#58 Death of a Childhood Hero [in progress]

Smilin' Ed McConnell died right in front of me ... sort of. He was right there on the television machine one minute, and then he wasn't ... because he was dead, I was alive and only eleven,  What's happening? He was right over there on the screen last week. It's gotta be that old Froggy playin' tricks again. But there seemed no amount of  plunking on his magic twanger could get Ed back.

I.didn't know him "face-to-face" till his transition from radio to TV, which sadly was a short 2 or 3 years. And it took me at least that long to get over it. Here's the deal ... I loved the guy.  I got to know Smilin' Ed before I could see his smile/ Ed was in my head.

[ A "partial post"  related to DMW #233. More to come, but here it is for now.]

#54 Nashville/Music City Footnote Endnote

Well, whaddyaknow. Nashunal news. Worst rainfall in historic times befalls the Music City over the weekend. Flooded the place. Maybe I put a jinx on it. But here's the interesting thing, itself worthy of one last annotation: it's been put to music already!

More about that in a minute. Here, yesterday, is the very evacuated, very wet, and very east end of "Lower Broadway" in Nashville's downtown tourist-district mentioned in last posts. Cumberland River in background ... and foreground! To your right a couple of blocks up would be Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, and, further up a couple of more, the equally iconic Ryman Auditorium, spared any damage (I gather) to its refurbished but still-humble self. Across the river, however, its come-lately counterpart and new official home of the Grand Ole Opry, the mawkish Opryland Complex--including convention center, hotels, and amusement park (true Spamalot, if you will)--reportedly suffered the most flooding. Poetic justice there, maybe.

As for "Camelot" on the other side of town--Vanderbilt, Parthenon, etc.--it's not only high-brow, but also very high-ground. No damage that I could locate amongst the online news reports. For there's really quite a steep drop from the western "headlands" to the bottom-land around the river (you'll notice that at one point on the video I came across). It's Tennessee, after all. Hillbilly country. In a good way and all due respect.

However, while surfing the internet for news I ran across a YouTube piece that must be shared, because so much in the Music-City spirit. For if there's a tragedy in your life--usually of the boy-girl-heartbreak kind--simply write a sad and twangy song about getting drunk about it. You can think of examples immediately, I'm sure. My archetypal favorite: "There's a Tear in My Beer from Cryin' over You." But then there's the punnish "She's Actin' Single; I'm Drinkin' Doubles (for My Troubles)." Or the lyrical "Pop a Top ... Again." Oops ... a whole 'nother post, never to be written.

Anyway, a fellow identified as Michael Deppish put this video together (in apparently no time at all), chronicling the great Nashville flood of 1-2 May 2010, along with an instrumental piece (though not really Nashville-sound at all) entitled "Windows" by a band called The Album Leaf. Very much worth the watch and the listen. (Notice at 1:17 that the cops are barricading Broadway's lower reaches behind them and down off in the distance.) Here it is.
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#53 Nashville/Music City Footnote III

For any good shaggy dog story, or furry footnote, the teller must dilatate and attenuate the plot(less)line sufficiently to result in complete anti-climax. So far. so good. The bathetic conclusion is nearby, however.

But first, that other side of town. To the east past Music Row (the record companies), on to downtown and now all the way over the river to the Disneyish Opryland complex--here is represented the Nashville most associated in the national consciousness. Spamalot let's call it, to distinguish it from the highbrow western end with its Athenian pretensions.

More specifically, from the (now-restored) old cathedral of country music, Ryman Auditorium, and down a few blocks to the Cumberland River you've got the revitalized, just-like-the-old-days Lower Broadway. This was/is Nashville's Bourbon St., or Beale St. in Memphis--its blues with "twang" if you will--where you can walk and sample for free the "Sound" coming from little open-door bars lining both sides of the street. No cover but a beer to get into these living definitions of a "honky-tonk," because most nights are amateur ones. And they're all only a few doors down from the next, punctuated by arcades, fast-food places, and "museums"/fan-shops dedicated to one country-music star or another, or all of them. Apocalyptically tawdry ... and great fun.

And, de gustibus, good music. The wannabe Porter Wagoners and Dolly Partons who flock to Lower Broadway most often bring some talent with them. Tootsie's Orchid Lounge has always been the ultimate mecca for those pilgrims. The real-life proprietor Louise "Tootsie" Bess could be seen hovering around the bar in my day, and several years later be seen doing the same thing, cameo-wise, in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975). She was to aspiring country-singers what Johnny Carson was to would-be stand-up comics. As in Altman's movie--and in the under-appreciated W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings that same year, with Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed, including a cameo by guess-whom--if you got a gig at Tootsie's, you got it made in Music City.

So it was for Ms. Parton, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, and Waylon Jennings, among others. Roger Miller reportedly penned "King of the Road" at Tootsie's. Porter Wagoner, on the other hand, was already a recording and television star when he hit Nashville in the late 50s. He had been featured on TV's Ozark Jubilee in his native Missouri for some years, had several hit records to his credit, and had earned the moniker, Mr. Grand Ole Opry, before Dolly even signed on with him.

He was almost a literal "hit" with me, too. Or call it a near-physical "brush" with celebrity. Enough. Here's the story. I'd been commuting to Vanderbilt from our place across the river for a couple of weeks before the fall semester had started, and could easily find parking on campus. But this was the first day of classes on that morning in 1968. Parking lots full. So back around to just off big 21st Ave., across from what was then the Divinity School, where I found a spot. Also across from campus on 21st was a pancake house--could have been an IHOP, but it shortly became a Lum's beer and hot-dog joint anyway--whose parking-lot driveway debouched into the side-street upon which I had parked, and upon whose sidewalk I was soon walking, carrying my briefcase, thinking intently upon the very new day ahead.

Gap in sidewalk ... proceed across driveway a step or two ... catch glimpse of bright yellow object in corner of right eye ... closing fast ... jump back ... see Cadillac convertible inches away sliding by and galumphing to a halt halfway into the side-street and already well into a right turn. Car rocks back and forth a moment ... driver with long, houn'-dog face, topped with flamboyant cowboy-hat, looks over shoulder of garishly embroidered jacket ... says in distinctive baritone:

Sorry about that, Pardner.

And drives off.
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#52 Nashville/Music City Footnote II

Nashville ... 'tis a silly place. It's Camelot and, pace Monty Python, Spamalot both at the same time. Two separate but equal kingdoms. Wonderfully schizoid. On the one hand there's the city as the "Athens of the South," with an actual full-size replica of the PARTHENON in Centennial Park to prove it. (Another Greekism, hubris, might also come to mind here.) There it is, right across West End Ave. from Vanderbilt University. But the latter is only one of literally dozens--think Boston or the NC "Triangle" hereabouts--of higher-learning institutions dotting the landscape.

The crown-jewel, my doctoral alma mater, was founded by steamship-mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt, the "Commodore"--a strictly honorary title like chicken-mogul Harlan Sanders' Kentucky "Colonel"--in 1873. Might as well have been called "Vanity" U, because once he had bought up the little Methodist college on the west side of town; had donated his money and his name; he and his family had little to do with it after that. Unlike those other trickle-down tycoon-clans like the Carnegies and Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts have never been great philanthropists, even unto "poor-little-rich-girl" Gloria. For example-- sort of a "NEWS FLASH!"--the Obamas just visited the spectacular Biltmore House this weekend on their romantic getaway to Asheville. They were doubtless the only ones who got in without paying the pricey entrance fees. That monument to gilded-age excess nearly bankrupted that line of the Commodore's progeny, which has been trying to catch up ever since Biltmore was almost but never quite "built" to this day. They were always good at spending, not giving.

