Night Thoughts At Noon

Homage To Bratfisch

2010-04-14T20:31:00.026-04:00

I have now been driving a taxicab in suburban Washington, D.C. for slightly more than nine months. I took it up last summer because I needed money. I still do it for that same reason. Believe me, I don't do it for kicks, although surprises -- good and bad -- do come up. Last October I picked up a fare, an actually quite-attractive 34 year-old woman, extremely drunk, who decided on the way home that she wanted to have sex with me. Right there in the cab. At 4:30 in the afternoon. Well ... that probably would have landed us both in jail, and another alternative, taking her to the Sleazebag Arms Motel, could have landed me in jail by myself when she sobered up later and, embarrassed, decided to file rape charges. So, like the ever-vigilant compromiser and paranoiac that I am, I gave her my business card and said, "If you still feel like doing this after you sober up, give me a call."

She never did.

I have learned a few new things since I took up the trade of hack, such as the fact that, with the possible exception of birds and snakes, there are no two more natural enemies in the world than cab drivers and the police.

This, by the way, has a long and venerable tradition behind it. I just finished re-reading a wonderful book about fin-de-siecle Vienna, Frederic Morton's A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889. Of course the central event of the narrative is the double-suicide at Mayerling of the Habsburg Crown Prince Rudolf and his girlfriend Mary Vetsera. But one of the key players in the drama was Rudolf's personal horse-cab driver, Bratfisch, and Morton describes his activities with a few asides thrown in, not the least factoid of which is that the horse-cabbies of Old Vienna had just as adversarial a relationship with the cops as their modern counterparts, to the point of building insulting "cop-snowmen" during Fasching at which, it being the carnival season, the police had little choice but to smile.

Those Viennese cabbies (bless their hearts) were as contemptuous of the censor as they were of the police. When government censorship clamped firmly down on any account of what really happened at Mayerling, the crackdown including confiscation of foreign newspapers that carried details and rumors the Emperor did not want his subjects talking about over their coffee, Old Vienna's cabbies got busy smuggling foreign papers in, then hiding them under the seats of their cabs and letting the curious read them ... at a price of forty kreuzer for ten minutes.

The city where I drive is served by three cab companies. Between the three of them they have roughly 700 cabs. And since many of us are on the road for twelve to fourteen hours a day, we are highly-visible, highly vulnerable (and highly numerous) targets for cops with quotas to meet.

The police department's hack office has three officers. Two of them are actually not bad fellows; the third is a total jerk.

Someone needs to sit this guy down and tell him that he does not have the most prestigious job in the police department. I mean, he isn't Head of Detectives. In terms of sheer prestige in police work, getting paid to jerk cab drivers around might rank right up there with mopping out the toilets. But this character takes himself very seriously, and he loves nothing more than watching some cabbie either cringe in fear before him or get mad and start cursing, giving him an excuse for further deviltry.

Just the other day this guy followed me into a Metro station. I was about to drop off a fare. He was probably bored, just wanted to yank someone's chain to brighten up his own morning. Anyway, the moment I had dropped off my fare and was pulling out of the Metro station he flashed his lights at me and pulled me over. He demanded to see my manifest. All cab drivers are required to keep a written log known as a manifest. You have to write down where you picked up each fare, what time it was, where you dropped them off, what time you dropped them off and how much the fare was. Some of the guys are very lackadaisical about keeping their manifests. I'm fairly punctilious about mine, if a bit sloppy. I didn't want to sit there in the middle of the Metro parking lot scribbling and blocking traffic, so I decided I would enter the fare I had just dropped off a short time later when I was out of the flow of traffic.

But having just seen me drop off a fare, (and looking for an excuse to yank some cabbie's chain) this clown pulls me over and demands to see my manifest, after first wagging his finger at me over a dented bumper on my cab (which one of his two colleagues had dismissed as no big deal months earlier.)

He jumped in my shit because I had not immediately entered the fare I'd just dropped off into my manifest the second she left the cab. "The law says you gotta enter that fare in your manifest the moment the customer leaves the cab," he harrumphed.

What absolute ballroom-bananas bullshit, as Hemingway might have said. I mean, as chickenshit goes, this crap ranks right up there with the self-important Safeway store clerk who proudly nails a customer for taking one extra packet of saltines with his salad-bar lunch.

All the cabbies in town utterly loathe this guy. This week when I went into the cab company to pay my weekly stand dues, (we're all independent contractors; we pay the cab company for using its infrastructure and the cab stands around town) another driver who had seen this cop pull me over, watched the whole thing, gave me a twenty-minute lecture about how much he detests this particular cop. I told him that I personally never argue with the guy; I just smile, take his bullshit and walk away. It's the best policy, really. In the early Mel Brooks movie The Twelve Chairs, which takes place in Russia right after the Bolshevik revolution, a fracas breaks out in which Ron Moody clobbers a cop. Raffish Frank Langella admonishes him firmly: "Don't EVER hit a policeman!" Well, "don't argue with a policeman" is also a good idea, because they like it when you do. Especially if you're a cab driver. Because cops really do have a special hard-on for us Gypsy Hacks who serve The Insomniacs, to paraphrase Tom Waits. I've come to believe it.

By the way, this particular cop, in addition to having a case of elephantiasis of the ego, is also apparently not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. (Well, yeah, he hassles cab drivers for a living. If he were playing with a full deck he might indeed be head of detectives.) Last spring when we, the latest batch of cabbies to pass the test, were being processed in, he demanded to see my immigration papers. This guy is so accustomed to dealing with cabbies from places like Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Iraq that he just assumed that all cab drivers must come from somewhere else.

"Immigration papers?" I scratched my head. "I was born in Vermont."

I think he got the message. And probably made a mental note to nail me for something, anything, at the first opportunity, to get even with me for making him look stupid for a moment.

Oh, well. Every situation has its ups and its downs, right? Being in business for yourself, for example. The downside:no guaranteed money; you have to go out there and hustle every day. And no benefits: you have to provide your own health insurance, and a vacation is just a week of making no money. But there's an upside as well: you can make your own hours and you can't be laid off. As one who has been laid off more than once, (and fired a couple of times) I can tell you that this last is indeed a plus.

As I'm sure Bratfisch would have agreed. Makes you wonder, though. After he lost the plum assignment of a Vienna cabbie's life, driving the Crown Prince Rudolf around, where he did he go from there?

Somehow I have a feeling he managed. A thick skin and a bounce-back ethos are essential to survival in the cab business.

Hail to Bratfisch. May he be in heaven, outsmarting the local flatfoot, even as we speak.

J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010

2010-01-30T12:09:00.009-05:00

J.D. Salinger's obituary was in the Washington Post yesterday. He was 91, the same age my father was when he died.

What a strange dude. (I mean Salinger this time, although my father was also an exceedingly strange dude.)

It seems to me that Salinger was Truman Capote's opposite number. They shared the distinction of publishing one smash-hit book, in Capote's case In Cold Blood, in Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye, then drying up creatively, or at least publishing next to nothing. But whereas Capote lusted after fame, glamor, exotic locales, celebrity gossip, television interviews and a big rolodex of famous names, all of whom he described as his "dear friends," Salinger published one successful book in 1951, then went out and hid in the woods for the rest of life, talking to practically no one. At the time of his death, he hadn't even published a short story since 1965, although the obit did mention that he stayed busy out there in the woods, writing stuff that he intended for publication only after his death. I guess we'll find out about that.

I read The Catcher in the Rye in high school and disliked it, most likely because it was de rigeur for adolescents to admire that book, and I had a contrarian streak in me. Re-reading it many years later, I found Holden's diction rather quaint, and certainly his jaded cynicism, a shocking novelty in 1951, was something of a yawn in the post-Watergate era. But because all adolescents like to think of themselves as alienated and "different" from everyone else, Holden Caufield immediately became an American folk hero. The obit did answer a question for me, which was why my contemporary, Joyce Maynard, who was going to Yale at the same time I was starting college, managed to publish a teenage memoir, Looking Back, when she and I were both all of 19 or so, gaining instant literary fame. Seems she was sleeping with Salinger at the time. Yeah, that would do it all right. Listen to me. I sound like Holden Caufield. Only one man knows why J.D. Salinger withdrew into the New Hampshire woods at age 33 and seldom came out again, refusing interviews, shunning publicity, publishing nothing. Well, that man is dead now, but I'm sure he had his reasons. R.I.P.

Of Smoked Hocks, Winter Nights and Paying It Forward

2009-12-03T10:16:00.005-05:00

I posted this on my "food" blog, "Red Wine With Fish," just about a year ago. December is the time of year when hot, hearty soups are on the menu, so here is the story of my best. Winrow cousins pay special attention: this is Grandma Winrow's recipe (more or less):

Years and years ago there was a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon which began with the voice-over narrator, the incomparable Bill Conrad, proclaiming, "Everybody can do something! For example, Homer Noodleman of Sioux Falls, South Dakota can put six flashlights in his mouth!"

Bullwinkle's special talent was that he could remember everything he ever ate.

Well, I can't remember everything I ever ate, but fortunately I can remember how I was taught to cook some of the things I've eaten, and that's where our story begins today.

I have this friend, Holly Inder. Now, when I met Holly many years ago her name was Holly Brayton, and I'm still inclined to call her that, because frankly, I only met her ex-husband once and the encounter was so forgettable that I can't even remember what he looked like, much less anything he said. Everybody can do something, as Bill Conrad said, and one thing James Inder did very well was blend quietly in with the furniture. So to me, Holly will always be Holly Brayton. I don't really know who Holly Inder was. A mistake, would be my best guess.

With that by way of non-sequitur, Holly and I were talking the other day about split pea soup.

Holly and I met in late 1985, when we were both preparing to go overseas with the foreign service for the first time. Now, Holly was a foreign service brat; she grew up overseas, then went to work in State Department telecommunications when she was in her twenties. Her father had been a telecomm technician during his own career; she was more-or-less following in his footsteps. I was 30 when I joined the foreign service and had never been overseas in my life.

Consequently, Holly has been to a lot of places I've never been. She stayed in the foreign service after I quit nine years ago, and continued to travel.

So when I get an opportunity to whip on Holly a place I've been that she hasn't, well, let's just say it's like taking the trick in a gin game. I like it.

So there we were, talking about split pea soup. Holly says to me, "There's a place in California I've heard about, where there's a restaurant that serves nothing but split pea soup."

"Buellton," I said, with an inward gloat.

"You've been there?"

"Yup. The town is called Buellton, the restaurant is called Anderson's, and yes, split pea soup is the premier item on the menu," I said.

Then, unable to resist savoring the moment a bit more, I added, with just a touch of world-weariness, "Buellton. Yeah, it's right off Highway 101 north of Santa Barbara on the way to San Luis Obispo. I ate there with my dad a couple of times on our way to Arroyo Grande to visit my aunt and uncle. Not far away from Buellton is another tourist attraction, Solvang, a fake Danish village. You can buy all kinds of baked goodies there."

I was lovin' this, as they say in the marketing department at McDonald's.

But I was just warming up.

"Yeah, Anderson's makes some of the best split-pea soup you ever tasted," I told Holly. "I don't know if it's available in other states, but in California you can buy it canned in the grocery store. Yeah, it's good." Then, with a pause for effect, I added, "But mine's better."

Anyone out there old enough to remember Walter Brennan on the old western series The Guns of Will Sonnet will recognize how I savored this moment. Remember the scene where Brennan, as old Will Sonnet, has the following exchange with Claude Akins?

Claude: Ah, you Sonnets. I wish I had the third one in front of me right now.

Walt: You mean James? Now that's a foolish wish, mister. From what I hear, James is the third best shot in the west.

Claude: The THIRD best?

Walt: James is darn good. But he's better. (Jerks his thumb at Dack Rambo, his grandson.) And I'm better'n both of 'em. No brag, just fact.

Yesiree Bob, my split pea soup's bettern' Anderson's. (Spit.) No brag, just fact.

And there's a darn good reason for that. Family tradition.

That is correct. My grandmother taught my mother how to make split pea soup, and my mother taught me. And my grandmother was the best cook who ever lived. Ergo, when I make split pea soup, I'm making it the way my grandmother did, and there's no better. Anywhere.

I can prove it. I did. I told Holly that I had put up a big pot of split pea soup just the day before, and that I would bring her some the next time I saw her. Well, I happened to be going down to Landmark Mall a few days ago to do some Christmas shopping, and Holly doesn't live far from there, so I took a Tupperware container of my split pea soup with me in the car, ran it over to Holly's place and dropped it off.

She called me the next day to tell me that it was every bit as good as I said it was. And that's saying something, because Holly is a better-than-average cook herself, and moreover, one of those women who don't mind admitting when a man can cook something better than they can. When she lived in Guam a few years ago, Holly had a boyfriend named Frank, so she told me, and this guy, an ex-Marine, really liked to cook. When he and Holly weren't canoodling, they were cooking. "But Frank was a better cook than I was," she cheerfully admitted.

Well, I can say this with all confidence: not all of my kitchen experiments turn out well. I really screwed up the mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving this year. But I can say with all confidence that nobody, and I mean nobody, makes better split pea soup than I do. Because when I cook this stuff, my grandmother is looking over my shoulder. Dante, steered through Hell by Virgil, had no better guide than that.

So make a list, run to the grocery store, get out your kitchen utensils, follow these instructions and prepare to go to heaven. But don't forget the Beano.

How good is this stuff? When my father was 90 and we were having trouble getting him to eat anything at all, he would polish off three bowls of this soup if I put it in front of him. That's how good it is.

Oh, by the way, I wouldn't dream of serving split pea soup without cornbread on the side. You know cornbread. In some parts of the east they call it johnny cake. In a future blog posting I'll tell you about the time I introduced a roomful of Russians to cornbread. Anyway, included with my split pea soup recipe is also my cornbread recipe, for those of you who don't mind going the extra mile rather than just grabbing a box of cornbread mix at Safeway.

MY GRANDMOTHER'S (AND MOTHER'S) SPLIT PEA SOUP

Ingredients:

Two 8 oz. packages of dry split peas

1 large onion

4 large carrots

2 smoked pork hocks or smoked ham hocks

Salt

Pepper

Garlic powder

6-8 bay leaves

Soak the dry split peas overnight, or at least for a couple of hours. They will expand, and you'll need to add more water. Then dump them in a soup pot and bring them to a boil. When they come to a boil, turn the heat down low and let them parboil until they're soft, usually 45 minutes to an hour. A whitish foam will arise from the boiling peas. Skim it off and throw it away.

Dice up the pork or ham hock as best as you can and put it in a saucepan with about two cups of water. Start it boiling too, then let it simmer on low until you have soup stock.

When the peas start to get nice and mooshy, drain some of the water out of them and add the soup stock. If you're using smoked pork hock with a bone, fish it out and chop as much meat off of it on a chopping board as you can. Throw the meat in with the peas and stock. Then dice up the onion and carrots and add them to the soup.

Then add the seasonings. salt and pepper to taste, maybe a tablespoon of garlic powder (less if you don't like garlic) and then add the whole bay leaves. Just let the bay leaves float in the soup.

Simmer on low heat for about another hour. Then turn the heat off, cover the soup and let it cool for three hours. When it cools, it will be thick -- almost as thick as soup that comes out of a can, Add as much water as you need to get it to the thickness you like, re-heat and serve. Remove the bay leaves before serving.

One great thing about soup: the more it's re-heated, the better it gets.

KELLEY'S CORNBREAD FROM SCRATCH:

Ingredients:

1 cup white flour

1 cup yellow corn meal

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1 cup milk

1 egg

1/3 cup sugar

1 tbsp. cooking oil

1 tsp. salt

Pre-heat oven to 375. Combine all the ingredients in a mixing bowl, whip or mix until you get smooth batter, pour the batter into a greased 8 X 8 square baking pan, and bake for 20-25 minutes. I like to spice my cornbread up by adding such things as salsa, grated cheese, diced jalepeno or bits of bacon. Experiment with your own ingredients, but the basic batter stays the same.

And for making a kitchen smell wonderful, nothing rounds this meal out like a freshly-baked apple pie. I'm back in my mom's kitchen on a November night just thinking about it.

Me voici

2009-11-07T10:51:00.005-05:00

Some of my friends have expressed concern over the fact that I haven't blogged in more than two months.

Seriously. Two people have.

God bless both of you, and all of you others too.

My last post, Surfing In The Rain, was about depression.

Well, I'm still working with it. It's an "autumn" thing, although I have always loved autumn. When it gets me, it usually gets me in autumn. You?

Ernest Hemingway was appalled when his erstwhile friend Scott Fitzgerald aired his dirty laundry in The Crack-Up, a chronicle of his, Fitzgerald's, breakdown.

Hemingway thought that this was extremely unmanly. You didn't air your personal problems. You kept them to yourself. Then you killed yourself, as Hemingway did.

Thank God the post-World War II generations have been easier on themselves than the generation born before 1914. My father was born in 1914, and he suffered in silence from depression for many years before death finally delivered him from it.

At the very end of the film Papillon (1973), Steve McQueen, who has been a prisoner on Devil's Island for many years, finally manages to escape by flinging himself into the sea along with a handmade raft. Just before the credits roll, Papillon (McQueen) hollers out his final line. Bobbing in the ocean, clinging to his raft, waiting for the tide to take him to the mainland, he shouts, "I'm still here, you bastards!"

He escapes.

She escapes. They escape. We escape.

We're still here.

Surfing In The Rain

2009-09-05T11:44:00.027-04:00

I'm back (after not blogging since July), and I have a serious subject to discuss as summer wanes and the equinox looms.

Show of hands: how many out there have ever experienced depression?

Okay, those of you who were in a bad mood last weekend because you didn't get the promotion you were counting on, or because your lottery pick was one number off the big winner, or were pissed off because your college football team lost, put your hands down.

I'm not talking about being stressed. I'm not talking about being disappointed. I'm not even talking about the blues.

I'm talking about depression. The big "D." The real deal. That thing that keeps you in bed because it arranges things so you don't even want to get up. That thing that immobilizes you against your will, takes your resolve, your concentration. Your hope. Your hopes. Your belief in the future. Your belief in the present. Your belief in anything.

Sometimes takes a life.

I have a former friend who shares my tendency toward falling into the grip of Old Omnivorous, aka Mr. Sad. He calls people who have never experienced depression "civilians."

Okay, I'll go along with that. Depression sufferers are a sort of army, because we fight an enemy that's powerful, unrelenting at times, and sneaky. Oh, boy is Mr. Sad a sneaky bastard. He waits behind the next garbage can, the next tree. He can jump out at you at any moment.

Except with me. I know when to expect Old Omnivorous.

Now.

I first experienced clinical depression when I was a teenager. Of course I didn't know what it was, then. Neither did my parents. They didn't know what was wrong. I didn't know what was wrong. All I knew was that I was a few weeks short of 16 and my life was over. Ha-ha. Well, it wasn't funny then. What do you say about a kid who comes home from school, puts on his bathrobe and sits in front of the television set, sometimes crying, until it's time to go to bed?

That was me: September, 1971.

Mr. Sad has been back to visit me a number of times since, and as was the case that first time, it's always right around Labor Day that he gets off the bus and checks in. I don't know exactly why, but when depression comes to visit me, it's almost always late August-early September when the games begin.

My doctor says he knows the reason why. Some people do tend to become depressed during the fall. Or in my case, when they see it coming.

My doctor knows more than I do, but my problem with that thesis is, for most of my life fall has been my favorite season. How can something you enjoy make you sad?

Well, for some of us, it's hardwired in, and the hardwiring goes back thousands of years. Spring is a time of renewal, autumn of shutting down. Days grow short. "September...November...," as the song goes.

Yes, but when I was growing up, fall was also the time of a lot of fun stuff. My birthday was in October. Then came Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Always something to look forward to. School vacation. Days off. Autumn was fun, once you got past that annoying business of having to go back to school.

But I'm going to be 54 next month. Back-to-school hasn't been part of my life for a good many years. And as we all all know, the older you get, the more the "big picture" intrudes. It's true: at midlife and later, I find that autumn, love it though I may, has become no longer the pageant of fun it was when I was a kid. It's what it always has been: a pageant of glorious, flaming-out color that adds up to one thing: Here Comes Death.

Mr. Sad doesn't come to me every year. No indeed. He has given me wide berths. Sometimes his visits come 10, 12 or 13 years apart.

The thing is, though, the older I get, the more often he shows up, like some sponging relative who's heard that you might have money.

He left me alone last year. I had other things on my mind, I guess.

But the year before last, 2007, I had him hanging around the house, uninvited. I knew he was here because I started listening to Mantovani and Percy Faith. When I, as a music lover, start thinking that anything more emotionally taxing than elevator music is going to be more than I can deal with, something's wrong.

My doctor put me on Lexapro and some other antidepressant. I soldiered through. I even got my act together and dropped 25 pounds.

But between my teen years and 2007, every time Old Omnivorous came poking around my window, almost always about the time of Indian Summer, I simply endured his presence until he went away, usually right after New Year's. Some people's cycles of depression only last a few days. An old friend of mine in this army has these mini-depressions. He's knocked down for two or three days, then he's back up. My cycles tend to last three months. I'm usually coming out of it when the January snows begin to fall.

But the thing is, until two years ago I didn't know what it was like to HAVE help. Sure, I had heard that depression was treatable, but I'd never bothered. I dealt with it by putting myself on routines that bordered on the autistic: turn left, turn right. Put right foot in front of left foot. Go for long walk after work. Return home at fixed hour. Fix dinner.

Crawl under covers and cry. And hope, come morning, you'll be able to get up.

My experience in 2007 was something of a revelation. Help works. Depression does respond to medication.

Shortly after getting that help, I was sufficiently back on my feet, emotionally anyway, to go back to playing my Glenn Gould and George Szell CDs rather than Mantovani's version of Charmaine. (I'm not putting down Mantovani, and Charmaine is a lovely song, especially in his all-strings arrangement. But I'd rather hear it when on an equal emotional footing than when I'm in a state where I feel that its non-offensive soothingness is all I can bear.)

Mr. Sad is poking around this week. I think he took advantage of a very sudden change in the weather here in Washington, D.C. We went from August Steambath to September's dry-air cicada-music literally overnight. It was about a week ago. On Sunday afternoon I was out driving my cab wearing a T-shirt and shorts, my summer cabbie uniform. I came out Monday morning to drive in exactly the same attire, and damn near froze. Overnight, September had arrived. A day early, no less.

With alarm bells on. Something in my brain suddenly said "Ah-ha! Labor Day! GET SAD!" And, fool that I am, when told to jump off the roof, I got out the ladder. Or my brain did.

I wasn't scheduled to see my doctor again until next month. But I called his office on Friday and asked if I could see him this coming Tuesday. I'm going to ask him if he can put me back on the antidepressants. At least until New Year's, when the All Clear traditionally sounds, for me anyway.

And if you're a soldier in this army, whether you're fully aware of it or not, my advice to you is, don't try to do it the way I did for 30 years and tough it out as the Lone Ranger. Help is there. Medication works; take it from me. The blackness CAN be softened to gray, and gray is the color of soft mornings. Soft mornings often become bright days.

The Moon...40 years and counting

2009-07-09T18:41:00.034-04:00

This posting is dedicated to my oldest and best friend, James R. Provenza.

Salud, my fellow "future astronaut" of the 1960s.

This month we click past Year 40 of The Moon, Adulterated.

From now until kingdom come, there are footprints on the moon. Lots of them. And junk. Lots of junk. Abandoned pieces of lunar module. Assorted exploratory ordnance. At least one golf ball. One American flag.

God knows what all else. Give our scientists and engineers enough time and they'll make the moon look the way they've made Antarctica look: like a gigantic KOA campground on the day after Labor Day.

But until July 20, 1969, 40 years ago this month, the moon was as pristine and untouched as any other celestial body. Now it's not. The human race has been there. Come back. Repeated the trip. Explored the lunar surface. Dug for rocks. Poked around.

Hit a golf ball.

For you under-40s, that's true. The late Alan Shepard, the Navy commander who became the first American in space in 1961, was also the first -- and so far only -- American, or for that matter citizen of this planet generally, to hit a golf ball on the moon. It was roughly 10 years after his suborbital flight in a tiny capsule perched atop a Redstone missile in May, 1961 that, as captain of the Apollo 14 flight, the third U.S. mission to land men on the moon, in February, 1971, Shepard teed up with a makeshift club and belted a golf ball over the lunar surface.

No one recorded how far Shepard's drive went, but the moon's gravity being one-sixth of the earth's, there's little question but that it probably made one of Albert Pujols' home runs look like a dry fart.

There is no need to re-hash what the space program meant to us little boys of the 1960s. Jim remembers, and so do I. When President John F. Kennedy announced in the same year that Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, and then a few weeks later Shepard became the second, that the United States would make it a goal to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the decade was out, he was by all eyewitness accounts being true to the spirit of his presidency.

"The New Frontier" was the tag-line of Kennedy's administration.

What better expression of that spirit than to soar into space?

And besides, the Russians had already gotten there. It was the cold war. We had to catch up.

We did, in style and across a decade's worth of headlines.

It was, by any definition, a heady time. Kennedy's death from an assassin's bullet, the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, urban unrest, riots in big cities, the hippie movement, drugs ... everything divisive, controversial and violent that we associate in retrospect with the 1960s, has hanging over it the image that stands above this blog posting ... an American spacecraft coasting over the lunar surface. Men preparing to touch down on the moon. Despite everything that turbulent decade hurled forth that seemed to deny or defy the spirit of The New Frontier, there was always this.

For me, the defining moment of the 1960s occurred just about six months before Neil Armstrong, captain of the Apollo 11 flight in 1969, stepped down on to the moon along with his fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, as their crewmate, astronaut Michael Collins, stood watch in the command module, orbiting the moon and awaiting their return from the lunar surface.

It was when the crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo, the Navy spy ship that had been seized by North Korea in early 1968, was released to freedom in December of that year. At the very moment that the Pueblo's crew walked out of North Korea and back to freedom, the crew of Apollo 8, one of a series of space missions that set the stage for the great lunar landing mission of the following summer, was in orbit around the moon. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were the crew of Apollo 8. Their spacecraft entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, 1968.

They took one of the most transfixing and permanently epoch-defining photographs ever taken: the image of the blue earth rising over the moon. Earthrise. It has been reproduced millions of times in millions of places in the years since. Mankind's first look back at the Big Blue Marble. Home, viewed from elsewhere. At the end of a decade that had seen so much noisy and violent disunity, this simple cosmic image of the greatest unity, our unavoidable unity, caused countless moments of stunned, sometimes awestruck reflection. Earthrise was the ultimate family snapshot: there we all were...all three billion of us. Alone in the cosmos, with only each other. For one magic moment, the shouting stopped.

As America and the world watched the crew of the Pueblo walk to freedom, they also watched Earthrise. And then listened to mission commander Frank Borman read aloud, on Christmas Eve, the opening verses of the Book of Genesis.

Ask me to name a moment that defines the 1960s. It's that moment. Not Woodstock, not any image from the horrors of Vietnam or of some grisly and heartbreaking political assassination.

It's that moment: The Pueblo's crew walks to freedom after 10 months in a communist prison as the crew of Apollo 8 takes a quick snapshot from space of the silent, sorrowful earth.

The sixties.

God, I'm glad they're gone. Anyone who wants them back has to be an idiot.

But July 20, 1969 has served for many of us who were growing up during that decade as a counterbalance, if not exactly an antidote, to November 22, 1963, a date that fewer and fewer people I know, especially those under the age of 50, even seem to remember anymore.

