Hockey nonsense

“I went to the Fights and a hockey game broke out”, quipped Rodney Dangerfield.
Funny? Yes it is. What isn’t funny are the deaths this year of three pro hockey
players and one amateur . Each one was a personal tragedy and had different circumstances but the unifying factor was that all three of the pros were “enforcers”, usually the biggest guy on the team that protects the smaller players. Outrage at these recent deaths was sufficient to produce letters of protest from people who blame fighting on the ice for everything. There was condemnation from a guy from the soccer hall of fame. Why not something from the synchronized swimming association, especially since the water in rinks is frozen. Some guy wanted a bigger international-size rink. We aren’t Sweden. One guy suggested that if a fight broke out we all stand up and turn our backs to the players. Maybe he means to moon them.
I played hockey from 14 to 18 and I was, I guess, an enforcer. I had to be since I was so slow and couldn’t dipsy doodle on scoring plays. I always made the team. You know what, those fights were actually fun and I couldn’t really hurt the other guy. Although one very tough hombre once loosened all my teeth. That’s why my favorite Christmas song is: “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth”. Look, fighting is just part of the game folks. They’re spontaneous and usually do not contain any malice aforethought. If you run into someone who holds strong opinions on hockey, ask him if he or she has ever played the game, do they know how to skate, have they ever seen a game, ever follow a team, know where the Flames and the Thrashers went (even Ken Jennings won’t know that). So if that person comes up empty, you’ll know that you are talking to someone Don Rickles would call “a hockey puck”.

Christopher Hitchens: truth-teller and patriot 1949-2011

We had the same hero—George Orwell. He wrote a magnificent book called, “Why Orwell Matters”. I named this blog American Orwell. We had the same friend, Salman Rushdie. When the fatwa went out on Rushdie, Chris defied the Ayatollahs on behalf of him, a very dangerous position then. I was only someone who Salman would visit in my London office when he got bored with his advertising assignments. He could speak eloquently on literature, politics and history. You can see why I admired Hitchens. He went to the barricades for the Kurds and called out frauds like Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, I was in the nearest piano bar. I drank and smoked like Hitchens once upon a time until one night, after I drank too many martinis, my gall bladder erupted and I had to be carried to the nearest hospital emergency ward. That was the end of my bacchanal days at age 32. I also stopped smoking. One of Orwell’s “hard truths” is that we are all forgotten after one generation, and after two, no one will ever know we had been alive. On that point I disagree. People will be reading Christopher Hitchens for many generations to come.

JESUS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

Santa is the top banana now. I noticed on the Michael Buble Christmas show that there wasn’t a single carol, not even Silent Night. The tune I hear most often on television and Muzak is “Have yourself a merry little Christmas”, a wonderfully poignant wartime song, but not pious. Of course Christmas now starts five minutes after Thanksgiving and the cash registers do all the ringing. The old narratives have lost their power in our brave new world. Italy is in a fix but they aren’t turning to the Vatican for help, it’s the IMF. Decades ago Woody Allen said (not cruelly but irreverently): “There’s a real traffic jam in Manhattan today, is the Pope or some other show business personality in town?”
Today’s sports page has a droll item. The wife of baseball’s $254mllion man, Albert Pujols. said that she was indignant that the Cardinals only offered him $150 million. At first she said she was angry at God and the Cardinals but in the end “it’s just like God to put us on a team called the Angels”. Dear Mrs.Pujols, every theologian knows that God always favors the American League, especially the NY Yankees. So now we have a season dedicated to “The Miracle on 34th Street”, certainly not the one in Bethlehem.

Newt Romney All American

This new film is a heart-warming and thoughtful remake of the 1940 biopic of the legendary Notre Dame player and coach Knute Rockne. It was made by Warner Bros. This one is made by the Koch Bros.
We follow Newt from his early days as a serial adulterer to three wonderful weddings and various exciting religious experiences. He goes to Washington (but not like Mr. Smith) and garners so much power it costs him over $300,000 in ethics violations. There is a touching scene where he stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial and says, “If this Republican can make it so can I, and I’ll have an even bigger monument.” In the 1940 film Pat O’Brien, as Rockne, says to his players, “Let’s win one for the Gipper”, meaning George Gipp, played by Ronald Reagan. In the new film, Newt rallies his team with, “Let’s let the Gipper win one for us”. Charlie Sheen is the lead in a role he was born again to play. I can’t tell the surprising ending but it does show the small drinking fountain dedicated to him on K Street.. Oh, and the feature plays with a short titled “Our GOP Gang” where Presidential candidates play Alfalfa, Spanky, Buckwheat and Darla. So, so funny.

Cheap People

That’s the phrase my rich sourpuss neighbor used to call everyone he met. What we now call the 99%. He had been on a bomber crew that flattened Japan in WWII. “Once you’ve seen one Jap you’ve seen them all’ he told me. He came back and went to USC (on the socialistic GI Bill) and then worked himself up to the boardroom during the post-war boom. He retired to Newport Beach on his stock options and other Unsocial Security instruments. When I met him in 1989 he had just ditched his first wife and married a true bimbo who he saw in the LA Times wearing a mink bikini. I go into this excessive detail to sketch out the kind of person who would gladly pepper spray kids and cheat on his taxes (he was an accountant). He would probably volunteer to operate a guillotine pro bono if it were available. He represents the old triumphal America, now ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. He was much older than me so he’s probably dead by now. Come to think of it he was already dead when I met him.

Occupy Wall Street--foreverf!

“Workless poverty” in 1930’s England transformed the Eton schoolboy and Imperial policeman Eric Blair into the socially-conscious George Orwell. He went Down and Out in Paris and London; he went down the coal mines and picked hops in England. He saw the rich get richer and the working class get little reward. Sounds like the situation in the US today doesn’t it? His weapon was a pen but sometimes a handmade sign will do the same job today. One can only admire those who have come out against the greed and duplicity of the Masters of the Universe. Eric Cantor calls them a mob. There is no generosity of spirit on the Right. They know they are safe. It’s all there in Michael Lewis’ book “The Big Short”. Sell the public investments then double cross them and rake in the money. It’s all there in Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class”. Millions out of work, bankruptcy and foreclosures as far as the eye can see and they’re still running BMW and Cadillac commercials. The politicians are staying out of this since Wall Street owns them. Can’t expect any help from Obama either since Goldman Sachs was his biggest campaign contributor. All you can do is act on your own behalf. Scissor your credit cards and don’t be politically inert. You still have a vote.
Lenin said there could never be a revolution in England because the crowd wouldn’t storm Parliament when the signs read “Do not walk on the grass”. This is America so stand your ground people. Don’t let anyone push you away. You can’t trespass on democracy.

Nein, Nein, Nein...No, No, No!