The University is most noted today for its top-ranked MEDICAL SCHOOL/med-center--two Nobel laureates (seven total, incl. other departments)--and its #1 ranking (last week's USNews) in grad-school EDUCATION, due in large part to the purchase and full incorporation a couple of decades ago of the venerable Peabody College for Teachers next-door. A long-time partner. Tipper Gore got her M.A. there; Al was Vandy Law. But in my day it was ENGLISH. It was the home of the still-influential New Critical School for the study of literature (Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren), and the "Fugitive Movement" in poetry, producing three U.S. Poet laureates: Alan Tate, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Penn Warren again. "Red" Warren is the only author, in addition, to win the Pulitzer for both poetry (twice) AND fiction: the novel, All the King's Men (1947). My "convention-buddy" James Dickey, Pulitzer-prized poet and movie-star-manque in his novel-to-movie, Deliverance, hailed from those heady environs too.

Let me pause over the former. He was no crowd-rouser like John Forsythe, but Robert Penn "Call-Me-Red" Warren was a hit nonetheless when we were able to bring my fellow Vandy alum to our little college in the late 70s. Still active, he was then working on a libretto ( !) for a collaborative operatic version of his famous novel (truly a man for all genres). Called Willy Stark, it was presented on PBS a few years later, and is now on DVD. During his visit to campus, we were able to screen the original, Academy-Award-winning movie-adaptation of All the King's Men (1949) with Broderick Crawford (Best Actor winner) et al., as yet unsullied by the disastrous re-make of several years ago, with Sean Penn (relation?) in the Willy Stark/Huey Long role.

As for my association with wild-man James Dickey, it'll have to wait for a later post. As for the luminaries on the other side of town--Nashville's Spamalot, if you will--I need to get back to the great clash/crash of cultures that occurred on that fall morning in 1968 where driveway + sidewalk + street met in near-deadly triangulation for the two people involved. And so I shall, right now. (more).
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#51 Nashville/Music City Footnote

Make that a quarter-note; I'm still semi-quavering from the incident. A truly comic, Minnie-Pearl moment. Never thought, just because I wasn't particularly fond of Country Music--even though I will lay claim to deep Southern roots--that I'd be RUN OVER for it! Well, almost--if my reflexes hadn't been awake enough that morning in the fall of 1968, my very first day of class in Vanderbilt's Ph.D program. Grand Ole Opry stalwart Porter Wagoner was only a hair's-breadth innocent of vehicular manslaughter. At the least: mayhem and manglement. His speed wasn't Toyota-lethal.

Look at those "-dos"! His pompadour challenges the heights of Dolly's B-52. And look at his long, houn' dog face (and voice to match). The archetypal country singer--famous already for classics like "Green, Green Grass of Home" and others, but today more so for his early partnership with Dolly Parton ... both of her. She was a recent "replacement" (who knew then?) for Wagoner's former female sidekick/duetist on his long-time popular TV show. But before Dolly broke away some six years later to her own spectacular fame, they were the most adored couple on Nashville's famed WSM, the Opry's eyes and ears, which beamed country music around the planet.

So ... not surprising that theirs was one of the very first shows we happened to tune into on the motel TV-set during idle moments late in the summer of '68, before our arrival that fall. (We were in the process of scouting locations to accommodate our home at the time--a "mobile" one, the "grad-school caravan"--that we would be having towed from the environs of U. of Toledo to "The Athens of the South" in just a few weeks)

We couldn't have missed it. Their weekly, live-0n-tape show from the venerable Ryman Auditorium was repeated and syndicated every day and all over the dial, so popular was it. "Oh, no," we thought, "better find something palatable about country music. Were gonna get a steady diet of it." What the hell, we'd be halfway there--livin' in a trailer-park an' all (though an "upscale" one, complete with pool).

It wasn't hard to become a fan. Particularly of the two pictured above. I firmly believe that the two of them, especially Parton's later celebrity, contributed to getting the Nashville Sound well into the mainstream. If it wasn't Robert Altman. Trivia-alert: If you'll recall, in that director's acclaimed movie, Nashville (1975), Henry Gibson (of TV's Laugh-In fame) was cast as "Haven Hamilton," a pompadoured country-singer, garishly clad in rhinestone vestmentage. Altman patterned him after none other than Mr. Wagoner, then added political ambitions to his character for plot-purposes. Trivium #2 (can't resist), same movie: Lily Tomlin was cast in a major role as an aspiring country-singer/song-writer; she's a divorced, working mother, waitressing till she gets her big break. (The actress actually wrote and performed her own song for the film.) Flash-forward to the great comic film 9 to 5 (1980), inspired by Dolly Parton's top-40 hit. Lily Tomlin, again playing a struggling divorced Mom, co-stars with Parton, who now has Tomlin's Nashville role as an aspiring country-songstress working office-jobs till she gets her big break. Cosmic.

Anyway, six years before her Hollywood breakthrough (Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, 1982, came soon after her success in 9 to 5--not to mention the very-close-to-home Rhinestone, 1984, the bomb which may have killed it for her) ... here she is with Porter Wagoner just before the break-up, clearly demonstrating why they were so popular. Take a look. Notice the good-natured banter, the blend of voices--very nice is the alternating of harmonics: she will descant soprano when he's baritone melody; he will provide lower-register "continuo" when she takes the melodic line.

Take a good look. Another six years prior to that show, he's the same guy who almost ran me down with his bright-yellow Cadillac convertible. (more)
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#50 In Praise of the KFC "Double-Down" III

Where and when could you purchase any and all items on the Kentucky Fried Chicken menu at HALF PRICE? Nashville, c. 1969-70. I was there. It was an offer we couldn't refuse, even though Minnie Pearl's Chicken offered an identical product for the most part, and just as good. And better coleslaw. For the year before, when our little family came down to Music City for the start of my doctoral studies at Vanderbilt, the countrified (/fried) comedienne had started up her own hometown-based, franchise-chain of fried chicken stores. She wanted to retire on it. Sadly--though not for her fans--she was back onstage at the Ryman Auditorium within three years. Broke. The Colonel's boys up in Louisville had gone for the jugular, right in her backyard.

I bring this up in connection with the Double-Down for several reasons. First of all, it's very hard NOT to make good southern fried chicken. It's no less than a divine delectation configured by Mother Nature herself. And the various fast-food incarnations testify to that fact. At home, cast-iron and Crisco are all you need. My Grandma Miz Lilla could make the delicacy in her sleep, sometimes literally, on our Georgia family farm--much helped by fresh ingredients, of course. This meant a full-feathered, fresh-"wrung" carcass from the chicken yard (no axe needed, just my Granddaddy's vise-like grip--all quite a sight for a young boy, especially the headless aftermath) ... and lots of McCormick pepper. She made the original Popeye's.

The Colonel's great innovation was to PRESSURE COOK them. Initially, this was to speed-up order-delivery time as business boomed at his original location. But the by-product--sealing in the fowl's natural juices--was what graduated an already magna dish to summa cum laude. Can't really replicate this at home, unless you're ready to risk life and limb with a volatile stove-top pressure-cooker (if even manufactured anymore), and high-G grease approaching the temperature of the sun's surface.

The smart, former debutante and Belmont College graduate in Theater and Dance, Miss Sarah Ophelia Colley (so different from the Minne Pearl persona), and her partners Mahalia Jackson (true!), and the colorful future governor of Tennessee, John Jay Hooker, ripped off the Colonel's idea--quick and safe away-from-home pressure cooking--and almost made it. The chicken was good, and so were the side-dishes. But the cut-throat tactics of the KFC boys, along with chronic mismanagement and some trouble with the SEC over stock-offerings, brought them down. Besides, they were just a bit ahead of their time by a scant few years. The whole Southern-fried phenomenon was in its infancy. That there was room for competition is proven by the ultimate success of such as the aforementioned Popeye's, plus Bojangle's, Church's. etc. (fill in your favorite). Setting aside the "secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices" ("secret"= monosodium glutamate), KFC and its rivals pressure-fry the chickens all in the same way, no matter the batter. This is why their product always tastes better than you can make at home, and why they all taste about the same; that is to say, very good indeed.