Millions of words have been written about how that autumn afternoon in Dallas supposedly crushed the postwar generation's hopes for the future and gave rise to the spirit of cynicism and doubt that would dominate American politics in the decades to come.

I won't go along with any such pat and simplistic view of something as complex as modern history. But I would certainly go along with those who would claim that July 20, 1969 vindicated, in a very large and significant way, the optimism that underlay JFK's public announcement in 1961 that the nation should try and make it happen. For that reason alone, it serves as a historical counterbalance, if not exactly a consolation, for the nation's loss nearly six years earlier.

Many people I know, including many dear friends as I get older, remember neither Kennedy's assassination nor Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon.

We who remember both now face the thinning of our ranks.

Lucky us.

Channeling Travis Bickle?

2009-06-15T18:13:00.023-04:00

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Just kidding with that title, of course. Travis Bickle and I have nothing to do with each other save my admiration for Robert de Niro's acting talents when he was young. And yes, I did mean to cast aspersions on what he's been doing for the past 20 years. If ever an actor decided to sit on his laurels...but never mind. This blog posting isn't a movie critique.

Still, what you see above, right above de Niro in his famous role of the mixed-up New York cabbie in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), is a symbol of my latest hat. That PT Cruiser isn't my taxicab, but my taxicab is a PT Cruiser, the only one in Yellow Cab of Alexandria, VA's fleet in fact.

Yes, I have gone into the taxicab business. What a month and a half ago was a cream-colored 2006 PT Cruiser with woody paneling, which if you ask me just cried out for a surfboard on its roof were it not for the fact that such a thing would look ridiculous rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House, is now a Yellow Cab.

Alexandria Yellow Cab No. 244, to be precise. And I wish the goddamn dispatchers down there would quit addressing me as "244." What are we doing, a remake of The Prisoner starring the late Patrick McGoohan? ("You are number six!" "Who is number one?") Ah, the nineteen-sixties. What a cheesy decade they were.

"My name is 'Kelley,' not '244!'" I keep yelling at them.

I have only been hacking for two weeks so far, but I've already learned some new things. For example, people just assume that cab drivers know where everything is. I've had people flag me down on the street or pull up next to me in their cars, roll their windows down and ask me for directions to such-and-such a place or such-and-such a street. It's touch-and-go, because I don't actually live in Alexandria and I'm still learning my way around that town, although you'd be surprised how quickly you get to know a town when you're driving a cab in it. Cruise up and down the same streets and avenues for eight to 12 hours at a time and soon you begin to feel like a native.

Last Saturday night I was parked in front of the Hotel Monaco, one of King Street's tonier spots. Now, King Street, for those who don't know Alexandria, VA, especially the lower end of it down near the Potomac river, is Party Central on a Saturday night. It's nothing but restaurants and bars, traffic and more traffic. And it is not a wide street, not by any means. So here I am, parked at the taxi stand in front of the Monaco, standing next to the cab and stretching my legs for a minute, and here, right down the middle of King Street, comes a 50-foot semi-truck-and-trailer rig. How that trucker got that truck down King Street is still a mystery to me, but you can bet the conga line of stalled traffic behind him, backed up halfway to the Masonic Temple, was calling him some choice names.

His passenger-side partner (no doubt they were "running team," as they say in the trucking industry) rolls down his window and asks me, "Hey, you know where Route 1 is?"

These guys were lost. With 80,000 pounds worth of tractor-trailer, right in the middle of Old Town Alexandria. On Saturday night, no less. I didn't envy them. Or anyone in their way. Or anyone right behind them.

"Yeah, that's North Patrick Street," I replied. "And I hate to tell you this, but it's that way," I said, pointing back in the direction from which they had come.

I had to explain it three times before they understood. But I watched in amazement as they went chugging down to the corner of King and Royal, then proceeded to execute the slowest, most painful left turn in the history of trucking, watched by about 200 gawkers. Presumably they understood me, hung another left at Queen and got to where they needed to go, without running over any curbs or tourists.

What else have I learned so far? Well, in the D.C. metro area anyway, people are as surprised as hell when they encounter a cab driver who speaks good English. I picked up a fare last weekend who asked me to stop on the way downtown and pick up his buddy with whom he was planning to party later. When the buddy got in the cab, he immediately dropped his voice very low in talking with his friend. I could hear him thinking: "Who the hell is this cabbie? Where does he come from? What's his native language?"

I whipped out my business card. "Here's my card," I said. "If you need a taxi or a notary public, give me a shout."

"I ... I can't believe it," he said. "A cab driver who speaks English? I haven't had a cab driver in this town who speaks good English in two years!"

"New England born, California bred," I told him. "English is my L1. And by the way," I added for theatrical effect, "go Red Sox."

Maybe he was a Yankees fan and I'll never get any repeat business from him, but I couldn't resist yanking (no pun intended) his possibly-racist chain.

Also, I have learned that, when it comes to taxicabs anyway, people tend not to want to bother with coins. I loaded up my change box with quarters, dimes and nickels in addition to the ones and fives I keep for making change. Not necessary, I found out. Most of my fares will just wave away the coin, round it up to the next dollar, go from there. Which can lead to embarrassing moments. I picked up a lady yesterday, early in the morning. She had two little girls with her. She was taking them to school, but needed a cab to go maybe six blocks.

When we reached her destination the fare was $4.73. She handed me a twenty. I began fumbling around for 27 cents.

"Don't bother with the change," she said.

Don't bother with the change? "But you gave me a TWENTY," I said.

"Oh, no, I meant the coins," she replied.

"Oh. I was just going to say, you're one heck of a tipper!"

We laughed, and I handed her fourteen bucks even.

Last Friday I had a United States senator in my cab. Remember that scene? Senator Palantine? "We Are The People!!??"

You movie buffs will. You others, go get the DVD.

Okay, you politics buffs will want to know who the senator was. Mark Warner, Democrat from Virginia. I picked him up at his home in Old Town and took him to Capitol Hill.

He talked on his cell phone the whole way. But I did engage him in a bit of chit-chat. I decided to yank his chain, because that's the kind of fellow I am.

I pretended not to know who he was. Actually, the truth is that I didn't know who he was until he told me. But when he stepped out his front door, my first thought was, "Congressman or worse." See, he was wearing the congressional uniform: blue sportjacket, solid color tie and khaki Dockers. All male members of Congress wear that uniform.

But when he asked to be dropped on Capitol Hill, "on the senate side," I got sneakily inquisitive. "Do you work for one of the senators?" I asked.

"I am one of the senators."

"Oh, yeah? Which one are you?"

"Warner."

"John Warner?"

"No, Mark Warner."

"Rings a bell, I think. Are you a Republican or a Democrat?"

"Democrat."

We drove along in silence for a few seconds while he checked his voice mail. When he was finished, I said, "Say, what have you guys on Capitol Hill been doing lately? I haven't looked at a newspaper in six months."

"Well, we regulated tobacco yesterday."

"I thought tobacco already was regulated."

"It is at the state level, not at the federal level."

Oh, goody. Another level of regulation. Today tobacco, tomorrow how many slivers of toilet paper you're allowed to use when you go to the crapper.

But I didn't tell him that. I dropped him off, gave him my card, told him to have a great afternoon.

It's all part of being a taxi driver, you know? Keep your customers happy. Be friendly. Smell good. Keep your cab clean.

And don't worry, anybody. I'm not going to go buy a .44 magnum and get a mohawk.

I can't afford a .44 magnum, and I'm too bald for a mohawk.

Memo to the New York Yankees: What Have You Done LATELY?

2009-05-22T19:28:00.034-04:00

Before anyone reads this posting, let it be known that I just hung a photograph on my bedroom wall of Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig sitting on the dugout bench together in 1938. "The Iron Man and the rookie."

This photograph was the only piece of baseball memorabilia that survived a horrific kitchen fire in a house my wife Valerie and I owned in Spokane Washington, on January 8, 2007. Everything else I had hung on the walls of that kitchen, including my mounted, autographed color picture of Nolan Ryan, taken on the night in 1989 when he threw his 5,000th strikeout, was destroyed. But while picking through the soaked, charred wreckage of the completely-gutted kitchen, I found this photo of DiMaggio and Gehrig, which I had given my late father as a Father's Day gift some years earlier, lying on the floor in a corner. It was badly covered with soot, but salvageable. I cleaned it up, framed it and hung it over my dresser.

Why would I, as dedicated a Yankee-hater as ever stepped into a ballpark, want a photograph of Gehrig and DiMaggio facing my bed? Not hard, as Robert Graves once said. It's right and morally proper to hate and despise evil empires. And as evil empires go, the Yankees rank right up there with the USSR, which squandered 55 percent of its GNP on military hardware. The GNP of the USSR was probably about the same size as the Yankees' payroll.

But hating evil, as personified by people like Stalin and George Steinbrenner, is one thing. Respecting great players is something entirely else. And Gehrig and DiMaggio were great players. DiMaggio, in fact, might qualify as the third greatest player of all time, behind Ruth and Cobb, or Cobb and Ruth, depending on which side of that argument you're on.

'Nuff said. On to the fun.

I've been driving around reading about the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry for days, owing to the fact that I've been keeping Mike Vaccaro's marvelous book Emperors and Idiots, a history of that rivalry, in my car to give me something to do while waiting out Washington, D.C.'s innumerable (and endless) red lights.

While enduring page after page, chapter after chapter of Yankee strut and swagger and Red Sox agony, I started thinking about the unfortunate, and not terribly accurate overall impression this creates for the average reader who doesn't know much about baseball but who, bombarded with Yankee propaganda from predominantly New York-based news media, is bound to get the impression of the Yankees as a team of unbeatable champions who never lose.

Well, the humiliation that the Red Sox visited upon the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series aside, (and it was truly, madly, deeply a humiliation; not just a defeat, but a crushing of Goliath's testicles by an insolently merry and disrespectful David) and by the way, the bluster of simian Yankee fans who never shut up about the Pinstripes' 26 World Series titles also aside, one intractable fact remains, and I'll go to the mat for it.

The Yankees have spent most of my life in a slump.

I was born in October, 1955. The very year, in fact the very month, that the Brooklyn Dodgers finally managed to beat the New York Yankees in the World Series after all those years of failure. The 1950s were the Yankees' decade, no question about it. Fortunately, not having been born until '55, I pretty much missed out on their glory days.

But, despite the much-vaunted 1956 Yankee "revenge" victory over the Dodgers in the following year, (in which Don Larsen pitched the perfect game which would be the last perfect game pitched by a Yankee until Larsen's fellow alumnus of San Diego's Point Loma High School, David Wells, did it in 1998) The End for the Yankee Dynasty was already in sight.

A premonitory flicker of The End occurred in 1960, when the Pittsburgh Pirates took the World Series away from the Yankees on Bill Mazeroski's famous bottom-of-the-ninth home run in Game 7. It amazes me when I hear people like Billy Crystal, in Ken Burns' famous documentary film Baseball, talk about Mazeroski's home run as if it were somehow unjust, a case of lese-majeste against their eternally-entitled heroes. Au contraire. That was justice, Billy, not its opposite. That was those oh-so-reliable mills of the gods, grinding deliciously away at New York's trademark arrogance.

The Yankees did come back to win the World Series in 1962, against the Giants. That was the October I turned seven.

I took no notice of it. I was only seven, had just attained the biblical Age of Reason. I was even years away from even becoming a Yankee hater.

But that truly was The End, for a long time.

The Yankees would not win another World Series until 1977, the October I turned 22. 15 years. Not exactly a dynasty. In fact in 1966, the year I played shortstop for the South Bay Little League Shamrocks, the Yankees finished dead-last in the American League. Boston ended the season in next-to-last place, one game ahead of them.

The World Series of 1963 and '64, the first two October classics I was old enough to notice, framed the highly-just end of a Yankee dynasty that had begun in 1949, the year New York took the pennant away from Boston in a cliffhanger of a late season (see David Halberstam's Summer of '49, a truly great baseball book.) But by 1963 it was over. First the '63 Los Angeles Dodgers, with the deadly right-left pitching rotation of Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax, throttled the Yankees in four games, and then the '64 Cardinals, fueled by the vicious right-hander Bob Gibson, vanquished them again. And then they were gone, the Yankees. Not to be seen again for a long time.

The Yankees would not even appear in another Series for 13 years.

They won the World Series in 1977, the year I turned 22. They won it again the following year when I turned 23.

They would not win the World Series again until the October I turned 41, 1996. In fact, the last Series in which they even appeared during that 18-year period was 1981, which they lost to the Dodgers.

From '81 to '96 they weren't even there. New York baseball in the 1980s and early '90s, as my book Three Flies Up points out, was all about the Mets. The Yankees were in the wilderness.

Under Joe Torre they had a flurry of successes in the final four years of the 20th century, winning four Series championships between 1996 and 2000. But do the math. I'm 53 now, and since I was seven, the Yankees have won the World Series eight times. Eight victories in 46 years. That's not a dynasty. That's not winning all the time. It isn't even winning most of the time. Yankee fans who gloat about 26 championships are mostly remembering the period from 1920 to 1962.

1962 was 47 years ago. John F. Kennedy was president in 1962. People were dancing the Twist in 1962. Women wore beehive hairdos in 1962.

1962 was a long time ago.

Now, let's move on and take a look at the 21st century, the only one that matters because it's the one we're living in now. The 20th century is history. Gone. Done. Ovah, as big-mouth, hot-air spewing New Yorkers say.

How many World Series titles have the New York Yankees won in the 21st century?

Zip. Zero. None.

"What about 2000!!??" I hear Yankee fans screeching.

Sorry, no. Zero is not a positive integer. The new count begins with "1." The year 2000 was the last year of the 20th century, not the first year of the 21st.

Now that we've settled that, ahem. I ask, how many World Series championships have the New York Yankees won in the 21st century?

Zip. Zero. None.

How many World Series championships have the Boston Red Sox won in the 21st century?

Two.

That's Red Sox two, Yankees nothing. And that's not the score from a Thursday night pitcher's duel, that's the score over eight years of the new century. The new century that wipes the slate clean. They say that after the last pitch of the World Series is thrown, everyone is in last place again until next spring.

Ditto when a century turns. When a century turns, the team that blustered and boasted its way through the previous century, buying pennants because it had more money than some countries, is rated exactly the same as all the other teams. On January 1, 2001, everybody in baseball was in last place. No 21st century World Series rings had been handed out yet.

Since then, Red Sox players have earned two. Yankee players, none.

2004 was the annus mirabilis of the 21st century. It will be hard to improve on from the standpoint of good historical precedents. Because it was the year New York's mouth was slammed shut.

And until the Yankees win a championship in this century, it had better stay shut.

Wagner in Steeltown, USA? Ausgeschlossen.

2009-05-17T17:48:00.027-04:00

Today, for only the second time in my career as a concertgoer and opera fan, I walked out of an opera before it was over.

In fact I walked out before it was half over.

In fact I walked out at the end of Act I.

The opera was Wagner's Siegfried, the production that of Washington (D.C.) National Opera.

The last time I walked out of an opera was in March, 1986, when my pal Charlie Berigan and I took to our heels following the second act of Handel's Samson at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The staging was just so downright silly that we decided we'd had enough.

But that time we walked out of purely aesthetic considerations. This time was different. This time I was both disgusted and offended.

I bought my ticket for this matinee performance last September. I waited eight months to see it. Then, on the very morning of the day I was to go to the opera, someone from the Wagner Society of Washington circulated the New York Times' review, written by Anthony Thommasini. It begins like this:

"WASHINGTON — Like many companies, the Washington National Opera is presenting its new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle in installments over several seasons. But financial setbacks, now everyday news in the performing arts, have forced the company to stretch out the schedule of its “Ring,” directed by Francesca Zambello in a co-production with the San Francisco Opera, much further than planned.

The company’s new “Siegfried,” the third opera in the cycle, opened at the Kennedy Center on May 2, three years after the first, “Das Rheingold.” The “Ring” will not be presented complete until 2013. But this “Siegfried,” seen here on Thursday night, was worth waiting for.

Ms. Zambello and her creative team, especially the set designer Michael Yeargan, are interpreting Wagner’s epic through the lens of American mythology and iconography. The “Ring” is presented as a class conflict between the haves and the have-nots."

Now, if I had seen this review in time, I would have put my ticket for this production up for sale on eBay. I go to the opera to hear music and experience drama, not to be preached at about politics. Especially not Marxist politics. Are these people kidding? There is nothing fresh, innovative or cutting-edge about loading up a Ring of the Nibelungs production with nonsense about "class struggle." It's been done before. Lots of times.

Maybe director Francesca Zambello didn't get the memo, but this is the ninth year of the 21st century, not the 68th year of the 20th.

Evidently New York Times reviewer Thommasini didn't get the memo either, although it shouldn't surprise me that the relentlessly left-wing New York Times would respond to "Marxist" Wagner, even 50 years after "Marxist" Wagner was anything new, the way the New York Times responds to anything "Marxist:" by jumping up and down squealing and hyperventilating like an excited pom-pom girl at a Pop Warner football game.

I went to the John F. Kennedy Center for the performing Arts not knowing quite what to expect. But I had a ticket in my pocket for which I'd paid $102 last year, and I wasn't about to just waste it.

But when the curtain went up on Act I, my worst fears were realized.

God, I wish somebody, somehow would do something about snotty, self-important theatrical directors who feel compelled to take classic works of art and stage productions of them aimed at communicating some political or moral message that originated in the mind of the director, not the author. Some message the director wants the audience to get. Directors should tell people where to stand and whether or not to cry when they deliver their lines. They should not take the work in question and use it as a soapbox for their own political beliefs.

Hence, the set of Act I of Siegfried, a tale set in mythic times among dark forests, with Nordic heroes, gods and giants wielding magic swords and whatnot, resembled the set of the old NBC sitcom Sanford and Son. Mime, the dwarf who dreams of stealing the mythic ring and the hoard of gold that goes with it for himself, is depicted as living in some sort of east Los Angeles junkyard, littered with gas cans, lawn chairs, piles of scrap metal and the bombed-out trailer that he apparently sleeps in. There's an old gas stove in front of the trailer that he cooks on, a la life in a 1930s hobo jungle. (Steinbeck!) As if all of that detail didn't make the "message" heavy-handed enough, looming in the background were gigantic images of an electric power corridor. (Industry!)

How absurd to have Wagner's characters singing about forging swords and slaying dragons on a set that would more appropriately have accomodated rival street gangs going at each other with guns and knives.

As greasy hero Siegfried, and then the god Wotan disguised just as greasily as "The Wanderer," enter and exit during Act I, they repeatedly go to Mime's bombed-out trailer to get bottles of something, presumably good, proletarian beer, out of the refrigerator, from which they swig while they deliver their lines. All this scene needed was Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in his "wife-beater" shirt, yelling "Stella!"

Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski? As I watched this idiocy unfold, I kept thinking of the first night I attended the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. During the Soviet period of Russia's history, the stage of the Bolshoi Theater was crested, proudly and in full view for all to see, with a gigantic profile of Lenin and a just-as-gigantic red Soviet hammer-and-sickle. Lenin and the hammer-and-sickle have long since been removed from the Bolshoi, as they are no longer anything of what modern Russia is all about.

In terms of sheer subtlety, that picture of Lenin and that hammer-and-sickle were all this production lacked. Perhaps Ms. Zambello contacted the Bolshoi to see if she could borrow Lenin and the hammer-and-sickle, and, given how cutting edge her vision is, she was no doubt shocked and dismayed to find that they had been long since discarded. Too bad for her.

It is almost beyond belief how anyone in the 21st century could take seriously a "Marxist" spin on Wagner, or anything else for that matter that wasn't intended as "Marxist" to begin with. Pretty hard to keep a Bertolt Brecht play non-Marxist, which is probably why you don't see or hear too much of Brecht anymore, but Wagner? Sure, he was one of the 1848 revolutionaries, but that didn't make him a Marxist, and certainly not a Leninist. And it's no excuse at all for muddle-headed aging romantics (I call them "the bald-headed ponytail crowd") who just can't let go of their tie-dyed Che Guevara T-shirts, carte blanche to go on for decade after decade using the Ring to flog a horse that, whether they like it or not, is dead.

for Mr. Thommasini and Ms. Zambello and all of the others who didn't get the memo, the USSR rolled over and died nearly 20 years ago. Even the supposedly "communist" Chinese have embraced their own somewhat bizarre relationship with free-market capitalism. The whole notion of class struggle, of "haves" and "have nots" locked into a quantifiable and scientifically-scannable preordained fight-to-the-death is as hopelessly 19th century an idea as perpetual motion or phrenology. I repeat: are these people kidding? Does anyone, in the year 2009, seriously believe in Marxism anymore, an idea which is no longer even "last century," but now, "the-century-before?"

I'm all for updating Wagner. But while we're trying to be up-to-date, let's keep in mind that some things that seemed "up-to-date" when the Beatles were still making records are anything but up-to-date now. "Marxist" Wagner? This can only be about my fellow baby-boomers' nostalgia for the Woodstock era.

Oops, I've said it. Next we'll see a production of Der Rosenkavalier set at a 1960s hippie rock festival.

Hopefully I'll see the reviews before I waste my money on a seat.

People change

2009-05-10T14:35:00.016-04:00

My choice of images with which to begin this blog posting was the basest kind of self-indulgence, rooted in the deepest nostalgia.

And I freely confess that nostalgia is a vice of mine, no less than alcohol, food and gambling are to some other people.

The image of Rod McKuen that appears above (and I realize that most of you don't remember Rod McKuen, which is the reason I'm writing this) is the cover of an album he made for Warner Brothers Records in 1969, Rod McKuen at Carnegie Hall. Billed as his "birthday concert," it was a live album of his songs and readings. Four sides, what was called a "double album" in those days.

For my 16th birthday on Oct. 12, 1971, I asked for, and received, this album. I still have it somewhere.

For that same birthday I was taken to a Rod McKuen concert at the San Diego Civic Theater. After the concert was over, I hung around among the Q&A crowd. Asked a question. He wasn't giving autographs, but I waited around the theater exit after that, and when he came out, I went up to him and shook his hand. I was newly-minted 16. "Mr. McKuen, I just want to thank you, because it was you who got me started writing poetry two years ago," I said to him.

"That's good, don't let anybody stop you," he replied.

He was a star. His fame was superlative. If you had given almost any American a word-association test in 1971 and said, "poet," the response would have been "Rod McKuen."

Women carried his books around in their purses. He was commissioned by popular magazines to write cycles of poems. People like Frank Sinatra recorded his songs.

And now almost nobody remembers who he is. He's in his late seventies now. He wears a beard, and looks a bit like George Carlin did just before he died. I hope that doesn't mean we're about to lose McKuen, even if the world forgot about him years ago, and I myself, by the time I was 17, no longer thought as much of his poetry as I did a year earlier. (By then I was hooked on Dylan Thomas.)

McKuen wrote many songs that were quite famous in their day, including Seasons In The Sun and Jean from the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie starring Maggie Smith. Smith won an Oscar for her performance in that film. McKuen was nominated for an Oscar for the song, but lost out to Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, a song Burt Bacharach had written for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the same year.

One of McKuen's many songs was entitled People Change.

And here, in which you will re-read much of what I just wrote, is a preview of my own novel-in-progress. What follows is an excerpt from a telephone conversation between the protagonist of my new novel and his recently-ex girlfriend:

“People change,” Olga remarked.

McCarver laughed. “You know what you just said? You couldn’t possibly know. But you just gave me the title of a song by Rod McKuen, and it couldn’t have popped out of your mouth at a more appropriate time. McKuen wrote a song called People Change.”

“Who was he?”

“Yeah, almost nobody remembers him anymore. Hard to believe, but in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, his name was practically a household word. He was a singer—with a terrible voice, though, very gravelly—and a songwriter who also wrote this treacly free-verse poetry that was very easy to read because it didn’t try very hard to be poetry. It was just thoughts, meandering thoughts, usually about failed love affairs. Women were suckers for this stuff; they love ‘sensitive’ men. Housewives carried his books around in their purses. If you asked any American in the early seventies to name a poet, ‘Rod McKuen’ would probably be the name you’d hear. He was perfect for that blow-dried era. I used to have some of his books. Lonesome Cities. Fields of Wonder. Some of the books were actually based on his record albums. Lonesome Cities was also an LP record, released in 1968 I think. Magazines like Women’s Day commissioned McKuen to write poems for them. He wrote a song, Jean, which was featured in the movie The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie starring Maggie Smith. Jean was nominated for the Oscar in 1970 for Best Song, but was beaten out by Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head from the score that Burt Bacharach wrote for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. All of this is apropos of nothing of course, except when Wayne Breedlove and I were teenagers, Rod McKuen was our idol. I used to check the Lonesome Cities LP out of the public library and listen to it by the hour when I was, oh, 15. Believe it or not, my big birthday present for my 16th birthday was being taken to a Rod McKuen concert here in Baltimore. Wayne’s and my early poems sounded just like McKuen’s, as did those of every wannabe poet in the United States in those days. Now he’s almost completely forgotten. But he was plenty big in his time. I was with Wayne when I heard my first Rod McKuen album, The Single Man. Queasiest bunch of self-pity-fueled hogwash you ever heard. We loved it. We wanted to be just like him.”

We did, too.

Now, with that by way of introduction, I get down to my real subject, which is how people really do change.

What follows is a list of things about me that have changed during my life. I used to be this, used to be that, used to like this, used to eat that...don't anymore.

I'll bet you're the same way. Because people change.

Make your own list. Share with me. As the Greeks used to say, "Know thyself." I had an argument along these lines just the other day, with a friend who refused to see the usefulness of examining the past. Only the present matters, she insisted.

Which is the same as saying that a room at night looks better with the lights off. Sure it looks better with the lights off; You're not looking at anything. I won't quote that wheezy saw of George Santayana's about how those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them, but I think there is more to be learned from the past than just remembering where you got the cuts and bruises. Wordsworth said the child is father to the man; what better way to know the man, or woman, than to remember the child?

What better way to know thyself than to reflect on how different your today self is from the self you used to know? (Or, as another of McKuen's songs had it, The World I Used To Know?)

Here are some ways in which I have changed over the years. Make your own list and share.

1. When I was 25 I was a big fan of Bruce Springsteen's. I can't stand him anymore. I think if I saw him coming down the street now, I'd go the other way.

2. When I was eight, I loved ketchup on scrambled eggs. Not now.

3. I was a bed-wetter as a child. God, I hope that doesn't come back in old age. It did to my father.

4. Like all baby boomers, I grew up watching television. Thousands of hours of it. You couldn't pay me to watch TV now.

5. When I was in college, I thought Japanese women were the most beautiful women in the world. I haven't necessarily abandoned them, but they've been supplanted by Russian women. (That could be because I've never lived in Japan, but I have lived in Russia.)

6. When I was 12 years old I dreamed of being an astronomer. By the time I was 15 I had realized that someone who can just barely manage long division is not going to be an astronomer. That ambition deflated quickly.

7. At ten I bridled at being told to go to bed. Now I don't have to be told.

8. Like most novice drinkers, when I was 19 I thought rum-and-coke was a great drink. Kids like alcohol, but they like it sweet. The thought of drinking rum-and-coke now is almost enough to make me heave.

9. In high school I thought that T.S. Eliot was a great poet, and that W.H. Auden and William Butler Yeats were jokes. After one semester of college I had reversed that judgement 180 degrees.