The less-than-Presidential debate was held in Las Vegas this week and we were treated to Herman Cain’s nonsensical 9-9-9 tax proposal again. Since all tax policy is social policy this is really on the wrong track. Not fair. Not practical. Not realistic. But it is the topic de jour for the media who can only milk “Dancing with the Stars” and “Bowling for Fish” so far. Actually, it doesn’t matter since none of the guys in dark suits are going to be President. That includes Ms. Bachmann, the Tracy Flick candidate for Student Council.
I hate parading my serenading but I’ve done a little poem for the event.
Mitt and Newt don’t give a hoot.
Newt and Mitt don’t give a !@##$%
Paul is sick.
Perry is scary,
Cain’s a pain,
Bachmann’s a bore,
The rest we can ignore,
So let’s keep Obama,
And the lovely Michelle,
And let these Republicans
Go to hell!
We’ve come a long way from Thomas Jefferson to a pizza parlor policymaker

How to fix our country

The President has a jobs plan. Oops, had a jobs plan. The Republicans have a jobs plan. They want the country to hire 10 more GOP senators and as many other elective officers as possible. But this is kind of silly, isn’t it? When you listen to the Republican candidates for President it’s inherently comic. Besides, if they aren’t already corrupt they will still have to deal with Lord Acton. You know, the guy who said “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
The bankers say that the Occupy Wall Street “mob” is naïve. They should be grateful it isn’t being led by Robin Hood or Leon Trotsky or they would know what a mob can really achieve, and it wouldn’t be pretty. Epic and heroic, and very messy.
I have an idea that is better than politics and the shallow negations that plague us today. You’re not going to get any wisdom from bloated buffoons like Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs. You need a real thinker like Fran Leibowitz who says, rightly, “Democracy needs things from its citizens so stand up and do your job”. What we need now is some civilizing energy from the populace. I have identified three areas where you can change your thoughts and you’ll change your world.
No. 1 Guns. They have killed more Americans than King George’s Redcoats did in two
wars. My home state Nevada has more registered guns on a per capita basis than anywhere. We also have 26 gun deaths per 100,000 which makes this one of the most violent places on Earth. Don’t buy a gun unless you’re shooting birds and squirrels. Let the police keep the peace and don’t try to get even with your ex-wife by killing eight people in a hair salon.
No.2 Drugs. This is the way to kill yourself today. I mean you start with yourself then kill your family and anyone else standing in the way of your addiction. Don’t be stupid. Don’t do drugs. Don’t enrich Mexican Drug Lords.
No. 3 Divorce. Men want a husband and women want a wife but the general population still has to go with the opposite sex. I’ve been married for over 54 years but this is what happiness is all about and I have two wonderful children that benefited. A single parent just doesn’t cut it when raising a family, even if you’re a Siamese twin.
Shakespeare wrote, “The fault, Dear Brutus is not in our stars but in ourselves”. The great psychologist William James said, “Man alone is the architect of his destiny”. And, as the great American philosopher Georges Santayana said, “You must change your evil ways”. Or maybe that was Carlos Santana. Wisdom walks in many doors

Say it again Sam

In Roger Ebert’s new book on the movies he says that he misses the great dialogue of past films and finds today’s scripts flat and dull. I was reminded of that recently while watching “Love me tonight” a 1932 musical comedy. Someone gets ill and the butler says to the flirtatious ingénue (played by Myrna Loy), “Could you go for a doctor?” and she replys, ‘Sure, show him right in.”

That’s witty, a commodity in rare supply in Hollywood today. After all, what is a Smurf, or Shrek or a Transformer likely to say that’s memorable. For that you need social observation as practiced by Billy Wilder. In “Lost Weekend” the alcoholic Ray Milland is in a bar begging for a drink and the bartender says, “One is too many and a thousand aren’t enough”. Even in a war movie like “Desperate Journey” you get a line like Ronald Reagan’s answer to a Nazi who says, “What’s your nationality?” and Reagen replys, “Half American, half New Jersey”.

Some of the problem comes from the botched remakes so popular now. The new “Arthur” was such a dud I walked out in the middle. In the original, Dudley Moore says to his manservant: “I’m going to take a bath” and the bored servant says, without looking up from his newspaper, “I’ll alert the media”.

Comedy is hard, I’ll admit, but I do like a scene from “The Doctors” where one doctor says, “My patient has just had a stroke, he slurs his words and nothing he says makes any sense”. And another doctor says, “Well, he can always move to Texas”.

The script that is the mother lode, of course, is “Casablanca”. “We’ll always have Paris”, “I’m shocked, shocked”, “Round up the usual suspects” and many others.

I met a young man in London who told me that there were no good scripts anymore and “Chinatown” was the last decent one. I told him there were always two he could go back to: “All about Eve” and “Double Indemnity”. His answer was, “never heard of them”

We have it all today, 3D, Imax, every special effect known to the computer nerds. Yes, the movies speak but, unfortunately, say nothing.

Killing time in Reno

You always get your money’s worth at the Reno Air Races. You have to pay admission and buy your own hot dogs and beer but the carnage is free. Yesterday a vintage plane went out of control and crashed into the VIP stands killing the pilot, of course, and eight others as well as maiming and injuring dozens of spectators. I tagged along to one of the events years ago, mostly to talk baseball to a pal of mine. In the middle of these daredevil events a plane crashed on the far side of the airfield. The pilot died and they carted him off to the morgue and the races continued. No fuss, no muss. I found it odd that we had witnessed a death before our very eyes and it didn’t seem to mean a thing. The only other time someone died before me was when a sax man collapsed and died on stage during his solo at the old Blue Note in Las Vegas. There was stunned silence for a few seconds then everyone began to shout for 911. We were all asked to leave immediately (without refunds mind you). There was another death at an air show the same day as well as the loss of a whole professional hockey team in a Russian crash this week. Those who are apprehensive about flying are told, “If your number comes up, it comes up”, to which the rejoinder is, “but what if the pilot’s number comes up?” Like in Reno this weekend.

Swiss miss hits UBS

Once upon a time I worked in Zurich, where serious money resides year round. They were dull, diligent people, just the right sort to handle my money when I had real money.
Today’s paper said that they took a hit of $2 billion in losses when a trader in London obviously hit the wrong buttons on his computer. My days with UBS are long over but in the heady days of the 80’s and 90’s I was riding high with them. Luxury boxes in LA and NY. Fine dinners in the executive dining room with a view of Rockefeller Center. Who wouldn’t want to sit in a room with Gregory Peck in the Bel Air Hotel while some guy in a grey suit with a suitable accent told us how brilliant we were with our money. My account executive whispered to me that the people in the room represented $8 billion of private wealth. By the way, if you have seven figure money where are you going to deposit it: the corner bank? I was probably influenced by “The Thomas Crowne Affair”, the one with Steve McQueen playing sexy chess with Faye Dunaway. So that’s how the rich have fun, at least in my fantasy. That was long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. The Swiss, like their cheese, are full of holes now. Harry Lime was right, 700 years of democracy and brotherly love and what did they give the world: the cuckoo clock--the kind you find in the executive offices of UBS.

Days you'll always remember

“Speak Memory”, Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography calls up the past in a memorable form. Of course all of us know where we were on 9/11. I had just gotten up and turned on the Today Show for their brainless blend of banter that I took with my morning coffee.
Those jolts of history-making days don’t come often in a lifetime but they do come along and affect each and every one of us.
I don’t remember Pearl Harbor because I was too young and too remote. The first “event” I remember was D-Day, June 6, 1944 since it was Arbor Day for us Fifth Graders and we could talk about it between raking leaves and doing as little as possible outside. Then came three big days in a row: April 12, 1945,the day FDR died and I came out of a showing of “For Whom The Bell Tolls”. Then VE Day, May 8, 1945, my 10th birthday, and quickly August 14th VJ Day. The two parts of the War were over and we celebrated joyously by riding up and down Jasper Ave. in our old Packard convertible. After that, the days became more personal. Graduation from UC Berkeley in 1957. Marriage to the love of my life, Peggy Jean, September 14. 1957. Birth of our son Tony, December 14, 1959. Birth of our daughter Alison, June 7, 1962. Etc. etc. etc as Yul Brynner dictated to Anna in “The King and I”. Unfortunately there are two important dates you can never remember: the day you’re born and the day you die. It’s the ones in between that count.

