I love character actors, always have, all the sidekicks, kindly uncles, wicked bankers, pompous politicians.  We have a bumper crop of great character actors today, in part because some directors have created what are essentially repertory companies; the same actors pop up in minor roles in most of their films.  My favorites may travel with Christopher Guest (Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, etc) Parker Posey, Michael Hitchcock, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Bob Balaban, and Guest himself.  My current favorite character actor is Ed Begley, Jr., probably best known for his roles on Arrested Development, Portlandia,  and Better Call Saul, but equally effective in the Guest company.  His dad, Ed Begley, was a great character actor as well, usually a very effective windbag.

Over the years, I’ve become convinced that most of the men who played leading roles in the Golden Age of Hollywood would probably be consigned to roles as character actors today.  I don’t share that opinion with everyone as apparently it is not a topic of abiding interest to most (any) people.  It happens to be the sort of topic that I can raise with my eldest son and his younger sister, both keen observers of popular culture.

My eldest son likes to remind me that my sensibilities are attached to an age I’ve never known, somewhere at the tail end of the 1920’s, just about the time sound came to moving pictures.  He might say that the use of a term such as “moving pictures” indicates the distance between his inner world and mine, and he’s not entirely wrong.

I’m part of the post-war generation, born in the  1940’s and graduating from high school in the mid-1960’s.  Think about that for a moment.  As I started grade school, popular music included “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?” and “Oh, My Papa,” as I left high school, “Hard Day’s Night” and “She’s Not There”.  At home, in the smallest town in New England, I watched television (three, sometimes four channels) and went to moving pics once in a while (neighboring town theater, so small we could call and ask the owner/ projectionist hold the start of the film as my mother forgot to put the frozen dinner in the oven) , but I spent a lot of time alone, with books, looking through magazines, listening to daytime radio,and watching the Million Dollar Movie(Same movie five times a day for a week – ask me about Mighty Joe Young).  Through a series of events I cannot explain, I often spent weeks alone with my grandparents, both virtually deaf and both wary of children. Tossing a rubber ball against the kitchen stairs took much of the morning, but the promise of a new book, a few radio shows, and bound collections of the Saturday Evening Post lay ahead.

All of which is to explain why it is that my turns of phrase sound more like those of a P.G. Woodhouse than a Hunter Thompson, although if I could write as well as either one, you wouldn’t be subjected to the sort of discoursive (British spelling) sentence such as that which I have just written.

This particular post was set off by the merry correction of my opinion of contemporary icons of the silver screen.  My daughter may have been present.

I opined that “stars” included leading men such as William Powell (Dick Powell for that matter),  what she might consider “older” men, men whose features were not classically beautiful.  It seemed to me that no active producer would greenlight a film dependent on the star power of Fred Astaire or Humphrey Bogart.  John Wayne was a large specimen (try standing next to him at a wax museum), but more rugged than regular.  Even as I write, I recall taking a band of sophomores to the British Museum, expecting that we could stand in shared awe before the Assyrian Lions.  They were halted in their tracks, not by the Rosetta Stone, but by a display of the armor Brad Pitt had worn while filming Troy.  Whatever opinion I might have of the film, I won’t forget the scene in which Pitt as Achilles literally climbs up one side of an a much larger adversary and down the other, hardly pausing in his ascent and descent, slicing whatever important bits he could while in motion.  Not the Achilles I had in mind when I read The Iliad, but darned impressive.

Impressive, and exactly the corrective I needed in order to try to modify my opinion that the culture had abandoned character for superficial symmetry of features.  Brad Pitt may have begun slouching into fame as a hitchhiking boy-toy in Thelma and Louise, but he quickly acquired enough quirk to play some darker roles, playing against type successfully in 12 Monkeys and Snatch.  Somehow, even with unfortunate goatee and weathered brow, he’s still what one of my students called, “a hunka-chunka manly man”.  Pitt, however, may be an anomaly; consider this remarkable pack of very accomplished actors.

Tommy Lee Jones, fabulous human and actor, is not a leading man.  Dustin Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Paul Giamatti, Ben Kingsley, Robert Duvall, Christoph Walz, J.K. Simmons, Alan Arkin, Chris Cooper, John C. Reilly are all “supporting” actors, even when the biggest name in the cast.  Litmus test?  Imagine any of these in a purely “romantic” role, clutched in a long close-up lip lock.

It has to noted that at least two of the “types” that starred in films of the 30’s and 40’s, the silky aristocrat and the buoyant song and dance man, have virtually disappeared.

David Niven, fox-faced Brit, played the smoothly aristocratic sophisticate.  Other actors in that camp would have included Ray Milland, James Mason, Claude Rains, and any number of Shakespeareans looking for a Hollywood pay-out.   I can’t think of a comparable actor in contemporary films.  Colin Firth in his various incarnations of Darcy-like coolly distant men of character?  Pierce Brosnan or Alec Baldwin?  Anyone who has played James Bond has to be relatively toothsome and so out of consideration, and Baldwin has moved from attractive leading man to “difficult” character of wealth or privilege.

Very few conventional musicals make it to your neighborhood  Cinema Fifteen, leaving less room for the supremely talented singers and dancers at the top of the marquee.  Fred Astaire, was an oddity, essentially a corn-fed midwestern boy-next-door, who happened to be exquisitely graceful and capable of carrying roles which demanded moving around in white tie and tails.  Astaire, born in Nebraska, played aristocrats less convincingly than he did the itinerant song and dance man.  Gene Kelly was a more classically good-looking version of the athletic hoofer; James Cagney and Donald O’Connor were less poster worthy energetic (occasionally, antic) dancers. Anyone who can explain Bing Crosby as a romantic lead is warmly invited to add a lengthy response to this article.

There several types that still hit the screen, presenting opportunities for the more ruggedly featured.  Bogart and Cagney may fall in the “barely-redeemed tough guy” role, played in recent years by Bruce Willis, Mark Wahlberg, Gerard Butler, Nick Nolte, Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwartzenegger, Vin Diesel, Liam Neesen.  Robert DeNiro bounces from entirely unredeemable to somewhat less dangerous dad/older mentor.  James Dean and Marlon Brando were both unstable and dangerous, but both were handsome, as are James Franco, Colin Farrel, and Jake Gyllenhaall

The Boy-Next-Door is clean-cut, wholesome, and approachable.  The key to appreciating the boys next door is to see that they remain popular without taking their shirts off.  In the 30’s and 40’s, Mickey Rooney and Van Johnson played the part; today’s versions occasionally have a bad day, curse convincingly, but remain essentially good guys.  Matt Damon is a heel in The Talented Mr. Ripley, but ordinarily sweet, even when tortured as in Good Will Hunting.  Damon’s Bourne does the work of a trained killer but could easily retire from the killing craft and open a cheese shop in Vermont.

Fortunately, my daughter is not shy in expressing her opinion, arguing persuasively that actors with character have a place in contemporary  hearts.  She points to actors such as Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield as examples of  type that she calls “really smart, quirky, slightly nerdy, and loveable.”  Daniel Radcliffe, apparently, can also be included in that tribe.  Point taken.

Henry Fonda’s name appears in the title of this piece.  He was presentable in terms of appearance (his kids and grandkids are gorgeous), but he had great appeal as the man of character, a good man, occasionally placed in situations that tested that character.  I would put Tom Hanks in that category today; he has played that part ever since he escaped Bosom Buddies and fell in love with a mermaid in Splash.  As he aged, his roles have had more to do with character than with cuteness, but just as Ed Begley, Jr. was ready to follow in his father’s footsteps, our next thoroughly transparent man of character may be Colin Hanks, still cute but approaching mature good sense.

Two recent documentaries do a nice job of identifying faces we’ve seen a hundred times.  The first was That Guy …Who Was  In That Thing, and the second is That Gal … Who Was In That Thing.  Great chance to catch up with Bruce Davison and Gregory Itzin, you know, the guy who was in 24?  Want to give credit where credit is due?  Track down David Costabile, Gale Boetticher on Breaking Bad.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We (not I or anyone I know personally) sent a probe to Jupiter that managed to survive an absurdly difficult approach in order to enter into an orbit from pole to pole.  The launch took place in 2011 and the probe , Juno, entered into orbit on July 4th, 2016, so this was not a red-eye to the moon; people who know something about distance in space suggest that the route covered about 540 million miles.  Had we the capacity to shoot a beam of light (at the speed of light, of course) it would take only about 48 minutes and 19 seconds to get to Jupiter. So, that’s faster.

Whatever dreamy misunderstanding I had about Jupiter was set straight by Scott Bolton, the project’s chief scientist.  “It’s a monster.  It’s unforgiving.  It’s relentless.  It’s spinning around so fast.  Its gravity is like a giant slingshot  slinging rocks, dust, electrons, comets.”  Apparently, the beautiful rings are primarily made of flotsam, some of that far slung dust, particles of which can last from 100 to 1000 years.

We’ll know more about Jupiter when the work of Juno is done.  We’ll know something about how the planet was formed, and probably a bit more about the solar system, the galaxy, the universe, but at the end of the day, in 2018, we’ll still lie awake and try to get our heads around the who, how, and why of all of it.

The who I mean is not the universal life force/creator/divine architect/good shepherd.  The who in question is the person lying awake, quaking in the hour of the wolf, remembering the shock that arrived when first gazing up at the stars, lazily mind-swimming in the view until, uninvited, the thought nudges the rim of consciousness –

“Whoah!  I’m pretty small.  These stars aren’t actually where I see them but off somewhere else, dancing in some other formation that someone else will see after I’m long gone.  This big picture makes my brain hurt.  Oh, and, I’m mortal. These stars will outlive me, but someday they’ll burn out and fizzle like fireworks in a fish pond.