10. At 20 I had a thick, full head of hair. At 53 I look like Arnold Schoenberg.

11. When I was a child, any and all talk of lawns, gardens and that sort of junk on the part of adults would make my eyes glaze over. Now I'm thinking about when I should plant my tomatoes. (Hint: next week.)

12. At 15 I used to sit up at night worrying about death. Now I just take another drink and go to sleep. As the guy said in the movie Manhattan, "I'm alive, I'm alive. When I'm dead, I'm dead."

13. As a youngster I was bored silly by jazz. I love it now.

14. I used to be afraid of girls. Now I'm afraid of women. (Probably more than I am of death, come to think of it.) Now, don't start screeching "misogynist," all you "feminists" out there. We all fear what we don't understand, and I gave up on understanding women years ago.

15. The exception that proves the rule: at 10 I used to get in trouble for reading library books when I was supposed to be doing my arithmetic. Stuff like that still happens -- I will still shirk what I'm supposed to be doing in favor of what I like to be doing.

16. When I was a teenager I loved the short days of fall and hated the spring. Now I love the spring and, although I still rather like the short days of fall, now they make me think of mortality more than what they used to make me think of, e.g. the holidays.

17. I used to love to go to the movies. When I was a kid, 50 cents got you a feature film on a big screen, and a cartoon. Now $11 gets you a feature film on a screen the size of someone's garage door, preceded by 15 minutes of commercials. Pass.

18. When I was young a snootful of alcohol would prompt me to call someone on the phone and bend their ear. Now, with each successive drink I take, the telephone becomes a repellent, not an attraction.

19. I used to love the play Inherit The Wind, in fact I did a cutting from its courtroom scene for speech tournaments when I was on the speech squad in high school. Now I regard it as simplistic, two-dimensional, manipulative and generally second-rate.

20. I was raised, like a lot of Americans are, sort of nominally Protestant. My parents' attitude was, any church more-or-less is okay as long as it isn't Catholic. In fact my parents (neither of whom went further than high school) encouraged me to despise and look down my nose at Catholics. When I was 19 I became Catholic. I haven't been anywhere near a church in years now, Protestant or Catholic, but I don't look down my nose at anyone (except New York Yankee fans.)

And now.......before I sign off, let me leave you with this thought, something to ponder the next time your local surplus store is having a special on gas masks:

A few years ago one of my doctors told me (and I don't know where he heard it) that when you sit down on the toilet to have a bowel movement, most of what you pass is not, in fact, food waste.

Most of it is stuff you have inhaled.

Say goodnight, Gracie.

Aujourd'hui le déluge

2009-05-07T07:35:00.014-04:00

Pictured at right is one of Washington, D.C.'s tourist attractions, the D.C. Duck. Half-bus and half-boat, You can ride around town on it, and then right across the tidal basin.

If things don't ease up here soon, however, the D.C. Duck might become a mode of commuter transport.

In fact, if things don't ease up here soon, we may all develop webbed feet. WE'LL be the D.C. Ducks.

If you were to visit the nation's capital now, I swear you'd think you were in Seattle. You know, good old rainy Seattle, where they see the sun so seldom that Bill Cosby once commented that when the sun does come out, people look at each other guiltily and ask, "What did we DO?"

Today is Thursday, and I don't think we've seen the sun since last Friday. In the meantime it's been either pissing down or pouring rain down rain steadily. Rain to annoy you a bit, like that persistent dribble that forces you to set your windshield wipers on "every-ten-seconds," and then all of a sudden whoosh--it's coming down like the proverbial cow pissing on a rock.

Last night my wife Valerie was busy in the garage, sorting out things for a neighborhood yard sale this weekend. She wanted me to get my three bicycles out of the way. I put them in the backyard for temporary storage, but was afraid they'd get rained on, so I rummaged in the basement until I came up with the only thing I could find to cover them with -- the drop cloth I use when I paint. Not the best thing, because it's only canvas, with no plastic on either side. But better than nothing. I threw it over the bikes where they leaned up against the back fence.

A few minutes later Valerie came up to me with an old used shower curtain she had found. "Here, this is plastic, it'll cover those bikes better than that canvas drop cloth," she said.

I went out and threw the shower curtain over the bikes. And not a moment too soon, either, because less than five minutes later here it came again, another downpour like something out of the ninth chapter of Genesis.

What is going on here? If this had happened in January and all of this precipitation we've been getting this week had been snow instead of rain, the government would have shut down completely. I'm not kidding. I have lived here in D.C. off and on for years. At the first sign of a winter snowflake, government offices empty out. It looks like the crowd fleeing Godzilla in a Japanese monster movie.

Come to think of it, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, would it? D.C.'s horrific commuter traffic would get to take a holiday, as would the rampant waste of your tax money on things like invisible sneakers and studies of why fish don't watch television.

I'll tell you one thing, though. All joking about the government aside, this relentless storm system is playing hell with us suburban crabgrass farmers. We have a particularly aggressive species of bluegrass that grows around here. When this stuff takes a nap in the winter, it's just harboring its energies for spring. The grass in my backyard grows so fast that the place looks like the Guatemelan jungle if I fail to mow at least once a week. Now, add all of this rain to that and you have a situation where the grass is growing so fast it looks like it's threatening to overthrow the city.

Remember that Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon about the Pottsylvania Creeper, Bullwinkle's prize-winning flower that grew to monstrous size in minutes...and then started eating people? I think I have something like that on my hands.

So does my next-door neighbor Ted, who came over here last night just as he was preparing to launch a lawnmower assault on his own lawn one more time. He had a great idea.

"I'm gonna buy some goats," he said. "How many goats do you want?"

"I'll take three," I told him. Do I have to provide them with rain slickers?

Ha-ha, of course not.

But I might have to call the D.C. Duck to come rescue them -- and me -- from off the roof if this doesn't end soon.

Sales Resistance 1A

2009-05-03T09:17:00.016-04:00

Okay, everybody. Here's yet another chance for all of you to benefit hugely from old K.D.'s extensive experience in the wonderful world of getting ripped off.

When dealing with anyone trying to sell you anything, I offer the following stars to steer by. I guarantee that they will bring you safely into port, and you, the fool, will not be parted from your money:

1. If it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true.

2. Internet web sites that promise you riches and then ask for a credit card number are always scams.

3. The following Q&A may be a cliché, but you’ll never go wrong keeping it in mind: “When is a salesman lying? When his mouth is moving.”

4. And by the way, things really do break the day after the warranties expire. That’s not your imagination.

5. Never make eye contact with anyone carrying a stack of anything.

6. Ditto anyone carrying a stack of anything who is obviously trying to make eye contact with you.

7. If you see a sign on something that says it’s for sale “as-is,” don’t buy it unless you’re sure you know how to fix it.

8. If you answer the phone and there’s a long silence at the other end, hang up. It’s a telemarketer or a bill collector—the long silence means that the computer which automatically dialed your number is disengaging and they’re getting ready to the put the telemarketer or bill collector through to you. Hang up!

9. Related to #8, caller ID is an essential in the modern world. If you don’t have it, get it.

10. Nobody legitimate sells anything door-to-door anymore. If someone rings your doorbell and tries to sell you something, assume he or she is a crook. Or it might just be the Jehovah’s Witnesses—they still go door to door. But they're usually nice people and at least they’re not going to ask you for a credit card number. Your call.

11. If you put your resume on Craigslist in search of employment, be advised that scammers are actively farming Craigslist for e-mail addresses. If you get an e-mail that purports to be from a recruiter looking to match you up with a job, be very wary. Legitimate recruiters will almost always contact you by phone. E-mail usually means it’s someone trying to recruit sales people or sell you an iPhone.

12. Citigroup is especially aggressive this way, and they will contact you by phone. If you get a call from Citigroup offering you employment in some "management" position,, most likely the job will involve commission sales. Take the call at your own risk.

13. If you’re thinking about buying a new car but haven’t made up your mind yet, don’t just wander up on to a car dealer’s lot. Their salespeople will be on you like ugly on an ape, and your only defense will be flight. Have an escape route planned before you leave the safety of the sidewalk. I find the binoculars-from-across-the-street approach both helpful and safe.

14. If a “career counselor” hands you a service agreement to read and then leaves the room, assume that on the reverse side of it you will find his very hefty fee, not mentioned until that moment.

15. This one is strictly for my former colleagues in the U.S. State Department: never so much as give the so-called Bureau of Diplomatic Security the time of day unless there’s a lawyer present. Those people are looking for promotions, and they’re looking for promotions at your expense. Don’t trust them, ever.

16. If someone is talking to you and he uses your first name three times in one sentence, run for your life. He wants to sell you something.

17. Also, it’s a good idea to keep track of how often that same guy blinks. If he goes for a full minute without blinking, he’s either a crook or a nut. Thus trapped, my m.o. is to say, “Look! a naked lady!” Then when he turns to look, I run.

18. Ask to see the goods, up-front. Take nobody’s word for anything.

19. If you are in fact looking to buy a car, never buy one from a private individual. Always go to a dealer. Even if that Nissan you found on Craigslist looks wonderful, it might have been sitting at the curb or in the guy’s driveway for six months and all of its gizmos and gasmos have deteriorated to the point where it’s just waiting to die.

20. There is no such thing as a legitimate "fat-off" pill. Any product in a bottle that promises to melt fat off you is fake. Some products might indeed suppress your appetite and help you that way, but anything called "Super Fat Magnet" or something of that nature is fake, fake, fake. There is no easy substitute for jogging and meal-replacement shakes.

21. Ronald Reagan said “Trust, but verify.” Well, he had it close. My advice is “Don’t trust to begin with, then you won't have to bother verifying.”

22. If you get an e-mail purporting to offer you a job, and they have the word "Employment" spelled wrong, e.g. "Employement," I'd say that's a safe bet for deletion.

The Angel of Death Strikes Again

2009-04-28T07:35:00.013-04:00

Sometimes I get the willies.

Last Friday I was sitting here blogging away, and I happened to mention Beatrice Arthur, who played Maude on TV in the 1970s and later, Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls in the 1980s and early '90s.

She died on Sunday.

Okay, she was 86. Still...

Folks, you are reading the words of the Angel of Death. That's me. I kill celebrities. I don't mean to do it, and as Garfield the Cat once said, I don't know how I does it, I jez' does it.

I have blogged on this subject before. Do a blog search on Eek, I Did It Again, and you will be taken to something I wrote back in the summer of 2006. I was driving on Interstate 90 between Spokane, Washington and Post Falls, Idaho on a standard booze run (the state liquor stores in Idaho have cheaper prices than those in Washington owing to fewer taxes), and I had the radio on in the car. I was listening to a program of popular songs from the World War II era. I began thinking about June Allyson, the petite little blonde movie star of the WWII period of whom they said she was the girl "every boy wanted to bring home to his family." I always thought my Aunt Jessie, my mother's sister, looked a little bit like June Allyson.

The next day I read her obituary in the newspaper. June Allyson's, that is, not my Aunt Jessie. My aunt had already died by then. But Aunt Jessie wasn't famous, just wonderful, so I can't be blamed for that.

You're not convinced. Ha, you're saying. Coincidence. Big deal.

As the French say, uh-uh. Search my blog again: It Ain't Over 'Til The Fat Guy Dies. How about him? Mitchell Rupe, on death row for murder, in Washington state. I haven't thought about this loser in years, not since reading a newspaper story in 1994 about how he had eaten himself off death row. He intentionally got himself so fat that his lawyer sold a Washington state judge the notion that hanging him would be cruel and inhuman punishment. He was so fat, you see, that hanging him might result in decapitation, which would be "cruel and inhuman." Great legal victory for Rupe.

But then I step in. I remember Rupe and his story one morning in 2006 while driving my car across Chula Vista, California ... an hour later I see his obituary in the paper.

This has happened over and over in my life. I'll start thinking about some famous person...and then I find out they quit breathing just about the same moment I was thinking about them.

My friend Diane thinks I have a form of extrasensory perception. I don't know. My own speculation has been that maybe the fillings in my teeth somehow enable me to pick up radio or television signals that go directly into my head, bypassing my ears. (This might explain my ability to recite lines from old reruns of The Andy Griffith Show endlessly.) TV Land broadcasts it; I pick up the signal somehow.

You think I'm crazy? Again, you think it's just coincidence, and that all of these old people are about to die anyway?

Check this out: Marilyn Chambers, the great porn star of the 1970s and former Ivory Soap girl, died on April 12 at age 56. She was a true classic, an American original. I'll never forget the afternoon some of my newspaper buddies and I crowded around the VCR in Vacaville, CA to share in the wonder of her Oscar-worthy performance in the classic '70s porno film Insatiable ("How lovely to have you back in London, my dear!") My journal records that on April 10 I was wondering whatever became of her. Two days later she was found dead in Los Angeles. And 56 ain't that old. I'm 53.

If you're in any way famous, you want to steer clear of me. I have the Evil Eye somehow when it comes to celebrities.

In light of this gruesome talent I seem to have, all of you Barack Obama fans out there ought to be grateful that I'm trying as hard as I can NOT to think about him. I haven't looked at a newspaper in nearly six months. That's why I go out to Dead-or-alive-info.org every couple of weeks or so, just to find out if anyone famous or once-famous has died lately.

By the way, has anyone seen Fess Parker around?

Miscellany

2009-04-23T11:41:00.007-04:00

I had my first encounter with evil when I was 15.

It was the summer of 1971. I was visiting a friend in Spokane, Washington.

We were walking around late at night and we stepped into a public restroom.

Somebody had written the following graffiti on the wall:

"A little bird with yellow bill
Perched upon my windowsill.
I lured him in with crumbs of bread,
and then I crushed his fucking head."

Some low-life dirtball apparently thought that was funny. (You know the type of person I'm talking about: the kind who writes on restroom walls.)

I hope he's dead, and I hope his death hurt a lot. I'm putting the world on notice: anybody, and I mean anybody, who thinks cruelty to animals is funny should have his belly torn open and his entrails set on fire before his eyes.

...

I attended a meeting of Washington, D.C.'s Advisory Neighborhood Commission for Ward 5 last night. Councilmember Harry Thomas addressed the gathering. Let it be known that when my neighbor Donald L. Williams asked why the D.C. police are flouting the city's no-cellphone-use-while-driving law, (along with everybody else) he could not get a straight answer out of Councilmember Thomas.

I met Commmissioner Robert King at that same meeting. He looks like James Earl Jones and he's a brother Mason. Good to meet you, Bob.

...

I saw something on the street in downtown Washington, D.C. on Monday that made me wish I'd had my camera with me. It would have been a fabulous photo. A guy was lying flat on his stomach in the middle of the street at the corner of 14th and F NW, half his body down inside an open manhole. The only things sticking out of the manhole were his legs and feet. Apparently he was talking to someone down inside that manhole. God, what a great photo that would have made!

...

This time of year I always kind of miss being in California. May is coming up, just about the best time of year in San Diego. There's nothing quite like a bright, breezy day in May out there on the west coast. I used to love sitting on the porch of my family's ancestral home in Chula Vista on an afternoon in May, the Padres' game on the radio (usually they were losing) and the gentle May breeze ringing the wind-chime that my father fashioned out of an empty wine jug many years ago. Once May is over, though, things get pretty grim. Come June, the area is enveloped almost daily in a persistent marine layer that keeps the sky quite gray. You can set your calendar by it: San Diegans call it "the June gloom."

...

I got an e-mail this morning from Roxanne at Roxanne's Artiques Gallery near the Brookland/CUA Metro station here in D.C. The same Donald L. Williams who couldn't get a straight answer out of Councilman Thomas about cellphone use by cops approached Roxanne yesterday on behalf of yours truly. You see, in addition to all of the other wild n' crazy things in my quiver, I'm also a sometime painter. Donald thought that Roxanne might be interested in displaying some of my art work in her gallery. I e-mailed her digital photos of a few of my canvases, and she inquired as to the media I used. I combine oil-and-acrylic on canvas with pastiche, a sop to the fact that I can't draw worth a damn. And no, I don't do Elvis on black velvet or dogs shooting pool.

...

I was at the Brookland/CUA Metro station the other day, wearing my Boston Red Sox cap. I saw another guy on the platform wearing a Red Sox cap, so I gave him the "Go Sox" countersign. He returned it, then rolled up his sleeve and showed me the beautifully-executed Red Sox team logo that he had tattooed on his left arm. "Red Sox Nation is just amazing," I told him. Later that same day, Donald L. Williams and I got into a whimsical discussion of how we might manage as roommates, should we ever be forced by circumstances (we're both basically destitute) to share space. Answer: Felix and Oscar writ large. "Now, THAT would be a mixed marriage," I said in all seriousness. And it's not because I'm white and Donald's black. There are more serious issues than race here. I mean, can you imagine a Red Sox fan and a Yankees fan living under the same roof? As the Germans say, Ausgeschlossen.*

...

There's a stretch of South Dakota Avenue in Northeast D.C., a residential area, where the average motorist averages 70 mph. The police department keeps records of this stuff. It's the reason they're installing cameras on South Dakota Avenue. I hate these cameras, especially after getting nailed by one myself, trying to beat a red light on Rhode Island Avenue a few months ago. But in a neighborhood where there's a playground, people should not drive 70 mph. Sorry, I'm just an old stick-in-the-mud that way. And I don't even have any children.

...

My pal Chris down in North Carolina gave up bread for lent. He says he's lost 25 pounds. I haven't seen him lately so I'll have to take his word for it. But now that lent is over, I hope he hasn't gone back to the baguettes and the dinner rolls. Chris has a new girlfriend; maybe that will help his resolve. You know the old saying: behind every man successfully losing weight there's either a trainer in a smelly sweatsuit waving a six-foot bullwhip, or a woman reminding him of what wonders weight loss will do for his...uh, stamina.

...

We are now a mere six weeks and change from the Tour de Cure in Reston, Virginia, a cycling event for the American Diabetes Association in which I am slated to ride a "metric century," e.g. 63 miles. I have been steadfastly in training since February, and have received $340 in donations from my friends, which has been generous and for which I am grateful. However some of my other friends who promised donations months ago have NOT coughed up and are steadfastly ignoring my repeated e-mail pleas for redemption. I'm about to give up on this crowd, but let me do so with the immortal words of Beatrice Arthur when she was playing that old bag Maude on CBS television back in the 1970s: "God will get you for that."

...

(Drum roll.) Millions of people have started writing novels; a few thousand actually finish writing them. I'm at work on a novel that I began last June 15 when the aforementioned bread-avoider, Chris, and I returned from attending the 13th International Hemingway Conference in Kansas City. I have given myself a deadline of this coming June 15 to complete this novel. I'm going to meet that deadline, folks. I have written 136,000 words as of yesterday. Meanwhile my pal Tony out in California, who has been working on a novel for about the last four years when he isn't out doing contracting work, has about 200,000 done on his. That's already too long, and Tony knows it. He and I have an interesting reciprocal deal in place, though. I'm a good editor, and when Tony's finished with his manuscript I'm going to cut Fastglass (that's the title) down to size. In return, Tony, an on-again, off-again writer for movies, is going to adapt my first novel, Tower-102 (iUniverse, 2000) as a screenplay.

*Ausgeschlossen--"Extremely unlikely."

Otras cincuenta cosas sobre mí

2009-04-08T08:27:00.039-04:00

Serendipity: A faculty for making fortunate discoveries. (Bobrow, Edwin. The Complete Idiot's Guide to New Product Development, New York: Alpha Books, 1997.)

A few months ago I posted a laundry list in this space of trivia facts about myself. 100 of them.

My pal Sasha looked at that this week and thought, hey, there's something that might be useful in introducing myself to my customers. (Sasha is an entrepreneur in Moscow.)He e-mailed me and told me so.

Now, it never would have occurred to me that anything so trivial as personal trivia could have any utility, so to speak. Not unless you're Justin Timberlake or Tyra Banks, and can therefore reasonably expect that some no-life pinhead out there who lives vicariously through celebrity magazines will be interested in what color coffee cup you use in the morning. (Speaking of coffee cups, the photograph above was taken a few years ago in of all places, Croatia. I was vacationing with my then-girlfriend Nadya on the Adriatic Sea. I liked the way they spelled out the word "Caffe" on the surface of my coffee.)

Anyway, I decided to add to the list of supremely uninteresting factoids about my sometimes-august, usually not-very-interesting self. Not 100 factoids this time; I have too much to do today. I'm going to shoot for 50, and see if I can get this done in the next 20 minutes. I have a project for which someone is actually paying me money, and it has to be finished by three O'clock this afternoon.

1. I just bought a baseball bat. Spring is here. I'm going to ask my friend Donald if he wants to go to the park and shag flies. I'm 53; Donald is 61. He has a glove, and now I have the bat. I have a baseball around here somewhere.

2. There are two bumper stickers on my 2006 PT Cruiser. Neither has anything to do with politics. One reads "Would You Drive Any Better With That Cellphone Up Your Ass?" The other speaks a cosmic truth: "Mozart Is God."

3. I shave the "old fashioned" way, with a stainless steel safety razor. Cheap disposable plastic razors are as much a hazard to your skin as they are to the environment. Also, I shave with lather worked up in a mug with a brush, not that mostly-air crap that comes out of a can. Ask any barber: lather actually worked up on someone's face gives you a closer shave than lather from a can.

4. My favorite brand of single-malt Scotch is Glenlivet. It's creamy-smooth, with a slight honey flavor. Delicious.

5. I have a ticket to see Richard Wagner's Siegfried at the Washington National Opera next month. I'm going alone. Nobody I know within the D.C. Metro area is as "into" Wagner as I am. (I'd love to see the whole Ring cycle sometime, but who has that kind of money?)

6. I have a scar on my throat from where I had the beginnings of a "turkey wattle" that I inherited from my father liposuctioned off two months ago.

7. I am now entering my sixth month of refusing to look at newspapers, watch newscasts or listen to newscasts. Whatever Obama and his little Politboro of Trotskyites are up to out there, I don't want to know. And it's working. Last week my sister mentioned somebody named Napolitano to me, and I had no idea who that was. Also last week, at Borders Books, one of the clerks said something to me about Slum Dog Millionaire and I gave her a blank stare. Turns out that's the movie that won Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards show. Who cares? I'm immersed in Proust, and will be until the Trotskyites are gone.

8. I have a tiger-striped tabby cat named Rageuneau who, I suspect, thinks I'm his mother. He slipped out into the rain yesterday, got frightened because he couldn't get back in the house, and began to cry. He wouldn't come to my wife Valerie, but he came to me.

9. I just became a Notary Public. Want to see my stamp?

10. Baseball season only started the day before yesterday, and I've already given up on the San Diego Padres for this year.

11. I have an unfinished novel-in-progress, with a self-imposed June 15 deadline for completion of first draft. This ain't no pipe-dream, folks. 125,000 words is not your average head-start. I'm about 75 percent finished with this thing.

12. First thing in the morning I take my coffee black. Later in the day I take it with hot milk, European-style. Of course, most Europeans do it the other way around, but I have a contrarian streak in me.

13. Of all the places I lived overseas during my 14 years in the State Department, Bad Godesburg, Germany was my favorite. Imagine waking up every morning just a stone's throw from the Rhine.

14. I'm in training to ride a Metric Century (100 kilometers or 63 miles) on my bicycle for the American Diabetes Association, in June. This event will coincide with the completion of my novel-in-progress. Go on line at www.tour.diabetes.org and contribute!!

15. I don't care what kind of wall-smashing sound it puts out, the Bose Acoustic Sound System is one ugly piece of machinery. I think it looks more like an espresso machine than a stereo.

16. The older I get, the better Frank Sinatra sounds.

17. I don't play golf. I could never get interested in it. I have two friends who are hopeless golf addicts, but I never did see the attraction.

18. Everyone who has read my blog, or my book Three Flies Up, knows that I'm a baseball fan. What fewer know is that I also follow IndyCar racing. Not NASCAR, Indycar. Aside from the World Series, the Indianapolis 500 is the only other sporting event in the whole year that I never like to miss.

19. One of the greatest cultural contributions my French ancestors made to the world was establishing which wines go best with which foods. Now if I could just get it straight...

20. There are few combinations on this earth that match that of a good cup of espresso and a really good cigar.

21. I have read all three books of Dante's Divine Comedy. Someday I want to read them in Italian.

22. Speaking of languages, Rosetta Stone (French) is on my birthday wish list. I have always wanted to learn French, and recently I had Rosetta Stone demonstrated to me. It works. I picked up several new words in the five minutes I stood there.

23. If I succeed with French, I'm going to take a shot at Greek. I have a slight leg up there -- I have studied Russian, and the Greek and Russian alphabets share certain similarities for the screamingly obvious reason that the Russian alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet.

24. I can make a delicious quiche out of just about whatever I find in the refrigerator.

25. I've been a Catholic for going on 35 years, but have scarcely been near a church in more than 25. I've been contemplating a return for three or so years now. If I only didn't have to unload a quarter-century's worth of confession! Can you imagine the kind of mischief a guy gets up to between the ages of 27 and 53, particularly if he has a contrarian streak in him to begin with?

26. Generally speaking, although April means the opening of the baseball season, I prefer March to April. March has an excuse for being chilly. It's March. April is supposed to be warmer, and I feel cheated when it isn't.

27. I seldom if ever write in longhand. It's not that I'm a high-tech geek or anything like that, and I appreciate the beautiful craftsmanship of a fine fountain pen. But I hate the sight of my own handwriting. (For all of his shortcomings, by the way, my father had beautiful handwriting. His was the last generation to be taught penmanship in school.)

28. I'm a lifelong fan of Ernest Hemingway's work, but I don't consider him a great novelist. He was one of the best short story-writers of all time, but he was a sprint-runner, not a long-distance runner. His fiction at its best combines the genius of poetry with the verisimilitude of good journalism. Fine, but journalism doesn't work on a big canvas. His novels are mostly self-indulgences and read as such.

29. The two most beautiful places I've ever seen (and I've been all over the western world) are western Montana and the central California coast around Santa Maria and San Luis Obispo.

30. I'm down to my last $1000. After that, Je suis me suis cassé.

31. I will not tolerate humor that is based on cruelty, whether to animals or people. When I first saw the movie Carrie, in which Cissy Spacek's high-school classmates pull an appallingly mean practical joke on her, I cheered like crazy during the scene in which she takes horrible revenge on them, using the telekinetic powers that Stephen King gave her in his novel. For this same reason British humor, so much of which centers around laughing at people's misfortunes, is wasted on me. Stanley Kubrick, whom otherwise I have always admired, was said to have started giggling while filming the gang-rape scene in A Clockwork Orange (1971). The British are just ugly people. Ugly in every way that it's possible to be ugly. They have rotten teeth and they think cruelty is funny.

32. I once took a few surfing lessons in California, and I really would like to get back to learning how to surf. (If I could just get to the point where I could stand up on a wave without falling off my surfboard, I'd be happy.)

33. Because I am from California, for a long time I thought that I'd seen all the sunshine I wanted to see in my life, and I hankered for four-season climate instead. While I still would not want to live in the tropics, (too hot & sticky for a warm-blooded French Canadian like me) the older I get, the more I incline toward wanting to live on the beach. But only on the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic.

34. I love children, but I seldom if ever regret never having had any of my own. I've had enough trouble taking care of myself; I'd hate to think what a lousy provider for a family I would have been.

35. My all-time favorite performance by an actor in a movie is Henry Fonda's in Mister Roberts, directed by Joshua Logan in 1955, the year I was born.