Gatsby gets the green light

A new film version of The Great Gatsby is in the works. It’s going to be filmed in Australia by Baz Luhrman, who gave us the frantic and over the top “Moulin Rouge” with two stars who couldn’t sing—but did anyway.
The movies love remakes such as King Kong, True Grit, Arthur, The Count of Monte Cristo plus all the foreign films they purloin for Hollywood purposes. They’re usually never as good as the original (because they’re not original!). It’s like illustrating a snake and then painting legs on it for good measure.
Gatsby is my favorite book so I’ll be in the audience just as I was for the Alan Ladd and Robert Redford versions. They were films packaged for their era and the new one will have attractive stars of the day, a hot director, costumes and a hip music score. The only thing missing will be the literature, the moral and the language. The melodramatic parts will be front and center.
One of the real stars will be absent: New York City (they don’t have one in Oz). Sometimes I think that the only one who could do justice to Gatsby is Woody Allen.
And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Fusion food is in

The new Korean Taco is all the rage in LA as is the Asian Burrito.
Marrying cuisines is now L’amour toujours de jour.
There’s a new restaurant on Melrose called Maximillian and Carlota’s to honor the ill-fated French rule in 19th Century Mexico.
Favorites include the always popular Taco Vin and The Montmarte Margarita. I know an inventive Master Chef in Carlsbad, California who has a way with a huevo and has created French Toast Zorro (avec spicy chorizo.) Ay Caramba! Formidable!
So far there have been no nuptials for English and Mexican food. But hope springs eternal for Canterbury Tamales or Pride and Pozole.
Bon appetit Amigo!

Farenheit 401k

Ray Bradbury told us of a future world where the firemen torched books in Farenheit 451, the temperature that paper ignites. Today it’s Wall Street that torches the stocks and bonds of firemen, teachers and everyone in the middle class with a 401k account. And it isn’t fiction. Nest eggs are going up in smoke by the trillions—with a T. What to do? Fight fire with fire. Extinguish Wall Street. Dump your broker and your 401k plan. Shred your credit cards. You will nevermore fear the economic volcanoes erupting around the world. I once heard a very wise Unitarian minister speak from the pulpit. He said, “Brother, if you want to be free, pay cash.”

Double, double, toil and trouble

The D words are here, and I don’t mean the ones Cole Porter used like Delectable, and Delovely. I mean debt, default, downgrade and that old standby, deficit.
Our leaders, those doofuses and Masters of the Diatribe, have talked us into a fine mess, as Hardy kept reminding Laurel.
These dodos have even sent the Dow plunging down. They must feel so patriotic. They’re probably comparing themselves to Nathan Hale only they’re saying: “I regret that I only have one country to give for my life”. Maybe we can’t get a New Deal out of this bunch but surely we can get a better deal. We need an economic DDay where a vast army of doers storm Washington to give a victory to the people. There is a sad little song for today with a chorus that goes like this: “I’m aware my heart is a sad affair, there’s much disillusion there, but I can dream, can’t I?” Dream on McDuff, dream on.

A new National Anthem

Actually it was written years ago for Bing Crosby by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke but it is a perfect fit for Washington in the 21st Century. I hear America singing:

Would you like to swing on a star?
Carry moonbeams home in a jar
And be better off than you are
Or would you rather be a mule?
A mule is an animal with long funny ears
He kicks up at anything he hears.
His back is brawny but his brain is weak
He’s just plain stupid with a stubborn streak
And by the way if you hate to go to school
You may grow up to be a mule.

Or would you rather be an elephant?
An elephant’s an animal that flaunts his long trunk,
He roars all day and all of it is bunk.
He sips his tea and slurps his gumbo,
But if you see yourself as just like Jumbo,
You may grow up to be a Dumbo.

A fish won’t do anything but swim in a brook,
He can’t write his name or read a book.
To fool the people is his only thought,
And though he’s slippery he still gets caught
But if that’s the sort of life is what you wish
You may grow up to be a fish.
And all the monkeys aren’t in the zoo
Everyday you meet quite a few
So you see it’s all up to you,
You can be better than you are,
You could be swinging on a star!

Our Unfinest Hour

To paraphrase Winston Churchill: “Never in the history of US governance have so many been betrayed by so few”. The chance of a default draws ever closer. The rating agencies are ready to pounce on our credit rating. Meanwhile, John Boehner and his Republican Student Council do nothing but pose and posture for Fox News. Dunkirk preceded the Battle of Britain (Our finest hour time). Here in the US we may be playing the same tape out of sequence—the Battle of the Budget is lost and then followed by our own Dunkirk with a massive defeated army of the middle class stranded on the beach waiting valiantly for Election Day 2012. Who can save us? Not the Congress. Not the White House. They represent themselves. Who’s left, just us. The Las Vegas Sun published a letter I submitted this week. It’s theme was that adversity is often the birthplace of successful change. Let’s hope it is and let’s hope we grow up.

Guns or butter. One or the other.

The usually obtuse Hermann Goering , coined the phrase, “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat,” when he was, well, buttering up Dem Deutschen Volke for the blitzkrieg he and his Nazi pals were planning for Europe in 1936.
Guns or butter is an apt phrase for the situation we now face in the US, but as usual our exceptional country doesn’t want to choose. We want our cake and eat it too.
So, with an annual Pentagon budget of $680 billion, three endless wars, over a million foreclosures and massive unemployment, merrily we roll along towards the cliff, American lemming style.
If you remember the opening of “Rebel without a cause” two guys are playing chicken by racing their cars towards a cliff. One of the guys is James Dean so you know he’s not going to die (at least until his Porsche crashes a year later).
However, the other guy’s sleeve gets caught in the door handle and he goes over the cliff. We’re the other guy now, and James Dean later. Fiscal death is just down the road apiece while Congress is checking the rearview mirror. We’re not Greece but we’re not Switzerland either. We have to choose.
The pudgy Goering, who never saw a strudel he could resist, really meant that both the guns and the butter were for the top Nazis. “Ich war Die zwarte!” he kept shouting from the dock at Nuremburg. “I was the Second!” (after Hitler), the kind of thing Donald Rumsfeld would bark if we had such trials today. We don’t, and we won’t.
The answer is in the lyrics of a song from the 1940’s.
“If you don’t spend, you bank,
If it ain’t Bing, it’s Frank,
Gotta be this or that”
A buttered scone for me, please.