So let's go back to that "toxic zoo" of a sandwich, as Mark Morford's SFGate article would have it. He's well-intentioned, but I think the guy's reason is clouded somewhat by the fallacy of sum-of-parts. After all, the Double-Down comprises but chicken, pork, and processed dairy. Thus separately: nothing less "good eats"--as my fave-cook and fellow Georgia-native Alton Brown would say--by any standard. And, together: healthy enough, if you don't eat the thing every day of the week. (The Food-Police always assume we do.)

Again, I do believe there's a refreshing soupcon of whimsy, a little self-irony, along with (I'm sure) the requisite bean-counting market-research menu behind the debut of the Double-Down sandwich. Morford seems to agree when he says, "It's sort of hilarious. It's sort of perfect." However, in the next sentence: "And then it'll probably make you vomit." Puh-leeze. Scroll down and take another look. We know pretty much the taste-experience we're in for. Far from vomit-inducing. Moreover, Morford surely must know that Southern-style cooking has been identified by prominent Foodies as America's only truly indigenous contribution to the world's great cuisines, standing proudly alongside the Chinese, Italian, French, and your choice of only one or two others. Southern-fried chicken has always been the jewel in the crown.

What, then, is Mark Morford's problem? Here it is: he writes out of San Francisco, right? Well, he's jealous, and starving for good, honest, down-home food. Around 'Frisco, no Crisco. He's got too many culinary possibilities to choose from, in complicated foreign combinations, and all entirely TOO FRESH. I know. When I visited the soon-to-be-famous Chez Panisse in '75, we had the pris-fix dinner (same entree' for everybody and then only $10!) of freshly-caught "free-range" trout, poached, of course (fried forbid). Fresh bread, fresh greens, etc. After the meal, the fresh young chef/proprietor, Alice Waters herself (for-real), came around to the very small number of tables at that time--squeezed into the second floor of a residential home in Berkeley--and offered us fresh-picked fruit from (I'm sure) a freshly-woven basket. Oh, the surfeit of it! Makes you want to vomit.

No, wait. I know Morford's real problem with the Kentucky Fried Double-Down Chicken Sandwich. Yankee-bias. Yep. That's it.
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#47 John Forsythe: "Grandpa" III

For me and mine, beyond that memorable afternoon at the races, the remainder of John Lincoln Freund's visit (apt birth-surname: "friend") was perforce anti-climactic ... except for simply everybody else on campus and hundreds of miles around. Trustee Del Mann couldn't have picked a better Hollywood guy to enchant an entire community. Natural charm. No effort whatsoever. (His teeth were entirely too big for his mouth, by the way. A curious anatomical fact, up close, but may explain his incredible smile, on- and off-camera.) And of course that VOICE! Notwithstanding these easily ingratiating qualities--he could have just basked in adoration the whole stay--no, like a true professional, he came to work.

First of all, he schlepped his own prints of his two personal-best films across the continent to showcase on the two successive evenings of the official gig. (No money for this, by the way; just good will by way of Tinseltown connectivity.) SRO both nights. After each screening it was simply Q&A between actor and audience, which would have lasted all night if I hadn't capped it at about a half-hour (we knew the autograph-stampede was yet to come). They were mainly Bachelor Father and his later-TV-series fans, and they were rabid, especially the women--he was no "Grandpa" to them. (Some threw panties and motel keys ... okay, wished they could--Bible Belt, you know.) Then autographs, which seemed to last forever. We didn't want any broken hearts.

His hardest work though was in the remaining daytime hours he was with us. For the next two days John Forsythe must have met every important supporter of the college there was--already at one formal dinner, then another, a couple of luncheons, a morning and afternoon tea or two, whatever. He was game for all of it. Never flagged for a moment. Of course he charmed everybody, and they in turn had their brush with celebrity. Also, we needed their money. We were struggling financially at the time (again, my first year), after a difficult transition from women's college to co-ed. But its fortunes began to improve significantly after Forsythe's visit. For all I know, he might have saved the college.

I got the clear impression that he was not at all bothered by the fact that his fame up to that time was primarily due to television. A come-down for the true actor, conventional-wisdom-wise, from stage or film. After all, he started out in the prestigious, hometown (for him) Actor's Studio alongside Brando and other future luminaries. He was even featured in several famous Broadway productions, including Teahouse of the August Moon and Mister Roberts. Then he went "downhill" into the new medium of television? Tsk.

It's also a fact that doing live TV drama is about as demanding on an actor's craft as anything else could be. Consider: it's a one-time shot. No second-plus shows, or takes. Everything rides on those scant and incorrigible 90-120 minutes in front of faceless millions. Forsythe paid those kind of dues in such classic TV franchises in the late 40s (!) and early 50s as Studio One, Kraft/Ford/Chrysler/US Steel/Goodyear "Theaters"--a dozen more--including Philco Television Playhouse where he worked with Delbert Mann. I count upwards of a hundred one-time performances, always in the leading or co-lead role. A hard-worker even then. So what if he was able to redeem those dues later on with the less-demanding but certainly more-fame-and-regular-paycheck-generating Bachelor Father (he was a real, bill-paying one), The John Forsythe Show, and To Rome With Love. And in the next two decades, as a real grandfather, Charlie's Angels and Dynasty?

So he wanted us to know for those two nights that he was a respectable screen actor as well. I'll vouch. Though never to be ranked with the acting greats, he had distinguished himself by that time in about a half-dozen memorable films, four of which helmed by the very best directors. Sad to say, these really represented his cinematic peak, all before his later, strictly TV-movie and sitcom success that kept him busy for the rest of his long and satisfying career.

Aside from the popular Kitten with a Whip ('64) opposite Ann-Margaret and Madame X ('66) with Lana Turner--both of which he preferred, he told me, NOT to be so damn memorable--he had starred in two films with Hitchcock: The Trouble with Harry ('55) and Topaz ('69); and two with Richard Brooks: In Cold Blood ('67) and The Happy Ending ('69). For her work in the latter, Jean Simmons (above)--director Brooks' wife at the time--was Academy-Award nominated for best actress in a leading role. (She just died this January.) We screened this one on the second night. A very brave pick, for John co-starred as Simmons' loveless and philandering husband, woefully dys-named "Fred"--a stretch for the usually nice-guy actor. Do you think the audience forgave him?

Harry and Happy were the actor's favorites. Moreover, he admitted to me that Jean Simmons' powerhouse performance brought out in him what he thought was the best job of acting he had ever done in his life. (more)
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#46 John Forsythe: "Grandpa" II

We picked up "Grandpa" John in Charlotte after his cross-country flight in "our" corporate jet. (The college was founded by Civil War "Major" J.L. Coker who founded the still family-owned Sonoco Products, a Fortune 500 company and major subsidizer of the school.) That was fun already. To add to the fun, it was a homecoming of sorts for the actor. He was familiar with the territory, having spent--surprise-- his only two years of college at UNC-Chapel Hill (right down the road from me lately). Smart guy. Even a bit of a prodigy. Only son of a NYSE broker, he was graduated from his Brooklyn H.S. at 16, and, after two years in the South, returned to his hometown to begin, at a mere 18, his career in show-business. As guess what? ... a VOICE! "Charlie Michelob's" smooth baritone was in demand already--in this case as a public-address announcer for the baseball Dodgers at Ebbets Field.

Conversation was easy with John, and we had a lot of time for it, in between events. It didn't hurt that the Blogman was already a semi-pro, pop-culture media and cinema freak, and had seen most of his work up to that time. Important work, that is. That included his best films, and, though I never watched a minute of his TV sitcoms, I remembered his starring spots on several of Alfred Hitchcock's weekly programs, which I never missed, or forgot. In fact, the actor had a long collaboration with my favorite director, and brought one of them along (of two films) to screen for his soon-to-be-revealed multitude of adoring fans that evening (and the next): 1955's The Trouble with Harry (above).