36. I wish the Dodgers had never left Brooklyn. Not because I have any great love for Brooklyn, but if they were still in Brooklyn I wouldn't have to put up with my friend Doug, a Bay Area native, hating them for no better reason than the fact that they happen to play in Los Angeles. (For an explanation of this, see my book Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball and Me. Outskirts Press, 2008, pp. 85-86.)

37. The last book I read was the original scroll of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. I didn't much care for it. I love On The Road, but the original scroll (which Kerouac famously typed, in 1951, on one continuously-unrolling sheet of paper which, when he was finished, was 125 feet long)is a rough draft, and it reads like a rough draft. Not fun.

38. The Phil Silvers Show, aka Sgt. Bilko, which aired on CBS from 1955 to 1958, was the funniest sitcom of all time. The least funny sitcom of all time, and I don't give a shit what Jay McInerny says, was Seinfeld.

39. I love rainy days as long as I don't have to go outside. Nothing is more pleasant than a dark, wet, gray afternoon indoors, with a fire in the fireplace, a glass of red wine at your elbow and Haydn on the stereo.

40. The 1965 Ford Mustang was the most beautiful thing Detroit ever built. (Although I have a gut-level aversion to dark blue Mustangs, for reasons I'm going to keep to myself.)

41. I love to grind my own coffee, but as pianist Helene Grimaud accurately observed in Grammophone magazine not long ago, coffee never tastes as good as it smells.

42. Stat-for-stat, Stan Musial was a better ballplayer than Mickey Mantle. Mantle just got all the media attention because he played in New York, where all the media except CNN are headquartered, while Musial played in St. Louis, which was still considered the hinterland in the 1950s. (And CNN wasn't even created until after both Musial and Mantle had retired.) New York LOVES New York. Nobody else does.

43. The first time I saw Helen Mirren was in the lamentable 2010: The Year We Make Contact. She was playing, of all things, a Soviet colonel. I thought she was really cute. Still do. If I were at a cocktail party, with both Helen Mirren and Reese Witherspoon in attendance, Reese could wait. I'd go chat up Helen first. She'd probably have more interesting things to say anyway.

44. I love the music of Stan Getz. In the right mood, I could listen to Stan Getz recordings all day.

45. The paintings of Henri Matisse make me very happy.

46. All other things being equal, I'd rather see the sunrise after having had a good night's sleep than after having stayed up all night.

47. Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited is the greatest rock n' roll album of all time. Bar none.

48. I've always been a cat person, and never cared particularly for dogs until I married my wife Valerie, who has always had dogs. She brought two of them into our marriage, both miniature schnauzers: Jacques and Alexandra. I didn't get to know Jacques as well as I would have liked, because he died shortly after we were married. But oh boy, did I bond with Alexandra! She outlived Jacqui by almost three years, and when she died on July 30, 2008, after a horrible epileptic seizure, I cried my eyes out.

49. I hate basketball. A game played indoors, by men wearing knee-length shorts? Cable TV at its next-worst, after CSI and House.

50. As Henry Miller once said to the entire world....

Σ' αγαπώ ! (In English that's spelled, and pronounced, "S'agapo." It's Greek for "I love you." Miller had it scotch-taped to his door.)

Sweet hours of the spring

2009-03-23T09:59:00.009-04:00

It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green corn-field did pass
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, Hey ding a ding, ding:
Sweet lovers love the spring.

This is the first verse of one of Shakespeare's most famous lyrics. It has been set to music countless times, my favorite being a setting for tenor and lute by Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Morley. (Elizabethan lute songs are one of my great weaknesses; I find them as irresistible as cashews.)

Shakespeare's lyric stands midway in a long tradition among English poets of celebrating the arrival of spring. From "Sumer is y-comen in, Lhude sing cuckoo," written around 1250 by that famous medieval English poet Anonymous, to Robert Herrick's famous Corrina's Going A-Maying and beyond, bards have been celebrating springtime as a joyous festival of renewal, flowers, birds, trees and fresh-air sex.

My own father, a great appreciator of fine art, oft-times told me of the sign he once encountered while driving along a rural back road somewhere north of Spokane, Washington: "Hurray, Hurray, the first of May! Outdoor screwin' starts today!" The poet exulted.

You can't get more eloquent than that.

I have to admit that for a long time I simply did not understand what all the fuss was about. I'm not talking specifically about love among the mosquitoes, but the larger issue of getting all excited about the spring. My feeling was, aside from the beginning of the baseball season, what's so bloody great about it?

This was because of my upbringing, of course. I grew up in southern California where it's pretty much warm all the time. When I was a kid I preferred the fall to the spring, excepting of course for that dreary business of having to return to school. Fall meant the shorter days which in turn led to my birthday (I was born in October) and then Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Once I got past the distasteful business of summer vacation being over with, the autumn was a procession of things to look forward to.

Spring? Eh. May in San Diego is pretty much like January in San Diego. Maybe three or four degrees warmer.

I got my first taste of spring euphoria, my first taste of what all those English and German poets were rhapsodizing about, when I was 13. The summer before my 13th birthday my family moved to the aforementioned Spokane, Washington. The year was 1968. We lived there for two years and then moved back to California. But when I went back to Spokane briefly, nearly 30 years later, to run a bed-and-breakfast, I found that if you asked people who had lived there all their lives whether they remembered the Great Winter of '68-'69, virtually all them did, and remembered it vividly.

It just so happened that the Dupuis moved to Spokane in the year when that part of the country saw its worst winter in 80 years. I, who had known little but sunshine since the second grade, found myself, now in the eighth grade, experiencing the kind of winter you would normally associate with a place like Minnesota. We were up to our asses in snow for almost four months. That stuff was on the ground from mid-December to early April. And between the snowplows and the shoveling, in some places it was piled up higher than I was tall. I came and went to and from school in it --fortunately we lived only one block from my school. The ice got so bad that I used to watch the bus drivers coming over the hill up the street from where we lived, locking their brakes and sliding the buses down the hill at a 45-degree angle in order not to lose control of them. I actually rode on a couple of those buses -- riding the bus to downtown Spokane was a regular "Saturday" thing we did -- and enjoyed the thrill of those wild rides. (The drivers didn't enjoy them, believe me.)

My mother got so disgusted with the winter that at one point she took all of the frozen food out of the freezer and threw it in the backyard as a form of protest that she had to be in Spokane at all. "If it's going to be ten below zero all winter, I might as well give the goddamn freezer a rest," she said. In April we were still finding frozen peas out there.

But in April it was still pretty cold. Spokane is at an elevation of over 2,000 feet and the chill can persist well into May. My dad took me and my friend Glenn out for the fishing opener that year on Fan Lake, between Spokane and the Canadian border. When we pushed our boat away from the dock that morning, it must have been 15 degrees on that lake. I was never so cold in my life.

And we didn't catch a single fish.

But it was ever-so-gradually warming up, and then came one weekend in May when the temperature spiked up into the sixties. Doesn't sound too warm, does it? Ask anyone from Wisconsin about this. When you've been walking around in temperatures ranging from 20 below to 35 above for three months, and all of a sudden a day comes along when it pokes up to 65, you think summer has arrived. You're ready to bust out the sunscreen and go sit in the yard with a daiquiri.

I was too young for a daiquiri, but believe me, I felt the intoxication. It was warm! I looked out the window and noticed that the trees had leaves on them again! The snow was gone! And, childhood being the festival of ever-ongoing anticipations that it is, my mind began wandering in the delicious direction of...summer vacation! (You thought I was going to say 'love,' didn't you?) I was 13, remember? Shelley sang, "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" Kids amend that to, "If spring comes, can the last day of school be far behind?"

Simon and Garfunkel had a hit record that spring, a bit of silliness called Baby Driver. It's about a kid who is alternately under-supervised, over-horny and very fond of racing motorcycles. My sister had the 45-rpm version of it and was playing it all the time. Its brazen joyousness and bouncy rhythm came to symbolize that mighty, ravishing spring of '69 for me. To this day, whenever I hear Baby Driver, I think of that incredible weekend in my youth when springtime seemed to burst upon us all in one dizzy moment, on the heels of what had been a long, chilly and gray hibernation.

I would not experience anything similar until I was an adult. My family only lived in Spokane for one more winter, which was much, much milder than the first, and then we were back in California, where I lived through high school, college and right through my twenties.

But in 1985 I joined the Foreign Service, and that meant Washington, D.C. I had been to D.C. one previous time, about five years earlier, but it was a one-week vacation which moreover took place in the late summer. I was 30 years old now and had not really experienced winter since junior high school.

I arrived in Washington in November. It was unseasonably warm for the first few days, but then, in the words of one of the local TV weathercasters, Mother Nature "turned on the refrigrator," and I was glad for the warm overcoat I'd brought with me. My training group was quickly transplanted to Warrenton, Virginia, about 50 miles west of D.C., where the State Department trains its telecommunications people.

So there we all were, out in rural Fauquier County, VA. Horse country. And then it started to snow. We had a white Christmas. D.C. doesn't usually have severe winters, but the winter of '85-'86 was, if not severe by midwest or New England standards, sufficiently cold and snowy to make us feel that we were winter-bound, particularly those of us who hailed from places like California and Arizona, which several of us did.

In training that winter I met and briefly dated a beautiful girl, a few years my junior, named Holly Brayton. The dating was brief because we were both getting ready to leave the country and she was leaving first. But for two weeks or so we saw each other almost every evening, and I'll never forget those drives: here I was, a kid from California with very little experience of driving in snow, making that trek down snowy and icy Virginia county roads night after night, covering the 20 miles between Warrenton and Manassas Park, where Holly had a condo.

By then I had been handed my first overseas assignment, Frankfurt-am-Main, in what was in those days still called West Germany. Holly, by contrast, was on her way to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, in perpetually-hot sub-Sarahan Africa. I would get my own taste of sub-Saharan Africa a few years later, when I was assigned to Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, just a hop to the right on the map from Liberia. But for now I was on my way to central Europe.

I was thrilled of course. I'd been wanting to visit Europe all my life, and now I was going there for a two-year tour of duty. I wouldn't have traded assignments with Holly for anything (though I secretly sighed that she wasn't coming to Germany with me.)

It was a chilly, gray day when I left Washington, and it was a chilly gray day when I arrived in Frankfurt.

Anyone who's ever lived in central Europe is familiar with what the Germans call Stark Bewoelkt. The term refers to Germany's stubborn, some would say perpetual overcast. The Austrian and Swiss alps which separate central Europe from Italy also separate it from much of southern Europe's famous sunshine, which is one of the reasons why Robert Browning had "Italy" tatooed over his heart, and I would not be surprised to learn that it was also one of the reasons that Goethe suddenly sprang from his bed in Weimar one night in 1786, jumped into a coach, pointed it south and stayed in Italy for the next two years.

The point is that Germany is what might be charitably called "misty." It sees gray skies more than blue ones. Consequently you see Germans anywhere and everywhere outside their own country where there's a beach. They're photophiles, the Germans, and anyone who has lived in their country knows why. I arrived in Frankfurt on March 13, 1986. For the first three days I was there we didn't see the sun at all. When it finally managed to poke through the cloud-ceiling, it wasn't much.

So there I was. It was mid-March and I had just segue'd directly from cold, gray Washington to chilly, gray Germany. What little sun I had seen for the previous three months had mostly generated uncomfortable glare from all of the icy streets and roads it was being reflected in, over which I was driving bundled up in coats and sweaters. I was, in short, experiencing the first genuine, unrelieved winter of my life since childhood.

Small wonder, then, that when the season of the poets returned, I noticed. You bet I did. During a breathtakingly short series of days in May, Frankfurt seemed to come back to life. Trees were suddenly full of leaves again. I awoke in the morning to hear birds twittering. Flowers bloomed. My neighbor Jack Robinson, a political officer whom I had never seen in anything but a suit and tie, was suddenly outside in rubber boots digging in the mud, preparing to plant something in the few square feet of dirt outside the apartment building. Frankfurt sits at a latitude roughly equivalent to that of Toronto, which means that when the days begin getting longer, they really begin getting longer. Suddenly you saw children playing outside until eight or nine O'clock at night.

And then there was the day when I decided to go out and ride my bicycle, just to enjoy the weather. The sun actually shone, a real treat in Germany, and it was warm enough to go outside without a jacket.

I rode my bicycle for a short distance in the general direction of the Frankfurt Zoo. On the way I encountered a little canal, on the other side of which someone had planted...strawberries!

If there's one smell that my mind associates unmistakeably with summer, it's the smell of strawberries. I stopped my bike dead on the dirt path alongside that little canal and just stood there for a minute, sniffing the strawberries and thinking of summer. It took me back inexorably to that wonderful afternoon when I was 13 and the sudden inrush of a spring day had me dreaming of summer vacation, which was now, after all, only a few weeks away.

So now I know what the poets meant. I also know what John Steinbeck meant when, in Travels with Charley, he wrote, "I've lived in climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I prefer weather." He then goes on to ask how anyone who lives in Florida can appreciate warmth, which is all they ever feel, or greenness, which is all they ever see. As a California native I can certainly relate to that. Steinbeck, who had lived in Mexico, knew what he was talking about.

You can't appreciate spring unless you've known winter. It's only March as I write these words and spring is only three days along, but you can feel things gradually picking up, even here in Washington.

By god, when the weather gets a little warmer still, maybe I'll get crazy and see if I can get my wife to go a-Maying.

Anybody know what the heck "a-Maying" is, anyway?*

Yeah, I know. Some smartass is going to say "Outdoor screwing."

Ole.

*Actually, my friend Dianne did some research and "outdoor screwing" isn't far off the mark. In Merrie England, "going a-Maying" was a delightful ritual wherein the boys would more-or-less persuade the girls to go out into the fields where the tall grass was and...Well, let's just say that a lot of weddings generally followed.

That enemy within

2009-02-24T07:54:00.032-05:00

PICTURED ABOVE: First, proof that I once had hair: Me at age 17, giving my newborn niece Sarah her bottle. (Sarah now has three little boys of her own.)

Then, me in my salad days, e.g. age four.
(That's been one of my biggest problems in life:
after kindergarten it was all downhill.)

In the course of the past 10 years I have spent $6,738 undoing the damage my parents did.

Some of you who have known me for a while will probably argue that I didn't spend enough.

But I was screwed four ways at birth, and unlike members of previous generations, who tended to just accept their fates and move on, we baby boomers in our bottomless, fathomless self-regard have made a regular industry of self-improvement, defined as the resolute refusal to accept getting old.

Or to accept much of anything else, for that matter.

Hey, don't bug me. The philosopher Paul Tillich (or was it Liberace?) said "Always believe in the possible." It's a short leap from there to "Always believe in whatever you can persuade yourself is true."

As I was saying, I was screwed four ways at birth, three of them having to do with DNA. One had to do with a brain-fart on the part of my mother.

You just can't wait to hear what they were, can you?

Okay, we'll start with the brain-fart. When I was born, my mother stuck me with a first name which, if you think I'm going to tell you what it was, you have another think coming.

Actually, you can find out what it was fairly quickly, because I came out of the closet right here on the blog site a few months ago. Just search my blog for the title Growing Up With A Funny Name and read all about it. By the way, I should have dedicated that posting to my old friend Holly Inder, who spent most of an afternoon talking me into coming clean. Holly has known my secret for years. Way back when we were both much younger, Holly and I dated for a short time, and one night while we were dating, the sneaky little dickens got the secret of my horrible first name out of me by promising to reveal her supposedly just-as-horrible middle name. (She may also have been nibbling on my ear like Mata Hari. It was a long time ago.)

Holly's middle name turned out to be "Lynn." (What's known in the advertising industry as a bait-and-switch.)

Okay, on to the other three ways I was screwed at birth. All three of them were my father's fault. Mom 1, Dad 3.

I inherited my father's narrow, slightly receded lower jaw. No big deal, you say? Hah. If I'd had Arnold Schwarzenegger's jaw, two of my biggest embarrassments would not have to have been addressed.

Because I inherited my father's too-narrow jaw, I also inherited his mouthful of crooked teeth. The jaw was too narrow, so the teeth climbed all over each other, just as his had.

This is a common problem with kids, which is why orthodonists drive Jeep Cherokees. And my parents, to give them some credit anyway, had planned to do something about it. When I was 12 they laid the groundwork for having braces put on my teeth. My remaining baby teeth were pulled out, and when my adult teeth came in I was supposed to get braces. But as so often has been the case in my family, there was no follow-up. We moved, and somehow my teeth fell through a crack. My older sister Carla had a pretty serious weight problem, and since she was my mother's favorite, I have always suspected that her girth trumped my mouth. They dragged her off to a doctor to have her obesity treated and forgot all about my teeth.

So I grew up with a mouthful of crooked teeth. I did figure out some ways to have fun with them. Sometimes I'd bite ever-so-lightly into a slice of cheddar cheese and admire the weird pattern they made in its surface. Corn on the cob was also an interesting experience -- somehow the cob never came completely clean because my teeth tore the kernels off unevenly.

Then came adulthood and the Dies Irae: my wisdom teeth started to come in and my narrow jaw didn't have room for the lower ones. After two nights of excruciating pain, I went to the same dental surgeon who had pulled out my baby teeth ten years earlier in preparation for the braces I never got, and he dug out and removed my lower wizzies. (Marine that I am, I insisted on a general anesthetic for this procedure.)

So there you have Items One and Two. My mother stuck with me a first name that made me sound like I had emigrated to the earth from the Planet Zorgon, and my father gave me his lousy teeth. But they weren't finished. (My parents, that is. Not my teeth.)

My father was also bald. In fact I don't think he ever had a full head of hair. I can't find a photo of him in any family album in which his hairline is doing anything but receding. I mean, I have seen pictures of him that were taken when he was in the Coast Guard. This was way back in 1935 -- he was only 21 -- and he's already balding.

Until I was about 20 I had a gorgeous, luxuriant head of hair. I'm not kidding. When I was in high school my hair was so thick that when I washed it I had to wring it out like a towel. Then, just about the time of my 20th birthday in 1975, I was over at my friend Charlie Berigan's house and his father remarked, "Kelley, you're losing your hair."

"I am not."

"The heck you're not." Mr. Berigan had spotted a spot -- you know the spot. It's on top of your head at the back, guys. That's where The Spot begins. And The Spot grows. And grows. And grows. Until you look like Richard Deacon, Mel Cooley on the old Dick Van Dyke Show. You know, the poor billiard-domed schmuck that Morey Amsterdam was always giving a bad time, calling him "Goldilocks" and such.

My father took me out to dinner on my 20th birthday and we talked about this. "I'm gonna be bald because you're bald," I said in an accusing tone.

"No, no, no," he said reassuringly. "You don't have my hair; you have your mother's hair." (This was the night I realized my father could have had a career as a con man.)

Yeah, right. If I had my mother's hair, I left it someplace. You could find me by following the trail of "my mother's hair."

I've learned to live with it. When I was posted at the U.S. embassy in Brasilia during my Foreign Service career, I was issued an I.D. badge to get me past the Marine guards and into the building. Where it said "hair color" I wrote down "bald." The FSNs didn't catch that, and so that's what my I.D. badge said for three years.

Hey, I'm not bitter.

And finally, when my father's parents were assembling him, they placed his chin just a little bit too close to his neck. Jay Leno my father was not. Perhaps to get even with them, he turned around and did the same thing to me. Again, no big deal? Well, for the first 30 years or so of my life it wasn't. But believe me, your genes are a ticking time bomb. They're gonna get you sooner or later. For most of his adult life my father had a wattle under his chin that made him resemble, ever-so-slightly, a pelican. By the time he was in his seventies he could have carried the mail in it. Don't take my word for it, ask his grandchildren. By the time Dad was in his seventies, my nephew Ricky used to enjoy climbing in his grandpa's lap and batting at that wattle, you know, like a kitten with a ball of yarn. Wattle, wattle, wattle. Yech.

Picture a bald pelican with crooked teeth. Now picture his son. You're getting a picture of me.

Now, men of my father's generation were fatalistic. You played in the uniform you were issued, you died and then you went to the crematorium. End of story. Name changes were strictly for criminals dodging the law. Cosmetic surgery was for sissies, and orthodonture was only for kids.

We boomers. We're such fighters.

In 1999 I finally got around to doing what I had to do as far as finding a remedy for my parents' first treachery. I went to the courthouse in Arlington, VA, paid a $38 filing fee and then a $2 notary fee, after which a judge stamped a piece of paper and suddenly my name was "Alexander Kelley Dupuis."

I only use the "Alexander" part for legal documents. To friends and family I've been "Kelley" since I was 15, and that's fine with me. I just wanted to get that horrible moniker off my Social Security card and driver's license once and for all.

I had always wanted to get my teeth fixed, but there was never the money for it. Then, in 2005 my father died. The family house in California was sold and I was sent my share of the proceeds: roughly $100,000. I gave most of it to my wife Valerie. Really, I did. She went through it paying bills and now I'm penniless again, and she keeps telling me to go out and get a job at McDonald's.

But when I got that money I decided there were three things I was going to do with it before handing the lion's share of it to Valerie: (1) Buy Valerie a diamond ring, since I hadn't been able to afford one when we were married. (2) Buy myself a really nice road bike (I'm a cycling buff) and (3) Get my teeth fixed, at last.

At age 50 I went to an orthodontist and dropped $4,000 having braces put on my teeth. Once I got them off, I found that for the first time since I was ten years old, I wasn't self-conscious about smiling. Now just give me something to smile about.

I wrote a poem about all of this, how I had braces put on my teeth at the same age that my father was having most of his pulled out. Poorly educated, my dad assumed that at some point he was going to lose his teeth anyway, so he decided to head nature off at the pass, so to speak, and spent the rest of his life suffering with an upper plate. Smart, Dad.

But about this time, I could see my father's genes preparing to launch another attack. That's right...the turkey wattle. When I was young I was able to control it with diet and exercise. It was merely a tendency toward a "double chin" that I had to fight like you'd fight any other kind of fat. But eventually Dat ol' Debbil DNA started to get the upper hand: no amount of jogging or cottage cheese was going to keep my father's turkey wattle off my chin.

Bravely, I leapt into the breach again. Just this month I hied myself off to Lifestyle Lift in Reston VA and paid them $2,700 to Cut Away. A young punk of a doctor who looked like he spent more time playing racquetball than working got under my chin with a scalpel, a syringe, sutures and an assistant. Within 30 minutes they had cut an incision, gone in there, liposuctioned off some fat, snipped away some skin and then sewed me up. It didn't hurt much, really, and the small amount of pain involved was a small price to pay for not looking like my dad.

For now, anyway. In five years I might be back there for a "tune up."

Now, I told my wife, the next step is to saddle up and head off to the Hair Club for Men and get fitted with one of those super-convincing toupees that fool everybody. I figure with straight, white teeth, no turkey wattle and a full head of hair I'll be able to pass for 35 again. That's a boomer's definition of Nirvana. Or Shangri-La, anyway.

Ha! You thought I was serious, didn't you? No, there's a place where even I will draw the line, and wearing a rug is it. After all, lots of cool guys were bald. Yul Brynner was very cool. So were Henry Miller, Sergei Prokofiev, Julius Caesar and Richard Deacon.

Well, four out of five ain't bad.

The Soundtrack Of My Life

2009-02-07T18:02:00.027-05:00

If life were one long movie and I were the star, this would be the music of my life.

You come up with a similar list for yours, and share.

Opening Credits: The Language of Love -- Dan Fogelberg

Waking Up Scene: Dawn on the Moscow River -- Mussorgsky

Car Driving Scene: Green Onions -- Booker T. & the MGs.

High School Flashback Scene: Dies Irae from the Requiem -- Verdi (I didn't have a particularly good time in high school.)

High School Love/Crush Scene: Slow movement of the Emperor Concerto -- Beethoven.

Nostalgic Scene: September Song -- Kurt Weill

Bitter, Angry Scene: Hit Me With Your Best Shot -- Pat Benatar

Break-up Scene: Answer Me, My Love -- Nat King Cole

Regret Scene: The Shadow of Your Smile -- Tony Bennett

Nightclub/Bar Scene: Let's Cool One--Thelonius Monk, segue'ing into Jeru -- Miles Davis

Fight/Action Scene: Street Fighting Man -- The Rolling Stones

Lawn Mowing Scene: Opening of The Plow That Broke The Plains -- Virgil Thomson

Sad, breakdown scene: Sunflower -- Mason Williams. (Now there's an obscurity!)

Death Scene: Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin -- Wagner

Funeral Scene: The Lone Pilgrim, as sung by Bob Dylan

Mellow/Pot-smoking/Drunk scene: Sleepwalk -- Santo and Johnny

Dreaming About Someone Scene: If You Are But A Dream -- Frank Sinatra (and she knows who she is.)

Seeing your significant other Scene: As Time Goes By from Casablanca.

Sex Scene: Chicago Transit Authority's cover of Steve Winwood's I'm A Man. (The lyric isn't much, but I always thought that the savage, pounding beat of this track, underscored by the bass and the drums, would the perfect accompaniment for a vigorous sex scene, you know, the kind with sweat flying every which way.)

Contemplation Scene: Adagio for Strings -- Samuel Barber

Chase Scene: Last movement of Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5

Happy Love Scene: You Make Me Feel So Young - Frank Sinatra

Happy Friend Scene: Stompin' at the Savoy-- Glenn Miller

Closing Credits: Slow movement of Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor. (Yes, I know this runs over the closing credits of Amadeus; that's where I got the idea! Hey, if it's good enough for Milos Forman...)

Did I get a good review, or what?

2009-02-06T10:06:00.008-05:00

Steven J. Svoboda, a book reviewer in California, recently wrote the following review of Three Flies Up, my most recent book, published last spring:

Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball, and Me. By Kelley Dupuis. Denver: Outskirts Press, 2008. 382 pp. www.outskirtspress.com. $15.95.

Kelley Dupuis has hit a grand slam home run with Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball, and Me. It just goes to show that if you are a good enough writer, you can get away with virtually anything. In this case, Dupuis has given us a nearly 400-page autobiography about his life and his relationship with his father that is pretty near impossible to put down once you start reading it. The fact that the author is not a famous athlete, musician, or scientist does not impede one’s appreciation of his story.

Dupuis proves himself a superlative writer, effortlessly turning the seemingly less than extraordinary events in his own life into a magical adventure filled with piquant moments. His father clearly loves him and just as clearly has some man-sized dysfunction that throws up a huge wall to the deeper father-son connection that would have benefitted both of them. No doubt the great majority of us guys (including myself) who hail from the author’s generation share this with him. So it is an easy book to relate to, made even easier by Dupuis' absolutely captivating combination of perceptiveness, honesty, and lack of pretension.

As a lifelong baseball fan, I greatly enjoyed the writer’s detailed relation of events on the diamond and how they informed his connection with his father. At times father and son do manage to connect and express the love they have for each other, sometimes directly, and other times through their shared love of the game.

Along the way, we learn about the author’s jobs in radio, old-time newspaper journalism, and for many years, with the State Department. I would never have imagined that the ins and outs of this work could be so interesting, but in Dupuis’ hands, it is little short of enthralling.

His marriage falls apart, though for decades he remains technically married to his ex. A long affair with a Russian woman he meets while working in Moscow for the State Department is described in lyrical detail. Only a few years before the present day, he tracks down and quickly marries the ex-wife of an old friend.

As Dupuis portrays him, his father was a deeply flawed man, hurling prejudice at many groups in a futile attempt to conceal his own inadequacies and gather attention for himself. Even at Dupuis’ mother’s funeral, his father feels the need to try to be the center of attention. One sobering moment comes when Dad shatters twelve-year-old Kelley’s Christmas bliss by snarling about how he hates the holiday. And yet, in the end, one has compassion for his father and compassion for the author himself. Truth presented this clearly and with this much heart cannot help but speak to all of us.