Geoff Dyer, literary magician

I first caught his act in 1996 reading “But Beautiful”, his ode to jazz. He didn’t stick to the music but the musicians and he moved a long way from the plodding and pedantic “History of Jazz” done by Ken Burns. It wasn’t a conventional book on jazz which is usually all enthusiasm and record dates. This was mostly about the madness and sadness of the scene. This hit the right note with me since I cherish the damaged angels Lester Young and Billie Holiday. I once closed up Birdland at 4 am stuffing my head with Bud Powell, the mad pianist nobody could surpass.
Then I turned to other things and didn’t revisit Dyer until just now when I read “Jeff in Venice. Death in Varanesi’ (get it, not Death in Venice). Pretty soon I was laughing out loud, a rare event for me I moved on to his “Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it”. Does this give you some idea of his style?
Dyer is an intellectual protégé of John Berger, the art and cultural critic. I discovered Berger way back in the late 1960’s. He said that advertising didn’t meet our real needs in a caption underneath a picture of some poor people walking past a billboard promoting glamorous jet travel. Of course advertising meets everyone’s needs, especially mine. There is no discourse like this in America. This was a new and provocative thought environment for me and worth considering..
Time to revisit Mr. Dyer. I read through “Out of sheer rage” (Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence) one of my favorite authors in college. I had the misfortune of telling this to the doyenne of Manhattan writers, Joan Didion, one evening in Greenwich Village. She sneered and pushed an imaginary custard pie in my face. Actually nobody reads either one of them today. Literature has given way to “names” such as James Patterson and Nora Roberts, who are not really writers but grocers, I mean grossers.
Dyer’s writing is hard to describe: elusive, witty, astute, digressive. I used to go to Magic Castle in LA I liked the all the sleight-of-hand but I especially liked Vito Scotti, a character actor in the movies who did stand-up magic. He did a modern version of Commedia dell-arte, the comedy of types such as Arlechinno, the mischievous servant. His act was the clever magician but he never used props, cards or rabbits, it was all pantomime. “It’s in the act”. the juggler said if he dropped a ball on stage.
Do I digress? That’s Dyer’s great trick and one of his great pleasures, digression. When he takes off the Commedia mask he becomes the articulate, serious and erudite literary critic as in his essay and review collection: “Otherwise known as the human condition”. He quotes Phillip Larkin, one of my favorites and a master of skepticism. I confess that skepticism has become my refuge from the All American avalanche of good feelings and good news now that we’re in three endless wars and essentially broke. We need a new song: “Brother can you spare a Food Stamp?”
One quick Dyer quote: “Writers always envy artists, and would trade places with them in a moment if they could. The painter’s life seems less ascetic, less monkish, less hunched. For the writer, work is characterized as the absolute cessation of physical movement (all movement is an evasion and distraction from the job at hand).
In the age of the computer the writer’s office or study will increasingly resemble the customer service desk of an ailing small business.”

. On the cover of “Out of sheer rage” is a blurb from Steve Martin saying: ‘This is the funniest book I’ve ever read”. There you have it; two wild and crazy guys, both writers, both magicians, both brilliant.

Gamble on amber. Dead on red.

Nevada has the best roads and the worst drivers in the country. Sometimes I wish it were the other way around. Yesterday I saw the light changing from green to amber so I slowed to a stop. A car whizzed past me at 60 miles an hour just as it turned red. I see this every day. I hope his appointment was important because the next one may be in Samarra.
The ecology of the road has become ever more dangerous. It started with behemoth SUV’s and trucks and has now moved on to texting, tweeting, eating, smoking; anything to keep your hands off the wheel and your eyes off the toad.
This week a truck smashed into an Amtrak train in rural Nevada and people were killed. I still don’t know the story. It was in the middle of nowhere with no other traffic in sight and still there was a collision. I guess the poor dead driver was doing a crossword puzzle.
There was a saying about the perils of a plane crash, that was meant to be calming: “If your number comes up, it comes up”. But the rejoinder is, “What if the pilot’s number comes up?”
James Janisse, the all night DJ on KJAZ used to sign off with “I wish you green lights and blue skies,” as commuters filled the LA freeways. I would add, “And a long happy journey through life.”

What does the future hold?

For Orwell it was a boot in the face forever. For Huxley it was drugged bliss. For H.G. Welles it was science and reason. For someone like me, retired and in my mid-70’s, it’s Groundhog Day. Today was like yesterday and tomorrow will be like today.
There’s no chance of a woman winking back, no more goals or homeruns in the offing, no exciting career challenges. On the other hand no chance of a DUI, a hangover, oversleeping, being late for work, being fired.
Graham Greene said the main consolations of old age were a fine aged cheese and a nice glass of Port. Don’t sneer. It could just be television and the supermarket.
Dean Martin despaired about getting old. In Nick Toches biography of him he said,
“I get up and have a bowel movement. I have breakfast and go to the Club and play a round of golf. I have lunch and gossip. I come home and have dinner, watch television, have another bowel movement, and go to bed. That’s my day, everyday.”
My consolation is reading all the books I should have read in high school and college. The other is writing this blog and emails. Thought is action, too.
Of course we’re not dealing with eternity. In one of John Updike’s final poems he wrote:
“You don’t want it to end, but it does…You don’t want to die, but you will”
So heed the advice on a sign hanging over the bar of The Arches in Newport Beach:
“The joy of life is living it”. It sure is.

The opium of the people

In 1843 Karl Marx said, “Religion is the opium of the people”. Today it’s sports. And, since hockey is a religion in Canada, the truth was borne out in the Stanley Cup Finals this month.
Vancouver suffered a bitter defeat at the hands of the Boston Bruins. Of course the players want to win but they have their multi-million dollar contracts and endorsements. Their happiness resides in their bank accounts and summer homes. It’s the fans who suffer, at least in Vancouver. These are people who are held hostage by their naïve belief in an inevitable victory. Weren’t they the chosen team with the best record in the league only to be struck down by a Bruin defenseman as big as Goliath. When God had forsaken them they went on a rampage disputing a heartless world.
In Boston it was all Hosannas as the team displayed the Cup in a triumphal parade reputed to be the largest gathering in the city’s history.
Identification is an important part of the fan’s mental makeup. His spiritual honor and emotions ride on his team. I confess that I identify with the Detroit Red Wings and could never be a “fan” of the Canucks who have been tortured for 40 years and 40 nights of failure.
Once upon a time the players were genuinely involved in the game. Long ago the great Red Wing Captain Sid Abel was quoted as saying, “Sure we played for money, but we would have played the Toronto Maple Leafs for nothing.”
The true reality of modern sports is money. The fan’s reality is illusion, the same as religion.

Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen has paid a beautiful homage to the loveliest city in the world. Like “Manhattan”, the opening scenes are ravishing and like all his films there is a jazz score, this time Sidney Bechet, and later Django-inspired playing. The first time I saw Paris I was stunned by the beauty of the bridges, the avenues, the galleries and the whole sensual atmosphere of the place. I took my two kids there for New Years--first stop The Eiffel Tower. I worked on an advertising project there for a week and ended up drinking too much and falling asleep on the Metro. When I woke up the car was in the barn and I had to tiptoe over the live rails to get out. And there were numerous other trips, the last time with my two English pals Bob and Steve, who liked to drink and make merry till all hours. They sent me home in a cab at 3 a.m. Actually it doesn’t matter if it’s midnight or noon or any hour of the day, it’s the most marvelous place in the world. If you’ve been you know what I’m talking about and if you haven’t you must put it on your bucket list. Then, as they do in “Casablanca”, you’ll be able to say: ‘We’ll always have Paris

The gentleman is a dope.

He isn’t very smart. I’m using a title from a Broadway musical since I’m talking about a congressman from New York named Weiner Airhead. He’s the guy who posted his shortcomings in titillating tweets, then denying it and lying about it. What a twit, he’s dumber than I was in junior high.
It’s still fairly innocent stuff compared to our other “leaders’: the adulterous ex. Senator Ensign, the mentally muscle-bound Arnold and too many others on the Federal payroll.
We’re too dumb to be governed anyway. If you read the news carefully you’ll see that all politicians represent themselves first and then us if it suits them.
They’re not statesmen, they’re actors like Reagan and Arnold, B picture hacks. There was a New Yorker cartoon years ago showing their favorite middle aged, middle class matron sitting in front of her television wistfully saying, “I wish Gene Kelly would run for something.”
I’ve just been told that the New York Congressman’s name is Anthony Weiner. Weiner Airhead is the guy who started EST back in the ‘70’s.

