpses cited--story is repeated in other places. I cannot readily make out which Pope Gregory is referred to, but I am guessing it is the First, who held the position from 590-604, was famous as a reformer, and has generally a high reputation in the history of the church, however much stock you want to put in that. I cannot readily find confirmation regarding his repealing the edict requiring priestly celibacy, though it appears another Gregory, the 7th, found it necessary to reinstate it as official policy in the 11th century. I have no further comment on it, I guess.

"...James Rossa, nephew to the King of Portugal, and then elect Archbishop of Lisbon, being very sick at Florence, "when his physicians told him that his disease was such, he must either lie with a wench, marry, or die, cheerfully chose to die." What kind of disease, pray tell, was this? And if he had picked 'lie with a wench', would the doctor have then had one wheeled into the room for him?

Off topic, but I always like being reminded of these once-great names and offices and lives. I tend to forget about groups like the medieval Portuguese aristocracy (the James Rossa anecdote is dated 1419), but they were no doubt a meticulously civilized crew after their fashion, and each of their membership a giant in the world they inhabited with the backing of a familial lineage and mythology already dating back centuries. And the extent to which they are remembered now is all dependent on how interesting their depictions in books and artworks are.

"...for scarce shall you find three priests of three thousand, that are not troubled with burning lust." Of course priestly lust is not a subject of mirth, because of the forms it must take. It seems not to consist of the same harmless quality that makes nerd-lust so comical.

On page 948 I wrote: "I am glad I read it, but I couldn't comfortably recommend it. You have to know if you need to read it or not."

"For to what end is a man born? why lives he, but to increase the world? and how shall he do that well, if he do not marry?" Paging 'Ol Dirty Bastard?

Since Burton always argues forcefully on both sides of every issue, it is to be expected that he devotes ten pages to strongly insistent arguments on the necessity of marriage and procreation, though these lean heavily on a kind of supposition that man is the measure of all things:

"Earth, air, sea, land eftsoon would come to naught,
The world itself should be to ruin brought."

This if man did not marry and fill the earth with human children. The poignancy that can be surmised from such discredited conceits still resonates with me.

The next topic taken up is jealousy. I love this story:

"R.T.(?), in his Blazon (?) of Jealousy, telleth a story of a swan about Windsor, that finding a strange cock with his mate, did swim I know not how many miles after to kill him, and when he had so done, came back and killed his hen; a certain truth, he saith, done upon Thames, as many watermen and neighbour gentlemen can tell."

"England is a paradise for women, and hell for horses: Italy a paradise for horses, hell for women, as the diverb (an antithetical saying or proverb) goes."

A (Sub?) Bourgeois in Michigan

So I never got around to putting up pictures from Florida this year; and in April I went to New York City for three days, to mark which event I had planned an elaborate post in which I laid out the logistic planning and expenses necessary to bring all of my children to town and carry it off smoothly even for so brief a visit. Of course we were limited in what we could do even more than usual, but I had not been to town in a couple of years and I have now reached an age where the number of times left me of ever going there, given my past record, is probably dwindled to a disturbingly small number, so it was still well worth it to me to go. All of the pictures from these occasions are stored in another place which I am not able at this time to access. Which is good, because it is past time I abandoned putting up photo albums altogether, and returned to writing literary generalist essays from an original point of view on a wide variety of topics of universal interest...

So I went to the upper Midwest for my big summer trip this year. It has doubtless reached the point of overkill for me with the road trips, but when you are one of those people who doesn't have any job or entrepreneurial skills, or at least finds it mildly embarrassing to have to tout such meager ones as one does have as the sum of a life's achievement--in other words, you cannot positively state that you will have always even one source of income, let alone multitudes of them, going forward--the possibility that someday all opportunity for even such modest travel will be gone inclines you to think you had better go while you can. 

We went to Michigan first. I had never been there. Michigan is supposed to be in a woeful condition, the very heart of the bad times. We bypassed the Detroit area, going up through Ann Arbor, where we stopped to have lunch. Ann Arbor obviously is a big university town, and I suppose still insulated to a degree from the worst effects of Rust Belt de-industrialization. There were at least plenty of people visible who were not completely downtrodden. Once you get past Bay City the state is largely uninhabited. Obviously you don't see much from the road. The landscape and the people you see in gas stations don't emit as obvious an air of poverty and hopelessness as comparable locales do in the south in my opinion. Again, I saw a sliver of the state, but I was expecting much worse. 

It is also true that I went to Mackinac Island, which is one of the swankier places in Michigan. This place is famous, I know now, but I did not know anything about it until I began reading up for this trip, and I thought it sounded interesting. It is interesting, and I think the older children liked it. I liked it, though again with so many young children you cannot do a lot of the things that you might like to do, such as sit calmly for twenty minutes and nurse a drink. But I would still rather go and eat ice cream and carry people up hills than stay home.