Death comes to all of us eventually, of course, and in Dupuis’ story, in the last pages of his book, three departures come in quick succession: the demise of the author’s mother, his alcoholic sister (and closest friend) Lynn, and finally, his father.

If you want to read an unusual, fascinating book, possibly learn more about your own relationships, and enter into the world of a man who couldn’t write a bad sentence if he tried, then be sure to pick up Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball, and Me.

NOTE BY KELLEY: I swear to God, I did not write this review myself.

I'm gaining on Jackie Robinson!

2009-01-31T10:21:00.019-05:00

I didn't know that Linda Lovelace was dead.

For those of you old enough to remember, Linda Lovelace was the star of Deep Throat, unquestionably the most talked-about porn film of the 1970s.

And guess what? She lived exactly 10 days less than I have. How ABOUT that?

Welcome to one of my addictions. It's a web site called Dead-or-Alive-Info.org. This web site can tell you whether almost any famous or once-famous person is alive or dead, and if they're dead, it will tell you when they died and sometimes, how.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It sounds ghoulish, doesn't it? You're thinking I'm some grown-up incarnation of the character Bud Cort played in the film Harold and Maude. Remember that one? Until he meets Ruth Gordon, he's a kid so relentlessly morbid that his hobby is attending funerals.

I encourage you to visit Dead-or-Alive-Info.org. But unless you have a thick skin, don't question the accuracy of anything you read there in anything so froward as an e-mail. The webmeister is a guy named Kent. I have had some dealings with him. "Prickly" would be a charitable way to describe Kent. He usually responds to corrections with snarky replies. He LOVES being right, and if you turn out to be wrong, he'll tell you so in very nasty tones.

That said, I occupy a distinguished position vis-a-vis this web site. Kent has a standing offer for all of his cyber-visitors: if you can catch one famous dead person before Kent does, you'll win a $10 reward.

As far as I know, I'm the only one in the history of this website who has actually won the ten bucks. One day I came across the obituary of Mercedes McCambridge, the great actress, then checked the site and Kent had her listed as alive. I informed him of this, and he sent me the $10.

But this is how prickly the guy can be. In a subsequent e-mail I made reference to having won the prize. He quickly came back with "You didn't win it, you earned it." How prickly can you get?

Kent's website doesn't just list dates of births and deaths. It has other swoopy lists like "People Alive Over 85," "People Who Lived to 100" and "Put 'Em In Order Quizzes." (Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Tsar Alexander I, and so on.)

Not too very long ago Kent added a wrinkle that I find barrels of fun: "Who Have You Outlived?"

Now, this is cool. You poke in your own date of birth, and then the website tells you how many days you've been alive. Then, listed above and below you are the names of famous people who, respectively, lived fewer days than you have, and lived more days than you have. These are the people you have to catch up with.

Another cool twist. You can set "Who Have You Outlived" for high, medium or low, which gets you paired up with "A" List Celebrities, "B" List Celebrities and finally, people like Sonny Tufts and Julius LaRosa, whom nobody remembers anymore.

This morning, for example, learned that I, at age 53, have lived 19,470 days, and I have outlived the following people on the "A" List:

Grace Kelly (171 days)
Judy Garland (2,291 days)
John F. Kennedy (2,492 days)
and...
Elvis Presley (3,909 days)

Now it gets really cool. If I live another 155 days I will have lived as long as Jackie Robinson did. If I make it another 1,369 days I catch up with Humphrey Bogart. And after that I'm breathing down the necks of Richard Burton, Clark Gable and Truman Capote, the last of whom I don't think I'd particularly want to be caught breathing down his neck.

On the B List I have outlived:

Gene Siskel (87 days)
Maurice Gibb (of the Bee Gees) 91 days
Jerry Garcia (104 days)
Lou Costello (115 days)

Those on the B List I still have to catch up with include:

Cleavon Little (32 days)
Jim Henson (122 days)
Vivian Leigh (132 days)
Warren Oates (160 days)
and...
John Denver (174 days)

John Denver (whose real name, by the way, was Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr.) occupies an honored position in my pantheon of famous dead people: he died on my birthday. Denver crashed his plane into the Pacific Ocean on October 12, 1997, the day I turned 42.

Now, on to the nobodies...This will test your knowledge of famous people you never heard of.

I have outlived:

Cornelius Gunter (8 days) (He was a member of the Coasters, and he was murdered.)

The aforementioned Linda Lovelace (10 days -- seems I didn't "choke." Sorry.)

Mohammed Amin (Kenyan journalist, also murdered insofar as he was aboard a jetliner that was deliberately crashed into the ocean) (25 days)

Mary Ford (1950s singer and wife of guitar virtuoso Les Paul) (27 days)

On the C List, there are a cluster of names I'll be catching up with very quickly:

Terence McKenna (drug guru) and Spike Jones (bandleader) (27 days)
Jack Wild (remember him on H.R. Pufnstuf?) (40 days)
Jim "Catfish" Hunter (42 days)
Vic Morrow (47 days)

Baseball fan that I am, you'll have to forgive me for being thrilled. This is as close as I'm ever going to come to matching records set by the likes of Jackie Robinson and Catfish Hunter.

Hey, I take my achievements where I can get them. Is it my fault I'm healthy?

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to dig up (get it? "dig up?") the Washington Post obituary page and see if I can cadge another 10 bucks out of Kent.

Party Time on Garbage Mountain

2009-01-11T07:57:00.007-05:00

I just had a terrific idea for a novel.

If I can find Thomas Pynchon (I'll probably need the assistance of the FBI--he hasn't so much as had his picture taken in 40 years) I'm going to suggest it to him.

If you're familiar at all with the works of Pynchon, you know that he was to paranoia what Lawrence Welk was to champagne bubbles. Conspiracies of every conceivable kind abound in the works of Pynchon, including, in one of his early novels, a shadow post office. I kid you not.

Well, if Pynchon is fascinated by conspiracies, I've got a hell of a notion for him.

Supposing the spammers are organized.

Scary, huh?

Picture it: right now, at this very moment, a couple of thousand of the sleaziest creeps this planet ever puked up might be meeting in some off-the-beaten path little town like Bullhead City, Arizona where they won't be noticed by anyone, all of them keeping a low profile by staying in scattered motels along Interstate 8, getting together in little pockets of eight and ten at a time to share trade secrets and arcane software that they developed themselves: "FilterBuster," "Back Door Man," "Under The Radar," "MegaWorm." At night they have a secret conclave in the back room at Denny's, where some malignant Poindexter wearing Nikes, Dockers and an Arnold Schwarzenegger T-shirt, speaking in a low voice and using a PowerPoint program on his laptop (with the door closed) explains the logarithm system by which he has just figured out 3,560,956,743,289 new ways to spell "Viagra" and "luxury watch."

Did I say I was going to tell Thomas Pynchon? Oliver Stone would love this.

I'm drawn to these musings because I got up this morning and, after my second mug of Folgers (I've had to give up Eight O'Clock whole bean due to budget constraints) I went to check my e-mail.

Now, I always expect to see spam in my inbox, and just as methodically, I go in each morning and mark each spam message, whether it's some slimebag offering me the Dick of Death that will Keep Her Moaning All Night, or a great new opportunity with an up-and-coming company that's so legitimate they're farming Craigslist for e-mail addresses to call in the suckers, or a chance to buy a $5,000 Rolex for $39.95, "ADD TO BLOCKED SENDERS LIST."

Generally it's a question of one, two, maybe three pieces of such garbage at the most. But this morning when I opened Microsoft Outlook, I had nine new messages, and every one of them was spam. I went in like I always do and started clicking away, siphoning all of these chances for great sex and great bargains right off into the cyber-sewer where they belong.

But lo and behold, more kept coming, even as I sat here. I went to refill my coffee cup, came back and there were three more.

In other words, I'm getting the impression that spam somehow runs a cycle, like a woman's menstrual periods. But unlike a woman's menstrual periods, this cycle has nothing whatever to do with natural causes or biological evolution.

This has to be PLANNED somehow, somewhere, by someone. I mean, all the spammers in the world wouldn't suddenly become active, like fleas on a summer afternoon, unless they were somehow (shudder!) organized.

You know, I think this scares me almost as much as the idea of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.

Once, in Berlin, I stood before the now-defunct Berlin Wall and saw where someone had spray-painted on its western side "Tyrone Slothrop, where are you?"

Tyrone Slothrop was one figure in Thomas Pynchon's epic novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973.) He's the object of a massive, supersecret conspiracy involving Germany's V-2 rockets, the ones that rained down on London during World War II.

I'm thinking about poor old Slothrop this morning. Where is he? And is there a coven of techno-maniacs hiding somewhere inside a mountain cave somewhere in Maryland, plotting the creation of some modern-day Schwarzgeraet like the one in Pynchon's novel, this one with the purpose of jamming every inbox on earth, at the command of the Grand Spammer, (who lives in a town in Norway so small that it's not even on the map) with so many advertisements for sexual potency and bogus real estate mortgages that, at a stroke, all the world's governments will be more paralyzed than usual and some latter-day Blofeld out of Ian Fleming, only wearing thick glasses and sporting a bad haircut, will be Master of the Earth?

Sean Connery, where are you?

Here they come again

2009-01-05T08:05:00.011-05:00

I've been re-reading Erasmus' The Praise of Folly. Published in 1511, it's one of the most famous satires ever written, and still gets read a lot, usually in university survey courses dedicated to the culture of the Renaissance. But it's funny, real bite-ass funny, and one of the reasons it's still read today is because it's still relevant. Boy, is it relevant. Old Erasmus was 400 years ahead of his time.

Folly herself speaks, in the guise of one of the gods of antiquity, or perhaps as the muse of the truly stoopid. Erasmus spares no one: kings, princes, popes, philosophers, the mighty, the low; Folly speaks of them all, and praises them for how unfailingly they follow her counsel. To hear Folly speak, the entire human race is hellbent on doing whatever and precisely does not make sense.

If Voltaire and the other architects of the 18th century Enlightenment knew this book, and it's probably safe to assume they did, one wonders where they got the idea that man is a reasoning, rational animal. Erasmus was telling it like it is 200 years before any of them came along, and it ain't pretty.

How seemly to be reading this classic screed on the subject of the relentless lack of good sense shown by the entire human race since time immemorial, when we're about to have a change of administration here in Washington.

Now, don't hit the panic button, anybody. I'm not going to discuss politics. Well, maybe sort of, in the sense that it's hard to bring up the subject of taxation without mentioning politics, since politicians are, after all, the source of all our taxations, right?

Sometimes I think that Washington is the only city in the world in which the word "DUH" has no meaning whatsoever.

A couple of days ago I posted a list of things I would like to see disappear forever in the coming year. Included on the list was "do-gooders." I cannot stand do-gooders. Charity is one thing, but the relentless refusal to mind your own business is something else entirely.

Unfortunately, the relentless refusal to mind your own business is the chief prerequisite, or so it seems to me, for a career in politics.

I smoke cigars. And I regularly receive cigar catalogues in the mail, since I buy most of my cigars online. And just last week I received such a catalogue from a cigar dealer who was advertising an "S-CHIP sale."

What, I hear you cry, is an "S-CHIP?" I didn't know myself, so I read the introductory blurb about the inevitable arrival of this S-CHIP, whether it's a man or a horse.

Well, surprise! It's a proposed government program. Grab your wallets.

S-CHIP appears to be the latest attempt by those relentlessly determined moralizers in our government to Punish Sin by forcing it to Subsidize Virtue.

S-CHIP stands for "state children's health insurance program." The idea is to create a health insurance plan for children. Now, nobody could be against a health insurance plan for children. The part of that acronym that gives me the willies is that "S." "State." Any time the State gets mixed up in anything, something is going to be done Stoopid.

The rub here is that S-CHIP is going to be funded entirely by tobacco taxes. Now, all of you anti-smoking bores out there are jumping up and down yelling "hallelujah" at the reading of these words I'm sure, because there is nothing a zealot loves more than hearing that the thing he hates is going to be punished in the kingdom.

Yes, they're at it again. The do-gooders are out to stamp out smoking by making it pay for health care, in this case for children. S-CHIP would amount to yet another tax on tobacco products, this one 53 percent. As it is, nearly all of that $5.00 a pack you pay for Marlboros is taxes, but no, they want more. That health badness just has to be punished, punished, punished!

This tax was actually passed twice last year, but was vetoed twice by that ogre Bush, who is obviously in the pocket of Big Tobacco, right?

Well, in giving this bill the veto, Bush reasoned that it doesn't make sense to fund a program that's going to grow over the years by slapping a tax on a product whose sales are declining.

But the Democrats take over Washington this month, and arguments like that one are lost on them. Sin taxes have an irresistible allure on the left side of the aisle, like the odor of Chanel No. 5.

Here's where "DUH" comes in. Regardless of what you thought of Bush, he, like my father, couldn't always be wrong about everything. My father was wrong about practically everything, but every now and then, once every leap year or so, he got something right. By the way, my father was a smoker, and every time the price of cigarettes went up he would merely shrug. "If I'm dumb enough to smoke these things, let them raise the price to $20 a pack if they want," he said.

You can't be more candid than that.

Now regardless of what you think about anything else the Bush administration did, it's hard to deny the validity of Bush's logic in this particular veto.

Ah-HAH! I hear you zealots yelling. "DUPUIS IS IN THE POCKET OF BIG TOBACCO!!"

Would that it were true. I could use the money.

But would you please please please please (to paraphrase a character in Hemingway) THINK about this for a moment?

Funding a health insurance program for children by slapping a tax on a product whose use we are trying to stamp out.

I'll go get a cup of coffee while you all think about that for a minute.

Okay, I'm back.

Now, if the truly lunatic logic of that proposal hasn't sunk in yet, let me offer a couple of hypothetical parallels. Let's set aside for a moment the fact that the states have already figured out ways to funnel tobacco-tax money intended for anti-smoking programs into such things as road-building projects, creating what Dave Barry himself called the perfectly idiotic situation wherein if we want more and better roads, we have to smoke more cigarettes.

Let's just set that aside for a minute.

Imagine we're back in the beginning of the last century. It's 1900. Horseless carriages are beginning to huff and chuff along the nation's roadways, pushing aside the horses and buggies that have had those roadways to themselves since the beginning of the republic and before.

Now, I'm a progressive congressman of 1900, and I see this as progress. So I decide I want to help this process along, encourage more people to put Old Bessie out to pasture and buy a Winton Flyer or a Stanley Steamer or whatever.

And I come up with this great idea: to encourage more paved road-building and encourage more people to swap their horses-and-buggies for automobiles, what we should do is slap a tax on the blacksmith industry! Blacksmiths are holding up progress by providing a service dedicated to All Things Horse, right? So we get the blacksmiths to pay for the new roads! Brilliant!

To Wile E. Coyote, maybe. Do you see the problem here? As the horses disappeared, so did the blacksmiths. Blacksmithing as a trade is obsolete now except on your occasional horse ranch here and there. So...where would my pool of money to pay for roads go when the blacksmiths vanished?

DUH.

Now don't get me wrong. I do understand why people get emotional about this issue, causing logic to fly out the window. I had real difficulty, for example, explaining my position on this to my friend Holly Inder. Her 14 year-old son Mason suffers from asthma, and she recently caught him with a pack of cigarettes, causing her to bristle and fume, as any parent would. Because her emotions were involved, she had trouble wrapping her head around my idea that funding children's health insurance programs by punishing people for using tobacco just doesn't make any reasonable sense. You persuade the goose to lay the golden egg, then you start chasing it around the barnyard with an axe, trying to kill it? Holly?

Or if that cliche doesn't do it for you, you know the old cartoon gag where the guy climbs up into a tree and then starts sawing away at the branch he's sitting on...BEHIND him?

I am all for providing health care for children, but funding it by taxing a product you're trying to get people to quit using is...well, I'd like to hear what Erasmus would say about it. Why not a tax on something whose use is increasing, like say, Sony Playstation? (Or are we already taxing that for programs to fight childhood obesity?)

Isn't this sort of thing that the state lotteries were supposed to be for? Folly would be a happy camper if she showed up today and saw how many billions of dollars are being ponied up by idiots to play a game in which their chances of winning riches are one in 150 million. How about funding these children's health insurance programs with another lottery? I promise you, you'd have no shortage of players. Or maybe a tax on gambling in general? A special casino tax?

Ah, but there the moral message is being lost, right? The idea here is not so much to provide a needed service, but to punish the sin that made that service more urgently needed, right? Why punish the gambling industry? Gambling doesn't give kids asthma. The most important thing here is to make sure we're punishing the right people.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, it must be equally true that the road to Washington is paved with the queasiest theology since a bunch of anabaptists somewhere back around the time of Erasmus decided to take Christ's exhortation that they "become as little children" literally, and began sitting around in a circle, babbling baby-talk at each other.

Don't believe me. Go look it up.

Some of those people could have found great jobs in Washington.

The List

2009-01-02T08:54:00.007-05:00

It is January 2, 2009. Those who follow my blog regularly (both of you) know that for four years now I have been kicking off the new year with my annual list of things I hope will go away this year, but probably won't.

We're doing something a little bit different this year. Jennifer Aniston and Britney Spears are being left off the list. And no, it isn't because Britney has a "new look," nor is it because Jennifer appeared nude on the cover of the last issue of GQ and we were told that she is now "hotter." (I never thought she was "hot" to begin with.) It's because every year I wish they would go away and every year they don't. I give up. I think I'll just start wearing dark sunglasses when I go to the grocery store in the hope of somehow avoiding both of their vapid, stupid mugs on every other magazine I walk past.

Okay, here's my list of things I hope not to see anymore next New Year's Day:

1. Superannuated election campaign bumper stickers. Do you know there are still some yo-yos driving around with Kerry/Edwards stickers on their cars? What are you people, bitter? Obama gets inaugurated Jan. 20th. Get over 2004, already.

2. Stupid white guys wearing baseball caps backward because they think it makes them look like rappers.

3. Stupid white guys wearing baggy pants that practically show butt-crack because they think it makes them look like rappers.

4. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and that whole asinine "New Atheist" fad. I always suspected that the "New Atheist" fad had something to do with George W. Bush anyway, and he's packing up to move back to Texas, so it's time for the next pseudo-intellectual fashion trend.

5. Speaking of fashion trends, can we get rid of those shoes for women that make them look like medieval court jesters? You know the ones I'm talking about, those shoes so long and pointed that they look like the best accessory to go with them might be a cap and bells.

6. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, or whatever the hell it is the "food police" are calling themselves this year. I'm talking about that prune-faced bunch of busybodies that comes out every couple of years wagging its fingers at us about something we're not supposed to eat. I'm not especially inclined to eat movie popcorn, seeing as how I haven't been inside a movie theater to see a feature film since 2006, but if I want to eat movie popcorn, dammit, I'll eat movie popcorn. Get out of my face, you freaking do-gooders.

7. Do-gooders in general, and PETA in particular, that organization of whack-balls who think Bambi and Thumper are not only real, but should be provided with lawyers so they can sue Disney for larger dressing rooms.

8. I don't know why this annoys me so much, but I'd like a stop put to people walking around in near-or-subfreezing weather wearing rubber flip-flops on bare feet. Rubber flip-flops are for the beach in July, not downtown Chicago on Christmas. What are you people, stupid?

9. Speaking of doing things at the wrong time, how about let's crack down on those die-hard NFL kooks who drive around with banners for their favorite football team flapping every which way all over their cars...in the middle of baseball season?

10. And speaking of baseball, allow me a personal foible here. I wish the San Diego Padres would get rid of Kevin Towers. As long as that cheapskate keeps yelling "poorhouse" and going on a salary-dumping binge every year, we Padres fans are never going to see the postseason again.

11. Never mind about people driving while blabbering into hand-held cellphones; I've squawked about that enough, including letters to newspapers and legislators. If the cops aren't going to do anything about it, nobody will. But how about people who walk mindlessly down the street, just rag-chewing away, completely oblivious to the world around them, just because they CAN? More than once I've been tempted to run over one of these cud-chewing morons on the premise that he or she probably wouldn't notice I'd done it.

12. Washington, D.C. residents who go around sporting "Barack Obama" T-shirts and hats. Folks, this is not a concert tour!

13. Television advertisements for fitness equipment featuring people who don't need it.

14. Since I brought up advertising, why is it that the only kind of beer you ever see advertised on TV is LIGHT beer? I happen to regard light beer as a crime against nature. Can we at least advertise REAL beer? What is this, some kind of sop to the nation's collective guilt about calories?

15. Body-piercing. Come on, enough is enough.

16. Ted Kennedy and his girdle.

17. Obnoxious buttheads who think it's funny to gun their engines and race past bicycle-riders within inches, at 90 mph.

18. That goes double for truck drivers who do that.

19. California Congressman Bob Filner, who has the grin of a jackass and all the charm of a dock strike.

20. I wish spammers would run out of ways to spell "Viagra."

21. Now that we're finally going to have a black president, can we get rid of Al Sharpton?

22. Computer games for kids that center around mass murder. What is it with us, anyway? We get hysterical if Junior glimpses a woman's nipple on cable TV, but we have no problem with him playing XBox games all day long with names like Grand Theft Gang Rape Part IV and Genocide Raiders of The Planet Splat.

23. Grossly-obese guys with shaved heads. Since when was Jabba the Hutt a fashion plate?

24. People sitting in restaurants texting while they eat. "Enabling" is something else that's gone too far.

25. And the best for last, because it actually looks like this one is going to happen.......O.J. SIMPSON.

Happy New Year.

Non, je ne regrette rien? Well...

2008-12-29T07:09:00.035-05:00

If this doesn't attract at least some male interest, then I'm a worse marketer than I thought.

Is it just me, or do they not make Playboy playmates-of-the-month the way they used to?

Pictured above is Paige Young, Miss November, 1968. She died in 1974 of an overdose of sleeping pills. But boy, in November 1968, when I had just turned 13, was she hot! The kind of airbrushed fantasy that we junior high school boys of that era would ogle together, huddling in the bushes of the canyon across the street from our school with a copy of Playboy that one of us had swiped from his Uncle Sid's den. (Ever notice how in those days, uncles with easily-pilfered collections of Playboy were generally named "Sid?")

Had sweet Paige not died in such an untimely manner when I was in college, bless her heart, she'd be about 61 now. (And probably the hottest 61-year-old you ever saw.)

That is correct. The dream girls of my youth are now either grandmothers or dead.

After sadly learning the fate of poor, doomed Paige, I looked up one of her colleagues from my boyhood, Barbara Hillary. Barbara was Playboy's Miss April for 1970. She adorned my bedroom wall when I was in the ninth grade, until my father made me take her down.

She's 59 now, and was last seen doing charitable work in the Philippines with cataract victims.

In those heady days when I was fighting acne and cruising the underground world of late-night sex-via-masturbation with the likes of Paige and Barbara, girls who posed for Playboy were usually aspiring actresses willing to rip their clothes off for some publicity.

I don't know what devils drove pretty Paige to her ignominous date with barbituates, but Barbara apparently had no showbiz ambitions. (She was from Alaska, by the way, if that has any relevance nowadays.)

For whatever reasons, Barbara Hillary, 1970's Miss April, shucked her clothes, had her 15 minutes of fame, adorned God-knows how many ninth-graders' bedroom walls, and went her merry way.

Good for Barbara. Sorry for Paige, and for Dorothy Stratten and Anna Nicole Smith and all the others who either self-destructed or had help. Being a Playboy playmate, like any other form of fame, is obviously a two-edged sword that has to be handled carefully. Some do it well, some don't. If you live long enough, you get to be old. If you don't, you get to be a good-looking corpse. Ave, atque vale.

If this isn't sufficient to put a guy in an autumnal frame of mind...

Actually, I'm not in an autumnal frame of mind. That might come as a surprise, seeing as how this is the time of year when a lot of people are in the mood for it. Christmas is over; it's the dead of winter (61 Fahrenheit in Washington, D.C. yesterday) and the Super Bowl is a month away. It's that suicide time of year. People with Seasonal Affective Disorder are missing the sun and clubbing themselves with Jim Beam.

Of course, that's only around here. I have friends in South Africa, where it is at this moment high summer. But I'm sure they have their own things to be depressed about.

But me? I'm fine. I turned 53 in October, but that's okay. On the whole I'm healthier than I was at 26. I'm taking two antidepressants; I'm reasonably focused and have sufficient energy if not a surfeit of it. I published a book last spring and I'm working on another one. My wife Valerie gave me a really fabulous Christmas present: she's converting the basement of our house into a library for me, complete with bookshelves, flat-screen TV, rack stereo, furniture, the whole nine yards.

Two of my own paintings hang on the wall down there -- I took up oil painting last summer.

All in all, not a picture of a guy getting ready to shoot himself. Still, something in me wishes I could go and track down Barbara Hillary and maybe Christine Coren (Miss March, 1970). Hopefully they're both alive. I'd like to invite both of them to Washington and take them both to lunch at once. Picture it: these two (hopefully well-preserved) grandmothers and me, noshing on shrimp cocktail at the Old Ebbit Grill three blocks from the White House, having a colloquy on coping with Scoundrel Time. And drinking a memorial toast to beautiful, doomed Paige Young.

This time of year (in the northern hermisphere, anyway) is traditionally given over to evaluation and reassessment, which is why so many of us end up making those lists of New Years' resolutions which we keep until, oh, January 3rd. I'm not going to bother with that this year; the truth is I usually don't. I know myself well enough to know that there's no amount of self-tut-tutting that's going to get me to change my ways unless a real alarm bell goes off -- like finding out last year that my weight was up to 214. THAT got me on a diet, let me tell you.

I was down to 187 last September, back up to 191 two months later. But I'm determined never to see 200 again, let alone 214. Who knows? Maybe with the new year I'll actually be able to get my ass back to the gym that hasn't seen me since the November election.

Resolutions, no. But reassessment and evaluation, yes. And because, to paraphrase the late Robert Graves, the god of the new year just slew the god of the old and the ghosts of ancient Roman Saturnalia can be imagined romping among the ruins of the Colisseum, it's time to slap Edith Piaf on the old CD player and see what "Non, je ne regrette riens" inspires me to think.

I'll tell you what. It inspired me to think that the song reflects so much bravado. Is there really anyone among us who has nothing they regret?

Speaking for myself alone, I have quite a laundry list of things I regret. And I can think of no better time of year to annoy everybody I know with it. The usual offer applies, all you folks out there in blog-land. You are more than welcome to make up your own list of things that the Catholic liturgy calls "What I have done and what I have failed to do" ... and share.

Here are some of mine:

1. I regret never having gotten a graduate degree. I've been fussing for more than 30 years about this one. (In fairness to me, I did apply to a couple of MFA programs last year and the year before, at Eastern Washington University and the University of Maryland. Both turned me down. May the Terps never win another division title.)*

2. While we're discussing education, I wish I had tried harder, both in high school and college, to get good grades. But I was always more grasshopper than ant, and paid the price for it.

3. And while we're discussing discipline, I regret that I never had enough of it to learn a foreign language, (although I did study Portuguese when I lived in Brazil, and Russian when in Moscow) or play a musical instrument.

4. When I was in high school I had a weekend job pumping gas. Teenagers did that in those days. One Saturday afternoon I said something really stupid to an old lady and offended the daylights out of her. I still get hot flashes thinking about it, even though she's probably been dead for 30 years.