Memorial Day: Death's Annual three day holiday

My mother’s name was Smith. Her father, Pete Smith, was killed in the First World War so, of course I never met him. I’m not even sure I saw a picture of him. There was a medal, but that’s all I remember.
He was Canadian so I tried to look him up at the Imperial War Museum in London. There was a guy at the computer doing his own checking and I asked him if he’d be long. “No, it doesn’t take long,” he said, “unless the name is Smith”. All the main characters in the 1969 film “Oh what a lovely war” were named Smith. That’s also the name Orwell gave to his tragic hero of “1984” Winston Smith. That’s because he is Everyman, symbolized by the most common English name. The end of the film is as powerful and poignant as any anti-war movie. Young Private Smith follows a red ribbon through the signing of the Armistice , past his now all-female family picnicking to lie down in the grass alongside other young men—the last soldier to die in WWI. But not the last young man to die in battle. There is a large sign in the Imperial War Museum that says: Over 100 million people died in war in the 20th Century.
One of my favorite poets, Phillip Larkin, wrote;
…Courage is no good: it means not scaring others.
Being brave lets no one off the grave:
Death is no different whining at than withstood.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave. I confess to being very cowardly about this. I can’t even look at the hopeful young faces on the Honor Roll of the dead at the end of the PBS News Hour. To me, they’re all Smiths.

Tobasco sauce made them do it.

I’m not into conspiracy theories but there is something sinister behind all these men behaving badly. Dr. Drew says it’s narcissism, a standard response for the daytime tv audience. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this but it does come from the CIA report on bin Laden’s pad. There was plenty of damning evidence, including porn DVD’s, but the thing that caught my eye was the fact that bin Laden did not allow Tobasco sauce in his home. Why Tobasco sauce? Because he knew it was an addictive aphrodisiac that drove middle-aged men crazy. Remember, he was out to destroy the Western world and what better way than driving important men to self-destruction. If you got a search warrant for the residences of Arnold, Charlie Sheen, ex Senator Ensign, Tiger and now Mr. IMF, I’ll bet you’d find a stash of Tobasco sauce. “She just came in to clean my hard drive”, Monsieur IMF said of the hotel maid. Why, because your third wife isn’t handy with tools? “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” That’s Sir Walter Scott’s poetic warning to guys who think that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Weird, perverse, lethal, vulgar, stupid

Of course I’m talking about the internet. I saw a link to Stephen Hawking this week where he stated there was no heaven. It took me to an AOL site called Weird which seems to be a perennial beat. It wasn’t Hawking that was weird , it was all the things on the same screen with his view of the Universe. “Any tweethearts out there?” A large ad for Argosy University which has as much value as a degree from Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge, Behold the Jesus fish stick. May is zombie awareness month.
This is an example of the great symbol drain noted by Neil Postman. Such sacred or serious symbols such as the flag, Jesus, Lincoln and Hawking are juxtaposed next to Donald Trump, Dennis Rodman and fish sticks.
Just as advertising has decimated the narrative on television it is now over-distracting the message on the laptop.
And speaking of the medium is the message: McLuhan! Thou shouldst be living at this hour: We hath need of thee. He predicted this as the waning of the literate print world was giving way to the acoustic, tribal visual world . Perhaps he wouldn’t even be surprised by Facebook and Twitter. After all, he coined the term “the global village”.
Where does that leave us in a world that won’t leave us alone
Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Leave your privacy at the door. Join a chat room and have a stranger call you names and insult you. Run a classified on Craigslist and have someone come over and kill you. Bump into a porn site and leave the house in handcuffs
There seems very little that is humane or rational on the web. It’s now all gossip or links to dubious commercial destinations. It trivializes the human condition but you can’t spoof a tsunami, or water down a flood or send up a plane crash. One of Dwight MacDonald’s prime examples of “Masscult” , the dumbing down of culture, was the new, simplified version of the King James Bible, robbed of its majestic language and reading like a press release. This was 60 years ago. What can we look forward to for the functionally illiterate high school graduate of the future: The King Jimmy Bible?

Revenge is sweet

Osama bin Laden in dead. Great news for everyone, although I do have reservations about the crowds screaming USA, USA. This isn’t the Miracle on Ice. Still, as one who was caught up in the joyous celebrations for both VE Day and VJ Day I can understand the emotion. It’s a victory to be savored. I have no idea how our Special Ops did it (we’ll have to wait for the Bruce Willis movie to see) but it was quite brilliant. Also clever was the burial at sea. No pilgrimages, no burial site, no monuments. He’s gone. George Orwell wrote that he couldn’t really hate Hitler because he saw so much pain in his face. This didn’t win him any friends in England but it was a personal, human reaction. Looking into bin Laden’s history we see that he was using our Stinger missiles to help drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan . He was in our good books then. But when he returned to Saudi Arabia he was disgusted with our deal with the oil rich royal family there. He then became a sort of Arabic Che Guevara and turned from a gentle (the papers description of him) and idealistic young man into a murderer. I hark back to Mary Shelley’s famous novel “Frankenstein”. It has nothing to do with Boris Karloff but is a morbid story warning about the dehumanization of art and the corrupting influence of science. The final lines are chilling and apropos of bin Laden’s ending: The Monster said, “my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds” .He sprung from the cabin window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.

Bill and Kate's Excellent Adventure

As if you didn’t already know about the wedding of the century between Prince William and Catherine Middleton. They are now heirs-in-waiting and given a steady diet of Malvern Water and constant attention they should be ready to ascend the throne in, oh, about thirty years. Until then, you shall see them dressed smartly in every magazine and reality show on earth. So far they have even had a pizza done with their likeness as a topping. Top that Donald Trump (the T is silent). They have now performed (in Phillip Larkin’s wry phrase) “their tabloid fertility rites”.
I love the new titles: Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the unbeatable new monikers Baron and Baroness Carrickfergus. As for us, The King of Queens is not listed in Burke’s Peerage and The Dukes of Hazzard were only a television dynasty, but we do have one person who outranks anyone produced by England: Duke Ellington.
Actually, I know a couple in San Francisco named Bill and Kate. They live a sane middle class life with their two sons and don’t have to worry a fig about the oppressive and omnipresent paparazzi. Human lives don’t really need 24/7 press coverage unless that’s what the great unwashed demands of them, until the day they die, and then it really heats up. (Pace Princess Diana).
Orwell said the English were just one big family, with the wrong people in charge. Hopefully, he is wrong about this couple. I won’t be around to see it. We still have to deal with Bonnie Prince Charlie and Dowdy Old Camilla

Classmates, reunions and Hard Truths.