Or something roughly like that.  And that set of brutal truths then bumps up against whatever psyche melting speculation has most recently playing at the Hometown Cinema 12, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, Abre los Ojos, any of the films or shows that seem to suggest that there is no demonstratable reality, that all we know exists only in our individual brain pan, and the entire structure of all that is (or isn’t) may be a subjective fiction.  I don’t know why the thought that I am dreaming myself, that my life is a lucid/fog-bound dream should be more terrifying than realizing that Russia, China, Pakistan, and North Korea all have nuclear weapons, or that the polar cap is now covered with tiki bars.  After all, it’s just a theory, as undemonstratable as anything else.

Well, it may pack a punch because it throws this whole “self” thing into question, shutting down just about the only set of certainties we thought we could count on.  How do we make our way through the day if we are uncertain that the day actually exists?

Let’s just put that inconvenient doubt aside for a bit because we still have to contend with how, and again, I’m less concerned with the how of Jupiter’s birth and more concerned with the how of sentience. How does it happen that we are aware of our own subjective experience?  I’m not asking why us (me) or why does sentience operate as part of our human experience; I’m asking how the complex electrochemical neurological spasms and spurts have anything to do with mentation.  I’m ok with all the mapping and prodding (talk about probes!) brain research has done in the last twenty years, the genetic signals and the trace minerals, but we’re still left not knowing what a thought is, where it originates, or why we know it as our own.  We can track down the flawed systems of sensation, processing, and expression when they break (phantom limbs, etc), but, like life itself, mentation is currently only indirectly observable.  Flashes of light and color indicate brain activity, pathways glow, lobes glow, proteins glow, but we can’t identify the how of any specific thought.

So, why?  Why has the universe bumping along on whatever spiral it has ahead included awareness of self?   Problem solving makes sense.  Kinesthetic awareness makes sense.  Gooseflesh and body hair make sense.  Not sure what evolutionary advantage resides in intimations of mortality or (perhaps) intimations of reality.  It’s pretty clear that a bunch of life forms can learn to distinguish between the left turn and food and the right turn and a blast from the experimenter’s taser.  At that level, probably not even mentation.  I’m pretty sure planeria don ‘t think, even though they can be conditioned.  Biologists call their behavior “directional bias”, and I’m likely to keep that tag at the ready whenever my choices about anything are questioned.  Why do I prefer Michigan football to Alabama football?  Directional bias.

I’m perfectly comfortable lounging in the hypothetical, but real thinkers want more rigorous standards, so I’ll ask the question:  If the only purpose of sentience is primal (You exist as a person separate from all other life forms.  Tigers are a life force that would eat you as an appetizer.  Good idea to avoid tigers.), I can’t imagine (mentation  201) why we would spend the amount of time that we do in  our heads, as it were.  To take the issue one step farther, what’s the point of brain activity that often provokes those locked in self-awareness to do everything in their power to shut down the transmitter?  Drink, drug, exercise, gamble, shop until somehow the noise inside the head quiets; otherwise unchained humans experience incessant thought about self as being trapped in a kind of cacophonous pinball machine.

How did I get from the trip to Jupiter to unrelenting brain static?  I guess I wondered why a trip of more than 500 million miles is an easier trip than an idle visit to a fairly obvious human question.  Who, How, Why am I?

I’m inclined to exercise my directional bias toward mystery.  It may turn out that it is better not to know how we know, you know?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every once in awhile, something I’ve heard  drops from one shelf in my memory warehouse to the floor, sprays widely, and I am jarred into thought.  Something about hearing the word, apology, pulled me back to a Sunday morning years ago.

I am about ten years behind in my listening to This American Life.  The bad news?  I’m getting farther behind every week; the show celebrated its 500th broadcast two years ago and is still going strong.  Good news?  There is an odd concentration of thought and feeling that comes in listening to a story that was entirely topical when recorded.  And, to digress in the service of candor, I listen to some favorites more than once, especially the two great episodes, both of which follow a disabled news team, first presented in “Special Ed – How’s Your News”.  I listen to the first story and the follow-up whenever the weight of the world gets too great; apparently we have heroes all about us.

In any case, a shuffle of archived shows brought me “Apology” and an episode I probably think about four or five times a week, “Apology Line”.  Here’s the description of the episode as presented by Ira Glass when the episode was rebroadcast in 1997.

” Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today’s program, apologies. Stories of people struggling to apologize against some difficult odds. We’ve arrived act two of our show…, “Dial S for Sorry.”

A runaway checks in:

Hi, I’m a runaway and all I want to say is that I’m kind of sorry that I left. See, I’m 15 and I saw your number in the newspaper. When I saw it, I had to call because I mean, you walk around on the streets all day long just looking for someone that just might say, hey, want a place to go? Come with me. They’ll give you food and everything. And they won’t ask or anything back. That’s all I want. I guess I take up too much time on the tape. But I just got to talk.

A phone call allows a surviving son to admit that he extorted payment from his dying mother, charging her $5.00 for a glass of water, $10.00 for a sandwich.

The call that caused me to pull my car to the side of the road came from a man whose confession was coldly lacking in affect.

“I’ve never told anyone this except my shrink. I accidentally killed my younger sister when I was a very small child and it’s haunted me all my life because I didn’t really mean it. It was just a game to me and I was really too young to realize what I was doing. And I was putting her head inside a plastic garbage bag and putting a rubber band around her neck just to see her face turn blue. I guess it was a lot of fun and I didn’t mean anything bad to happen. But I guess I didn’t realize what would happen if I did this too long and she suffocated. I hid the plastic bag and I went out of the house. My parents weren’t home. And they never found out. They thought it was crib death. They never found out I did it.

I’ve never been able to tell them. I think it would hurt them worse than losing her to find out that I did it. I kind of wish my parents could hear this tape, but I guess they never will.”

I guess it was a lot of fun.

Let’s be clear.  That’s NOT an apology.

While there is value in confession, even the sort of anonymous confessions made on the Apology Line, an apology begins with the understanding that harm has been done, moves quickly to the assumption of responsibility, and then to an expression of regret, followed by an open-ended willingness to do what is necessary to make the situation right.

It’s human nature to hope that an apology will bring forgiveness, and it may, but an apology offered in exchange for forgiveness is essentially a transaction, hoping words are currency.  They aren’t.

I had to learn that my version of apology was often simply an excuse.  “I’m sorry, but that guy on the bus who stood on my toe made me so mad that I snapped at you.” That’s not an apology; it’s a defense of my behavior.

I was also the master of other equally bad apologies.

For example, I have learned that  adding the word “if” turns the responsibility for  injury back on the person I’ve injured.  “I’m sorry IF you took it that way.”    Uh, obviously my remark was taken as I intended it; I just hoped I could duck out of responsibility for it.

I could be even more offensively weaselish.  “Ok, I’m sorry I didn’t show up, but YOU are the one who wanted me to clean up the garage.” The unfinished end of the sentence is, “so it’s your fault.”

It’s a slightly more authentic apology when statements of regret bump into boundaries.  “I’m sorry I barked at you, but you kept leaning into me while I was trying to explain.”  I’m rarely healthy enough to say.  I’m sorry I barked at you.  I’m still trying to figure out how to express  myself when I’m uncomfortable.”

I may not be alone in not  wishing to be held accountable for my actions, but I think  I developed some advanced skill in pulling myself out of contact as consequences drew near.   I know I’m still withholding when I apologize so generally or so abstractly that there is no texture or weight to my apology.  The worst is flippant.  “Sorry about that.”  Only slightly better is, “I’m sorry for whatever it is that I’ve done. ” Marginally better?  “I’m sorry for everything.”  The shield is in place even as the words are  said.

I have had to learn that an apology demands clarity.  “I’m sorry I pouted and slammed dishes rather than talking about what was on my mind.”

The final level of apology has to do with contrition, authentic regret or remorse coupled with determination not to repeat the hurtful behavior.  In some cases, an authentic apology demands a next question.  “What can I do to make this situation better?”

That’s it,for apologies,  unless I’ve offended anyone.  IF I’ve offended it was because I’ve been running a fever and lost my favorite pair of sneakers, and YOU are the one who chose to read this stupid blog post anyway.  Sorry about that.

 

Every Cineaste has a “pantheon”, a critical assessment of the directors and works that are unassailably the most significant films of all time.  Some stick with the New Wave: Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol.  For others, it’s Hitchcock, or Scorsese, or Kurosawa, or Bergman,or Welles, or Kubrick, or Fellini.  What films are always at the top of the list?  Citizen Kane, Vertigo, The Rules of the Game, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Searchers, Battleship Potemkin, The Seventh Seal.  All great films.

The same group confesses to what they call “Guilty Pleasures,” films so mainstream, so conventional, that no amount of critical jargon can elevate them beyond personal partiality as trivial entertainment.  I’m quite fond of the films they nominate (Valley of the Dolls, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Barbarella, The Boys From Brazil, Willard, Point Break) but each has a critical point of connection in terms of auteur (Russ Meyer) or actor (Crispin Glover, Sir Lawrence Olivier) that the films can be seen, at the very least, as worthy of polite, demi-eyebrow-raised discussion.  The Love Bug and Honey?  Gator and Bullet to the Head?  Eye of the beholder.

I studied with Jeanine Basinger at Wesleyan and had the good fortune at the same time to have a slight friendship with Pauline Kael.  Both women helped to invent the language of film criticism, and both women held films to a very high standard.  They were each capable of writing and speaking with crisp insight, holding directors responsible for failure to make a film that kept its promise; they believed that form and meaning were essentially bound together; a film better look and play to some purpose other than flash and sizzle.

And yet.

Kael wrote, “Movies are so rarely great art, that if we can’t appreciate great trash, there is little reason for us to go.”  In print and in private, Pauline Kael enjoyed steamy, sexy films, especially those with lots of sweating, well muscled, lithe, lightly clothed actors,  as long as the film did not drop into pathos.  She loved Paul Newman’s Hud in part because he is an unredeemed heel and did not jump on the bandwagon when Scorsese’s Raging Bull was the critics’ favorite because she felt the film was suffused with sentimentality and self-pity, despite occasional physical brutality.  As a critic, Kael thought Hud was sloppy; at home, she though Newman was a hunk.