But first, it turned out that we had a lot of time to kill. His flight connections had got him to our general environs quite early in the day. He would have public exposure enough beginning in a few hours, but indicated that he didn't want to be motel-bound--rather, he wanted to go someplace private to relax, chat some more, and have a beer or two (he had just started his job with Michelob) to wind down before the spectacularities commenced. Since all the appropriate college mucky-mucks were occupied, frantically preparing for the high-toned Hollywood evening to come ... I just took him home. Heineken would have to do.

It was late spring, and my youngest, Andrew, was already back from a half-day at school, while his older brothers were still on full. So the six-year-old got all the Forsythe largess that afternoon. He was a cute and cuddly kid, and they hit it off immediately. As far as Andy was concerned, he became indistinguishable from one of the family. And it obviously was just the tonic, aside from the beerage, that the actor needed.

At one point in the lap-sittage, my son began fiddling with "Grandpa's" wristwatch. It was one of those big elaborate sports-watches (he was an avid tennis-player, and getting started as a breeder of racehorses) with several dials on its face, as I remember. These had really just hit the market, and were rather fascinating, even for grown-ups. "How about a RACE, Andy?"--taking off the watch in preparation. (We were in the backyard.) "We'll TIME it! You start here and run as fast as you can to that tree just before the driveway. Then run back to me and we'll see how you came out on this little dial here. Then we'll see if you can beat it. Okay, ready ... " Or words to that effect. He'd played this game before, no doubt with his same-aged granddaughter.

So it was off-to-the-races at our improvised Forsythe Downs, and the heirloom snapshots were taken. A "good time" was on record for all participants ... until too soon the time on his magic watch ran out. (more)
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#45 John Forsythe: "Grandpa"

His peers in elementary and high-school wouldn't believe it, so my third-son Andrew (named after my paternal Grandpa) had to bring periodically a couple of snapshots to the school-grounds to prove it. Yes, he had really sat on John Forsythe's lap as a tow-headed young boy of six in the spring of 1972. Played "race-against-the-second -hand" with him. Even called him Grandpa, because there was a strong resemblance to my father, and the child got a bit confused. Little kids will do that, and it didn't help that Forsythe, who died last week at 92, was so very grandfatherly. He had practice. His granddaughter, Deborah (from a short first marriage--his second lasted 51 years), was exactly Andy's age at the time.

Additional proof was required as the actor's fame grew back in the late 70s and 8os as the off-screen voice of Charlie on TV's Charlie's Angels (ironically: his very last acting jobs were to reprise that role for the Drew Barrymore movie-versions in 2000 and 2003), AND as Blake Carrington on Dynasty, enormously popular no doubt with many of the parents of my son's classmates as they progressed through school. "I've become a sex-symbol in my sixties," he was quoted as saying.

When he made his 3-day, 2-night appearance that spring at our little college in South Carolina, he was sort of in between careers, in a bit of a slump, really, as far as media-fame goes, which was one reason we were able to fetch him to such an un-commercial venue. The overriding reason, though, was this happy quirk of fate: Our new President was good friends with AA-winning director--for the landmark Marty '55--Delbert Mann. (Also did other notables like Separate Tables, That Touch of Mink, oodles of TV movies.) They were fellow Vanderbilt alums (like me, coincidentally), and Mann was recruited to be on the Coker College Board of Trustees. Hence Forsythe. They had in turn been best friends since TV's "Golden-Age" days when Mann had directed the actor (always with one foot in regular-paycheck television and the other in modest movie success) in several live-broadcast dramas of the day.

Trivia note: not in "Marty" though, which I remember vividly as a 10-yr-old in 1953 watching live on Philco Playhouse with my parents. Mann directed and Rod Steiger starred. Usually I was a captive audience for these high-cultcha TV events; however, this was first "adult" drama that really impressed, but which I didn't quite understand until pubescence had fully set in about two years later, when I saw Mann's movie-version with his fellow Oscar-winner Earnest Borgnine in the lead. Had no idea, then or now, why the great Rod Steiger lost the film-role, or why-in-the-world Borgnine won an Oscar.

But back to Forsythe's visit. Despite his relative downturn at the box-office and in TV fame, there was no lack of rabid fans in Hartsville, SC. Hundreds of middle-aged women flocked to our little campus to see the still-super-handsome star of the long-running Bachelor Father (through 1961, pictured above) and a couple of short-lived series in the 60s like the lately-canceled To Rome with Love. Their husbands too. He was currently narrating the popular the popular nature series, World of Survival, and was just starting his fifteen-year stint (!) as the voice of Michelob Beer--the "Weekends-Are-Made-for-Michelob" era. A lot of voice-over work during this period, culminating a few years later with Charlie.

Anyway, he was almost as big a smash as when the first McDonalds opened in our town that same year. And I was in charge. No fault of my own. New faculty are notoriously elected--as some sort of cruel initiation rite--the chairperson of whatever committee they happen to fall into. Mine was fortuitously that first year the "Special Events Committee." John Forsythe became my very special event. He lived up to his reputation--then, and right up to his death--as one of the nicest guys in Hollywood. (more)
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#36 January Jottings

As months go ... for the speaker in T.S. Eliot's
Wasteland"--

APRIL is the cruellest [sic] month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow ... (1922)

Winters in London (the double-"l" gives the poet's expatriation away) are somewhat milder in temperature than than those in the poet's native Connecticut, but even more uncomfortable due to the island's inherent (gulf-stream) foggy/flaky clamminess (think Oliver Twist here).

Okay, he's making a symbolic point--in fact one of the clearest in that famously obscurantist poem. In an obvious thought-inversion of the Canterbury Tales' opening lines, the pessimistic speaker sees in nature's promise of renewed fecundity only disillusionment, as compared with the human world. Memory reminds him that budding desire has been re-deadened in the past, as perhaps a late April frost might kill off the new Lilacs. Can't blame the guy. T.S. Eliot was in a kind of "green-card" marriage gone bad in and around the time of the poem. No small thanks to free-loving philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had earlier bedded young Tom's terminally-neurotic English wife, Vivienne, who he admitted later was the poem's primary muse. (For a pop-version of this interesting story, Netflix 1994's Tom & Viv.)

But give me the unambiguous optimism of Chaucer's April, thank you. It's the linchpin of the Prologue, appearing in first few lines of the classic eighteen that I always had my students commit to memory by the end the term:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes ... (c. 1385)

Here the sweet showers of April pierce to Eliot's dull and drought-ridden roots of March, and, by "virtue" of this, the spring rains will with absolute certitude engender those Lilac-flowers. As well as all the other tender crops, because Chaucer's warm west-wind's sweet breath will bring no frost. The clever word-choice of generic vertu bounces us easily into the human world, taken up the lines following those above. "Inspired" also are those spiritually dried-up pilgrims "from every shires ende of Engelond" seeking to get a virtue-fix at Canterbury Cathedral. A little holy water in the presence of the Martyr should do the trick. (St. Thomas still resides there, I'll bear witness, in a lovely effigy-topped tomb, easily accessible to the pilgrims who keep on a-coming, over 600 years later.)