5. At some point when I was growing up, I should have stood up to my father and invited him to go ahead and slug me like he was always threatening to do, then called the cops and had his ass thrown in the jug for assault and battery. I doubt if he ever would have laid a finger on me again.

6. I regret my first marriage. Chris and I got married for the wrong reasons, and in the face of any number of warning bells that only trouble lay ahead. Dumb.

7. And while we're on the subject of marriage, I regret not having married Anna Predeina, the sweetest, prettiest and most adorable girl in all of Russia, when I had the chance to. I let her get away.

8. I regret having wasted 14 years of my life in the U.S. Department of State. They had me stuck in a stupid, menial job and despite my best efforts to move on to something better within the Department, seemed determined to keep me there. I should have smelled the coffee after two or three years and moved on.

9. Related to that, I regret not having persevered in radio news. I gave radio two years and then chucked it and went off to join the government. Radio was a heck of a lot of fun, if the pay was a disgrace. I have pretty good pipes and I'm a reasonably-competent journalist. I know I could have ended up with ABC or CNN radio if I'd stuck with it.

10. I wish I had gone out for baseball in high school. I love baseball, but once I had reached the upper age limit for Little League, I never played again. I steered clear of sports in high school in order to vex my father, with whom I did not get along. And I probably wouldn't have been much of a ballplayer, but maybe junior varsity. Who knows?

11. I wish I hadn't taken it so hard when Jamie Hartshorn dumped me to marry Michael Damer in 1985. That was what drove me into the foreign service, so that gives me two things to regret. Looking back, getting shed of her was the second best thing that ever happened to me. (The first best was being forced to quit the State Department in 1999.)

12. I regret not having stood up to a stupid, skinny, poorly-educated government jerk-off named Richard Allen in 1989 when he got in my face at the U.S. embassy in Brasilia. Instead of backing down, I should have invited him to swing and then promptly had his sorry ass fired. (See #5, above.)

13. I regret that, as a result of a breach with my father in 1996, when my mother died in 2000 I hadn't seen her in more than four years.

14. I sometimes regret the two subjects that were my college majors: journalism and history. They're fine subjects, but sometimes I feel that I "copped out" in not pursuing a literary major and then going on to teach. On the other hand, when I see what peckerheads some professors I know turned out to be (and he knows who he is), I'm glad I steered clear of academia.

15. I regret that it took me until age 52 to really plunge into painting. I had dabbled in watercolors a few times over the years, but I never knew how much fun painting could be until I decided that it didn't matter whether I could draw or not (I can't) and took up the oils.

16. I regret that the Weekliner newspaper, published in Arlington, VA, crashed and burned after only three issues. I was managing editor, and until I got into a barroom brawl with the stupid hillbilly who was bankrolling the project, I was having the time of my life. But the issue over which we fought was the paper's last issue anyway.

17. I often regret never having had children. But just as often don't.

18. I regret never having served an internship in journalism when I was an undergraduate at San Diego State. That postponed my first newspaper job by at least two years.

19. I regret having been churlish enough, at age eight, to return the candy cane my fourth-grade teacher gave me at our class Christmas party rather than acquiesce to my mother's demand that I go and thank her for it. None of the other kids were saying thank-you; why should I be the only one, was my thought? My mother was so upset she started to cry, and I felt so guilty I went back later intending to say thank-you to Miss Seabrook, but she had gone home.

20. I regret having spent so much time regretting things.

Bring on 2009. I have a book to finish.

*In anything. Not even squash, synchronized swimming or hot dog-eating. Man, I'm bitter.

Will Success Spoil Joe Strazcynski?

2008-12-22T08:57:00.035-05:00

Ecce Homo: ambitious 18 year-old (above) and middle-aged blowhard. (right.)

The 1972 Chula Vista High School "Smile committee:" BACK: Diane Vranes, Joe Straczynski, Mel Hallam, Kelley Dupuis. FRONT: Karen Martin, Mary Falk.

Herman Wouk's now-forgotten 1962 novel Youngblood Hawke begins with the words, "Did you ever know a famous man before he became famous?"

Well, yes I did. But I part paths with Wouk's next assertion, which is "chances are he seemed like anyone else to you."

No, the guy I'm thinking about never "seemed like anyone else" to me.

Once upon a time there was a very ambitious boy. At a very young age he had already decided upon his calling: he wanted to be a writer.

So far I could be talking about myself. But this story gets far more interesting than anything I could tell you about me.

The boy in question refined his ambition early and stayed true to it. He would wander in numerous directions while in pursuit of his ultimate goal, but he never lost sight of it.

He wanted to be a great science-fiction writer. Besotted with tales of the bizarre and the otherworldly, he dreamed not just of becoming the next Gene Roddenberry, the legendary creator of Star Trek, but of outdoing him. Writers like Rod Serling, H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury were his models.

Yes, to J. Michael Straczynski, as he likes to call himself, (friends and enemies alike call him "Joe," and when he was young he used the nom-de-plume "Jay Stark" for a while, presumably to cover his tracks while publishing cheap pulp fiction in trashy sci-fi magazines--it was all part of the grand plan) writing science-fiction stories was only the first rung on the starlit stairway. Even when he was barely out of high school, his eyes were already on the ultimate prize: Television.

When I was young we used to talk about the importance of "rising above our environment," which to my little circle of friends meant getting our butts out of Chula Vista, California and moving on to bigger and better things. Joe was born in New Jersey but spent most of his formative years in southern California. It goes without saying that he was set upon rising above his particular environment. He did so. As relentless in his own way as any other individual obsessed with achieving great things in this world, (think Lyndon Johnson, Hitler, or J. Pierpont Finch in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying ) Joe, through hard work and persistence, transcended his environment step-by-step. He "made it," as we Americans like to say.

He paid a price of course, and from an early age. I'm talking about high school, of course, which is where I first met Joe. He was a member of the Chula Vista High School Class of 1972. I was Class of '73.

Joe was something of a "perimeter fence" character on campus, by which I mean you did not see him going out for track or running for student council. He was usually seen walking about the grounds with a volume of Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov tucked in among his schoolbooks. He was very tall and lanky, wore horn-rimmed glasses and had a stubborn shock of hair that was always falling down over his forehead. The glasses and the hair earned him the nickname "Jerry Lewis" from his classmates. His idea of a witticism was to describe himself as a "Transcendental determinist with atheistic tendencies," which he did, often.

In short, Joe was what was known on campus in those days as a "nerd."

I know whereof I speak, by the way, not only because I knew Joe, but because I was something of a nerd myself. I didn't share Joe's fashion habit of combining button-down short-sleeve shirts with basketball sneakers, but like him I was a somewhat marginalized character, not given to extracurricular activities like sports, (although I did sing in the choir and, during my senior year, was on the speech team) noteworthy, if at all, chiefly for my ambition, which somewhat resembled Joe's. Like him I wanted to be a writer. The main difference between us lay in what Tim O'Brien might have called "the things we carried." Joe lugged around Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke; my authors were guys like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. In short, Joe wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be an Author. His was the more realistic ambition.

I remember how we met. It was in the winter of 1972. Joe's senior year, my junior year. Some misguided soul on the student council had decided that something was needed to "break up the third-quarter blahs." That something, the student council decided, would be called "Smile Week." It would be a week of jokes read over the P.A. system every morning during homeroom plus other assorted frivolity, the whole thing culminating with a Friday-morning assembly in the gym devoted to a comic skit which would be performed in front of the entire student body. I was dragooned by my creative-writing teacher, Mrs. Joanne Massie, into participating on this committee along with a group of fellow students which also included Joe Straczynski. Now it can be told: I, Kelley Dupuis, actually performed in one of Joe's earliest productions. He wrote the skit for the "Smile" assembly, and I appeared in it doing my imitation of the late sportscaster Howard Cosell. (Impressions were the hot thing in stand-up comedy in the early 1970s.)

The assembly's climax came when my friend Johnny Keersmaeker, appearing as the school vice-principal, a fascistic moron named Richard Armbrust, demanded to know who the author of this "skit" was. Joe Straczynski arose from the audience, and Keersmaeker, using the pistol they used to start track meets, "shot" him in front of the whole student body, after which two guys carried Joe, the dead body, out of the gym. Big yucks.

About this time, Joe, the self-proclaimed "transcendental determinist with atheistic tendencies," just happened to develop a huge crush on a girl named Cathy Williams, who was one of the campus Jesus freaks, as they were known in those days. Unswervingly true to his principles, Joe dropped the atheistic pose and became a Jesus freak himself, presumably in the hope of getting Cathy's attention. I wouldn't mention this petty detail were it not for the fact that Joe remained a dedicated born-again Christian for the next three or four years. Even after he'd gotten over Cathy and graduated, he continued to make a pest of himself pitching Jesus left and right. He didn't have a lot of friends and he clearly wanted to be friends with me, which was perfectly all right with me except for the fact that his relentless salesmanship for Jesus in those days made me uncomfortable, and not inclined to want to be around him for more than a few minutes at a time.

Now, Joe might launch a counterattack to this screed and point out that when we were boys, I shunned his friendship because I was jealous of the fact that he was having more success getting published and noticed than I was. Well, I've already admitted the truth of that in a blog posting I put up nearly three years ago. And it is true: I was jealous of Joe's early successes. That's because at 18 I didn't know any better. I didn't have enough perspective to realize that Joe was writing for a clearly-defined market, the sci-fi market, a market with a built-in audience. I was dreaming woozily of becoming the next James Joyce. Not much percentage in that.

He was talented; no question of it. Very talented. And he was placing stories in pulp magazines when I was still experimenting around at my desk trying to whip up something that would make the world recognize me as a genius. My ambitions were hopelessly lofty. Of course Joe had more success than I did, in the way that most of us define success. But I had lost interest in science fiction when I was 15. Joe was mining a vein that I'd abandoned. I wanted to write mainstream fiction. I wanted to write Literature. Joe just wanted to get published and make money. Viva Joe.

But jealousy wasn't the whole story. If I shunned Joe's company in those days, I did it as much for his relentless campaigning for Jesus as for the fact that he was getting published at an age when I was getting ignored. I just didn't want to buy what he and his friends were selling.

Joe and I attended Southwestern College together, and then later, San Diego State University. When we were students at Southwestern, circa 1974-75, I would occasionally give him lifts home from school in my car. On one of these afternoons he took me into his room, where he showed me some documents he acquired from God-knows where. He had them hidden in a drawer and bound up with wire. But he brought them out, undid the wire and shared.

They were documents relating to the study of theurgy, which, as he explained to me, is the craft of summoning up demons and evil spirits without putting your own soul at risk.

Oh-kay. I got out of there as quickly as I could that particular afternoon.

About this same time, Joe wrote an indignant letter to our college paper, the Athapascan. Seems there had been some sort of Jesus concert and some college rowdies had been making noise, destroying the mood, so to speak. Joe was highly indignant, indignant enough to write to the paper.

In fact Joe spent a lot of time in those days being indignant. He took a dislike to one of his teachers, wrote the poor man an exhaustively long hate letter, and slid it under his office door. Talk about bold courage. Talk about ego; I mean, imagine writing somebody a ten-page hate letter and then assuming they're going to read all of it.

Joe did the same thing to me once. In those days writing hate letters was his idea of being boldly assertive. Somehow he got the idea that I had "cut" one of his stories from the San Diego State University magazine, Montezuma Life, when I was majoring in journalism and served on the magazine staff one semester. In truth I had no such authority on the magazine; on that issue I was merely a copyeditor. I didn't decide what went in and what didn't.

Which didn't stop Joe from writing, and mailing to me, a meticulously typed, single-spaced ten page hate letter telling me in great detail what a son-of-a-bitch I was. I read the first sentence of this rant and threw the rest into the wastebasket. But Joe, I'm sure, went around for days strutting around like a rooster, chest thrust out, thinking he had really told me. I'm sure he did think I'd read through all of his venom. More's the pity.

Oh, and by the way, the Jesus thing eventually did a 180. Joe next surfaced in the public eye (if you want to call this surfacing in the public eye) when he went before the local city council demanding that it remove the Bible from the shelves of the public library. He identified himself for the newspaper as a representative of the San Diego State University Atheist Students' Union. Knowing Joe as I did, it wouldn't have surprised me to learn that he was the Atheist Student Union's entire membership. Slaloming back and forth between whoopee-for-Jesus and self-proclaimed militant atheism: I'll leave it to the reader to decide what that might suggest about someone's emotional stability. But it was the seventies; we were young, and when you're young you're enthusiastic, yea or nay. But anyone could see that the boy who described himself as a "transcendental determinist with atheistic tendecies" in high school was back, i.e. the nerd was back.

Joe and I didn't speak again until the mid-1980s. By then we had both decided to let bygones be bygones, I guess. We were grown men now, in our late twenties both of us. Joe called me up one night when I was living in Vacaville, California, where I worked as a newscaster on the local FM radio station. Joe was at that time writing for a kid's cartoon show called He-Man and the Masters of The Universe. He had realized his ambition of making it into television. I was pleased for him and said so.

Shortly after that I left radio and went into the Foreign Service. I sort of kept track of Joe's progress through my mother, who informed me a few years later that Joe was writing and also producing episodes of Angela Lansbury's show Murder, She Wrote. Mom cited one script Joe had written which she thought especially clever, in which the skullduggery afoot involved a computer.

I next spoke on the phone with Joe in 1993. He told me he had a new project in the works: he and a partner had cooked up a scenario and a script for a new science-fiction series they were hoping to get into syndication, Babylon 5. As I said before, I gave up science fiction when I was a sophomore in high school and I've never watched Babylon 5. But in the years that followed I congratulated Joe on its success plenty of times.

The spring we had this telephone chat, I was on my way to Moscow, where I'd been assigned to the American embassy. Joe had just a few months earlier attended his 20-year high school class reunion. Mine was coming up. I wouldn't have made it in any case because I was to be in Russia when the reunion took place, but Joe advised me strongly not to go, even if I were able to. Then he told me a funny story to explain his advice.

"If I expected to be greeted as some kind of conquering hero, you know, the guy who became a successful television writer and all that, I was to be disappointed," he told me. "Hardly anyone even remembered me. After a while I went to a pay phone to call my wife and tell her I was coming home. When I got off the phone, I looked down and noticed that my fly was open. That was it, boy. The high school nerd had come back to haunt me. I got in the car and drove straight back to L.A."

With Joe active in Hollywood writing for TV and all of his other projects, and me working for the government now, we were pretty much out of one another's orbits. He lived in Sherman Oaks somewhere; I was back-and-forth between overseas and Washington.

Circa 1996, when I was in D.C. but getting ready to decamp for Europe one more time, Joe and I swapped a few e-mails. He gave me his personal e-mail address and told me to use that one to communicate with him rather than the one that the Babylon 5 fans used, which apparently always had a very full in-box. I congratulated him once again on the success of B5, and he told me he had another series in the works of which, if anything came of it, I never found out.

In 2006 I posted a blog essay about having known Joe when we were young and how proud I was of his successes. Jealousy was long past; I enjoyed "bragging on him" to friends. I learned later that he was aware I had written this essay, but never said anything to me about it. I suppose I should have considered that a red flag, a hint that at 52 the boy might be getting too big for his britches in the sense of accepting praise and kudos as simply his due.

And so it was with pleasure that I e-mailed Joe again early in November upon reading in the newspaper that he had just written his first big-budget Hollywood movie, Clint Eastwood's Changeling. He had come a long way from He Man and the Masters of the Universe, and I acknowledged the fact. We chatted a bit about the difficulties of his profession. I even asked him why he was still working. Years earlier he had once told me that he wanted to "Get out of the Hollywood rat race, retire to England and just write novels for the rest of my life." Well, I would think that the success of B5 and all of the subsequent franchising that went with it had made Joe quite a wealthy man by 2008. But the dream of the English countryside had apparently been tabled, at least for now. Who could blame him, for a chance to work with Clint Eastwood?

Joe was friendly enough that I didn't think there would be any harm in including him occasionally on distribution for some of my blog musings. I mean, what the hell? If he didn't want to read something I sent him, he could delete it. And if he didn't want to be included on distribution for my stuff, a polite I-don't-have-time-to-read-everything-people-send-me would have sufficed.

Instead, imagine my surprise when I opened an e-mail from him in mid-November and found his tone so screechy that I could almost see the spittle on his computer screen. "I did NOT give you my personal e-mail so you could send me your every errant thought!" he practically screamed, and then peremptorily requested removal from my distribution list.

So much for good manners, and by the way, a pretty strong indicator that the boy known as "Jerry Lewis" to the Class of '72 had indeed gotten too big for his britches. Hob-nobbing with folks like Clint Eastwood and Mick Jagger had apparently convinced the one-time geek who dabbled with theurgy in his bedroom at his parents' house that he was now a Real Important Guy, and much too busy to be bothered with all of these pesky hangers-on and autograph-seekers.

Oh, and by the way, he hit "reply to all" when he sent me this very curt diss, so everyone to whom I had sent my blog posting also got Joe's little nastygram, which prompted inquiries like "Who the hell is this guy?" "What's his problem?" and "Who IS this asshole?"

By then the reviews of Changeling had begun to appear in the newspapers, and it occurred to me that they might have played some role in Joe's foul mood. The reviews I saw ran from fair to poor; the Washington Post, Washington Times and Wall Street Journal were of one mind that the film wasn't up to Eastwood's usual standards, and at least a couple of them singled out Joe's script as part of the problem. The movie review website Rottentomatoes.com has given Changeling reviews that run about 59% positive and 41% negative. Not terrible, but not exactly your average Christmas blockbuster either.

Stung by Joe's rudeness, I replied to his nastygram, suggesting that perhaps Changeling's less-than-superlative reception by some of the critics was what was making him crankier than a nauseated wolverine that weekend.

He replied within moments, practically yelling in print that the reviews were overwhelmingly good (whose?) and suggesting quite strongly that I should never darken his doorstep, electronic or otherwise, again.

Well, okay. No problem. With friends like him I don't need big-headed celebrities, do I? And by the way, you would be surprised how many Babylon 5 fans don't know who Joe Strazcynski is. I mean, who watches the credits, right?

And then of course there's the old joke about the blonde who comes to Hollywood intent on stardom...and promptly sleeps with a writer. The low place of writers on the showbiz totem pole is the stuff of legend.

But don't try to tell that to J. Michael Straczynski, hometown boy who made good. He seems to think that he REALLY made good. Good enough to make him too good for the rest of us. So. Has success spoiled Joe Straczynski?

Let's see what the fan mail says.

Oh, yeah. He's also a welsher. In 1974 I bet him five dollars that he couldn't read Finnegans Wake. He couldn't, and he has yet to pay me my five bucks.

Un centenar de cosas sobre mí

2008-12-16T15:13:00.013-05:00

A couple of days ago I was asking a friend some questions. You know, easy stuff like "What's your favorite movie?" "Who's your favorite singer?" That kind of thing.

I sometimes get asked questions like that when I'm filling out forms. I'll bet you do too.

So I decided to sit down and make out a personal Trivia List. Here, if anyone cares, are One Hundred Things About Me.

Review my list, then make one of your own. Share.

1. I’m a day person, not a night person. I’m up with the chickens and generally don’t like to get to bed any later than 11 p.m. at the latest.

2. I only like coffee if it’s hot. I can’t stand tepid coffee, nor can I stand stale coffee. If it’s more than an hour old, I’ll throw it out and make a fresh pot.

3. I like early music early in the morning. Before 9 a.m., I only want to hear music written before 1800.

4. Cars generally don’t excite me. My feeling about cars is, the easier to park, the better. I like my PT Cruiser, but I’d also like to have a Mini Cooper, which would be even easier to park.

5. When I go to a baseball game, my favorite place to sit is at field level along the first base line. I can almost never get seats there.

6. Most people who like opera prefer Italian opera to Austro-Germanic. I’m the other way around. I like Italian opera fine, but a list of my favorite operas would be heavier on Mozart, Wagner and Richard Strauss than it would be on Verdi and Puccini.

7. I do NOT watch television. Period. If I’m sitting in front of a TV screen, it’s either playing a baseball game or a DVD movie. I haven’t watched a TV series since the 1980s and have no desire to.

8. I don’t especially care for Indian cuisine. I’ll eat it, but if we’re talking about going to an “ethnic” restaurant, I’ll tend to steer somewhere other than Indian. Curry isn’t my favorite thing.

9. Hot weather drives me nuts. My least favorite activity is sweating. When it’s hot outside I just want to stay inside with the air conditioning blasting away.

10. I detest people who hate cats. I love cats. If you hate cats, you have a mental problem, and I don’t want to hear your excuses. Go die.

11. Loving cats doesn’t mean I hate dogs. I like dogs just fine. Most of the time.

12. Christmas presents should be opened on Christmas morning. If you open them on Christmas Eve, that leaves you with nothing to do Christmas Day. What fun is that?

13. I’m usually extremely impatient. Sorry about that. I just am. I do NOT like to kept waiting, and if I see a line in front of something I want, I’ll come back later.

14. When it comes to staring at women, I’m more of a leg man than a chest man. High heels and shapely calves will catch my attention faster than big boobs.

15. I enjoy cigars, and no, I’m not interested in quitting, so don’t even bring it up.

16. Bicycles are almost a fetish with me. I’ll wander into a bike shop and drool over the goods like some guys will wander into a BMW dealership and do so. If I were as rich as Bill Gates I’d probably have a dozen bicycles. As it is, I have three.

17. I have a similar thing about sound equipment. I must own six radios, and I’m forever perusing audio catalogs and magazines, dreaming of the ultimate high-end system that would make my basement sound like Carnegie Hall.

18. I hate to write checks. Consequently I have a bad habit of paying bills the day before they’re due.

19. I have an adversarial relationship with anything mechanical. They say there are two kinds of people: those who are good with people and those who are good with machines. I’m definitely in the first category. I can get along with almost anybody as long as they’re polite. But let a machine malfunction on me and my first impulse is to hit it with a sledge hammer. I think my problem with machines is that they won’t listen to reason.

20. I’m a Russophile. I’ve been fascinated by Russia and Russian culture since I was 13.

21. I have no desire whatever to visit any country known for its hot climate. (See 9, above.) I’ll take Norway over India any time.

22. My favorite city in the world is Paris. My favorite city in the United States is Spokane, Washington.

23. The funniest show in the history of television was The Phil Silvers Show, aka Sgt. Bilko. It aired on CBS from 1955 to 1958. Before the advent of home video, I would stay up late to catch reruns of this great comedy.

24. I can’t stand bourbon. It’s too sweet. I prefer Scotch.

25. If I never see another picture of Britney Spears or Jennifer Aniston, it will be three weeks too soon.

26. Beethoven’s String Quartets in C-Sharp minor and A Major, respectively, op. 131 and 132, represent the highest creation of the human mind. Nothing more beautiful has ever appeared on earth than these two pieces of music.

27. Early morning is the best time to make love. (But grab the Listerine first.)

28. One of my most cherished dreams is to live someplace where I don’t have to own a car.

29. I don’t write poetry any more, but I love poetry. I surely do.

30. I once got to be managing editor of a weekly newspaper for a few weeks, and decided it was the most fun I could have with my clothes on.

31. One of the things I will most regret having to give up when I die is being able to hear Mozart.

32. I love to cook, and I’m good at it.

33. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a flawless novel, but Tender Is The Night is underrated.

34. Allen Ginsberg was a charlatan masquerading as a poet.

35. I agree with W.H. Auden that all Christians are part Protestant and part Catholic, because the truth is Catholic, but the search for it is Protestant.

36. One of my greatest regrets is that I never learned to speak or read French, the language of my paternal ancestors.

37. I’m a third-degree Mason. And no, we’re not secretly running the world. Most of us are retired.

38. I was born with no pectoralis muscle on the right side of my chest. I’ve only met one other guy in my life with this particular oddity. The right side of my chest is nothing but bone and cartilage.

39. I can’t stand loud noises of any kind. I live near two hospitals and a fire station, and the sirens all day drive me absolutely batty.

40. My parents were both poorly-educated, and they frequently embarrassed me.

41. Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March is one of the truly great novels in English.

42. One of my favorite sounds in all the world is that of a dove cooing early in the morning in southern California.

43. I once took a few surfing lessons, and would like to get back to learning how to surf.

44. When I’m not writing or cooking, I love to paint. I can’t draw worth a tinker’s damn, but there are creative ways to get around that.

45. I regret never having learned to play a musical instrument, but being as relentlessly left-brained as I am, I could never get the hang of reading music.

46. I was a State Department telecommunications specialist for 14 years, and hated every minute of it, although I enjoyed the traveling that went with the job.

47. Speaking of which, I have lived in Germany, Brazil, Cote d’Ivoire and Russia. While living in Brazil, I reached the “intermediate” level in studying Portuguese. I know how to make feijoada, the Brazilian national dish, and I have actually tasted samogon, Russian moonshine. It’s vile.

48. Global warming is the biggest con game since P.T. Barnum.

49. I’ve been keeping a journal more-or-less steadily since I was 13. In my basement I have two footlockers filled with notebooks of various kinds, and my computer contains folders which in turn contain my journals going back roughly 10 years. The extant notebooks in the basement go back as far as 1974. I sometimes wonder what, if anything, someone will do with all this after I die. Probably toss it, but I can say it gave me something to do.

50. Partly because of my journal-keeping, I have a memory that some people find remarkable. Be careful what you tell me; I probably won’t forget it, because I just might write it down.

51. Before e-mail came along, I also used to keep letters from people. I have found letters in my footlockers dating back as far as 1970.

52. I love pizza. Homemade pizza on Christmas Eve was a tradition in my family for years.

53. I have no desire to own a Kindle or any such gadget. Books! Viva books!

54. People who jabber into handheld cellphones while driving should be summarily shot.

55. The CIA is not the world headquarters of evil. Quite the contrary; the CIA is incompetent. I wouldn’t trust the CIA to deliver flowers. They’d wind up on the wrong continent.

56. I was never happier in my life than when I lived in Bad Godesberg, Germany.

57. I once drove in a demolition derby.

58. I was in Moscow in 1993 when President Boris Yeltsin sent in the tanks and shelled his own parliament. A buddy of mine shot video that day and I have a copy of the tape somewhere.

59. Also in Moscow, I was in the audience at the Great Tchaikovsky Hall the night the visiting Washington National Symphony, under Mstislav Rostropovich, played Shostakovich's First Piano Concerto. The piano soloist that night was Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the son of the great Russian dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. That night I became a true believer: I knew that Communism was finished.

60. I was one of the founding fathers of the Hash House Harriers chapter in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. I ran 51 hashes over two years, and hosted 17. I was so active in the Hash chapter in Brasilia that when I left post in 1991, the Hashers threw a party in my honor.

61. I’m proud of having been born one week after the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the New York Yankees in the World Series for the first time.

62. I can’t stand the sight of Ted Turner, and if the slick magazines don't knock it the hell off with Michelle Obama, she's going to join the list too.

63. I have trouble getting along with people who have no sense of humor.

64. I agree with Mark Twain that school boards were created to give the feeble-minded something to do.

65. Nobody regrets the institution of slavery in America more than I do. If it hadn’t been for slavery then, I wouldn’t be hearing rap music now. (Of course I wouldn't be hearing jazz either, and that would be a tremendous loss.)