This is not going to be pleasant reading. If you do get through it I’ll have some comforting words for you.
I’ll be 76 next month. Same day every year, May 8th. It won’t be as joyous as May 8, 1945 when I celebrated both my 10th birthday and VE Day riding around Edmonton Alberta in an open car until way past my bedtime. As Scott Fitzgerald said, “the greatest thing life can give you is youth”.
I was at a reunion last week of staffers (not me) who worked together on the UC Berkeley Daily Cal newspaper in the 1950’s. They’re still a pretty spirited lot, have all their marbles, are courageous but are coming to the last chapter of the story. One has had a stroke and walks with a cane, one is recovering from cancer and has her head covered with a cap, the rest are balding, gray haired, widows or widowers. My zaftig wife is one of them but she still has hair the color of Rita Hayworth’s.
When Casey Stengel was showing his young outfielders how to play the ball off the fences one of them said, “How does an old guy like you know this stuff?” and Casey replied, “Jeez kid, I wasn’t born this age”. None of us were.
I have a high school reunion next month in Vancouver but won’t be going. It’s too far and too depressing. My best friend from the sixth grade and President of the Class didn’t even make it to the 25th reunion. He had drowned in his thirties. At the 55th I asked my “two kiss” girlfriend” of my Senior year if her feckless, divorced husband was still around and she just pointed up to the sky, the shortest, sweetest obit I’ve ever seen.
The giant scythe keeps mowing us down with a bumper crop on the horizon. But, as Jean-Luc Picard says, “It’s a condition of our existence”. However, what is the quality of our existence these days anyway? Recession, wars, poverty, terror, Newt Gingrich. “People in nursing homes die watching late-night television,” Garrison Keillor said, “ and if I were one of them I’d be grateful when the darkness descends”.
Orwell advised his readers to face the hard truth that we are all forgotten in one generation and in two no one will ever know we had ever lived.
So, here’s my advice to keep the ball rolling, no matter what age you are: read more poetry, more Hagar The Horrible, go to the movies but only if it’s a Pixar film, don’t waste time with Oprah or the evening news, compliment three people every day, including strangers. As Yogi Berra says, “It isn’t over till it’s over”. If this has left you depressed get out your DVD of “Singin’ in the Rain” or put on the Hi Lo’s cheerful version of “Life is just a bowl of cherries” with the life-reinforcing chorus: “Live and laugh at it all, you know, like Ha-Ha, Ha-Ha, Ha-Ha”.

Faust Finds The Formula

The new film “Limitless” is a modern take on the legend of the man who sells his soul for youth, knowledge, wealth and power. Only he gets away with it and the devil goes away empty-handed.
As the promo line says, “What if a pill could make you rich and powerful (the way it does large pharmaceutical companies). It’s one of those faux literary films like “Inception” all full of the special effects that infantile young men love.
The lead character, Morra, starts out as a feckless loser, moocher, bum. He comes across the “pill” by chance and instantly is focused, energetic and quite brilliant. The pill wears off , so to keep supplied, he has many brutal adventures, kills a few people until he finally makes a fortune and learns how to make the pill safe and abundant (for himself, nobody else).
But what does he do with this power? Become a modern Prometheus, champion of mankind? Who dat? No, he goes to Wall Street, makes bazillions and in the final scene he is running for the US Senate. There are no ethics or morality in this film. For that you need to see “The Lincoln Lawyer”.
Morra doesn’t want to cure cancer, save Africa a la Albert Schweitzer, work out the gaps in Quantum theory, no, he wants to go to Washington, be on CNN, meet Katie Couric.
What an underachiever. As we used to say in high school, “what a pill!"

Suze Orman channels Ben Franklin

I saw Suze Orman, the financial guru with the butch haircut, declare on TV that the American Dream was dead. Sorry Thomas Jefferson. Using her blend of simpleminded and unsophisticated language (she is not a trained economist) she claimed that the new American Dream is peace of mind and frugality, a page from Poor Richard’s Almanack. A penny saved is a penny earned. Waste not, want not.
I can’t disagree with her although it does dispense with one of the tenets of bourgeois living, namely the materialist urge which provided the incentive for work.
So, who will survive the slump? Significant shifts in economic power are here already. The Chinese are buying Buicks hand over fist. We’re vulnerable because of our dependence on oil and the bite it takes out of our disposable incomes. Save money? Fiscal sociology is the central feature of a modern political economy. We’re a consumer society. As Marx said in The Communist Manifesto, “ the bourgeoisie has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all previous generations together.” Poor Karl can’t get no respect from Americans.
Who would put themselves in hock for a Cadillac today? Who wouldn’t scissor their credit cards with their cunning fine print and never-ending fees? But that’s the problem. Western society is dependent on wants and the squander of resources on needless products of status and display. The New York ad agency Young & Rubicam once said: “All you NEED is a cave, a fire and a piece of meat”. So much for needs in a society dependent on wants and a multitude of products for status and display.
In my blog of Nov. 8. 2010 I quoted Marx, Veblen and others who don’t have TV shows. Orman wouldn’t know Keir Hardie from Andy Hardy so she can’t enunciate classical or modern economic theory. As McLuhan says, television pollutes the thought environment. She runs a “helpful hints” column, a Penny wise and Pound foolish approach. It’s somewhat like the fortune cookie I got this week that said wisely, “Look to your inner being for guidance”. Indeed I shall. Still, I suppose she is trying to help the poor middle class get back on its feet. People who have lost their jobs, lost most of their home equity, their savings and their hope can use a little feelgood talk. I’ll even chip in with some useful advice of my own: give up valet parking and watch those pennies add up!

What makes Gatsby run?

Let me play literary critic for a moment. I’ve just finished a book that I haven’t read since high school. It’s Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run?”, a scandal when it was first published in 1941 and far over the head of this reader circa 1952.

But now older and much better read, I saw something I wouldn’t have seen before, nor would many other readers: it is a companion book to the pre-eminent novel of the twentieth century, Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”.

American Lit is now in session. Both novels have first person narrators: Sammy’s Al Manheim is Gatsby’s Nick Carrington. Both main characters are uneducated young men who make big money and achieve success on their terms. Both Gatsby and Sammy change their name to “Americanize” it. Both yearn for the same wrong and unattainable woman. Both books have New York City as central locales.

Of course the action takes place a decade apart and the backgrounds are very different. Gatsby is from the Midwest and Sammy Glick is from a poor lower Manhattan family.

It happens that Schulberg and Fitzgerald knew each other in Hollywood and worked on a film together with disastrous results.

Gatsby remains the greatest novel of the twentieth century while “Sammy” is now just a footnote, like other Hollywood novels such as Christopher Isherwood’s “Prater Violet” and Nathaniel West’s “Day of the Locust”

Scratch a novelist and you’ll find a moralist, which is the strong bond between the two books. The final passage of Gatsby is considered one of the most lyrically tragic and beautifully written in literature.

But the final paragraphs of “Sammy” are no slouch either, reflecting on the moral lessons life teaches us. “It was too late to hate him or change him,” says the narrator, “his will had stiffened, formed to the life-molds, the terrible hungers of body and brain, the imposed wants, the traditional oppressions and persecutions”…and so we beat on, boats against the current.