So ... for want of a better segue in getting back to the point--and pace Mr. Eliot--Kalendis Ianuarius still has to be the mostest cruellest month of all. To body and mind. In fact, even in the lower-temperate zone of Mediterranean Rome, the early Latins found the 30 days or so of deep winter so unspeakably unpleasant that (in addition to the next 30 or so for good measure) they remained nameless in the Roman calendar for hundreds of years! Along with the "washing-up" month of Februarius, the name of the two-faced god Janus was a relative late-comer to the yearly time-keeping instrument that has ruled the West for ages. (more)
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#30 Dark Days and SAD III--Xmas

Here's the third "celestial calendar" I visited some four decades ago, when, as I mentioned earlier (MM #5), a bumptious American tourist could still wander the sacred precincts freely, and give the stones a hug or a kick, as the spirit moved. (Much as one could in those days lean over the velvet ropes at the Louvre, and stare unhindered at Mona Lisa's lovely eyeballs (MM #26). Located also on the Salisbury Plain, this one, called Woodhenge, was a stone circle without stones, nor even a henge--i.e. a "hanging" lentil affair upon two standards, as at Stonehenge, at least from what survives. Ironically, those stubby stone pillars in the picture are just sad markers of the post-holes where the original wooden ones, long decayed away, would have been. Otherwise, its a pretty-close, poor-man's rendition of the doubtless royal and aristocratic Stonehenge, just as is the perhaps more "middle-class" stone version at Avebury, in last post. I'm sure, however, that the Winter Solstice festivities were enjoyed in equal measure regardless of location, or status of the revelers.

Dating from the Iron Age, these and other prehistoric stone and wooden circles in the British Isles and across northern Europe attest to the extreme sun-dependency of these planter and pastoral cultures. And the festivals associated with them show clearly just how important it was to boost everybody's spirits--especially the not-insignificant proportion of the Seasonal Affective Disordered (not to mention the "sub-syndromal") amongst them--when the terrestrial/celestial clock-circles marked the happy circumstance of the Winter Solstice. Light the bonfires! The long, dark days were over: the sun had proved itself capable of once again lighting the earth for the important agricultural seasons to come. At least for one more year. Sol Invictus! The Unconquered Sun.

After all, midwinter festivals are historically THE most widespread and persistent annual publicly-oriented event--in whatever guise--celebrated around the planet, in those latitudes where the change of seasons and the disposition of the SUN is of such (literally) vital importance. At base, it's a secular (strictly:"of-the-times") exultation of NATURE, of its solar equilibrium in this case, much like paying homage to the important equinoctial turning-point of Easter--still retaining its pagan-Germanic namesake, Eostre, goddess of the Spring, by the way--no matter the RELIGIOUS overlay. No matter who is doing the appropriating.

So, just as Christians are stuck with the the fertility icons of egg and bunny at the annual celebration of Jesus' death, they've got to put up with yule logs and evergreens, gift-giving and wassailing, at the anniversary of his "birth." And it's their own fault. Or at least that of the early Roman Catholic church. The irritating mantric complaint about "putting Christ back in Christmas" is an historical oxymoron. He wasn't there in the first place, and his non-existent Biblical birthday was NOT celebrated (Easter was more important, and had an historically confirmable date), UNTIL it was clear to the the Church Fathers that the Roman variations expanding on the late-December event--Sol Invictus day, the 12 days of Saturnalia with Juvenalia thrown in, etc. (the latter is how KIDS got into the whole thing)-- were all celebrated throughout the Empire by then, and simply not going away. Even though the Empire had been recently and officially Christianized.

The last straw was Mithras entering the picture. Popular especially among the Roman legions (I saw a bas relief of the god on a visit to the Housesteads outpost at Hadrian's Wall, in the north of England), this hot Persian deity was rooted in ancient Zoroastrianism, and his cult was growing. A warrior god-son who was miraculously and motherlessly born of Ahura Mazda, Divinity of LIGHT, and whose rituals included blood sacrifice--this guy had a lot going for him, Christ-wise, and more. He was also a SUN-GOD. And one easily associated with the established Roman god, Apollo. The annual holiday of his birth? Dec. 21, the Winter Solstice!

Too much competition, to ignore for very long. Taking over ALL of the Roman Empire's midwinter festivities in the name of Christ--principally targeting Dec 25, Saturnalia, that orgy of potlatch and potation--was, no question, a stroke of genius on the part of the Church Fathers, now acting for the official State Religion. Changed the Western World. But they couldn't change the quintessence of this "solar-powered" holiday exulting in the wonders of the Natural World. The New England puritans, for example, weren't fooled. For them, this un-Biblical Christmas-thing had to be pagan. Everybody was having entirely TOO MUCH OF A GOOD TIME. Consequently, it was a CRIME in them parts to celebrate it, for a couple of centuries. That's because they knew the "true meaning of Xmas"... didn't they.

So, to all the SAD and not so sad, Happy Winter Holidays!--the way they were forever meant to be celebrated. Above all, Lux Esto!--"let there be light"--and plenty of it.
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#26 Mona Lisa's Pupillae

I was able to view Da Vinci's (see last posts) most famous painting "up close and personal" at the Louvre in 1973 while we were on our "Paris break" from one of those British-Isles-oriented, college-courses that I led overseas. This was before the museum began installing an ever tighter series of security barriers, including now a kind of plexiglass bubble-box that I must assume would keep the spectator at some distance--and optically interrupted--from the live surface of the world's most notorious near-anonymous face. Pity. Because ... if I had to view the original work in that constricted way for the first time, as others must do today, I never would have figured out what was so special about it.

For in those more trusting times--when you could actually hug a stone at Stonehenge--if you were a devotee of the divine La Giaconda, you had simply to LEAN (albeit awkwardly) over the conventional velvet-rope-and-brass-standard "barrier" lining the the gallery at a distance of about three or four feet from the wall. That is, if you manage to wriggle through to the front of the crowd. Not a problem for an aggressive Ugly American.

When once you're close enough, then comes the surprise. It's not the smile. It's all in the EYES. Okay, it's the eyes in conjunction with the smile. But here's the enormous difference between viewing the painting in an art book or on the TV screen and viewing it in person: you get to see the dots of her eyes, so to speak. The PUPILS.

For one thing, the actual portrait is larger than you might imagine: somewhat over 2 ft. x 3 ft.--big enough to see all of Da Vinci's detail, if viewed from a reasonable, fairly close-up distance. Now in the small photo of the painting above--and however/wherever else you are most likely to see it--her eyes come off as sort of unfocused brown and white. (A blue-eyed Italian lady might have been a different story.) Our little black lens-apertures are missing from view. They're simply below your threshold of perception, under these second-hand circumstances.

Even so, there's no doubt she's looking at you; Leonardo positions the irises just right, binocular-wise. He didn't study Anatomy for nothing. But in person, it's the pupillae that will effectively bring about the irresistible BOND between her eyes and yours. They take the woman's gaze, locked with yours, to another level of intimacy altogether. That's the secret to her fame, I believe. For those who have seen the real-life "Mona Lisa" under the formerly ideal conditions, her "look" becomes more than a casual glance: rather, it's a penetrating, philosophical, kind of Sartrean le regard. As if she knows something about THE YOU standing there--the painter, the viewer, whoever catches her eternal eye--that might be better left unknown. And knowing that ... she smiles.
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#23 Celebrating Bjarni ... III--The Maps

Here's another map, limned by a young Icelandic teacher and hobbyist cartographer named Sigurd Stefansson around 1570 at the bishopric of Skalholt near modern-day Reykjavik (note ancient residue in last syllable). Sigurd's map gave a much more accurate picture of the northern latitudes of the New World, believe it or not, than the earlier Waldeseemuller world map, by now the standard, and the one that had forever immortalized Amerigo Vespucci at the expense of his fellow countryman, Columbus. For the scholarly Sigurd had done his homework well. He relied on the sagas.

His map had zero impact at the time, of course, but that little capital "A" down in the left hand corner would have enormous influence on the archaeological rediscovery of the true "discovery" of America ... some five hundred years later. Sigurd followed the sagas faithfully in piecing together the land-and-sea-scape provided in mainly two of somewhat lesser literary worth, but abounding in historical value: the Saga of Eirik the Red and the Groenlendinga Saga (not taught in my class, but pointedly and often alluded to).