Jeanine Basinger has a very clear critical voice and is among the most widely published of academic film critics and historians.  She is a remarkable teacher, in part because she combines a love and reverence for film and for its history with a sharp critical eye.  One of the highlights of my work with film came in listening to Jeanine as she screened Johnny Guitar; she noted every decision Nicholas Ray had made, essentially allowing us to see how a director creates a universe of incredible density and intensity.  That said, she treasures the films of Frank Capra, has written about Lana Turner, Shirley Temple, Gene Kelly, and a history of marriage in the movies.  She is a curator, historian, critic, and above all, enthusiast.  I owe my love of Preston Sturges to her, and it is with Sturges that I start the list of films that are pretty great.

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

Watching a Preston Sturges film is like being trapped UNDER a deeply cynical elder aunt maintaining scathing and wickedly funny patter as the thoroughly dysfunctional family moving through the room takes pratfall after pratfall.  Sturges’ films are so tightly packed, both visually and with overlapping dialogue, that it may take more than one viewing to fully appreciate how cleverly ordinary exchanges become indelibly funny.  Eddie Bracken frequently plays what I can only describe as an Everyman WASP nebbish/schlemiel, a nervous Charlie Brown, in this film Norval Jones, categorized as unfit for service, pining for blonde Betty Hutton,as Trudy Kockenlocker,  a ditzy small town beauty who extends herself in every way to servicemen heading off to combat. Finding herself pregnant with no available husband, she enlists Jones as a stand-in, presenting himself as the father, although Trudy can’t remember the name of her one-night  adventure.   “It had a z in it. Like Ratzkywatzky or was it Zitzkywitzky?” Comedies about unwed mothers were verboten; censorship applied by the Hays Office (Motion Picture Production Code) prevented showing a married couple in the same bed and what they termed, “heavy kissing”.  So, As Critic James Agee observed, “The Hays office must have been raped in its sleep” when Morgan’s Creek was released.

Ball Of Fire

I’m increasingly aware of the charm that seasoned character actors brought to the films their studios shot during the height of the studio system.  A film programmer once asked me who my favorite actor was from that era, and my first thought was S.Z. Sakall, known to those who loved him as “Cuddles” Sakall.  Casual filmgoers will know him as Carl, the headwaiter in Rick’s Club in Casablanca, or as Barbara Stanwyck’s chef, Felix Bassenak in Christmas in Connecticut.  Sakall is one of seven professors living together as they compile an encyclopedic account of all things known.  Think Snow White and seven brainy dwarves, one of whom is Gary Cooper, playing against type as  a lanky academic, Professor Bertram Potts, untutored in affairs of the heart.  Snow White in this case is anything but snow white; Barbara Stanwyck plays Sugarpuss O’Shea, a hip singer in a nightclub and a gangster’s moll on the lam, hiding out in the encyclopedists’ lair.  Cooper and Stanwyck make a charming set of unlikely lovers, but the real texture of the film is in the various backstories of the remaining professors, each of which falls for Sugarpuss in his own gentle fashion.  In addition to Sakall (eminently cuddly in this outing), the experts include Oskar Homolka (crusty uncle in I Remember Mama, frequently cast as dangerous spy from somewhere in Eastern Europe), Henry Travers (Guardian Angel, Clarence, in It’s A Wonderful Life), Tully Marshall (A Yank At Oxford), Leonid Kinskey (bartender, Sascha, in Casablanca), and Richard Haydn (Max Detweiler  in Sound of Music).  Gene Krupa puts in a cameo appearance as the star drummer in Sugarpuss’ nightclub, playing Drum Boogie on matchsticks, Allan Jenkins is a garbageman (voice of Officer Dibble in cartoon, Top Cat), and Elisha Wood is a waiter.  Wood is a smarmy and ineffectual hoodlum in dozens of films, perhaps best known as the creep, Wilmer, in The Maltese Falcon, and is always a good bet to be the first to die in any film in which he appears.  This great supporting cast bring out the best in Sugarpuss and Potts and makes this a thoroughly charming film.

Big Trouble In Little China

Big Trouble is as close to a successful self-aware pulp mash-up as you are likely to find.  John Carpenter’s fondness for genre films has allowed him to turn out some dandies (Halloween, Starman, Escape From New York, Assault on Precinct 13, Prince of Darkness), each of which has the Carpenter touch, a mixture of genuine appreciation of the tropes of the genre and a wry admission of the silliness inherent in the genre.  In writing Assault On Precinct 13, Carpenter challenged himself to meld together two films he much admired, Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.  All for under $100,000.00.  Genius!  Similarly, when Carpenter was handed a project set in the American West in the 1880’s, it was but the work of a moment to transform it into a Chinese mysticism and martial arts film set in contemporary San Francisco.  Kurt Russell plays a wisecracking truck driver, marvelously overconfident and monumentally ill equipped for the battles he will have to wage against The Lords of Death, a street gang set on kidnapping a young woman who will serve the needs of evil sorceror, Lo Pan (James Hong in a role that only he could play), and the Three Storms (Gigantic Chinese martial artists portraying the elemental forces of Thunder, Rain, and Lightning).  There’s another war afoot between two competing ancient societies, Chang Sing and Wing Kong, allowing for widespread and almost constant mayhem (Carpenter had been dying to do a martial arts film) interrupted by two slight love stories.  Russell’s macho posturing is a send-up of John Wayne at his most oblivious and, set against the creepily mythic forces with which he contends, truly memorable.

The Court Jester

Danny Kaye deserves his own tribute site, but The Court Jester may be the most enduringly accessible of the Kaye’s films (with the obvious exception of White Christmas).  The premise is entirely familiar: Lumpish, greedy pretender (character actor Cecil Parker)has taken the throne abetted by a scheming advisor who wields a mean sword (Basil Rathbone, villainous Sheriff of Nottingham in Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood).  A princess (Angela Lansbury well before her stint as Jessica Fletcher on Murder She Wrote) falls for Kaye’s character, an ineffectual hanger-on in the band of woodmen led by a ersatz Robin Hood, known in this pastiche, as The Black Fox.  Through a series of misadventures, Kaye has to prevent the rotters from finding and eliminating the true heir.  On the way to the castle, he falls for one of the Black Fox’s company, an extremely competent young woman (Stunningly young Glynis Johns, honey-voiced, most known now as the suffragette mom in Mary Poppins) and is forced to impersonate the most celebrated jester of his time in order to worm his way into the inner circle at court.  There are many unexpected pleasures, but the best may be the extended duel between Rathbone and Danny Kaye, who slips in and out of hypnosis, alternately quivering wimp and contemptuous  expert

This film is lavish in set and color, the most expensive comedy of its time, and a semi-musical romance as well.  Kaye often performed the giddily goofy wordplay concocted by his wife, Sylvia Fine, a songwriter peculiarly gifted in the art of composing tongue-twisting novelty songs, done famously by Kaye, often in an assumed accent.

Double Jeopardy

Tommy Lee Jones, Harvard roommate of Al Gore, All-Ivy football player, English major plays competent, tough, principled men with unfailing sensitivity.  His performance in No Country For Old Men is heartbreaking, and his pursuit in The Fugitive set the bar for all bounty hunters.  He’s on the hunt again in this film, but he is chasing a resourceful wronged wife, Ashley Judd this time.  I don’t know if there is a badly-used-wife thriller genre (Sleeping with the Enemy, Enough), but this one has all the most disturbing of the elements, including injury, betrayal, and a contrived conviction for a murder.  Both Jones and Judd are strong in their roles, and their adventure is filmed against some delicious backdrops.  This is a clever edge of the seat chase film with balance and enough suspense to keep it moving well.

Point of No Return

Let’s start with Miguel Ferrer.  He’s a good person.  Really.  He’s been kind to me.  On the screen, however, he’s the best bad guy ever.  His mom, Rosemary Clooney, probably never thought her little boy would turn out to be the oily villain in Robo Cop and the terrifying Shan Yu in Mulan.  Happily, Ferrer is not the only horrible person in Point of No Return.  How about Harvey Keitel as “the cleaner”, and this is 1993, well before Pulp Fiction. In fact, Bridget Fonda is wholeheartedly horrible at the outset, and increasingly dangerous from her point of no return as a highly trained assassin. I like the original, Nikita, directed by Luc Besson, and I like the John Badham version on its own merits, partly because the transformation Bridget Fonda undergoes as she is remade from skanked out drug addict to sleek human weapon and partly because Venice (California) looks fabulous.  I don’t know that Joss Whedon absorbed the tone and shape of this film in conceiving the tv show, Dollhouse, but there are resonances that can’t be ignored.   The soundtrack is remarkable; Nina Simone sings, “Here Comes the Sun”, “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl”, “Feeling Good,”  Wild is the Wind,” and a soul-searing version of “Black is the Color of my True Love’s Hair.”

House Bunny

I know, the premise, putting a Playboy bunny in place as a sorority housemother, appears slight, and the weight of a thousand tasteless and almost routinely offensive Frat/College/Late Adolescent films is a profound burden, but The House Bunny is disarmingly sweet, essentially repurposing Ball of Fire by dropping good-hearted Anna Faris in the midst of the Nerd House, a collection of social misfits (Emma Stone, Katharine McPhee, Rumer Willis, Kat Denning among others), allowing each to bring out hidden capacities.  Some of the charm is in seeing Emma Stone emerge from gawky, self-conscious goofiness to the hesitant beauty we have come to know.  At the time, Stone had done a few television shows (Malcolm in the Middle), and had appeared in Judd Apatow’s Superbad, but was still a relative unknown.  She’d hit it big in the next few years (Zombieland, Easy A), but was already unerringly effective in creating a character that was awkwardness personified.  There are fairly conventional geek vs sorority queen sequences, but the abiding good heartedness of this film  allows a conventional comedy to take on some surprising weight.  A particular treat, I contend, is the trio (Stone, Rumer Willis, and Kat Dennings) backing Katharine McPhee’s take on the Waitresses song, “I Know What Boys Like.”