66. J. Robert Oppenheimer was a loyal American who got a raw deal.

67. I’m on my fourth espresso machine, still looking for one that makes decent espresso.

68. Jack Liles Nolen, my high-school speech coach, was the only teacher I ever respected.

69. I wish they would find Osama bin Laden, then stuff him with pork chops and hang him by his dick from the Empire State Building, with Pat Benatar singing Hit Me With Your Best Shot in the background and the whole thing live on CNN.

70. I do not believe in UFOs. Whatever dirty bizniz is going on at Area 51, it doesn’t involve E.T. More likely it’s just the government up to its usual stupidness, like trying to invent invisible sneakers or something.

71. On a hot summer day there is nothing, and I mean nothing, better than ice-cold lemonade.

72. Stan Musial was a better ballplayer than Mickey Mantle, but Mantle got all the publicity because he played in New York while Musial played in St. Louis.

73. I detest PETA. I’m a wholehearted and enthusiastic supporter of the ASPCA and the Humane Society, but PETA, whose premise is that animals should be treated exactly as if they were people, is a nut group. These are people who think Bambi and Thumper are real. Yeah, well, Chip and Dale should gather them up for the winter.

74. I generally prefer red wine to white, but I like a good pinot grigio.

75. I do not consider Ernest Hemingway a great novelist. He was a very great short-story writer, but not a great novelist.

76. Handel’s Water Music is one piece I never seem to get tired of, and there are many, many pieces of music about which I can’t say that.

77. Carnations are my favorite flower.

78. Two smells I absolutely love are those of freshly-ground coffee and gasoline, though not mixed together.

79. Frank Sinatra’s 1943 recording of If You Are But A Dream brings back one of my most cherished memories, which believe it or not involves ironing a shirt.

80. Henry Fonda’s performance in Mr. Roberts is probably my favorite performance ever given by any actor in any film, ever.

81. Light beer is a crime against nature.

82. I’ve sometimes wondered why, if the Devil is supposed to be so smart, he keeps making sucker bets with God and losing them.

83. Speaking of religion, I think I would have an easier time loving Jesus if he had just once said “Ain’t got no,” or cracked a mother-in-law joke. (How do you say “Ain’t got no” in Aramaic?)

84. Interleague play in Major League baseball absolutely, positively sucks.

85. If there are two fashion trends I wish would go away, they’re square-toed shoes for men and those ridiculously long, pointed-toe shoes for women.

86. Guys who cover themselves with tattoos are jerks.

87. Girls who cover themselves with tattoos are jerk-ettes.

88. Jay Ward made the funniest cartoons of all time.

89. Bulked-up bodybuilders are a revolting sight. Muscles are fine, but you can take anything too far.

90. The greatest invention of modern times was the mute button.

91. My favorite rock n’ roll song of all time is the Byrds’ recording of Mr. Tambourine Man.

92. My favorite rock n’ roll album of all time is Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan, who wrote Mr. Tambourine Man.

93. I read Larry McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove while staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It kept me in my hotel room almost all weekend. I couldn’t put it down, and was sorry to see it end.

94. As big a twit as he could be when he opened his mouth about politics, I do miss Leonard Bernstein.

95. Although I love to cook, I hate to clean. I’d just as soon hire someone else to do it.

96. I like my steak extremely well-done. My wife likes hers practically raw. Believe it or not, we argue about this.

97. I can’t stand the surrealist style in art. Give me Picasso over Salvador Dali any time.

98. I generally prefer brunettes to blondes, though there have been exceptions.

99. I rather like Pope Benedict XVI. Smart guy. Good writer.

100.Generally speaking, life looks better when viewed through the bottom of a glass.

Unintended Consequences

2008-12-05T08:46:00.008-05:00

Isn't it funny how we so often wind up achieving the opposite of what we intend?

The most spectacular example I can think of would be of course the Nazis. They tried to wipe out the entire population of Ashkenazic Jews in Europe. What was the result instead? The founding of the State of Israel.

On a less globe-shaking front, look at Major League Baseball. For nearly a century, baseball's team owners conspired to keep player salaries low by way of a dirty little form of indentured servitude known as the reserve clause. When the players finally burst this chain in the 1970s and won the right to free agency, their salaries skyrocketed to levels the owners probably never dreamed in their worst nightmares.

I was tending bar last night at my wife's company Christmas party, and no, I am not going to call it a "holiday party."

As I stood there mixing rum punch and popping the caps off bottles of Sam Adams that some joker had shaken before he put them into the refrigerator, I naturally overheard conversations. And one of the conversations I overheard was the one about how you had better plan on parking far away and taking the Metro into town if you're planning to attend the inauguration next month, because simply everyone will be wanting to come and Witness History.

Yes, Washington is all a-dither, all goosey-pimply over the big party it's getting ready to throw next month when the Anointed One steps up to be sworn in. Which, after listening to some of the breathless party-talk I heard about it last night, got me to reflecting on ... Newton's Third Law of Motion.

You all know about Newton's Third Law of Motion. That's the one that says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You know, like when you push your boat away from the dock, the 20 pounds of "push" you apply to the dock makes the boat go 20 pounds' worth of the other way.

The law applies in more areas than physics. I just mentioned two: genocide and baseball.

The election campaign that just concluded last month,(after about five years) and will result in the Big Party next month, was, I was repeatedly told, the one that would "restore civility" to American politics.

Really? Then would someone tell me why this campaign that just wrapped up has ended more friendships than any presidential campaign I can remember in my lifetime? In 2004 I had friends who voted for Bush and friends who voted for Kerry. But when the election was over, we were all still speaking to each other. Right now I have two acquaintances and one cousin who have stopped speaking to me because I didn't vote for Obama.

Let's get a grip, people! Even Spike Lee said in an interview before the election that America's black population needed to "calm down" about Obama. After all, Lee pointed out, "He isn't Jesus."

He isn't even Elvis, whose name I mention because I'm remembering the night, many years ago, when I was working the graveyard shift in a 7-11 store in California. This was shortly after Elvis died. A random member of the Church of Elvis wandered into my store during the wee small hours, and while buying cigarettes, delivered herself of a eulogy for her fallen idol. When I said candidly that I didn't understand Elvis-olatry, that after all the guy was just a singer, albeit a talented one, and not St. Francis of Assisi, she grabbed her cigarettes and stormed out of there no doubt determined to boycott the Southland Corporation forever and take her business henceforth to Circle K.

This is like that. And it gets crazier. Sometimes, when I'm really bored, I will read the adult advertisements on Craigslist for laughs. I've never answered one, I just read them and surf on. Last week I saw one inviting any -- but not quite all -- interested swingers to a swapping-and-general-whoopee session somewhere out in northern Virginia. There was just one caveat: you were only welcome at the party if you voted for The Anointed One.

Great. Having voted for Obama is now a pre-req for exchanging body fluids (and STDs.)

Just call me a heretic, but the dirty rumors are true. I'm guilty as charged, all you Barry-olaters out there. I did not vote for Obama. And and as you head for my house with torches and pitchforks, I'll tell you something else. His skin was part of the reason -- not its color, its thickness, which seemed to me about one micron.

This is a guy so used to adoration and so unused to criticism that he cries "foul," "unfair," "low blow" and "distraction" if someone is gauche enough to point out that he's eating his shrimp cocktail with the wrong fork. The usual arguments about his inexperience and thin resume aside, that in itself was enough to wave me off the bandwagon. Now, believing as I do that the office generally makes the man and not the other way around, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this score and assume that the hard knocks that come with the job of being the most powerful person in the world will give him a fast education. But I think he should grab an opportunity and enroll in the three-week fast-track course that George W. Bush could teach him on learning to simply ignore it and carry on when you're being called every filthy name in the book and a few they have to make up. Because there will be a honeymoon, but it will end. And honeymoons are all Barack Obama knows. It's not all cheering crowds and flying underwear out there, and he's about to find that out.

And you Barry-olaters who think Elvis has re-entered the building are going to find out, too, and just as quickly as he.

So come on, Rob Lawson. Come on Julie Anderson. Come on, cousin Melissa. Smile and make a funny face. Elvis aside, this isn't church, although I think I might start attending again after all these years, if only because I think at this moment prayer is one of the few options left to those of us who believe in Newton's Third Law and wonder just where the ship of state is going to be sailing after having been given such an uncritically enthusiastic send-off.

Music For A Late-Night Cigar

2008-11-20T07:58:00.023-05:00

The rather stern-looking guy in the photo to the left is not Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of 12-tone music, but his younger disciple, composer Anton Webern. If you don't know who he is, you will in a moment. For those who have read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (all six of you) the death of Webern, shot by a trigger-happy American GI when he stepped outside to have a cigarette after dinner in the spring of 1945, is a key episode in that novel. And it happened for real.

But to understand what the heck I'm about to talk about, you have to know who Arnold Schoenberg was, and Webern too. They were partners in a particularly significant cultural enterprise.

I'm going to put up the caveat here that I usually add to my blog when I'm writing about baseball: non-baseball fans are excused. And if you have no musical training and no understanding of, or interest in, the meaning of the term, "12-tone," you are similarly excused.

I'm regularly in the habit of smoking a cigar in my library before turning in at night. And my evening smoke is almost always accompanied by music. I've found that certain kinds of music are best at certain times of day. For instance, before 9 a.m. I don't want to hear anything from the Romantic period. It's just too damn noisy. From dawn to about the time the breakfast dishes are done, all I want to hear is stuff from between about 1590 and about 1800. Monteverdi. Dowland. Telemann.

Late night is the best time for music of an intimate nature, by which I mean music for small enembles which requires you to pay attention. The kind of music that cannot be background noise. Beethoven's late string quartets never sound better to me than they do after 11 p.m.

Lately I've been listening to music of the so-called Second Viennese School over my last cigar of the day. Or I should say, the Second Viennese School and its adherents. I mean of course, atonal or 12-tone music. Now, I'm not crazy about this kind of music as a rule, and yes, there is a sort of eat-your-vegetables thing going here; 12-tone reigned supreme for most of the 20th century. To simply ignore it would be like trying to pretend that T.S. Eliot never wrote, even if Eliot isn't your cup of tea, and he's seldom mine.

So. For the past few nights I've been listening to stuff like Schoenberg's Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto; Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra Op. 6 and Alban Berg's Lyric Suite.

Now, I'm going to assume that anyone who's still reading at this point already knows what all of this music is about and doesn't need it explained. So I'm not going to go into trying to explain dodecaphony. Besides, I'm a non-musician myself and not really qualified to explain it. If you put a page of sheet music in front of me, I can point out the treble and bass clefs; the leger lines, the whole note, the half note, the quarter note and the symbols for sharp and flat. But as far as looking at it and hearing something in my head, forget it. I sang bass in the choir when I was in high school, and I once took a few guitar lessons but had to drop them when my money ran out. That's the extent of my musical training. My only qualifications for talking about music are a lifetime of listening to it and reading about it. I think I'm the only person I know who has watched Leonard Bernstein's 1973 series of lectures at Harvard, The Unanswered Question all the way through at least six times on VHS over the years.

But for those who would like a thumbnail explanation of what I'm talking about, 12-tone or dodecaphonic music emerged before, during and after World War I. A group of composers led by Arnold Schoenberg, most of them Austro-Germanic (hence, "Second Viennese School") decided to dispense with the whole idea of writing in keys. 12-tone music is constructed using "rows" instead of keys, a "tone row" being a certain arrangement and/or permutation of the 12 tones in the chromatic scale.

Atonal or 12-tone music has a distinctly weird, interplanetary sound to people who have never heard it before. Because there are no keys, there are no "tunes" as we understand them, unless like Alban Berg in his Violin Concerto, you snitch a tune from Bach or someone else and work it in there somewhere. Because 12-tone music dispenses with keys, it also pretty much dispenses with the whole idea of melody. That means you have to listen for something else when you're listening to it, which gets me back to that business about late night being best for intimate music, which I consider 12-tone to be, because it really taxes your attention. You have to pay attention if you're going to get anything out of it at all; it's not going to come and caress your ear with Che gelida manina.

To put it bluntly, to the uninitiated 12-tone sounds like so much random banging, honking and screeching. I know, because that's what it sounded like to me when I first heard it.

Serialism (so called because a 12-tone row is also called a "series")as I said, held sway in musical circles for practically the entire 20th century. For a generation or so between the 1920s and the end of World War II, there was something of a split in the classical music world between Schoenberg, Webern and Berg's followers, who were all writing atonal and serial music, and followers of Igor Stravinsky, who resisted the new style until after Schoenberg's death in 1951. Rather than abandoning tonality, e.g. the idea of writing in keys, Stravinsky kept it alive by applying one innovative twist after another to it, in works as varied as Le histoire du Soldat, Oedipus Rex and the Symphony in C.

But once Schoenberg was in his grave, Stravinsky came around to dodecaphony. Some think he was led to it by his long-time friend and amaneunsis, conductor Robert Craft, a passionate exponent of serialism. But that argument is for another day. In the 1950s and up to his death in 1971, Stravinsky was turning out works like Monumentum pro Gesualdo, The Flood, and Requiem Canticles, all of which embraced the 12-tone method.

One of the problems I have with 12-tone music is that it's so complicated and theory-driven that a composer must have a powerful personality to make any personal imprint on it. Stravinsky certainly did, and even his 12-tone pieces still sound like Stravinsky. Webern, too, is distinct in his use of the style; his music is very spare, most of his pieces fleetingly short and heavy on exploitation of various timbres. Stravinsky admired Webern, and I'll go out on a limb here and say that I think Stravinsky's late pieces, the 12-tone works, sound more like Webern than they do like Schoenberg. Stravinsky was always distinct in his use of rhythm, and like Webern he was interested in exploring different timbres. For example he described a passage in his Orchestra Variations of 1965, (which by the way, were dedicated to the memory of T.S. Eliot) as sounding like broken glass being ground up.

But Bernstein made the point in his lectures at Harvard on Schoenberg and Stravinsky respectively that the 12-tone method made it possible for almost anyone, by memorizing a few rules, to come up with a presentable piece of music. My take on that remark is that dodecaphony lends itself to mediocrity very easily, and an awful lot of it sounds like all the rest of it. Schoenberg certainly had a strong musical personality, and when I listened for the first time to the Maurizio Pollini recording of his Piano Concerto, I wrote to my pianist friend Charles Berigan back in New York that it seemed to me as if, but for the lack of a key signature, this piece could be Brahms. Charlie more or less nodded in assent. Well, Schoenberg was famous for being a "conservative radical." He gave up tonality reluctantly, developing the new 12-tone method with relentless Germanic logic in response to the problems posed by Wagner's famous "Tristan chord" and what came after it.

That problem arose from the simple fact that the Romantics, from Chopin to Wagner, had experimented so thoroughly with chromaticism, that is, making their music wander far and wide from the traditional dialogue between the tonic and dominant keys, that they had pushed it to the snapping point. Composers like Gustav Mahler, Max Reger and Hans Pfitzner had stretched chromatic expression so far that Schoenberg decided it could no longer be contained within a tonal framework, and did what seemed to him the logical thing: he threw the key signature out and started over.

Then World War II came along and he moved to America.

America has always been culturally somewhat in thrall to Europe, and American composers embraced the Schoenbergian method with both arms. Some big names resisted; Aaron Copland held out for a while, but eventually even he started experimenting with The Method.

In no time, 12-tone music was the thing to do on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe had spoken. For the entire second half of the 20th century, dodecaphony held unchallengeable sway in the university music departments of the United States. You either wrote serial music or you were a reactionary and a fuddy-duddy.

And this is where our old friend irony steps into the picture. There are certain parallels between serialism and Marxism. For one thing, as Bernstein pointed out at Harvard, according to Schoenberg's rules (which were meant to be broken of course) in the construction of a 12-tone row, no one note can be repeated until the other 11 have sounded. And if a note is especially high or low, it can't be held for a long time because its position as high or low gives it a more prominent place than the other 11 tones, just as would being repeated. In other words, the method creates a complete tonal "democracy" if you define democracy as preventing any one individual from having any more or being any more important than any other individual.

That sounds to me like the way Marxism defines democracy, or at least the way Marxist regimes traditionally described themselves when calling themselves "democratic republics."

I don't think there is any coincidence in the fact that 12-tone music took over the university music departments at the same time that the political science departments were giving themselves over to Herbert Marcuse. There is something about serialism that inspires the dogmatic approach, and of course you can say the same thing about Marx. Marxists were forever accusing each other of apostasy, and any composer right up to John Corigliano who dared to deviate from the righteous path of Schoenberg would immediately suffer the ostracism of not being taken seriously, in much the same way that poets who persist in using meter are not taken seriously in English departments today.

How ironic then, that the country which tried to lead the world down the path to Marxism for 74 years, the Soviet Union, had a strict rule against Schoenberg and his method. In the USSR, of course, the problem was that everything from chalk to cheese was dictated from the Kremlin, and of the command-givers in the Kremlin, starting with Stalin, you could charitably say that when it came to music, as with architecture and so many other things, all their taste was in their mouths. Stalin was about as musical as a hedgehog, but he told Soviet composers what kind of music they had to write, as did his successors. And they stuck to a strict rule: what they called "formalism," by which they meant music that stressed form over content, was forbidden. There were Soviet composers with enough genius to work around this rule and still create great music. Shostakovich and Prokofiev are the first two that come to mind.

But in my youth, Shostakovich was not taken seriously in the United States. 12-tone music was so firmly in the saddle in American musical circles that composers and musicians looked down their noses at Shostakovich as being at best hopelessly old-fashioned, and at worst a Kremlin toady doing the bidding of his masters. It wasn't until Solomon Volkov published Testimony, a memoir purported to have been dictated by Shostakovich himself, that his stock in the west began to rise. Testimony showed Shostakovich to have detested Stalin and everything he stood for, and to have bridled under the way the Soviet regime made him live his life as a musician.

When Shostakovich died in 1975, Testimony had not yet been published and 12-tone was still king. But a few dissenting voices were beginning to whisper by the time the 1980s rolled around. Some in the musical community began pointing out that 12-tone music, while it might have solved a problem for fin-de-siecle Vienna and Europe generally, had little if anything to do with the American experience. Some also began looking at their watches and pointing out that 12-tone had now had 75 years or so to find an audience, and had yet to do so anywhere outside of universities and at festivals of "new music" attended mainly by composers and musicians and hardly at all by the public.

The public, generally, just didn't like 12-tone, and was getting tired of being hectored about eating its vegetables. The academy, predictably, labeled the public as dunderheads and philistines who just wanted to hear the same Tchaikovsky pablum over and over, and went about its business like the cultural priesthood it saw itself to be. One thinks of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier telling the American financiers who were paying for the buildings they designed to just shut up and pay the bills. "We'll tell you when it's done. Write us a check and then leave us alone." The musical intelligentsia had a similar attitude.

But by the 1990s, (interestingly, concomitant with the collapse of the Soviet bloc) tonality began to reassert itself in ever-bolder voices, and the cries of "Philistine" from academia began to grow somewhat fainter. Composers from the former Soviet empire such as Lithuanian Arvo Paert were writing music that was shamelessly tonal, as were John Tavener in England, Corigliano in the United States and plenty of others. Aaron Jay Kernis, a New York-based composer who attended The San Francisco Conservatory in the 1970s with my friend Berigan, won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1998 with a piece so tonal that Charlie told me it sounded like Hugo Wolf's Italian Serenade.

What can be said for that? Well, from my standpoint it's a big plus if you can hear a piece of music and actually recognize it without having to stop and get out the book or read the jewel box notes. And that's my biggest problem during these late night vigils with Schoenberg, Webern and company. I enjoy their music, but more as sound than as music. Sure, it's interesting to try and follow what they do with orchestration, dynamics and timbre, but the music all sounds so much the same that I can only take it in helpings and then I want to go back to my set of Brandenburg Concertos. I have listened to Leon Kirschner's 1963 Piano Concerto maybe a dozen times, and every time I hear it, it's like I'm hearing it for the first time. It's that forgettable. And it sounds like every other 12-tone piece I've ever heard. If I didn't know it was by Kirschner, I wouldn't know it was by Kirschner. On the other hand, I can hear a passage of Tchaikovsky, Berlioz or Bruckner and immediately know who the composer is even if I don't know the piece. I'll leave it to one of my musician friends to explain that to me, but it's the truth.

Tonight I might give Schoenberg's Pelleas and Melisande a try. It's an early work, written before he went "over the edge" tonally with the op. 11 piano pieces that proclaimed the arrival of atonality in 1908. But this is 2008, 100 years later. And I think tomorrow night I'm going back to Beethoven quartets. I ate my vegetables. Bring on dessert.

What The Dickens Is Going On?

2008-11-16T08:54:00.013-05:00

Okay, everybody. The election is over. Even the shouting is over. It's time to turn our attention back to the things in life that are truly important.

Old books that nobody reads any more. Yeah!

What follows is actually two entries from my offline journal, both of which date from the fall of 2003. Their subject: getting in touch with Charles Dickens. I kid you not.

If books mean nothing to you, don't bother with this. On the other hand, if you're as passionate about them as I am, there might be food here for lively debate between you and me, whoever you might be...

From Kelley's Journal, November, 2003:

I

Sometimes a confluence of events comes along and pokes me. It has happened now and then throughout my life. They don’t have to be big events, like the loss of a job followed by the failure to find another, followed by a car trip across America. They can be small events, like the reading of an essay following upon the heels of a conversation, followed by the rediscovery of an old, familiar volume. That, in fact, is what just happened, and as a result I feel that my life as a reader has been, in some small way, kick-started. In any case I am reading again, in a tentative way, but throwing tentativeness to the breeze, have undertaken a formidable project in that area: Little Dorrit.

Little Dorrit? Yeah. For most of my adult life, indeed, for most of my life as a reader, I have had an allergy to the Victorians. All that windiness, all that length, all that prudery, hypocrisy, imperial smugness. Who needed it? Twenty-some years ago, Ray Araiza used to tease me about my proud claim that “I don’t read the Victorians.” Hemingway and his generation had fought the good fight to liberate American literature from the stranglehold of Britannia. I was their heir, or so I thought. What did I need with Dickens, Thackeray and company?

Well, the journey to Little Dorrit actually had its earliest beginning in September, 2001. Tatiana Floyd and I were driving from Baltimore to Boston for the Labor Day weekend. We took along with us some books on tape to listen to in the car, one of which was a collection of short pieces by Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up. One of the essays on that tape concerned the brouhaha which followed the publication in 1998 of Wolfe’s novel A Man In Full. Specifically, the fuss that three famous, and jealous, fellow-writers kicked up over its success. Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving all went on television at different times to trash A Man In Full, Mailer claiming that it was “journalism” and not fiction, (he ought to know about that!) and Updike stuffily asserting that it wasn’t a product of “our” literary culture. But John Irving outdid his two fellow sniffers: in an appearance on Canadian TV, the jealous author so lost control of himself on the subject of A Man In Full that he was liberally using the “F” word. And here’s the rub in the case of Irving’s on-the-air tantrum: Wolfe mentioned that some reviewers of A Man In Full had compared it with Dickens, and that was what really got Irving’s goat: Irving, it seems, is a great admirer of Dickens, who would like to be compared with Dickens himself. To see Wolfe compared with Dickens drove John Irving into “F-word” convulsions in a TV interview.

This intrigued me. What possible attraction, I wondered, could Dickens have for the author of The World According To Garp and The Cider-House Rules? I would think that two more dissimilar writers couldn’t be imagined. The idea was tucked away in my memory under “curiosities from the world of book-chat.”

Then, maybe three weeks ago, I was picking through Something To Remember Me By, a volume of short fiction by Saul Bellow. Bellow wrote an introduction to this tryptich of novellas, its theme being precisely this fact, that they were novellas as opposed to novels. He discussed our general failure in recent years to make as much time for reading as people used to, hence a general trend to make fiction shorter than it used to be. I don’t remember the exact context, but as an illustration of the sort of long novel to which people no longer want to bother making a commitment of time and effort, Bellow specifically cited Little Dorrit.

Item filed, note with question attached: why Little Dorrit? Dickens wrote plenty of long novels. Why didn’t Bellow cite Bleak House or The Pickwick Papers? It seems to me that they are both generally better known.

Next came my conversation at Marie Callender’s last Wednesday night with Jan Barnett. Jan told me over soup and buffalo wings that she was endeavoring to stake out some time in her life these days for the things she considers important, not the least of which is reading. When she mentioned that she was reading some of the short stories of Colette, it was like someone had tossed a glass of cold water in my lap. I suddenly found myself thinking back to my college days, or at least to Jan’s, when we were all, each in our own way, so interested in literature that we were reading like fiends. In my case the drive was especially strong because I wanted to be a writer, wanted it worse than anything, and of course as my erstwhile teacher Don Baird had said to me when I was 18, “As for writing yourself, keep reading. Sure, all writers are readers.”

From my teens until I was about forty, it seems I was always reading something, usually something from the “western canon,” e.g. something from the entire pantheon of serious western literature, running the gamut from Homer to Tolstoy, from Thomas Mann to Saul Bellow. (For the most part steering clear of the Victorians, except for Oscar Wilde, who flouted their conventions.) But as my forties progressed and the realization that I was not, after all, going to be a Hemingway or a Henry Miller or even a W.H. Auden began to coalesce in real time like a photograph in the darkroom becoming ever-sharper, my interest in reading great literature gradually began to fade, to extend the simile, like an old Polaroid. Now here’s Jan, who by the way has earned my admiration for the graceful way in which she has accepted her own version of my experience: when she was in college, Jan dreamed of becoming a great artist. She knows now that she probably isn’t going to be the next Georgia O’Keeffe, but she has accepted the fact with equanimity, still enjoys drawing, and by the way, is trying to block out time these days for such things as reading the short stories of Colette. Noted and filed.

Next, just yesterday morning in fact, I was reading an essay by critic Sven Birkerts in a book of his that Lucia gave me, Readings. The essay, Against The Current, concerned itself with Birkert’s experience—and, by extension, our experience generally—of “losing touch” with the world of close reading and the sparks it can cause to fly, thanks mostly to the way our postmodern perceptions have been totally taken over and reshaped, even redefined, by the all-pervading ocean of electronic media in which we spend every moment of our waking lives these days. Using as a starting point his self-described inability to read and appreciate poetry as he once did, Birkerts moves on to a detailed discussion, first of how our—his—altered modes of perception have endangered the attentiveness needed for reading, and then to details of some of the small steps he has taken to try and recover some of that, chiefly by making the sacrifice of doing some things in a deliberately slower, less “efficient” manner than they are usually done these days. For example, writing letters with a pen rather than a computer, and then taking the time to walk to the mailbox to mail them, noticing things around him on the way.

Slowing down, in other words, and tuning in while at the same time tuning out.

All of these little experiences brought me to a decision: I was going to read Little Dorrit. Yesterday afternoon I got in the car and drove over to the Chula Vista Public Library to see if it was on the shelf. I knew that it probably would be; after all, who reads Little Dorrit any more?

And then, as I was entering the library on this mission of reading, another tiny fillip of experience occured, a sort of closing-the-circle gesture on the part of the book gods, which, come to think of it, could not have been more perfect had it been scripted for the occasion.

The library’s little used bookstore, tucked away in one corner of the main library, is open on Saturday afternoons. I seldom go in there because they seldom have anything that catches my interest and anyway, in my current living circumstances I don’t have much room for storing books.