Sigurd the Mapmaker read an incredible story ... one eminently suitable for Hollywood adaptation. But also true. Harrowing sea-voyages. Frontier Indian fighting. Near starvation. Birth of first child on North American soil. Sound familiar? Nope, its not Massachusetts or Virginia. All this happened more than a half-millennium earlier, on and around that magical year 1000, and on and around the places depicted on Sigurd's map.

Here's what the sagas told him: there was the Icelandic merchant Bjarni's first sighting--those "low-lying hills covered with forests"--when blown off-course on his way to the Norwegian outlaw Eirik the Red's Greenland colony. Eirik's opportunistic son, Leif, picked up the challenge 15 years later ("forests" meant timber, of which tree-depleted Greenland, despite its P.R. moniker, was in dire need) by setting sail in in the very same long-ship that Bjarni used, along with several others. (Note: I have seen these big, clinker-built, dragon-prowed, more-than-seaworthy knarrs "up close and personal." It was during my "quest for the Beowulf poem's Heorot" in 1973, when I visited Roskilde, Denmark, site of the Viking Ship Museum. See DM # 139.)

He took a safer route than that of Bjarni's wind-blown ride across open waters, however, and this was important for Sigurd's map. Leif took a "coastal" course, staying as close as he could to land masses that HAD to be there, if Bjarni was telling the truth. They were. In fact, it would have been a miracle if these itchy Viking sea-hounds had NOT discovered the northeast coastlines of North America. Just look at the map. Or check a modern one. These guys already had the nautical-tech to sail Columbus-like across vast ocean-distances if necessary, but they didn't have to. "Vinland" is right in Greenland's backyard ... literally: as mentioned earlier, they share the same continental plate.

Curiously though, Sigurd doesn't use Leif's "Vinland" to label his promontory in the lower left of his map (actually the island of Newfoundland--he also generously attached his own Greenland to "mainland" North America. Even in 1570, nobody had yet circumnavigated the forbidding extent of that massive, ice-bound island). His other designations are right from Leif's expedition: In late fall or early winter of 1000 A.D. they first make historic landfall--Leif would be the #1 European to do so, and he would hang on to that record for five centuries--on what he named Helleland (= "flat-rock-land," present day Baffin Island); next they arrive on the shores of heavily-forested Markland (= "wood-land," today's Labrador), farther south and much more promising for Leif, at least commercially, as reflected in the name he gave to it; and finally the voyagers land and set up camp on the inviting coast of Bjarni-country. On the "low-lying hills" he finds grape-vines. And upon them vinber = Old Norse for "wine-berries." (It was the Medieval Warming Period; the Little Ice Age was not to strike these latitudes for another 350 years) Here was the place to be. They all stayed the mild winter, and Leif named the place after the grapes.

But as you can see, Sigurd doesn't label this seeming New World Eden "Vinland"--as Leif would have it, according to the saga accounts. He names it after Leif's name for its aboriginals: the Skraelingar (O.N. "skin-people"-- for wearing/trading skins or being half-naked). My speculations are that perhaps the 16C Icelander was (unduly) skeptical about all that grape-business (the Little Ice Age had long since taken effect across the northern climes), or that he was trying to be cartographically accurate as to the true inhabitants of the place, since his Viking kinsmen had long ago abandoned it. For all he knew, the Skraelings might have had a thriving nation going in 1570; the English and French hadn't really gotten started yet.

Whatever the reason, Sigurd's map unwittingly verifies the root cause behind the FAILURE of the Norse colonization of America ... Americans. Native ones, that is. The Indians drove out the white-eyes for once. And only time. After ten years of struggle, Leif Eiriksson's original settlement--right near that little capital "A" on the map--was abandoned forever. Today it's the community of L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, and they speak primarily English. A smattering of Eskimo, but nary a word of Icelandic. (more)
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#22 Celebrating Bjarni ... II--The Sagas

Now that my lazy "Columbus Day Fortnight" is over, and the days of November are already hard and dark upon us, alas ...

Until the 1960s we had only the word of the Norse sagas that any of this Viking exploration and colonization of America took place at all. Our school-kid fantasies of the swashbuckling Viking adventurers who got the jump on Columbus by 500 years had remained the stuff of myth and legend for as many more, for most everybody. Until: Mr. Leif Ericsson's summer home in the Canadian province of "Vinland" (okay: modern Newfoundland--more appropriately named, however, than its later namers could have known) was discovered. And archeologically verified.

More of that later. But lets talk about those Norse sagas for a minute, and about some interesting missed opportunities in the realms of history and literature. My background in Medieval Lit (and especially as Anglo-Saxonist and Beowulf scholar) put me in close touch with Old Norse/Icelandic works of poetry and prose. In fact, I taught an inter-term, special-topics course called "Northern Saga" (with a couple of Old Irish epics thrown in) at my college for several years. Fuggetabout your Quixote or Gulliver or Pamela as candidates for the first modern NOVEL in Western Literature--it was the Icelandic Brennu-Njalssaga, only one, the best, out of a half-dozen more that could be chosen. And written down some 300 years before! (Those ancient Scandians discovered more than just clinker-built long-ships and continents.) But they were entirely ignored and thus completely non-influential until relatively modern times.

First--and I promise not to "re-schedule" a college course here--the sagas were ignored as true belles lettres primarily because nobody read them. Outside of the shared-language audience of Iceland and Norway, that is. (And then by very few; after all, they were first in medieval manuscript, like the page fom Njalssaga above, before the age of print, which in itself helped spur the "modern" novel. The sagas were that much SO far ahead of their time.) Written down in the late-13th and early-14th centuries, they were simply NOT part of the Western Literary Tradition really until the Penguin people got to translating and distributing them in earnest some 50 years ago. Pity, for among the 30 or more sagas extant are three or four that could stand comparison with Hemingway.

The most gifted of the anonymous saga-writers didn't know they were writing novels, of course. They were writing history, preserving notable past events (theretofore passed on orally) by putting them into readable prose. Luckily for us, they took liberties--never with actual events, but with the character of the characters behind them. In short, they added psychology. The true measure of the true novel. There is for example no greater portrait of complex womanhood--the good and the bad--than Hallgerd in Njal, nor of flawed heroism than Gunnar in that same saga. Also, and I don't know quite how they managed it, the real historical events follow a coherent novelistic structure, right along with character exposition. The "story of the burning of Njal" is the epitome and triumph of these unsung novelists, but look for some great "modern romance" in the Laxdaela Saga, some rousing action-adventure in the full-length sagas of Egil and Grettir the Strong, and some tightly-knit short-stories (yes, they seem to have discovered the modern version of that, too) in such as the "Hraefnkels Saga" and several others. If you have the time.

Second--the sagas were ignored as true history until, again, virtually modern times. And again luckily for us, the events described are exactly right. For whatever fortuitous reason, the saga-writers chose events that occurred right around the end of the first millennium: from about 95o to 1050, a period involving political and religious turmoil in Norway, its subsequent colonization of Iceland and Greenland, and the first European settlement in America. Exciting times. What's interesting is that it took another 200 years or more for the Icelanders to write it all down. Even then, as history, not much attention was paid. Nobody in Britain or the Continent was reading Old Norse then, or even 200 more years later when Columbus et alia were contemplating a trip west across the Ocean Sea. The Great Northern Route to the New World never entered their minds. Of course the idea of a "New World" never entered the mind of Columbus even after he "discovered" it--even unto his death. Poor guy. That's why, ironically, the German cartographer Waldeseemuller gave first-name credit to travel-writer and quondam explorer Amerigo Vespucci on his influential 1507 Universalis Cosmographia. The map-maker's toponym stuck. As we all know.