N.B.  This is the opportunity to give credit to Kirsten Smth and Karen McCullah (formerly Karen McCullah Lutz) who wrote some of the most engaging of films in the genre that came to be called Girl Power.  The two combined to write or co-write Ten Things I Hate About You, Legally Blonde, Ella Enchanted, She’s the Man, and The House Bunny.  You can add any of these to yet another list of films that are pretty great.

What About Bob

Movies that bristle with animosity rarely appear in the ranks of most appreciated comedies, but the descent of a noted Psychiatrist (Richard Dreyfuss) into frenzied retaliatory madness provoked by an unrelentingly needy patient (Bill Murray) works because Dreyfuss is put upon to just the right degree of insult and Murray demolishes boundaries with the clumsiness of a charismatic narcissist.  Dreyfus is pompous enough to deserve some of the misfortune he encounters, and Murray is intrusive enough to make Dreyfus’ fury reasonable.  The psychiatrist’s family, which could have become collaterally damaged, has been waiting for the transparent vulnerability Murray’s character brings to their summe retreat.  Julie Haggerty, often given the role as a flighty and over-nervous woman, is kind and competent in this film.  Son, Siggy (Sigmund) is played by Charlie Korsmo, a terrific child actor,  who also played Robin William’s son, Jack in Hook.  Korsomo left acting behind, went to MIT and then to Yale Law School – film’s loss.  Daughter, Anna, is played by Katherine Erbe, now a regular on Law and Order: Criminal Intent and also a death row inmate on  HBO’s Oz.  For many, young Erbe has one of the most memorable scenes, as a fully sentient teen forced to communicate with her psychiatrist father through the use of hand puppets.  Pretty great.

Get Over It

I can’t watch Martin Short for too long; his mastery of character is so painfully compelling, and those characters are ALWAYS grotesque and unsettling, that I have to take ten minutes to breathe a bit..  His work on Saturday Night Live is well documented, but he has been equally disturbing on Canada’s SCTV , in a number of cameo roles (Plastic Surgeon on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt!), as a host of various interview shows as an assumed persona, and in a series of impersonations that are devastatingly funny (Manic Jerry Lewis Telethon).  All of which is to say that Short, a drama teacher in this teen romantic comedy mash up of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and any number of high school comedies (Clueless?) simply adds spice to a very strong cast.  Ben Foster, Kirsten Dunst, and Shane West are the teens central to the romantic triangle, but older protective brother, Colin Hanks, rivals Short, essentially setting blind date Carmen Electra on fire in a  Hibachi restaurant.  The auditions for the musical version of Midsummer, a predictably terrible adaptation scripted by quintessentially narcissistic drama teacher (Short), may be entirely too close to the real thing.

State And Main

I’m a fan of ensemble films, movies that bring a great cast together and allow characters to bump up against each other in ways that drive the narrative but also reveal texture of relationships.  Christopher Guest assembles ensembles in that fashion, bringing a cast from one film to the next, allowing actors to play differing sorts of roles, as in Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration.  Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, and the Coen brothers also carry actors from script to script, maintaining a balance among actors, even when an A list star is in the cast.  America’s Sweethearts brings an ensemble together as does Love Actually.

State and Main is an ensemble film (William H. Macey, Sarah Jessica Parker, Alec Baldwin, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julia Stiles, Charles Durning, Rebecca Pidgeon, Patti LuPone, Clark Gregg, Ricky Jay, Jonathan Katz, and John Krasinski) set in a small New England town.  This is a version of the backstage film written with wry good humor by David Mamet.  Mamet also directed, as he did The Spanish Prisoner, with the sort of attention to dialogue that allows actors of this calibre to flex their comedic muscles.  Baldwin’s engorged libido has forced the cast of a film in production to flee the small town in New Hampshire appropriate to their needs to an equally small town in Vermont that is little prepared for the havoc the production will bring.  The leading lady, Sarah Jessica Parker, refuses to do a nude scene unless she is paid what amounts to the film’s entire shooting budget.  The leading man, Baldwin, sets his sights on an under ages Julia Stiles.  Philip Seymour Hoffman, the screenwriter asked to modify the script as accident and human failings change the circumstance of filming, is charming and vulnerable as he battles a severe case of panic/writer’s block.  Any one of these actors could be singled out as remarkable; the ensemble is, well, pretty great.

 

 

 

 

From A Whiff of Murder: A Mystery with a Twist of History

There is some distance between the intentions of Yale’s founders – religious men, mostly graduates of Harvard College – who hoped to train ministers grounded in the principles of the Puritan faith, from which more liberal thinkers in Massachusetts had strayed, and the free drinking members of the Class of 1863 who stumbled into (and out of) Moriarty’s Saloon.  This ale house attracted a rowdy band of students who quickly established “Mory’s” as Yale’s favorite watering hole.  Over the next century, Mory’s became so closely identified with the college and so much a part of the tradition of a cappella singing at Yale that the tavern and the institution became one.

Established as The Collegiate School of Connecticut in 1701, Yale became Yale with the donation of nine bales of goods from its first benefactor, Elihu Yale of the East India Company.  Thus, was Yale established and thus was born the commonly applied nickname – “the sons of Eli”.  Moved to New Haven from Saybrook in 1728, Yale College was the first and only college in Connecticut until the founding of Trinity College in Hartford in 1823.  

By the end of the 18th Century, Yale’s students were required to take Hebrew, Greek, and Latin in order to more effectively study the Bible.  As the influence of German universities crept into American education in the 19th Century, the curriculum broadened.  And, as an agrarian nation became industrialized, the composition and mission of the college changed as well. From preparing the sons of the landed gentry in Connecticut in its first years, Yale increasingly called the sons of industrial and commercial wealth from across the nation. After the Civil War, a new baronial class sprang from steel, railroads, lumber, oil; the newly established private banking houses made finance itself an industry.  The sons of these barons and magnates, raised in sprawling estates above or beside the gritty factory towns, were sent to the newly minted boarding schools (Saint Paul’s, Saint George’s, Saint Mark’s, Middlesex, Groton, Hotchkiss, Choate) and to the older academies (Phillips Andover, Phillips Exeter, Deerfield, and Lawrenceville) before they entered a world of splendid ease in the colleges waiting to welcome them.  

By the late 1800s, Yale was established as one of the nation’s premier institutions of higher education.  Unlike Harvard and Princeton, both of which were somewhat regional in their population – Harvard drawing predominantly from Massachusetts and New England; Princeton from the Middle Atlantic states and the South – by the second half of the 19th Century, Yale enrolled as many students from New York as from New England and as many from the South and Midwest as from New York.

By 1900, approximately 20% of an entering class were sons of Yale graduates, and almost 70% matriculated from private schools.  Public school graduates came from well-established high schools in Greenwich, Shady Side, Merion, Lake Forest, Shaker Heights, Grosse Pointe, Edina, Lexington, or San Francisco.  Yale was almost entirely white and overwhelmingly Protestant.  The proportion of Jewish students was limited to fewer than 10% of any class, and the number of Italian Catholics even smaller.  No black students were admitted to the undergraduate college at the turn of that century, although Yale was the first of the Ivy League universities to grant a medical degree to an African American doctor.

The experience of the undergraduate in the first decades of the Twentieth Century was celebrated in popular literature of the day, and the experience of the Yale undergraduate was peculiarly well imagined.  An article in the June 1961 edition of American Heritage Magazine reflects upon the extraordinary career of Gilbert Patten who, under the pseudonym of Bert L. Standish, produced a novel each week for twenty years, more than nine hundred stories in all, describing the career of Yale’s most prodigious fictional hero – Frank Merriwell.

It took a dozen early novels, set at the “first-rate” and fictional boarding school, Farday Academy, to prepare Frank for the extraordinary career he was to enjoy over the next twenty years at Yale.  The series took on real momentum with the publication of Frank Merriwell at Yale, introducing readers to a hero of consistently high moral standards, unthinkable athletic prowess, and impossible good looks.

Upon his first meeting with the company of gentleman scholars and athletes in New Haven, Merriwell made an immediate and vivid impression:

“He never drinks. That’s how he keeps himself in such fine condition all the time. He will not smoke, either, and he takes his exercise regularly. He is really a remarkable freshie.”

The author of the American Heritage piece, Stewart Holbrook, described the legacy of the series on generations of sports writers:

“Sports writers, when faced with reporting a last-minute home run in the ninth inning, or a long run down the field in the fourth quarter, often referred to this providential stroke as a “Frank Merriwell finish.” This was in an era when the only football, of course, was college football. And if you don’t happen to know where Frank went to college, it was Yale. One of Merriwell’s unforgettable lines went into history:

“You are a cheap cad,” Frank told the overdressed Harvard bully.

Many of the more than nine hundred Merriwell stories, it must be recorded sadly, libeled the illustrious university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

Which of the crimes was the greater, one wonders – bullying or being overdressed in Cambridge?

Sports writers may have adopted some of the overblown rhetoric of Standish’s gridiron dramas, but the far greater impact was on millions of boys who grew to manhood idolizing the clean-cut fair play of handsome Frank Merriwell.

A recent edition of The Yale Alumni Magazine took some pleasure in celebrating, “The Ten Greatest Yalies Who Never Were,” including Merriwell, Dink Stover, Tom Buchanan (Gatsby’s rival), Michael Doonesbury, Sherman McCoy (Bonfire of the Vanities), Niles Crane (Frazier’s brother), and C. Montgomery Burns ‘14 (Sometime employer of Homer Simpson).

In describing Merriwell, The YAM proposed this curious tribute:

“In the days when the phrase “Yale man” conjured up an image of a solid, athletic fellow who played fair and came from a good family, Frank Merriwell was an ideal for many American boys—an unequivocal paragon of virtue who had, as one reviewer put it, “a body like Tarzan’s and a head like Einstein’s.

Frank Merriwell did not confine his heroics to the novel.  He appeared in a comic strip, on radio, and in a film series produced by Universal Studios in the 1930s.  