The lighthouse above is one of the iconic Great Lakes lighthouses. It is not on Mackinac Island, but on another, larger island next to it that is preserved land. These places here, in case you did not know, are in a busy little space where the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan (connected by a famous and pretty majestic five mile long bridge) and Lakes Michigan and Huron meet.

The approach to the dock. Believe it or not as I get older I do question the value of site-seeing without any more defined purpose than being in a certain place and hoping to absorb something of its value simply by being present. It doesn't work much. Perhaps it is slightly better if there is some mildly strenuous aspect to it, such as walking or bicycling, or doing research, and I do think for young people there is often some real stimulation. But for me, it is all like everything else now. I am clearly not going to change very much, and the qualities that people flatter me as having and claim to be admirable are not such as I am able to hold in any high value, so pretty much anything I do is going to be, and seem to me to be, rather flat. But for all of that, I am speaking now from the vantage point of the end of a busy summer; by February I am sure I will be eager to go anywhere. Also I have not flown or gone to any foreign country other than Canada in eleven years, so maybe that would seem invigorating after a fashion. That would be very expensive though.

Mackinac Island is famous for having banned cars a very long time ago (1898), which law has never been rescinded. I thought the carless atmosphere would be more striking, like it is in Venice, but here the effect was merely like that of being in an open-air amusement park or historical village, because the island is quite small and any sense of a local population is completely overwhelmed by the touristic apparatus. While Venice is also overwhelmed with tourists, it is still a city of some size, it is very old and different from anything to which we are accustomed, and one can still stumble occasionally, out of high season at least, on a few pockets of workaday local life. Or perhaps I just happened to be in Venice when I was younger and was more attuned to my surrounding environment.

My sons wanted a picture of the vintage water fountain with a foot pedal to draw the water. The lad in the sunglasses is not one of my children by the way. One thing I did observe, was that in both Michigan and Wisconsin, to which we went afterwards, every drinking fountain we came upon had cold, and usually ice cold water. This is almost the direct opposite of the situation on the east coast, where finding a water fountain dispensing cold water can be a more elusive quest than finding free parking. I should add that for most of this trip the temperature was 95-100 degrees, and in Wisconsin they were having a terrible drought. It was a little  cooler way up here in the middle of the actual lake. Probably the high 80s. 

My poor daughter, who has no idea where she is or what is going on, suffering in the heat. Intelligent little girl, though. She may have a chance.

View of Lake Huron some high point on the island, I forget exactly which. Despite what I just said a couple of minutes ago, the Great Lakes are, considering them in themselves and separate from my presence among them, a defining part of our country, and I would like to see more of them. I was especially obsessed when I was out there with going some day to Isle Royale National Park, which is a huge island in Lake Superior, part of Michigan but much closer to Minnesota and Ontario, which is the least-visited National Park in the lower 48. You have to be a serious person to go there. Apart from one lodge at the island's far east end, you are on your own as far as sleeping and food and water goes. All the modern guidebooks present it as utterly daunting, real adventure travel. Your bones will ache, you'll be dirty, the mosquitoes are the size of flying mice. In my 1962 guidebooks, they have photographs of smiling suburban families grilling some whitefish they have caught outside their little pitched tents, with their rowboats pulled safely up onto the shore; but to go there nowadays they recommend you undertake intensive training for a year or two beforehand, and the underlying tone is that children who are not very experienced in this type of high-intensity travel shouldn't be brought there at all.

Nice picture of one of the boys. That's all. The two older ones are only a few years probably from not wanting to go on trips anymore. Another grasping excuse to keep taking them.

Outside the fort at the high point of the island. Lake Huron in the background.

Another child, this time on the wall near the famous Arch Rock.

The famous Arch Rock. Sightseers have been making their may up here for a long time. It's a decent walk from the town, 45 minutes or so. Enough to make most people, and certainly me, feel that the drinks they'll have back at the hotel bar when they return were well-earned.

The place to stay on Mackinac is the 1880s era Grand Hotel, which has that archaic elegance and program of meals and dances and events that you can't really put a price on, which is why double rooms without much in the way of 21st century amenities start at $330 or so a night. We, alas, did not stay there, though it is one of the few hotels I have come across in my travels where I do feel I would like to stay some day, because on Mackinac Island it does seem like if you aren't staying at the Grand Hotel you are kind of missing half the point. They must allow children to stay there, though I believe there are etiquette standards, and I don't think they're allowed in the restaurant at dinner and that sort of thing.

The old fort, which kept the island in American hands over the course of more than a century. A little expensive, but, if you are going to go all that way, you shouldn't skimp on too many things--we had already bailed on the Grand Hotel., and, as well the activities and space and displays in the complex are pretty extensive, though we don't really take, or have, the opportunity to study everything in these places with the depth they deserve.

Though this looks like we are all earnestly learning about life while being stationed at this remote outpost in the 1880s (though the posting was coveted compared with being on Indian duty in Arizona or New Mexico), I assure you nobody is learning or retaining anything, me least of all.