The biggest irony, though, is that for five centuries before all of this, most everybody who could speak the North Germanic dialect of Indo-European already knew where the johnny-come-lately "Amerigoland" was, and who discovered it. (more)
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#21 Celebrating Bjarni Herjolfsson Day

Er ... Columbus Day. Or, rather, Native American Day (aka: Indigenous People's Day). Or Leif Ericsson Day. Or Vespucci Day. In fact, I was so inspired last Monday by all the various "discoverers" of America that I awarded them a whole week, and promptly took it off--a bit of a holiday from more pressing and lately depressing matters as Health Care Reform and Afghanistan. Not ready to go back there yet--as the President is still fiddling with the latter, and Congress is forever diddling with the former ... in the full carnal sense, it seems.

So ... what follows are some historical musings, of mainly the "What If?" counter-factual variety. Specifically--Why aren't we all Vikings? Us Americans, that is. It's a fluke of history we're not. Just as it's only slightly less a fluke that we're not all Hispanic, though rampant immigration/patriation seems to be making up for lost time and opportunities post-Columbus. The Spanish were perfectly poised to settle the whole of North America--in what could have been a grand pincer movement between Florida and California--from the early 1500's on, if they hadn't been so hungry for gold. Spain's was a conquest mentality in its approach to the New World, always. They weren't called Conquistadors for nothing. Their "take-the-money-and-run" strategy worked for them in MesoAmerica and to the South only because they got there first, and only because of the vast hemispheric distances that protected them from the settlement strategies of the English and French. To oversimplify a bit.

But what I've always found fascinating about all this--especially given my North-Germanic heritage--is what happened half-a-millennium earlier. When the Columbus Day break came around for us school-kids of the late 40s and 50s --Oct. 12th had to be a week-day or sometimes Sunday (then carried over to Monday), or you were out of luck back then--there was always a smart-ass like me who reminded everybody that the Spanish hireling from Genoa, Cristoforo Columbo, was a late-comer in the America-discovering business ... by 500 years. The first European to set foot on the Western Hemisphere was a Greenlander Viking appropriately named Leif (= "heir," cognate with our "leaving") by his father, the Icelander Eiric the Red--himself a notorious outlaw from Norway. Leif Ericsson actually discovered America, I would point out, and he gave it the much sexier name of "Vinland." Or so said revisionist historians and the Norse sagas I was reading. It often happened, of course, that an even smarter-assed kid would chime in with: "Well, it was really the Indians--they were here long before that." Argument over.

Technically, it wasn't Leif either, depicted above in Christian Krogh's famous painting. He got wind of (sorry) "new lands" west of Greenland some 15 years before his literally ground-breaking voyage dated about the year 1000. He got the news from a fellow named Bjarni Herjolfsson ("Bear War-wolf's-son"--love it), an Icelandic merchant-man. Seems Bjarni was blown off course on a late-summer trip from Iceland to Greenland on his way to visit his parents, who had settled there with Leif's father Eiric (who should be recognized as the first colonizer of the Americas, I think, because "Graenland"--his marketing name for the frost-bound island--lies within our continental plate). Anyway, when the storm abated, Bjarni and his crew found themselves within sight of "low-lying hills covered with forests" that had never been seen before. This was Vinland, as Leif, as much of a P.R. guy as his father, was to call it later. But Bjarni was overdue for his appointment with Mom and Dad in Greenland. So, despite his ferocious moniker and the pleas of his more adventurous crewmen, he refused to make landfall. Subsequently, even though these "new-found-lands" were evidently only a short hop away, it took another i5 years for Leif to get up his first expedition. But he did it in style. He even bought Bjarni's original Viking knarr to set sail in!

So, why isn't our country named Vinland? Or Bjarnica? And why is it that most Americans can't chat-up the Icelandic pop-star Bjork in her native language? It was all because of the Skraelingar. (more)
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#20 Luck, Woody, Tennis, Gump IV

One last peeve. Love Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump (1994). Truly the Feel-Good-Movie-with-Grit for the ages. Whenever it comes around on its two- or three-year cycle on cable, I can count on being thoroughly entertained again. Sort of like my thing with The Thing--the John Carpenter/Kurt Russell 1982 version (NOT the albeit great 1951 James Arness original that I originally saw only fitfully through the seat backs and in between frightened runs to the lobby long ago at either the aforementioned Avalon or Stoney in Chicago)--but for different reasons.

Well, one of the movie's life-analogies--the more famous one--is to a box of chocolates, as pictured in last post and containing half of the home-spun words of wisdom. Adumbrated by his mother, and repeated way too often in the course of the motion picture, here it is from Forrest:

My momma always said, "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."

Gnash! The sound you hear is teeth a-grinding. It's hard NOT to get bruxistic about this line of dialog, because #1 it's taken up so often by otherwise smart, well-meaning people, who, perhaps brain-washed by that popular and well-meaning film, are half-consciously convinced that these ARE words of wisdom about our life on this planet. Heck, I've heard it used quite seriously by one of my former colleagues as the basis for a commencement speech! And #2: Woody Allen's bogus "net-court" tennis-analogy rises to sheer genius when compared to this pile-size dump of pop philosophy. Illogic squared.

To be fair, though, to the film-maker and to the novelist from whose work the movie is adapted, the line may have been meant to be stupid, as a handy bit of character-exposition. Gump IS so very stupid vis a vis the ways of the world, while being so very SMART in other very important ways. (In the novel, by the way, he's portrayed as something of an idiot-savant, adept in Physics and Math, which keeps his grades up for football.)

However, "Momma" is portrayed as being much more worldly-wise than her son. If her philosophy of Life and Luck, other than being in good fun, is to be taken seriously--and Forrest has more than his share of tragedy in an otherwise well-spent life--then it fails in the following respects, in ascending order of importance:

• There's most often a "actual-size" map/key printed on the inside cover of the box indicating the varied make-up of each chocolate confection in their separate compartments. If you can read, then you'll "know what you're gonna get." Nary a soupcon of Luck involved.
  

• Even if you can't read, or can't even see, there's a SKILL to be developed by the inveterate boxed-chocolate-sampler sampler. (The element of skill is also what hurts Woody Allen's net-court analogy.) Set by industry tradition, the contents of each chocolate-covered piece is identifiable by its generic shape, in conjunction with a distinctive "swirl" on top. Nothing random about it.

• Assuming illiteracy or blindness or lack of bon-bon acuity, no matter what you randomly pick, you're still gonna get a CHOCOLATE something-or-other, for crying out loud, not a camouflaged pebble. "Momma wants you to try one one of these, Forrest, but watch out for the pebble look-a-likes" ... "But how am I supposed to know which-is-which, Momma?" ... "Just go ahead, son, I'm teaching you a lesson about Life." Much better analogy.

• Make a totally gut-wrenching pick? You can simply spit it out. Life works just like that, does it not?

So enough with the box of chocolates already, which took on so much of a life of its own outside the movie. A more palatable analogy about Life in a world of Chance and Circumstance, and the role that Luck plays in it, is the White Feather that floats willy-nilly upon the scene from time to time. Forrest himself "unwittingly" defines the symbolism at the end of his truly eloquent speech to his now grave-bound Jenny:

I don't know if Momma was right or if it's Lieutenant Dan. I don't know if we each have a destiny [not really supported by her chocolate-box nostrum, however], or if we're all floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I think maybe it's both. Maybe both is happening at the same time. I miss you Jenny.

Better ... but the white feather is so gratuitous. So inorganic to plot and character. At least the Wood Man makes the symbolism of the hovering net-court tennis ball tie in naturally with his mis en scene. Now, if Gump's feather had floated into his ear and given him a nasty infection ...
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#25 Two Books by Steven Berlin Johnson

Saw this pop-science/pop-culture author last March on "The Colbert Report," promoting his latest book, The Invention of Air (2008), ambitiously subtitled, "A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America." It's really all about Joseph Priestley, who has been a hero of mine for a number of reasons, and for a goodly number of years. Long library waiting-list. Just got it a couple of weeks ago, and a review is to follow in the fullness of time.