Before Frank Merriwell had finished his illustrious career at the fictional Fardale Academy, however, an earlier hero, John Humperdink (“Dink”) Stover, the hero of Owen Johnson’s “Lawrenceville Stories” and Dink Stover at Yale, left Lawrenceville School for New Haven.

Across the quiet reaches of the Common he went slowly, incredibly, toward these strange shapes in brick and stone. The evening mist had settled. They were things undefined and mysterious, things as real as the things of his dreams. He passed on through the portals of Phelps Hall, hearing above his head for the first time the echoes of his own footsteps against the resounding vault.

Behind him remained the city, suddenly hushed. He was on the campus, the Brick Row at his left; in the distance the crowded line of the fence, the fence where he later should sit in joyful conclave. Somewhere there in the great protecting embrace of these walls were the friends that should be his, that should pass with him through those wonderful years of happiness and good fellowship that were coming.

“And this is it — this is Yale,” he said reverently, with a little tightening of the breath.

They had begun at last — the happy, care-free years that every one proclaimed. Four glorious years, good times, good fellows, and a free and open fight to be among the leaders and leave a name on the roll of fame. Only four years, and then the world with its perplexities and grinding trials.

“Four years,” he said softly. “The best, the happiest I’ll ever know! Nothing will ever be like them — nothing!”

However idealized, Dink Stover’s Yale was more realistically presented, perhaps because Johnson had actually attended the college (as he had actually attended Lawrenceville). From the outset, Stover’s career is filled with richer complexity than the Tip Top Weekly could sustain.  

There are some snakes in this Eden, as Dink Stover finds upon boarding the train for New Haven.  A couple of over-bred and clearly entitled socialites (Andover and Hotchkiss) have begun sizing up the entering class and considering the prospects for the Bulldog football team:

“There’s a couple of fellows from Lawrenceville coming up,” said a voice from a seat behind him. “McCarthy and Stover, they say, are quite wonders.

”I’ve heard of Stover; end, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, and the team’s going to need ends badly.”

Charismatic and athletic, Stover is also intelligent, sensitive, and democratic.  His early friendship at Yale is not with the Andover and Hotchkiss boys but with Tom Regan, a plainspoken man of twenty-two who had fought his way to Yale from a working class background in Iowa.  Like many who arrived at Yale from schools other than the “feeder” boarding schools, Regan has taken an entrance examination in order to win a place at Yale.  It took him six tries to pass, but pass he has.

Moved by Regan’s obvious pride in having earned a chance to enter Yale, Stover offers his untutored opinion.

“It’s a pretty fine college,” said Stover, with a new thrill.  “It’s the one place where money makes no difference…where you stand for what you are.”

Regan turned to him.

“I’ve fought to get here, and I’ll have a fight to stay. It means something to me.”

In short order, Stover finds himself contending with a social system which excludes people such as Tom Regan.  From the start, the well-connected freshmen are consumed with plotting the strategies by which they might win a place in one of the exclusive senior societies.  A place on the football eleven or as an oarsman ensures consideration for one of the better sophomore societies as does “heeling” the literary magazine or newspaper.   

What do you know about the society system here?” said Le Baron abruptly.

Why, I know — there are three senior societies: Skull and Bones, Keys, Wolf’s-Head — but I guess that’s all I do know.”

You’ll hear a good deal of talk inside the college, and out of it, too, about the system. It has its faults. But it’s the best system there is, and it makes Yale what it is to-day. It makes fellows get out and work; it gives them ambitions, stops loafing and going to seed, and keeps a pretty good, clean, temperate atmosphere about the place.”

“I know nothing at all about it,” said Stover, perplexed.

“The seniors have fifteen in each; they give out their elections end of junior year, end of May. That’s what we’re all working for.”

“Already?” said Stover involuntarily.

“There are fellows in your class,” said Le Baron, “who’ve been working all summer, so as to get ahead in the competition for the Lit or the Record or to make leader of the glee club — fellows, of course, who know”

“But that’s three years off.”

” Yes, it’s three years off,” said Le Baron quietly, “Then there are the junior fraternities; but they’re large, and at present don’t count much, except you have to make them. Then there are what are called sophomore societies.” He hesitated a moment. “They are very important.”

Do you belong? ” asked Stover innocently.

“Yes,” said Le Baron, after another hesitation. “Of course, we don’t discuss our societies here. Others will tell you about them. But here’s where your first test will come in.”

There are other voices in the class, levelers who feel the secret societies undermine all that Yale might offer.  Gimbel, a “troublemaker” even at Andover suggests that the membership in the sophomore societies threatens the entire college:

“Stover, it’s a bigger thing than just the peace of mind of our class.”

“But what is your objection to us?” said Stover.

“My objection is that just that class feeling and harmony you spoke of your societies have already destroyed.”

“In what way?”

“Because you break in and take little groups out of the body of the class and herd together.”

“You exaggerate.”

“Oh, no, I don’t; and you’ll see it more next, year. You’ve formed your crowd, and you’ll stick together and you’ll all do everything you can to help each other along. That’s natural. But don’t come and say to me that we fellows are dividing the class.”

“Rats, Gimbel! Just because I’m in a soph isn’t going to make any difference with the men I see.”

“You think so?” said Gimbel, looking at him with real curiosity.

“You bet it won’t.”

“Wait and see.”

In the end, Dink stands against the secret societies, championing friends like Gimbel who read and think.  It is without irony that Johnson suggests that Stover’s virtue is rewarded, of course, when he is tapped as the last man by Skull and Bones.

The Yale of Skull and Bones, sophomore societies, pitched battles between classes , competitions in oration, and championship football is the Yale that gave birth to the Whiffenpoofs.  

By the end of 1909, a select group of voices had tumbled from the ranks of the Glee Club and into Mory’s Saloon.  Their numbers would swell and would include some of Yale’s most illustrious graduates.  By the 1930s, a tapped class at Skull and Bones was incomplete without at least one Whiffenpoof.

Suspension of disbelief – the willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties and believe the unbelievable, sacrificing logic for the sake of enjoyment. But, what if one has no critical faculties?  If there is no sacrifice of logic?  What if BELIEF is at the heart of engagement, and the stakes become so high that enjoyment  is off the table?

In the world of professional wrestling, the term “kayfabe” is used to describe the elaborate stratagem by which a narrative of primal battle – good vs evil, clean vs dirty, athlete vs thug, hero vs villain – is developed and maintained.  I’m an adult now  and capable of seeing professional wrestling as it is, recognizing it as a peculiarly American kabuki, choreographed, often sadly absurd, with predetermined and specifically scripted outcomes.

Now I know.

August 24, 1960 – Bridgeport, Connecticut

The match held in the Bridgeport’s Armory was what was called a House Show, not televised.  I don’t mean not televised nationally; I mean not televised at all.  I was confused, of course, because the main event was a second defense of the WWWF tag team Championship, pitting Red and Lou Bastien against the filthiest of competitors, the Fabulous Kangaroos, rancid thugs from the Outback, “managed” by Wild Red Berry, a former wrestler and boxer, notorious for dirty tricks and unscrupulous methods of prying victory from the jaws of defeat.  Berry would later “manage” Killer Kowalski,and his tag team partner,  Gorilla Monsoon, speaking for the behemoth, ostensibly a mute from Manchuria (kayfabe)..

As one might guess, the Bridgeport Armory was not Madison Square Garden, the venue for most televised major matches.  At the Garden, rising stars such as Bobo Brazil and Nature Boy Buddy Rogers grunted their way through the undercard as established champs, Vern Gagne, Nick Bockwinkel, Argentina Rocca, Bruno Sammartino, Dick the Bruiser, Hard Boiled Haggerty,  Killer Kowalski, and Haystacks Calhoun enjoyed the limelight. In Bridgeport, Sailor Art Thomas and Bruno Sammartino were the headline singles match, and the third in a series of grudge matches between the Kangaroos and the Bastien Brothers was the top of the card.

Look, I am aware that puerile admiration of large sweating men is not the most appealing of subjects, and I am almost certain that few readers will care to track the history of professional wrestling much farther, if any tracking has actually happened thus far.  My hope is that you can stick with me long enough to understand the depth of betrayal I experienced, not as a foolish fan of wrestling, but as a citizen of a great republic.

I grew up in the northwest corner of Connecticut in the 1950’s, surrounded by farms and forests.  I saw other children at school, but had no playmates.  My parents  and their friends were artists, writers, academics, and musicians, fully engaged in creative endeavors, simply unavailable when a boy such as I, consumed by passion for all sports, begged to be taken to a baseball or football game.  I read Sports Illustrated and Sport Magazine from cover to cover, Baseball Digest, the Street and Smith pre-season guides, novels by John R. Tunis (The Kid from Tomkinsville, The Kid Comes Back, The Iron Duke, The Duke Decides),  The Chip Hilton series, the Bronc Burnett Series, The Fireside Book of Baseball.  My room was festooned with college football pennants and a striking set of prints by Robert Riger, distributed by Shell.  My NY Football Giants heroes were all around me – Sam Huff, Dick Modzelewski, Frank Gifford, Kyle Rote, Alex Webster, Rosie Brown, Charlie Conerly.

But I knew I’d never see a real game.

Through a tangled series of events, an elderly refugee from Germany became our housekeeper.  She may have kept house in some extraordinarily loose definition of the term, but she did settle in daily for marathon binging in front of our television, limited though viewing options were.  Queen for a Day was a particular favorite in the afternoon, but the evening was set aside for, you guessed it, professional wrestling, broadcast on the now-defunct Dumont Broadcasting System.

I learned at the knee of an expert.  Enamored of Gorgeous George, an extravagantly coiffed and wardrobed psychopath, a 300 pound vicious Liberace, Mrs. Orschler screamed in German at those who threatened him.  I came to appreciate the athletes, Vern Gagne, who had been a medal winning amateur wrestler and Italian/Argentine Antonino Rocca, a gifted gymnast, prone to flying from the top of the ropes, summer saulting his victim into the “Argentine Back Breaker”, a complicated half-nelson.