The American Peasant

Years ago, during the Cold War, a Soviet spokesman was quoted as saying, “Why does the American Peasant put up with all the wasteful military spending?”
I was both astonished and offended by the statement, not the wasteful spending part but the term American Peasant. Does a peasant drive a Buick or live in an air-conditioned split level ranch house? How dare these Tartar savages insult us?
Of course wasteful military spending continued unabated to this day despite the warning President Eisenhower gave us about the military-industrial complex. War is Peace is one of the pillars of Big Brother. During the Reagan years we boasted of bankrupting the Soviets. Well, you can now include us in the Chapter 11 filing.
Dosvidanya suburbia, McMansions, and second homes. Au revoir fancy restaurants, expensive wine and lavish tips. Goodbye gas guzzlers, and those fat 401K s (the K stands for Kaput). We’re all working class now.
But what about those plump pensions for State workers? We can’t afford them anymore. “Any government that robs Peter to pay Paul will get the full support of Paul”, said George Bernard Shaw, no Fox News apparatchik, but a genuine Fabian Socialist.
The pension liability facing the States is now over $3 trillion. So the protestors crowd the State house in Wisconsin. I think that if you’re going to storm the Winter Palace you’ll need more than placards to change the system. The Ur union organizer Samuel Gompers was asked long ago what he wanted and his one word answer was “more”. I’m afraid the word today is “less”.
Don’t look at me tovarich. I’m a Don but not a Cossack. I agree with you. We’ll just have to see how the Nouveau Peasentry deals with the new reality. To quote the Unitarian Minister Bob Marshall, “If you want to be free brother, pay cash”.
Nevertheless, it’s nice to see the dictators falling in the Middle East. I saw my favorite war movie this week, “Sahara” circa 1943. The whole conflict is there in the desert. The pathetic Italian prisoner denounces Mussolini to his Nazi fellow prisoner who kills him. Meanwhile Tank Commander Humphrey Bogart gives the most inspirational speech in the film. He convinces his band of Allies to hold the line in a 100 to 1 shot. They prevail with bravery and losses. Tobruk is retaken and the Germans are stopped at El Alemein. Bottom line, to win you have to sacrifice and endure, die if you must if Rommel breaks out even if his name is Glenn Beck or John Boenher.

The wittiest man in England

His name is Steve Lovering and he is an Eminent Bathonian (meaning he lives on charm and pale moonlight in Bath, near London).You might find him on Facebook but he’s far too modest to put his profile on Debrett’s or Burke’s Peerage.
He has been amusing me for years without resorting to long-winded jokes, puns, attitude, four letter words or any of the rusty tools of today’s unfunny comics. (See my blog “Say something witty” Dec. 10th, 2010 posting.)
He does it with erudition. He is extremely well read and superbly educated (just ask him).
Although he has written comedy professionally, his main career has been in advertising. He is sort of an English Don Draper, from Mad Men. In other words, pretty cool.
He is also very well traveled and comes to visit me in Vegas, which he calls Gomorrah. I did stump him once by saying that I knew what they did in Sodom but what were they guilty of in Gomorrah? He dodged this with some quote from Phillip Larkin rather than hear my theory that Sodom and Gomorrah were brother and sister, but that’s another parable.
Here’s how quick he is. There’s a spa here in the new Cosmopolitan called The Violet Hour. Ring a bell? Probably not, but Steve instantly knew it was from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. “At the violet hour, when the eyes and back turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits..” Notice he didn’t stoop to saying it’s a spa known as The Waist Land.
He knows Orwell as well as I do, probably better since he once lived in the same flat as Saint George. Here’s some of his quickwittedness in action:
The most dreadful scene in 1984 is the torture chamber where people’s worst fears are used to break them. When the guards start to attach a cage with rats on his face, Winston screams, “Do it to Julia”, the ultimate betrayal of his love. He is broken forever. As Steve says:
Winston worked hard for the State,
Met Julia and goes on a date,
His thought crimes come out,
He sees rats; turns devout,
Now he thinks that Big Brother is great.
Steve has enjoyed a Dorian Grey deal and seems never to look older. I suppose when he does reach old age he will have to leave his mews house in Bath and be taken to a home for the terminally handsome.

Spam, Scam, Thank You Mam!

It started last month when a scheme slithered into my mail box. Voila, it contained a check for $4400 made out to me from a real bank. I had to do a few routine things such as remit some of it to people I’ve never heard of, but hey, a lot of it was mine to keep. I showed it to my bank manager and he said he would gladly deposit it but if it didn’t clear in ten days I would be stuck with a big fee and my own checks would be cashed. Actually, anyone could smell a rat in this one: a big check for doing very little, in this market! Hope springs eternal in the human breast. (1)
Two came in yesterday. One was simply a blatant chain letter. Send money to the top name and insert yourself at the bottom. Oh, and also buy 400 labels from them. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive (2) This is a Stone Age scam but it proves that a sucker is born every minute (3).
The other was more polished and was triggered by two of the seven deadly sins: sloth and greed. It was titled Document of Award Payment and featured a check for $1,400,000. This is something Publisher’s Clearing House told me about when I subscribed to the ultra-thin Time magazine. I thought it was kosher. But I took time to read it carefully. It had no real sender’s name or address and it made some glaring mistakes in English, but you can see that in the newspaper every day. What I noticed was the check mark to enclose $19.99 basically to prove that I was me. It had nothing to do with Publishers Clearing House. What do ya think, I’m dumb or something? (4)
These are decidedly simple scams, unlike the big money rip offs in mortgages and derivatives but they are booby trapped just the same.
Schemers love dreamers, but folks, just put your dreams away for another day. If it says Act now, Urgent, Offer expires in five minutes, click here, only $47 for the secret to a six figure income I suggest you Act Now and throw it in the trash can and click the spam button. Never give these suckers an even break. (5)
(1) Alexander Pope, (2) Sir Walter Scott, (3) P.T Barnum (4) Lena Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain. (5) W.C. Fields Quotations courtesy of www.ask.com

An explanation! My kingdom for an explanation!

It’s Oscar month on TCM so I watched Richard III, the one with Laurence Olivier, not the remake with Ian McKellen done in 1930’s fascist costume. That’s the one where I cheekily told the girl in the box office, “Gee Richard III, I must have missed the first two”. I know she didn’t have a clue what I was saying but then who would know anything about history 500 years ago, no matter how important it was.

There have been plenty of films about Henry VIII , a part played by Charles Laughton, Richard Burton, Robert Shaw and Eric Bana and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jeff Bridges in the role. It’s a great way for actors to chew the scenery but how did this much-married ruffian get there? I got hold of a new book by Michael Hicks called “The Wars of the Roses”. Notice the plural, not the War of the Roses that everyone uses and was the title of a Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner black comedy.

The real wars were hardly comedy. There was more death and deceit in that era than The Sopranos and Law and Order put together. As one historian called them, “the most frenetic and purposeless battles in English history”

But who knows anything about them except for the famous lines Richard opens with in Shakespeare’s play, “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer” to his exit line, “A horse, my kingdom for a horse”. Now you can be the first on your block to speak with authority on this, and see if anyone cares.

The Wars of the Roses were the end of the Middle Ages and the start of Modern Britain. This brings up the question of whether history is even important today. One of my most distressing encounters was with a young man who proudly told me that he just graduated from college with a major in History. So I said I’d give him an easy test on dates. I started with 1066, ”the Industrial Revolution” he said. Well, no, it was the Norman Conquest of England. I then said 1860 to 1864, ”the Industrial Revolution” he said quickly, well, yes, but more particularly the American Civil War. By now, he was getting annoyed. I tried 1914 to 1918 and he just shrugged his shoulders, 1939 to 1945, “nothing happened then” he said sulkily. He’s probably a tenured Professor by now in some Midwestern college teaching the History of The Tea Party.

At a cocktail party I said to someone, “What news on the Rialto?” and the hostess said, “What is that, some kind of New York saying?” Well, Al Pacino played Shylock so maybe it is.