Meanwhile, I got hold of his earlier book, Everything Bad Is Good For You (2005), subtitled, almost as ambitiously, "How Today's Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter." Johnson's study of what I'll over-simply call "techno-culture" and it's effect on our collective gray-matter IS good for you, and will make you smarter and--this is most important--less guilty about the time you and/or your kids spend on playing video-games or watching television.

Johnson's got some science to back that up, but first, he got me hooked early on when he explains his central thesis by coining a metaphor from a Woody Allen movie!--

... popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years. Where most commentators assume a race to the bottom and a dumbing down--"an increasingly infantilized society," in George Will's words-- I see a progressive story: mass culture growing more sophisticated, demanding more cognitive engagement with each passing year ... making our minds sharper, as we soak-in entertainment usually dismissed as so much lowbrow fluff. I call this upward trend the Sleeper Curve, after the classic sequence from Woody Allen's mock sci-fi film, where a team of scientists from 2173 are astounded that twentieth-century society failed to grasp the nutritional benefits of cream pies and hot fudge.

That's the author's only reference to the movie--he assumes probably correctly that most of his readership would've seen it, or at least heard about that "classic sequence." However, it's just too good not to share more fully with the Myriad Readers. Sleeper (1973) is perhaps my favorite from Allen's early, "mainly-funny-with-some-social-satire" period. Here one of Woody's trademark "schlemiel" characters, Miles Monroe, is brought back from an accidental cryonic state 2oo years into the future. His former diet was a regimen of all the hippie food-fads of the day; in fact, to hammer the point home unmercifully, Allen has him working at a health-food store! After thawing him out, two scientist-doctors discuss the morning after, all the while puffing on their cigarettes:

--For breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger's milk."
--Oh yes [chuckling]. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
--You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or ... hot fudge?
--Those were thought to be unhealthy ... precisely the opposite of what we know to be true.
--Incredible.

Or later when, after they advise him to be sure to inhale deeply on a proffered cigarette, Miles confronts them with his confusion:

--Where am I anyhow? I mean, What happened to everybody? Where are all my friends?
--You must understand that everyone you knew in the past has been dead nearly 200 years.
--But they all ate organic rice!

This is the author's Sleeper Curve. Video-games bad? Nope. Turns out they're good for you after all. They are only one aspect of an intellectually rich, high-tech landscape through which a modern 10-year-old navigates: "shifting effortlessly from phone to IM to e-mail in communicating with friends; probing and telescoping through immense virtual worlds; adopting and troubleshooting new media technologies without flinching." That last was written before likes of Twitter and FaceBook (etc.) came into prominence, which can only further his point. Compare all of this to the rather simple-minded recreational toys and games of the past, and again you get his point. New stuff make brain good.

Public classrooms may be overcrowded and teachers underpaid--traditional test scores continue to go down--but outside of school kids' brains are developing sophisticated problem-solving skills. And IQ scores continue to go up. That's right: over the past 50 years Americans have improved by about 15 points, half of that in the last couple of decades. Johnson believes the paradox is solved when we look at what IQ tests test: problem solving, abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, spatial logic--a sufficiency of all of which is to be found in modern media technology. Q.E.D.

Even prime-time television has become more intellectually rigorous over the last couple of decades, Johnson believes. And I like his take on it. Ever since Hill Street Blues, he says (to paraphrase), a story-arc with multiple plot-threads has been de rigueur for the most successful sitcoms--popularly and critically--from Simpsons to Seinfeld to my current favorite, Scrubs. (Though I might contend that it really got started with shows like All In the Family and Mary Tyler Moore.) No longer "present tense" from one episode to the next, where the bare-bones "situation" was enough for the viewer to "get" the joke--Three's Company, Home Improvement--the newer shows require external references, an accumulated context that the audience must draw upon in order to be in the know. (That's why they're so popular in reruns: the viewers already have their ready-made "insider's playbook") Johnson points out Sam's past drinking-problem in Cheers, for example, or George Costanza's made-up character/entity "Art Vandelay," who appears in several episodes of Seinfeld. And I'll add the notorious "Master of My Domain" episode which keeps coming back in the form of "self-denial" in-jokes throughout the rest of the series.

Finally, and incidentally, my kids came up and along a bit before the monster techno-media revolution--somewhat ahead of the Sleeper Curve--but the author cites various fantasy and role-playing games as possible precursors to that revolution. One of those he mentions is Dungeons and Dragons, to which my first three sons were devoted player-aficionados. As far as I know, they never gave it up. I guess that's why they're so very, very smart. Or not.
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# 24 Bunuel and Defoe--a Footnote

Little did I know ... a favorite movie from my youth turns out to be the work of none other than Sn. Luis Bunuel: The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954). Despite the poster, Dan O'Herlihy spoke English, I'm pretty sure. All his Mexican co-players were dubbed, I assume, but that would probably have escaped an eleven-year-old. Haven't seen it since I sat down to watch it--probably one of a double-feature--at the old Avalon movie palace in Chicago (see DM for earlier references--way too many of them for a healthy childhood). What a shock it was to discover, in looking over the director's corpus last week, that he played a then-anonymous part in my formative cinematic years and beyond. I had either read the book before or soon after the Avalon, but at any rate I felt at that young age I had a real fix on Defoe "academically," long before I caught up with his if-not-better-works: Journal of the Plague Year and his true classic, Moll Flanders--later in life.

You may have noticed a rather conspicuous gap in the Spanish auteur's career, as I have presented it anyway, between the 1929 Dog and his breakout Mexican/French films of the 60's--amazingly, that figure also represents his age! Briefly: after his exile from his homeland, he did menial dubbing and editing work in Hollywood for awhile, before settling in Mexico permanently, where for a couple of decades he ground out essentially B-movie, commercial fare of little consequence at all. Except for Crusoe. It was released internationally to some acclaim--again, much of this comes as late-breaking news to me--with the Irish-born O'Herlihy in the lead, for which he got his one and only Academy Award nomination. (The actor, a good one, was a man of few significant parts, it seems, though I did recognize him when he appeared later in a major role in Fail Safe (1964), and in many more less-major ones over a long career in film and television.)

Crusoe came out at just the right time, at least for us kids. It was an era of Saturday matinee swashbucklers and desert-island adventures like Treasure Island and Swiss Family ROBINSON, and you can tell from the poster that Bunuel's movie was advertised as such. Moreover, that's the only way I can remember it.

HOWEVER: now that I know that the film was/is a "Bunuel," let me just speculate a review, from a grown-up perspective. We are "musing," after all. Right off, exile and castaway would be the perfect subject-matter for the expatriate and, even more importantly, existentialist director. Here we've got total free-will (except for Friday the "willing" slave), unencumbered by the superficial constraints of bourgeois society that the writer-director satirizes so unmercifully. And, wow, couldn't Bunuel nail this theme definitively when Crusoe finally grants his "man" the gift of complete freedom. Conveniently, Friday's "phantom of liberty" is quite literal, but enslavement in any form to anyone or anything would be Bunuel's idea of the worst crime imaginable, and he probably allows this to play upon his hero's psyche. Why probably?--because I DO recall several nightmare dream-sequences (of course) involving mainly Crusoe's father (a potential Freudian wonderland) in the course of the movie. But I no doubt ignored their thematic significance at the time. They would have been getting in the way of the "aventuras."

And what about Bunuel's trademark imagery? When I revisit the film I'll look for lots of ANTS. They pop up in almost every one of his movies as a symbol of one thing or another, and what better place for them and other scary mini-creatures than a desert island? Here the very real would translate easily to the surreal, and vice-versa. (Incidentally, his collaborator on Dog, Salvador Dali, loved the little fellows too--check out the ant-riddled clock in the lower-left corner of his most famous painting, "The Persistence of Memory.") And I know I'll find nature's sufficiency of Bunuelian megafauna--both the quick and the dead.

But then again ... Netflix notwithstanding, I may just leave his Adventure of Robinson Crusoe as a very pleasant childhood memory.
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