And, she would take me to matches in New Haven and Bridgeport.

I had other heroes, of course.  I knew the stats of every New York Yankee (Yogi Berra, Bill Skowron, Clete Boyer, Andy Carey, Gil McDougald, Bobby Richardson, Tony Kubek, Elston Howard, Hank Bauer, Enos Slaughter, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Ryne Duren, Don Larson, Bobby Shantz, Bob Turley), admired Bob Cousy, Gordie Howe, Maurice “Rocket” Richard, his smaller brother Henri “Pocket Rocket” Richard,  Jim Brown, and Otto Graham, but the only heroes I had actually seen in person were Red and Lou Bastien, the Bastien Brothers.  They were true athletes, flying from one corner of the ring to the other, leaping from the ropes, flipping and cartwheeling, tagging each other into the ring wth what I could only call inspiration.  No, genius!

In the tumult that was professional wrestling, amidst the low life cheaters and cads, they were decent and honorable, courageous, generous, and … and I believed with all my heart that they were as they seemed, men of dignity and skill, fighting cleanly for their place at the top of their profession.

The Kangaroos stood for all that was vile, in wrestling and in sport.There were other heels, of course, louts who applied the forbidden choke hold, or who secreted some dangerous object in their trunks, an iron bar, say, with which to club a more able opponent to the mat. The Kangaroos resorted to all these and more, dragging chairs into the ring, slamming their victims into tables at ringside, even producing shards of glass from a hidden pocket, opening a gash over the eye of one of their betters.

They tagged illegally.

I know, compared to slicing and smashing, improper tagging out seems relatively benign, but it struck at the core of my sense of fair play.  What’s left to hold the universe together if tag teams don’t tag as they should?

All of that aside, Wild Red Berry also contributed to their crimes, frequently holding an opponent immobile while a Kangaroo punched (illegally), or throwing dangerous objects into the ring.  Terrible stuff.

The Bastien Brothers had defeated the Kangaroos in a title bout in New Haven in April, then lost the belt to them in June, in Washington, D.C.  Rematch in BRIDGEPORT, and with  no assigned seats (barely seats anyway); I could almost literally be in the Bastiens’ corner.

I cannot bear to relive the match in detail  The Bastiens fought nobly, cleanly, winning the first fall.  They had the Kangaroos well in hand, seemed about to end the match early, when an illegal tag (see?) brought both Kangaroos into the ring against a single Bastien.  My faith in a benign universe not yet violated, I quivered at the edge of the ring as the third and final round began.  After a few moments of unremarkable pulling and tugging on the part of both teams, Wild Red Berry snuck into the action, dragging a chair.  Lou Bastien had Australian Al Costello in a submission hold; the Kangaroo was attempting to tap out when his partner, Roy Heffernan (illegally) leapt into the ring and punched Lou in the throat (illegal).  Red, seeing his partner fall, started to clear the ropes only to be driven to the floor by impact of a swung chair.  Lou, gasping was held down by both Kangaroos and pinned (illegal), and Red lay in what I assumed was a terminal coma.

Disappointing.  Disturbing.  Quasi-Traumatic.  But this debacle was not the cause of my loss of faith in all things good and beautiful.  No, that would come two days later.  I was inconsolable and furious.  The more I considered the many wrongs done to my heroes, the more determined I was to set things right.

I was twelve years old.  I had no money, no friends, no influence, but I lived in America, the land of Lincoln and Roosevelt; justice would be served!

I borrowed two dollars against my allowance and composed a telegram to the highest office in the land.

“Dear President Eisenhower.  A great wrong has been done to the Bastien Brothers.  Only you can bring justice to the true tag team champions of the world.  In the name of all that makes America great, I call upon you to repair this outrage.”

August turned to September.  Not a note, not a letter, no telegram, no phone call, and, from what I could gather, NOTHING had been done.  I knew Eisenhower was in the last months of his presidency, but come on; with great power comes great responsibility.

Kennedy won the election in November, and the burden of leadership of the world’s most powerful nation slipped almost seamlessly from Ike to JFK.  It seemed unlikely that Eisenhower had passed my telegram on to his successor; it wouldn’t have taken much time to have a quick conversation in passing, but, I guessed other issues might hsve elbowed my plea aside.

I vote, and I do feel a sense of responsibility to stay abreast of current affairs so as to remain part of an informed citizenry, but, at some level, I know that justice is not always served, virtue is not always rewarded, evil can win out over the good and true. In the course of a lifetime,of course,  I’d be disappointed again and often.  Only two months later, at the start of my ninth grade year, Bill Mazeroski would hit the only seventh game walk-off home run to give the Pirates the World Series victory over my Yankees. I was crushed; for the next eight months, I had to listen to the braying of the boorish Pirate fan with whom I shared a dormitory common room.  Disappointing, sure, but a loss delivered within the rules of the game.  The rules of the game.  As weeks without a response from the White House stretched into months, I realized that I had lost my belief in the transformative power of sport and my faith in the rule of law.  It was only a short step to the cynicism that stained my world view throughout the late 1960’s, for what is a cynic but an idealist who has been crushed by the weight of the real?

I try to remember the idealism with which I sent that telegram.  I like that deluded, hopeful kid, worked up enough  to expect a nation to protect decency and honor.  Sure, the match was  a sham, and my outrage was misplaced, but as I think of how betrayed I felt, over what was and is a trivial moment, I can summon appropriate determination to take on the real and larger  wrongs in a complicated world.

I am but one, but I am one, and I’m saving my allowance for some truly beefy telegrams.

 

 

“And what impels him to repeat this process at every single lesson, and, with the same remorseless insistence, to make his pupils copy it without the least alteration? He sticks to this traditional custom because he knows from experience that the preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating. The meditative repose in which he performs them gives him that vital loosening and equability of all his powers, that collectedness and presence of mind, without which no right work can be done.”

Eugen Herrigel – Zen and the Art of Archery

I am a creature of habit, I admit; there are those in my family who might suggest that I am a slave to habit, but they fail to understand that the collectedness and presence of mind with which I enter the day is due almost entirely to the rites and rituals with which I begin the day.

I have been shaving for many, many years, but spent the first thirty with no regard for the manner with which I scraped away my daily stubble.  Tedious necessity, I thought, shaking my can of aerosol shaving cream and picking up the flimsy disposable razor.  I had long since abandoned electric shavers as they failed to provide smoothness of cheek, and they made too much noise early in my day.  So, I shaved “wet” with little appreciation of the varieties of apparati available to the discerning shaver.

(N.B.  Grammarians drop gloves over the use of “apparati” as the plural of apparatus.  It’s an odd locution, I know, but, really, any more affected than “campi” to describe more than one campus or “auditoria” in speaking of more than one auditorium?  “Sanitaria”?  If one wild excess is a rumpus, are several “rumpi”?)

Back to shaving.

As a lad, I was taken with Burma Shave’s  tortured rhymes placed on billboards across the nation.  Actually, the doggerel verses were placed on small boards separated by some distance, so that the auto approaching them read the first line, then the second, then the third, and had to wait a bit for the fourth.

Shaving brushes

You’ll soon see ’em

On the shelf

In some Museum

Had to admire the wit and waggery, so used Burma Shave until I became environmentally awake, then scraped away with whatever soapy substance I could find at the local pharmacy.

Emotionally unattached to the standard soaps and devices, I knew I had to cast a wider net. Eager as I was to remain unsullied by website surfing, I nonetheless searched for more satisfactory shaving soaps, buying a ceramic shaving mug and the first of many shaving brushes on-line.  I was still a perfunctory shaver, glad enough to find relatively pleasant shaving soaps, but unmoved by the experience of shaving.  Just a job.  Get it done.  And then …

I stumbled across the line of shaving creams produced by Taylor of Old Bond Street.  Jeremiah Taylor founded the company in 1854, during the reign of Queen Victoria, determined to reflect British understated style and  elegance. I took the plunge, ordering the Eton College College Collection Gentleman’s Shaving Cream Bowl, first produced when Taylor of Bond Street became the official barber of Eton College.  The description of the substance was simply irresistible.

“A beautiful masculine fragrance with dominant citrus lemon notes combined with fruity citrus notes of orange and mandarin. All this is blended with gentle floral notes that rest on a base of warm patchouli. Contains Lemon oil and Patchouli oil.”

All true and the smoothest shave I had ever experienced, but was I satisfied?  No, not by a whisker!  A shaving cream this delicious demanded a far better brush than the hand-me-down I had found at the bottom of a bureau drawer.  Over the years, I found I preferred the Infinity Silvertex Shaving Brush by Kent.  Badgers breathe more easily as this is a synthetic bristle brush, which dries more handsomely than the badger brush, but I have learned that every face and every shaver is different.

Brush in place, Eton College cream almost done, I took a leap of faith and tried the rest of the Taylor line.  Again, each cream has a personality and each sends the shaver into the day with a different sort of embrace.  Eton College Cream is the heart of my shaving routine; I order it as the first in my rotation of three, substituting a few other favorites in turn.

Mr. Taylor’s Cream has (A fresh fougere accord with herbaceous top notes of lavender, bergamot, green notes resting on a heart with geranium and soft green fern.)  I must have missed the herbacious top notes; Mr. Taylor is not in my cream rotation.

Sandalwood (top notes of geranium, lavender, rosemary and liquid amber supported by a heart of carnation, fern and orange blossom resting on a sumptuous base of patchouli, sandalwood, vetivert, powdery musk and rock rose) was perfectly fine, but not a top choice.

The St. James Collection (A fresh masculine fougere opening with bergamot and mandarin intertwined with citrus ozone notes supported by a fruity floral heart resting on a woody amber base) is fresh and somewhat smoother as it lathers, winning a spot in the rotation.

Jermyn Street Shaving Cream Bowl for Sensitive Skin is allergin free and remarkably soothing.  It, too, has a place on the shelf.