Here are some facts in case there’s a snap quiz: Richard III was killed at The Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Henry Tudor became king and Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509. This is not the guy Herman’s Hermits sang about in “I’m Henry the Eighth I am, I am”. They were usurpers. The term War of the Roses came from Sir Walter Scott in 1829.



As the great American historian Cole Porter advised, “Brush up your Shakespeare, start quoting him now”. After all, Shakespeare wrote eight plays about the period. By the way, the winner was the House of Lancaster, the guys who wore the white rose, the reds were the House of York. After III no more Richards, after VIII no more Henrys, lots of Edwards and Georges, a few Queens and Charlies and, of course, the long-reigning Larry King.

However, as far as I can tell the only survivor of this medieval massacre was the actress Claire Bloom who played Richard’s girlfriend Lady Ann. She has lived long enough to play Queen Mary, the mother of George VI in the Oscar-nominated film “The King’s Speech”. Lesson over, back to Super Bowl XLV. Boy, you have to know your Roman numerals to study history.

My career that wasn't.

I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Journalism. This was so I could continue my brilliant career as a high school jazz columnist, copyboy and night reporter on my alma mater paper, the mighty Vancouver Sun.
But a funny thing happened on my way to byline fame and stop-the-presses action.
When I showed up for my interview at the Sun with my wife Peggy, they announced that they could only hire one of us and since Peggy had worked on magazines in New York and the Berkeley Gazette and, most importantly, was a member of the American Newspaper Guild, she got the job. Besides, they offered her twice the money I could get.
So she went to work on the paper and I went to work at a night liquor store.
I took interviews during the day but a journalism degree doesn’t attract much attention in the broader economy. I got a job with the prestigious but stolid Hudson’s Bay Co as an executive trainee. One of the truisms about Canada is that it doesn’t value talent and openly disdains ambition. Otherwise Diana Krall would still be singing in Nanaimo bars and Jim Carrey would be doing standup in Toronto.
I was treading water till I applied for a job at an advertising agency. I was hired on the spot by a brilliant guy from New York who liked the Berkeley part of my resume.
Thus did my 35 year career in advertising get started. The most fun you can have with your clothes on they say, correctly.
It certainly paid off in money and adventure after we left Vancouver.
The future has no facts and when you’re starting out you don’t realize there is no such thing as a career, just the jobs you get or lose. You’re usually so tied down raising a family or keeping up with the Joneses that you don’t understand that it’s more important to heed Joseph Campbell’s advice and follow your bliss.
If I’d stayed in Vancouver I would have had one year’s experience 35 times. No growth and no adventure. Journalism would have disappeared very quickly for me anyway until today you have the internet asking, “Is your cat psychic?”; the Enquirer screaming, “Dwarf rapes nun, escapes in UFO” to the over-packaged hysteria that masquerades as cable news. And on a page in Life magazine I saw today they couldn’t even identify Glenn Miller correctly. They had Ray McKinley playing the drums. Where have all the fact checkers gone?
In the satiric “Being There”, a TV reporter asks the infantile Chauncey Gardner if he prefers print or television news, and he gives his stock answer, “I like to watch”, and she announces triumphantly, “at least someone has the guts to be honest”.
So, what would have been the result of a career in journalism? Instead of a smile from Julie Christie in London and meetings in New York, Paris, Madrid and Tokyo I would probably have ended up back at the night liquor store.

America always works.

You can hear it in her poetry:
From Walt Whitman:
“I hear America singing.
The carpenter singing, the mason singing, the boatman singing,
The delicious singing of the mothers
Their strong melodious songs”.
From Langston Hughes:
“I too, sing America,
I am the darker brother,
I laugh and grow stronger,
I too, am America”.
From Marge Piercy:
“The people I love the best jump into work head first,
I want to be with people who submerge in the task,
Who do what has to be done.”
In a limerick:
“There once was a baker named Fred,
Who checked out his checkbook and said,.
My funds are so low
Guess I’ll knead some more dough
That’s the best way I know to make bread”.
As the curtain rises on “The Glass Menagerie”, Tennessee Williams’s narrator says “It was that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind and were having their fingers forced down in the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.” Even then, girls could still earn ten cents a dance and sing “Ain’t we got fun”.
The billionaire George Soros lost some serious money in the Crash of 2008 but said without bitterness, “I was betrayed by my dreams”. He has moved on, which is what I would advise everyone to do now. This week I read about Patricia Kluge who seems to have blown $100,000,000. She too, was betrayed by her dreams. As for Bernie Madoff and his rich clients, the word schadenfreude comes to mind. When I worked in Zurich we said “Das ist schade” when someone had a cold or a headache. Losing millions requires more advanced German.
All pain is instruction and so America is back in school and will emerge smarter about money, the market and mortgages.
I was fired once upon a time in a very cold room in Toronto by a guy wearing a cheap suit. Did the world end? It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I moved on and in three years I was in the best job of my life, living in London in a 5000 sq.ft. flat overlooking Regents Park. I could even approve my own expense account.
Things will work out for America. They always have. Stephen Sondheim penned a great song in “Follies” about the ups and downs of a showgirl. It goes something like this:
“Good times and bad times come and go and I’m still here…went through the Depression, met a big financier…and I’m here”.

Wisdom can walk in any door.

I believe it was Russell who said, “ We all live the same lives”. That’s not Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, but the actor Kurt Russell. Just the same, it has the ring of truth. You can study Plato and Wittgenstein and not learn as much as you would from a few Fortune cookies.
If you remember the film “My Dinner With Andre”, Wally tells Andre that Fortune Cookies know exactly who they are going to. Mine do. Here are two recent ones: “Your senior years will be happy and fulfilling, and “Establish harmony and balance in your life”. For all I know Sarah Palin’s cookies say: “You will make big money spewing nonsense”.
I ponder something the dramatist Franz Werfel once said, “Mildness is wisdom”. This seems to be true everywhere but in present day America where someone mentally disturbed can buy a gun and go on a murder rampage.
You can study books on philosophy but they are only the tech manuals on morality. My insights mostly come from literature. “Either it comes easy or it doesn’t come at all”, “The greatest thing life can give you is youth”, “Her voice was full of money”, “Hit the baseball where they ain’t”. “The habit of careful veracity can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity, producing, wherever it exists, a lessening of fanaticism, with an increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual understanding.” That’s not Kurt, that’s Bert.

The N-word goes down the memory hole

Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s “1984, is charged with rewriting (really falsifying) history to conform to Party doctrine. This is what Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben is doing in rewriting “Tom Sawyer” and especially “Huckleberry Finn”. He is replacing the N-word with “slave”, thus taking the text away from Twain and misinforming a whole generation of students. First of all, everyone knows what the N-word stands for and is really too antediluvian to be used by anyone today. But Twain was writing in 1885 before immigration and before any racial sophistication. This guy Gribben also changed the name of the villain in Tom Sawyer from “Injun Joe” to Indian Joe. When Smith found some bit of information that annoyed the Party, his job was to toss it down the “memory hole” for permanent destruction. His girlfriend Julia works for Pornosec, a division of the Ministry of Truth which provides “literature” of a sort for the Proles. Her novels are written by machine , and have only six possible plots which are shuffled around to distract the readers. “We’ll let the readers decide,” Gribben said. Actually I’ve just emailed him with my suggestion for another offensive book: Joseph Conrad’s “Nigger of the Narcissus”.
How about “ African-American of a ship that is overly vain”. Let the readers decide.