My favorite, Grapefruit Shaving Cream, however, is an oddity, hardly recognizable as part of the Bond Street Collections.  In fact, only a true believer can find the product on the Taylor of Old Bond Street site, and there is little of the romance in the prosaic description ( Invigorating Grapefruit Shaving cream creates a uniquely smooth and creamy lather while protecting and moisturising the skin to give a better shave.)  Ho Hum, and yet … neck and neck (as it were) with Eton College, in part because it makes the bathroom smell delicious throughout the day, and in part because it brings just a soupcon of zest to the shaving adventure.

I’m less fussy about razors, pretty much sticking with those that have the heft and balance to allow the elaborate choreography of my three-zone shaving.  My current safety razor is the Merkur, standard length.  I have done considerable comparison of blades, however, going so far as to order blades sharpened by nameless blade mechanics in Bangkok before settling on Astra Superior Platinum Double Edge Razor Blades, made in Russia.  I bought 100 blades three years ago and have thirty five left; they remain sharp for more than a month’s daily shaving.  Of course, I also use one of Harry’s fifteen dollar razors and their cartridge blades ($2.00 each) for the final pass, expecting each cartridge to last  about a month-and-a-half.  I’d buy Harry’s products even if the blades were less impressive; they have the most handsome packaging in the retail shaving world.

Products aside, the real value of the morning’s routine is in sinking into each stage of preparation and application.  Many experts suggest showering before shaving; my brother shaves WHILE shaving.  I don’t like the hot towel wrap (claustrophobic), but I do use two steaming hand towels and a brush that has been sitting in steaming water. A quick swirl brings cream to brush, circular massage, lather to cheeks.  Swipe once chin, next upper lip.  Shave with the grain, cheeks, lather and shave against the grain, neck , lather and shave from left to right on the chin.

No need for moisturizers or lotions; I’ll have the trace scent of the shaving cream with me, even after I shower, and no chance of dryness through the day.

Is this Ikebana, the Tea Ceremony, or the Japanese Bathing Ritual?  Probably not, but at least it is not seppuku.  I should note, however, that I keep an alum block on the presentation towel where lie the razors and  the brush.  The more commonly used styptic stick is a flimsy and less effective corrective to a loss of concentration.  It is the concentration, after all, that brings collectedness and presence of mind, the zen of shaving.

 

 

 

Pat Summit died this week at the age of 64 after a long fight with Alzheimer’s Disease.  She began her career as a college athlete before the introduction of Title IX, playing for the University of Tennessee – Martin and on the first Olympic Women’s basketball team.  As a coach, primarily at the University of Tennessee, Pat Summitt won 1,098 games, eight national championships, and an Olympic gold medal in 2004.  She was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, named the Basketball Coach of the Century in 2000, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and the Arthur Ashe Courage Award in the same year.

She never had a losing season.

Pat Summitt was tough and bred toughness in her players.  Many of them pay tribute to her on this excellent overview of her career:   http://espn.go.com/core/womens-basketball/

For those of us who watched the Lady Vols play basketball at the highest level, watched Tennessee battle powerful Louisiana Tech and Baylor, and begin a heated rivalry with the University of Connecticut teams coached by Geno Auriemma (Auriemma’s U Conn Huskies have won a combined 108 games with no losses since 2013) , women’s basketball seemed about to explode as one of America’s most-watched sports.  At roughly the same time, America fell in love with Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain, and later with the current US National Soccer Team, faithfully watching every game of the Women’s World Cup and lining up for subsequent practice matches and exhibitions.

At some point, I’ll indulge in a rant about the importance of Title IX in the evolution of modern athletics; let’s just remember that, facing violent opposition by the men who held control of the event, Katherine Switzer was the first woman to finish the Boston Marathon in 1967, having entered under the name, K.V. Switzer, and that she was attacked on course by a race official who tried to rip the number off her jersey.  1967!  Before Title IX, the principle athletic activities for girls in high school were cheerleading and square dancing.  As a college athlete before Title IX, Pat Summit remembered playing three games in a row at Tennessee Tech in the same sweaty uniforms; they had no money for a change of clothes.  Female Olympic swimming and track athletes came from AAU clubs and associations, not from high school and college programs.

Today’s rant, however, is about the relative insolvency of women’s professional sports in the United States.  The top ranked player in the LGPA, Lydia Ko, pulled down $1,816,738.00 in 2015.  Jordan Spieth, the top PGA golfer in that year, hauled away $53,400,00.00 million in prize money and endorsements.  Serena Williams is the most successful female athlete by far; Williams ranks 40th in the Forbes list of wealthiest athletes with an income of $28,900,00 in 2015.  Who is ahead of her?  Well, Tiger Woods pulled down more than 45 million last year, Joe Flacco more than 44 million.  Tennis player, Kei Nishikori earned more than 33 million.

And tennis and golf are the two most well established of women’s sports.

All of this arrives with my disappointment that so few people are watching top level basketball played in the WNBA, and, that, outside of Portland and Seattle, an equally small number are watching NWSL soccer.

The Portland Thorns lead the league, five points ahead of Chicago and ten ahead of arch-rival Seattle; Portland has five of the national team on their roster, including Meghan Klingenberg, Lindsey Horan, Allie Long, Emily Sonnet, and Tobin Heath.  Everyone’s favorite goal scoring machine, Carly Lloyd plays for the Houston Dash; Hope Solo is goalkeeper for the Seattle Reign.

Meanwhile, the three dominant players on U Conn’s undefeated team, Brianna Stewart (Seattle Storm), Moriah Jefferson (San Antonio Storm), and Morgan Tuck (Connecticut Sun) were the first three picks in the WNBA draft, and the level of play in the WNBA continues to be impressive at both ends of the court.  Ball movement, sharpshooting, and great defense are impressive, as they are in the women’s collegiate game.  Guards Diana Taurasi, Elene Delle Donne (also a dominant forward), and Skylar Diggins direct beautifully choreographed offense, leading fast breaks and passing with sharp accuracy. Forward Maya Moore is Taurasi’s equal on the floor, an outrageously effective shooter, and Candace Parker is still a tough competitor. (Make sure you hear her tribute to her coach,Pat Summitt).   Right now, Brittney Griner is the most respected center in the league, but Briana Stewart is on the way.

Until the Golden State Warriors developed an elegant offense based on ball movement and precise shooting, I pretty much watched only the last two or three minutes of games in the NBA.  Despite a life-long interest in soccer, I tune in and out of most men’s games.  I’m a Tigers fan and watch those games in their entirety (when they get some air time), but drift and out of most other MLB games until the playoffs.  Novak Djokovic is a freak of nature; I’ll watch him play anyone.  I won’t watch most men’s matches with the same fascination.  College football?  NFL?  Red Wings hockey?  Can’t tear me away from the screen, and …

I like watching women’s sports at the highest level.  There is no greater drama at the moment than Serena’s quest for another Grand Slam title, which would tie her with Steffi Graf.  She has a raft of younger rivals, all playing with focus and grit in order to match her power and will.  Pretty great tennis, and the number of young American players starting to climb makes every tournament interesting, no matter who ends up in the final pairing. Women’s soccer makes sense to me as the men’s version does not, perhaps because I am allergic to flopping and endlessly unproductive runs.  I watch the NCAA softball world series because the laws of physics do not permit at least of the three pitches that seem to operate by remote control.

The good news is that with the arrival of the Summer Olympic Games, swimmers, divers, gymnasts, runners, jumpers, rowers, archers, cyclists, volleyball players, equestrians, weightlifters, and rugby will join women playing tennis and soccer.  My only regret is that most Americans will not see the dominant softball players who so overpowered all competition that the game has been removed from the Olympic line-up; maybe in 2028?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m overwhelmed.

I intend to write a short and admiring response to Rana Foroohar’s Makers and Takers and to her contention that American (and global) business has given way to speculative financialization (i.e. taking / not making), but the sheer volume of critical and inescapable SOLVE-ME-RIGHT-NOW crises has reduced me to near catatonia.

Please consider these realities:  Quite aside from climate change, the disappearance of species, the certainty of wildfires, hurricanes, and melting glaciers (better hurry – Glacier National Park is almost out of glaciers, and one prognosticator advises that with sustained drought, Yosemite will look like Joshua Tree), aside from this apocolyptic global crisis, we have more than enough local issues to keep us nervous for quite a while.  Wells in California have gone dry, the Colorado River no longer runs its full length, Phoenix and Las Vegas face some long-postponed issues of water scarcity, Oklahoma now has more earthquakes than California, thanks to extensive drilling, the City of Flint, Michigan still depends on bottled water, and children there have been irrevocably damaged by lead poisoning, and parts of the Louisiana Gulf coastline have already disappeared.  Of course, it could be worse.  In the Middle East, the Dead Sea is shrinking by the hour, vanishing into a giant sink hole.

Not enough?  Homeless men, women, and children clog the streets; more than twenty percent of all children in the U.S. live in poverty.  Schools and prisons have become warehouses, holding pens for the American underclass, much of which is made of people of color.  Renewable resources are increasingly not renewable, what was once a middle class has largely disappeared, the number of working poor increases annually, millions of refugees live in desperation, some streaming into Europe, some into the United States (51% of whom are children fleeing gang and cartel violence), Russia is rattling sabers in the Middle East and China in the South China Sea.  Oh, and North Korea has nukes.

So, the European Union is under siege, as is NATO and the United Nations, nativists are contending for power in Austria, France, and Britain, and a reality tv star has hijacked the Republican Party as millions of Americans have had enough.  No new jobs, growing mountains of debt, and little in the way of encouraging growth in any sector but cosmetic surgery.

As far as I can recall,  I was not notified when the decisons were made to abandon every certainty I had embraced throughout a reasonably long and happy life.  I am pretty sure I would have noticed if a note had been slipped under my door promising that a free-market economy, liberal democracy, good jobs, clean air and water, multitude of animals, forests and icebergs, well-paved roads, national pride, effective government, and public civility would all be on the brink of extinction by the time I became a grandfather.

OK, I came of age in the tumultuous ’60s , when the promise of a better world was not only conceivable, but set to music. It had a beat; you could dance to it, and dance we did.  Maybe we should have danced less and done the grunt work necessary to shaping the future as we imagined it, but the brightness of the future was so patently obvious; in the simplest of terms, all we needed was more of everything.  More people, more money, more channels, more celebrities, more kinds of food, more technology, more medicine, more power.

Apparently, we all missed the memo.  “Today is the tomorrow you should have worried about yesterday.”

Well, we didn’t worry enough, perhaps because for some time we were cowering under desks waiting for the next nuclear holocaust, or because a bit later things seemed to be going so delightfully well.  Who or what is to blame for our current undeniably bleak prospects?  I would love to pin it all on those who do not share my political or spiritual convictions, but the truth is probably in the shabby admission that we have been greedy.

“Greed is Good.”  Gordon Gekko’s anthem to excess in 1987’s Wall Street rang down through the subsequent decades, and, even when we really did know better, there was something exhilarating about the cunning and craft of mergers, acquisitions, and booming markets.  Sure, we used terms such as “Barbarians at the Gate” to describe corporate raiders turning leveraged buy-outs into huge personal fortunes, but we secretly thought corporations could use some shaking up, and, after all, is not the accumulation of 4.8 billion dollars (Henry Kravis) the real stuff of an American Dream?  How does an ordinary Joe get in on the action?  Play the market, sure, but in the 2000’s the fast money seemed to be in Real Estate.  Need a loan?  No Problem.  No collateral?  No problem.  You can turn this house around tomorrow, buy two more, and join the parade.  The big banks and investment houses leapt at the chance to play with pensions; the elevator seemed to go only up and up and up.

Then the economy went into the toilet.  Not so much fun anymore.  Well, actually, we loved that decade’s worth of hyper-speculation in which debt became the most significant American commodity; the market had gone berzerk, and paper fortunes puffed us up mightily.  Then the bubble began to sag in 2006, got saggier in 2007, and totally went flat by 2008.

Michael Lewis had the chutzpah to think that he, a mere financial reporter, could untangle the complexities of the most debilitating collapse of Wall Street since the Great Depression; he not only figured it out but told the story with such clarity that had a six year-old read the book in 2005, he could have seen the collapse coming.  The Big Short sold well as a non-fiction expose, and the film version was equally well received.

Huh. Let’s think about that.  Audiences were charmed to see hedge fund managers make personal fortunes by betting against the market.  Sure, it was fun to see the big houses take it in the shorts, knowing that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt with something like 600 billion in assets, but preventing the next depression  brought even more swollen federal debt and virtually no reform of the structure of American (or global) financial machinery.

And that’s where I have to go next, having recently read Makers and Takers : The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business.  The central premise of Rana Foroohar’s investigation of contemporary economics is so much worse than I had expected.  Foroohar’s well documented assertion is that we learned nothing from the last global melt-down, did nothing to prevent other speculative bubbles, and, in fact have failed to see that the business of America is no longer business but financialization.

The book opens with a description of Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook’s most notable initiative in 2013 – borrowing $17, 000,000,000 in order to buy … stock in Apple.  Apple could have been seen as quite comfortable, holding roughly 145 billion dollars in various safely held accounts (hello, Panama Papers/ good bye taxes paid to the U.S.), and another roughly 3 billion streaming in EACH MONTH.  You and I might be cautious in borrowing 17 billion dollars, but Apple gets its money at a rate far lower than we mortals.  OK, you say.  Sure,  that’s a lot of cash, but it costs big money to open new frontiers in technology.  Hmmmm.  are we talking about the Apple watch?  Oh, that’s right.  Nothing new from Apple in a while.

The 17 billion in repurchased stock created some hefty dividends and drove the price pf the stock higher, even though nothing new had been released into the market.  So, what does Apple make these days?  Paper fortunes for its largest stockholders (including Tim Cook).

In microcosm, that deal is what American capitalism looks like these days.  Big money is in finance, essentially in speculation.  It doesn’t take much deliberation to see that speculation has two notable disadvantages in the operation of a national (or global) economy.  In the first place, obviously, nothing is created, fabricated, produced, grown, distributed, or sold.  And, as a consequence, speculation does not create jobs or increase the financial well being of any but those who speculate successfully.  There can be no “trickle-down”, especially if assets are hidden outside the country and invisible to taxation.

I am a bear of very little brain when it comes to issues of finance, but I found myself moved and surprised in hearing Hillary Clinton speak to coal miners in West Virginia.  She told the truth: The jobs aren’t coming back.  West Virginia’s economy is obsolete, and no amount of politically motivated posturing is going to fix their economy.

I would never counsel politicians to speak the truth in an election year; voters don’t want to know how little an elected official can actually do.  I give Hillary a lot of credit for dropping the candidate’s mask long enough to see a real human across the table; that goes a long way toward starting a real conversation about banks and corporations “too big to fail”.

My grandchildren may not be able to see stars in the sky (hope they won’t miss tigers, polar bears, and most of Louisiana), but there is still time to address the ravages of piratical financial speculation in order to begin the process of rebuilding roads, bridges, dams, schools, and trust.  There is still time to remember how to make rather than take.

 

 

 

 

I try not to believe everything I think.

Both belief and thought are larger and more ineffible than I like to … think?…believe?  … they are.   It isn’t easy trying to keep track of what it is that I actually believe or think about believing.   I have been loping along on conceptul cruise-control for quite a while, and I suspect I am not alone in postponing a thorough examination of the convictions that underlie most of my actions and opinions.

So, when a friend passed on Heretic by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I quite literally did not know what to think.

The book’s introduction informed me that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Goverment, prolific writer and lecturer, a Muslim born in Somalia, raised in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and, since 1992, a resident of the Netherlands.  She sought and won asylum, worked cleaning factories, and was elected to the Dutch Parliament.  Her first published work, Infidel,  an autobiography, met with considerable hostility.  She was labeled by critics of her condemnation of female genital mutilation and the subjegation of women as an Islamaphobe, single-minded and reactionary.  Collaborating with Dutch filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh, she released a documentary entitled Submission, the English translation of the word Islam.  Both she and Van Gogh were threatened with death; Van Gogh was assasinated in 2004.

There’s controversy galore with every chapter of Ali’s recent history; she probably lied a good bit in petitioning for asylum in the Netherlands and cost the country a pretty Euro in requiring a safe house and security detail, not only in Holland, but also on her travels promoting her ideas and her books.  Big flap, by which I mean Kerfuffle, when Brandeis University withdrew the awarding of an honorary degree after an outpouring of protest from those who find her Islamaphobic, unless, as Brandeis maintains, the university had ony hoped to include her in a group of people to be admred.  Time Magazine names her as one of the 100 most influential, but  her critics slam her for painting all of Islam with the same brush, essentially arguing that Islam, in its unchanging rigidity, is radical Islam.  That’s a tough stance for lberals to accept, but, then again, she is a fierce advocate for the rights of women in the Islaic world and outspoken in describing the effect of genital mutilation – hard for a liberal to ignore.

Heretic : Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now is Ali’s fourth book, published in 2015.   Her views have changed somewhat in that she called for the defeat of Islam in earlier publications, but now suggests that reformation might be the more appropriate hope as Islam encounters Western modernity.  Much of the book describes the inherent structures of Islamic thought that have made reformation unlikely; reformation might be the best of all outcomes, but there appear to be very few ways in which reform can find traction.  She divides the Islamic world into three factions, each of which contend for authority of the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith.  “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah; and Muhammad is His messenger.”

She identfies herself as belonging to the third and smallest group: Muslims who have fallen away from Islam because of practices they cannot endorse but who would embrace the fath if it were to be reformed.  The group Ali terms “Medina Muslims”, Sunni or Shiite,  see the enforcement of sharia, Islamic religious law as a an absolute religious duty.  Zealous Shiites look for the restoration of the Twelfth Imam and the global estabishment of Islam, Sunnis to the establishment of a new caliphate, but both, Ali contends, practice fundamentalism allowing no change of religious law as established in the Seventh Century.  “Mecca Muslims”, the more moderate Muslims,  abide by religius observation in what they wear and eat, butdo  live in what Ali terms an “uneasy tension with modernity.”

Ali believes that five central foundations of Islamic faith have to be reformed, recognizing that no questioning of these precepts is currently open to question or discussion among Muslims.

1.  Muhammad’s semi-divine and infallible status, along with the literalist reading of the Qur’an.
2. .  Investment in life after death rather than life on earth.
3.   Sharia and the rest of Islamic law.
4.   Allowing individuals to enforce Islamic law.
5.   The imperative to wage jihad or holy war.

Oddly echoing the Trumpist call to arms, Ali hopes the West will come to its senses and label zealotry “Radical Islam” as the five precepts above allow radical enforcement of sharia.

So, what does any of this have to do with what I think or believe?

I am only recently aware that I have moved through the last half century with the abiding conviction that modernity, in all its aspects, would inevitably bring rationality, compromise, tolerance, and mutuality of enterprise, seeing as how we are all stuck on the same planet and all.

I continue to be surprised by opinions other than my own, particularly when they appear to operate against all observable reality.  How is climate change a question of partisan politics?  How does grotesque inequality of wealth and resources serve the general good, or, at the most crass level, general prosperity?  How does fundamentalism not only survive but grow in an age of scientific and technological attainment?  How is it acceptable to live in  a nation in which violene has become normal, in which children go to bed hungry every night, in which an increasing number of people fall into poverty even as they work at any job available to them?

So, this week I am contendng with the growing certainty that modernity, technology, invention, medicine, satellite television, the World Cup, Coca Cola, I Phones are not likely to persuade a Medina Muslim not to hold women in subjegation, not to practice genital mutilation, not to see me and those I love as “pigs” and “monkeys”.

Obviously, I need to stick to reading books that allow me to sleep at night.  Except … I have also just finished Makers and Takers:  The Rise and Fall of American Business.

Next time.