But as I wandered into the little shop yesterday, and browsed around the cramped shelves, I spotted an old friend: Literature: Structure Sound and Sense, by Laurence Perrine. (Harcourt, Brace & World, © 1956, 1959, 1963, 1966, 1969, 1970.) This was the very textbook that we used in Donald S. Baird’s English 6 class, “Composition and Literature,” Southwestern College, Fall Semester, 1973. (MWF 8:00-8:50 a.m.—Imagine discussing T.S. Eliot at eight O’clock in the morning! Still, we did.)

I was 18, it was my first semester of college, and this textbook, along with Baird’s own curmudgeonly pontificatings, was a key factor in the shaping of my own tastes in poetry and fiction during the years that followed. (Baird’s greatest gift to me was Yeats. He could be a little prick, but he did me that favor.)

Donald S. Baird is probably dead by now. And there was that book. Did I say “the gods?” More likely, Baird’s own curmudgeonly little ghost patting my butt as I entered the library in search of Dickens, giving his seal of approval to the quest. As I recall, the cost of this textbook in 1973 was $10. I got it back yesterday for 75¢. It, and Lake Woebegon Days by Garrison Keillor, and yes, The Mill On The Floss by George Eliot, eminent Victorian. Total for all three: $1.75.

The library’s two copies of Little Dorrit were both in—surprise!—in fact I had my choice between the one in old blue library binding and the one in old red library binding. Both are slightly yellowed and just a shade tattered. I chose the red one: New York, Dodd, Mead & Co. 1951.

As of this morning I have read up to Chapter Seven. It’s going to be a long journey, as Saul Bellow promised it would be; I’m on page 64 of a book that runs 788 pages. And so thoroughly has the world changed between Dickens’ time and our own that I am already having occasional trouble “taking his sense,” not so much with regard to the language as to the sensibilities of his characters. The Victorians’ shared system of values and beliefs, not to mention their customs, bore little resemblance to whatever shared system of beliefs we have left in the age of the Internet. But no matter, it is giving me a warm feeling in the gut to begin this long journey, and I am determined to see what lies at the other end.

II

Two weeks ago I announced in these pages that I had decided to read Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens. I’m just about halfway through it now, a few pages short of finishing Part One. What are my impressions of the book so far? Well, right off, I can see why some reviewers compared Wolfe’s A Man In Full with Dickens. An argument could indeed be made that Dickens was the Tom Wolfe of his day, or Tom Wolfe the Dickens of ours. Michael Burgess and I were discussing Dickens and my decision to read Little Dorrit the other day. “Dickens was a journalist,” Michael remarked. Indeed he was, in the same sense that Balzac and Zola were journalists. The landscape of London at the beginning of the industrial revolution was what Dickens painted, and he was always exposing the social ills of his era; Little Dorrit’s target was the institution of debtor’s prison. In the custom of that time, his novels were serialized in magazines before they appeared between covers, so he was indeed writing for a popular audience. Novels don’t get serialized in magazines any more, but Wolfe was a magazine journalist before he began writing books. The parallels are easy to draw, which makes me wonder about John Irving’s hissy-fit on Canadian TV.

An American reader in the early twenty-first century can’t help but find Dickens a little verbose. It isn’t just because we don’t read long books any more, either. Both journalism and prose fiction have become noticeably less long-winded in the past 100 years. As a journalist who has studied the history of journalism as well as of literature, I can testify that as you progress from 1900 to 2000 in reading newspaper articles, you’ll find them progressively less and less “wordy” until you reach today’s journalism, which is so terse by comparison with earlier eras as to seem like shorthand. When I pick up a newspaper article written at the time of World War I, I’m aware that I’m reading prose. Ornate sentences, carefully crafted. Curlicues of simile and metaphor. It’s obvious that some of these guys were writing with pen and paper, not typewriters. In fact it wasn’t until the 1960s that this kind of thing finally disappeared. As the newspaper market shrank, newspaper writing became less and less distinguishable. Journalism isn’t crafted at all any more, unless you’re talking about the opinion columnists. Journalism today is churned out as product. Pick up the front page of any major newspaper and the reporting of any two journalists will read pretty much like the reporting of any other two. Formulaic, brief and to the point.

Of course Dickens wasn’t writing newspaper stories, he was writing fiction. But he was writing in a leisurely, mannered style which was the norm of his day and not of ours, whether you’re talking about journalism or fiction. Leisurely, mannered prose fiction was precisely what people like Hemingway, Nathanael West and Raymond Chandler were trying to get away from. They, and their contemporaries, laid the ground rules for the kind of fiction we’re used to reading now: pithy, from the hip. DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, in fact, have taken this postmodern stuff so far that their prose resembles Marlon Brando’s mumbling. It’s not a uniform rule, of course. Some contemporary authors have gone out of their way to be unaccommodating to our short attention spans: I think of Pynchon, Barth, Vikram Seth, whose A Suitable Boy was so massive as to draw comparisons with Tolstoy from the British critics in 1991, (but which sank like a rock), and even Garcia Marquez, who dispensed with paragraphs in his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. But these are acts of intentional obtuseness: guys like Dickens and Henry James were long-winded because that was what their audience expected, not the opposite. They weren’t flying in the face of anything. And, come to think of it, Pynchon, Barth and Garcia Marquez actually belong to an earlier generation. I still think of them as modern, but their heyday was the 1960s and ‘70s. Garcia Marquez published 100 Years of Solitude in 1967. That’s a hop, skip and a jump back for me, but I’m pushing 50. To anyone under 35 that must seem like the olden days. And some to think of it, this is the 30th anniversary year of Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon is no spring chicken either. Barth must be in his seventies: he was hip to the hippies when they weren’t too stoned to read.

And then there is the question of what used to be called “sensibility.” The 19th century was (I should say, is) infamous for its “sentimentality.” (I’ll have to get out the OED and research the history of this word; I’m not sure it even existed in Dickens’ time.) From the time of Rousseau until the massive global disllusionment that followed World War I, public taste tended toward bathos and tears. “Feeling is all,” Goethe said in Faust, and he may have meant it ironically, but he wasn’t kidding. For a century, novelists, poets and playwrights laid it on with a trowel, which is why we find so many of them unreadable now. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was credited by no less than Abraham Lincoln with being the spark that started the American Civil War; today one can’t read it without laughing. I’m not comparing Harriet Beecher Stowe with Dickens, but I am saying that the “sensibility” of the mid-19th century tended to favor scenes and characterizations which today we would consider mawkish. I remember my 10th grade English teacher, Mrs. Terry, (who was very much a child of the “hip” ‘60s) mercilessly ridiculing Longfellow’s poem The Wreck of the Hesperus for its gooey sentiment.

Again, I’m using an extreme example: Longfellow is a second-rate poet. But my point is that you do find in Dickens, or I do anyway, some undeniable traces of this pandering to the “sensibilities” of his time which can make some of his characters seem a little unbelievable to modern readers. Little Dorrit, so christlike in her self-sacrificing, so relentlessly sweet, humble and devoted to her father, looks to me like Mary Pickford hamming it up in a silent film. Arthur Clenham is a painfully nice guy who, in the manner of his time, goes around acting like he has no dick. Even when he falls in love with Pet, he tries to persuade himself that he hasn’t. God forbid that any Victorian should admit having a dick. (Curious, or perhaps not quite so curious after all, is the existence, of which we are now fully aware, of a very active and fecund pornographic sub-culture in Victorian England, of which My Secret Life and The Pearl are two famous examples.)

But having said all that, there is a great deal about Little Dorrit that has a contemporary ring. England no longer has debtor’s prison, but reading about it reminds me of how thoroughly our American attitudes toward fortune and misfortune have been influenced by those of our sister-culture on the other side of the pond. Last week I was recounting for our publisher, Linda Rosas, my interview and subsequent e-mail communication with “the grief lady,” Pam Ramsey, whose life has so totally careened out of control in the past few years that she is now a desolate case, crying for help to the local newspaper. “We all choose our path in life,” Linda said breezily, and as far as she was concerned, the subject was closed. I couldn’t help thinking of the scene in Roman Polanski’s Tess, which was of course based on Tess of the d’Urbervilles by eminent Victorian Thomas Hardy, in which some casual passerby remarks of Tess’ misfortunes, “It’s yer own fault.”

There you go. W.H. Auden pointed out in one of his essays that it’s no accident Catholic countries gave us almshouses, while Protestant countries gave us debtor’s prison. Catholic culture is (or was, anyway) untouched by the influence of John Calvin, whose doctrine of predestination added up, in the countries where Protestantism triumphed, to a prevailing idea that you could be as selfish and self-centered as you pleased, while continuing to think that God was smiling on you. Since everyone was predestined, before the Creation, to be either damned or saved, it is therefore a sign of God’s grace if you’re well-off and prosperous in this world, and a sign of His disfavor if you’re poor or down-and-out.

It’s a short leap from there to the idea that there is something shameful about being poor. There are countries in the world where begging is an honorable profession. But that’s not the case in England and it is certainly not the case here. In our Anglo-American culture, even to be unemployed is a kind of blot on your character. I know, I’ve been there. The sight of the Dorrit family languishing in the Marshalsea, with Dorrit’s elder daughter, Fanny, forced to work as a dancer and at the same time hissing and spitting at anyone whom she perceives as casting aspersions on her “genteel” family, is a sharp reminder of where all of this came from. Admittedly, I cannot relate to Fanny’s, or her father’s, anxiety over word getting out that any member of their family has been actually forced to work for a living, she as a dancer and Little Dorrit as a seamstress. We don’t have quite that level of class snobbery here: America does have its rich class, as most countries do, but it doesn’t have an idle rich class, as England once did, a landed gentry that considered it shameful to soil its hands with any kind of labor. But pride and hubris are themes that cut to the bone in American fiction just as they do in Dickens, both fictions growing from societies in which money success (America) or preserving one’s “position in society” (England) are the terms that delineate the good life.

Small wonder Wolfe made the critics think of Dickens when he created Charlie Croker and company. We might not sing songs like Wait Till The Sun Shines, Nellie or Don’t You Remember Sweet Alice any more, but Dickens and Wolfe were definitely mining the same vein.

So. Is great journalism great literature? Tom Wolfe actually created that question himself in the 1960s when he and his ilk created the so-called “new journalism,” which in short order had Norman Mailer riffing on himself (and winning the Pulitzer) for The Armies of the Night, an exercise in narcissism disguised as journalism, which makes it only that much more ironic that he should have dismissed A Man In Full as “journalism” five years ago. Family feuds. I know something about those. I also know that Dickens is probably smiling from his grave.

Notes From Underground

2008-11-13T08:12:00.012-05:00

Let me tell you, my stress levels have really dropped since the election last week.

I mean, they're down to nearly nothing. I'm Mr. Valium, and I don't even take valium.

Is it because I'm happy about the outcome of the election, and expecting a wonderful, golden new day in America now that The One is about to be anointed Dear Leader? Am I dancing around singing It's Almost Like Being In Love in anticipation of what the Obama-ites have been promising us for two years now, that with the Dear Leader installed in the White House, we're all going to join hands across America and start singing I'd like to buy the world a Coke, and keep it company?

Don't make me laugh.

No, it's because I have made good on the promise I made to myself before the election, to wit, that if Obama were indeed, as has come to pass, chosen to be anointed Dear Leader, I was going to drop out. Unlike Alec Baldwin, who threatens to build a raft and sail to Tasmania every time it looks as if the Republicans might win an election, (but has yet to do it) I have fulfilled my promise. I can't afford Tasmania, but I can sure as hell afford to pull the plug.

And not only that, but it's easy.

A generation ago Norman Mailer gave an interview upon publishing a perfectly dreadful novel called Ancient Evenings. The book was a fantasia upon, oh, anal sex and such, set in ancient Egypt. Now, Mailer had never written a historical novel before and one could argue that this one attempt failed. I've always suspected that Mailer wrote Ancient Evenings because he decided that his archrival Gore Vidal, much more skilled and adept at historical fiction than Mailer, needed upstaging.

It didn't work. The year after Ancient Evenings came out, (1983) Vidal published Lincoln, just possibly his greatest novel. People are still reading Lincoln. You can pick up a copy of Ancient Evenings on Amazon.com for $.01. I checked.

Now, the reason I bring up the late Mr. Mailer, and his ridiculous attempt at a historical novel some 25 years ago,is precisely because of that interview he gave when the book came out. I read it, and I remember him telling the interviewer that the reason he wrote Ancient Evenings was because he felt so out of place and out of touch in the America of the 1980s, e.g. Ronald Reagan's America.

Now that we're all about to start living in Barack Obama's America, all of a sudden I know exactly how Mailer felt.

Only I'm not going to respond by writing pornography set in ancient Egypt. I'm going to respond by disengaging. In fact I've already done it. The mass media have no place in my life for the next four years. I've quit reading the newspapers. (The only part of the Washington Post I look at any more is Sherman's Lagoon. The rest goes in the trash, where, if you ask me, the Washington Post belongs anyway.) I don't watch television, but that was no sacrifice; I didn't watch television before. I might tune in WETA if they're playing Handel, but the minute I hear that ominous voice say, "From National Public Radio News in Washington, I'm Howard Putz," I turn the damn thing off until Handel comes back. I still use Google as my home page, but I've switched off "My Google" so I don't have to look at news headlines. I have canceled my subscriptions to any and all magazines that even faintly smack of politics or current affairs. From here on out I subscribe only to Grammophone, Indycar, Bicycling, Baseball America and The New Criterion.

In short, I don't want to know what Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Frank and Kennedy are doing out there. I just don't want to know. Don't tell me. If the headlines starting January 21 feature things like "CONGRESS CONSIDERS REPARATIONS FOR DESCENDANTS OF CHINESE RAILROAD WORKERS; APOLOGIZES FOR OPPRESSION," or "BILL WOULD AUTHORIZE FREE CONDOMS TO KINDERGARTNERS," or "HOUSE OKs $2 BILLION FOR STUDY OF WHY FISH DON'T WEAR iPODS," I don't want to know about it. And when you all see that headline reading "IRAN LAUNCHES NUCLEAR ATTACK ON ISRAEL; OBAMA INVITES AHMADINEJAD TO TEA,'" don't bother me with that one either.

While the party goes on in anticipation of this brave new world, I am plunging myself into a study of the tonal language of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643.) I'm not a musician, so it's slow going, but I have plenty of time. I am in fact working on a novel, and Monteverdi's music figures in the plot, so this isn't just a case of academic onanism; however I have a short list of projects to keep me occupied during the upcoming reign of Obama and his little politboro of Hugo Chavez clones, once I have finished with my studies of Renaissance Italian church music. They include re-reading Proust's The Search For Lost Time, studying French, becoming a notary public (and maybe buying a scooter to go with that) learning to make creme brulee and memorizing a whole bunch of Shakespeare sonnets in order to annoy people with them at dinner parties. I'm going to work on improving my chess game. I'm going to study the history of ancient Greece. I'm going to paint as I like and die happy.

But I'm not going anywhere near the news. It'll be tough, living as I do in Washington, D.C., but as Garfield the Cat said when he announced his plan to spend an entire week in bed, "I refuse to let anything deter me from staying the course."

Oddly, (or perhaps not so oddly) I'm thinking of one of Paul Simon's early songs, one that he must cringe to hear now. I Am A Rock should never have been recorded, much less released. Its lyric is the worst kind of sophomoric poetry, the sort of stuff I might have written at 16 to vent my spleen at some cheerleader who turned me down for a date. But its last verse, insipid or not, pretty much sums things up for me right now. I can't quote the whole verse due to copyright laws, but go listen to the song. The last verse has to do with wrapping himself in a shield of poetry and books as his "armor."

Yeah, well. That's me. I am a rock, I am an island. 'Til 2012, anyway.

And a rock feels no pain.

And islands don't read the papers.

The Dawn Of A New Day In America

2008-11-05T18:01:00.009-05:00

I typed that headline with my own two fingers: "The Dawn Of A New Day in America."

And now that I've had a few minutes to wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes, it's time to play that fun game I was playing late last week when it did indeed look as if the Democrats were going to take all the marbles this year.

The game is, see if you can find something good in any of this.

Last week, if you'll remember, I was able to think of three good things coming out of a Barack Obama victory in the presidential election:

1. No one would be able to get away with calling America a "racist country" any more.

2. As a direct result of #1, both Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would have to go out and get a real job.

3. For the next eight years we won't have to look at the Clintons.

But doggone, wouldn't you know it, a can-do optimist such as myself can always find another silver lining in what any sane person would realize is a pretty sad situation. True, Obama and his Gang of Four (Pelosi, Reid, Frank and Kennedy) will get busy quickly appointing ultra-liberal judges with no interest in the Constitution except twisting it to further the left-wing agenda; the aforesaid politboro will tighten the screws on anyone who opposes the abuses of the big labor unions and do away with secret union ballots so the Big Labor fat cats can more easily intimidate union voters; they will also bring back the so-called "Fairness Doctrine," which will enable them to shut down talk radio and silence any and all opposition voices in the country; they'll quadruple your taxes to pay for more giveaway programs in which they will be the ones who decide who gets the goodies; they'll abandon Iraq to Al Qaida and they'll weaken our national defense in the name of making other nations "like" us better, thereby inviting another Sept. 11,because anyone who thinks talking nice to Islamofascists will make them purr like kittens is nuts. They'll nationalize health insurance so you have to wait eight months to see a doctor, stifle initiative by regulating business large and small to death, and for dessert, don't be surprised if they gin up some kind of national "hate speech" law which will codify and make official what they already think: that anyone who disagrees with anything they say is spreading "hate speech." Who knows but that I and all the other bloggers in America who express conservative ideas may be in prison by 2010.

Eight years ago the lefty bloggers were saying similar things about George W. Bush, that is when they were able to shove their tongues and eyeballs back into their heads. Now it's our turn to have the fun of "speaking truth to power."

Hey, last night millions of you were all cheering for this, Mr. and Ms. America. We'll see how you feel about it in a couple of years.

But I was going to discuss another silver lining to this cloud.

Well, yeah, actually it's a biggie. Listen, folks. When the Democrats are finished with their postelection bacchanalia and are looking at their bloodshot eyes in the bathroom mirror while they reach for the Pepto-Bismol, it's only going to be a matter of moments before they come to an awful realization.

Nobody has anyone but them to blame now.

Washington becomes a one-party town in January. The Democrats will control all three branches of government. Totally. While that gives them carte blanche to build their queasy brand of socialism, let's keep something else in mind: no one has dared to whisper this throughout the entire campaign as Obama went around promising pie in the sky to everybody, but history has spoken pretty clearly on this subject, to wit, socialism has been a miserable failure everywhere it's been tried. And I'm not just talking about the Soviet Union. I'm talking about everywhere it's been tried. There is no recorded instance of a country's economy and its people prospering in a situation where the government held the reins of everything, regulating and nationalizing to its heart's content. Socialism always causes initiative to drop, productivity to sink, inefficiency to burgeon, capital to flee and quality of goods to deteriorate. Did you ever hear of anyone wanting to buy any product from the Soviet bloc except vodka, caviar or weapons? There was a reason for that, you know.

You're waiting for me to come to the silver lining, aren't you? Actually, I mentioned it above: nobody will have anyone to blame but the Democrats when things go down the crapper. The Republicans will be in any practical sense, gone. They won't be in charge of anything.

Oh, dear, dear, dear. What on earth are the poor media going to do? Without the Republicans around to blame everything on, who are they going to blame?

Well, let's see. The last time I checked the numbers, roughly 91 percent of all this nation's journalists were registered Democrats. Anyone care to make book that when things go down the crapper, the media will blame someone other than the Democrats?

I'd say that's probably the best bet since taking the Yankees over Pittsburgh in the 1927 World Series.

I'm going to go out on a limb and make a fearless forecast here. When the young man who saw the presidency as a learning experience and persuaded America to let him have the job by means of a silver tongue and massive amounts of Internet-generated gold steps on his crank, (and he's bound to) one of three things will happen. The media will:

(a) Ignore it.

(b) Insist it was no big deal and that "everybody" does it.

or

(c) Claim their Chosen One is the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy. (And, by the way, since the circumstances will allow them to add this particular frosting to the cupcake, they'll also claim it's a "racist" conspiracy.)

However, even with "racist" added to it as a bonus point, this last expedient might not fly as well as it did a decade ago, because the Republicans really will be out of power. Kind of hard to make a "vast conspiracy" out of a bunch of guys who are figuratively hanging around the union hall sucking up the free coffee and swapping thigh-slappers about the old days.

And if the economy tanks, or what's more likely, stagnates, with inflation and unemployment both soaring to truly Jimmy Carter levels, since periods of heavy government interference with the free market usually do result in sluggish, stagnant economies, the media will:

(a) Ignore it.

(b) Put on a happy face and try to tell everyone that the economy is really rosy.

(c) Run lots and lots of stories about when things were worse,

or

(d) Call in panels of "experts" who will figure out a way to claim that the downturn actually began with the previous administration and hence, the Republicans are to blame.

By the way, the media did NOT do this, or anything like it, in 2001 when the economy was in trouble, although it was as clear as day that the recession had begun in March, 2000, when Clinton was still president and Bush's election was seven months away. The fact that the 2001 recession had begun on Clinton's watch was loudly ignored by all but the conservative media.

But no matter. It's going to be fun to watch. Remember "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more?" A lot of people on both sides of the aisle were sorry, I'm sure, that Nixon didn't make good on that threat. Perhaps he should have. While it would have meant passing up his turn to be president, he sure as hell would have had the last laugh.

And, mark my words, somebody's going to have the last laugh. And I would also make book that it won't be Pelosi, Reid or any other member of the soon-to-be-politboro running America.

Stick around. After the agony, this might be good for some laughs.

An Open Letter To A Friend On The Eve Of Election 2008

2008-11-03T18:53:00.004-05:00

This is the text of an e-mail I sent this afternoon. Tomorrow we vote. God help us all.

Dear Rob:

Well, tomorrow it all ends. Two years of this crap. I think we're all about to collapse from campaign fatigue.

You know, when we were debating last week about McCain versus Obama, there's one thing I didn't bring up. And I should have.

Aside from the fact that having to choose between those two guys is kind of like having to decide whether you want to swallow lye or swallow battery acid, I don't know if I made it clear that it isn't really so much Barack Obama himself I'm leery of. If it were just a question of sticking him in the White House so that all of those aging hippies from the 1960s, who remember being at Woodstock even though they were at home in Oxnard that day, can hum a few bars of "We Have Overcome" and feel young again, well, I could see a set of circumstances under which that wouldn't be too intolerable. Like if Newt Gingrich were still Speaker of the House, for example.

And there you have it, as my niece Alicia used to say. It's not so much an Obama presidency that scares me as the prospect of an Obama presidency with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank and Ted Kennedy running Congress, with all opposition swept away. Boy, if this doesn't scare you as a conservative, you're not paying attention. This is going to be the ultimate case of the weasel given a key to the chicken coop. Obama's little politboro is going to have a free and untrammeled hand to ram through any program, any bill, any tax hike they want. Nothing will stand in their way. The first thing they'll do is appoint and confirm a few hundred ultra-liberal court judges. That way the Democrats will be in complete charge of all three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial. If THAT doesn’t scare you, you’re really not paying attention.

And after that, Jenny Bar The Door, as my mother used to say. In four years they'll have turned this country into England in the 1950s -- all initiative squashed, free markets suppressed, welfare rolls swollen, thousands of newly-created federal bureaucrats sitting on their fat asses collecting benefits and waiting for their pensions to kick in, half the population on the dole and the other half paying for it. And with the New York Times and the Washington Post jumping up and down like a couple of squealing pom-pom girls, cheerleading for the whole sorry spectacle. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is no doubt rubbing his hands with glee at this moment as he orders more enriched uranium and draws big X’s over Israel on the map, while Hugo Chavez must be kissing his picture of Che Guevara and peeing his pants with joy as he schemes to make Latin America Marxist again, fearing no opposition from an American president who thinks he can deal with thugs like Chavez by inviting them over for tea and schmoozing.

If the Orkney Islands were within my budget, I'd be gone by Wednesday and I wouldn't even take a shortwave radio with me. Instead, I’ll be locked in my study reading Edmund Burke, De Tocqueville and Solzhenitsyn. Come get me when it’s over.

And, finally, here you have my last word on the subject. Bring on President Obama and the United Socialist States of America. And when, in a year or so, you find out you’re working for the government until June 28 to pay your taxes, not April 30 as is now the case, well, as Billy Joel put it, “Go on and cry in your coffee but don’t come bitchin’ to me.”

Ave atque vale.

The crazed search for a silver lining

2008-10-28T10:56:00.009-04:00

You just might be looking at my next home.

The media have been telling us relentlessly, for months now, that the outcome of next week's presidential election is a done deal. Inevitable. Preordained.

Of course they said that about Hillary Clinton too, didn't they?

But the message coming from the Washington Post and the New York Times is pretty clear: unless you're planning to vote for Barack Obama, you might as well stay home.

As we used to say when I was in high shool, "They wish."

No, I'm going to go out and cast my vote for John McCain, as should anyone who doesn't especially relish the idea of living in the USSA -- United Socialist States of America.

I saw a bumper sticker years ago that I loved. "Like Your Mail Service? You'll LOVE National Health Insurance."

Get ready for it, and don't come crying to me when you feel a twinge that might be appendicitis and are told that you can see the doctor next November.

But I don't want to get started on that. I've already outlined my personal strategy for surviving four years of President Obama and his cadre of crypto-Marxists led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid: total disengagement. Unlike Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon, both of whom have threatened to leave the country if there's a Republican victory and neither of whom has actually put their money where their big mouths are, I'm not going to leave the country when Obama and his politboro take over. Don't get me wrong: if I could afford it I'd move to the Orkney Islands. But I can't. (Unlike Baldwin and Sarandon, so what are their excuses?)

Yes, the above-depicted manhole cover just might be my new front door. I'm going to batten down the hatches, cancel my newspaper subscription, quit listening to the radio, give my TV to the nearest needy cretin and change my home page to, oh, I don't know, SorenKierkegaard.com? Some place where I am absolutely assured that I won't see or hear anything remotely resembling news. I just don't want to know what Obama and his gang are up to out there. But if I peek out from under that manhole cover and see that all the trash cans in the neighborhood have "PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT stamped on them, I'll have a pretty good idea: someone decided that "spreading the wealth around" also applied to trash, and the Democrats rolled it through their one-party Congress without a rhetorical shot being fired. (Can you imagine garbage collectors as federal employees? In no time the whole country would look like New York City in the 1970s, when the garbage collectors were going on strike every forty-five minutes.)

I have to prepare for the worst. Even Rich Lowry and Byron York, writers for National Review, the country's premier conservative magazine, are already assessing what McCain did wrong. That sounds like fatalism to me, and those guys are more in the know than I am. Come November 5 we're probably going to be looking at the apotheosis of Jimmy Carter II. God help us all.

So I'm trying to think of something, anything good that might come out of this. Yes, of course, there's the feely-good factor that America elected itself a black president. I don't have a problem with that. I've been telling people all summer and fall that if Shelby Steele or Thomas Sowell were running for president, I wouldn't be able to get my sneakers laced up fast enough to run out and vote for either of them. For me the feely-good factor just doesn't outweigh the fact that the country is about to take a sharp swing to the left, and no good is going to come of it except the feely-good factor. Get ready for a LONG recession, everybody. Because it's government's endless tampering with the economy that makes recessions run long, and Obama and his crowd are going to tamper with the economy until its nipples are raw. (Had FDR and his cigarette-puffing "brain trust" kept their mitts off the economy, the Depression might have been called just that, not the GREAT Depression.)

Racking my brain, however, I have been able to come up with two -- no, maybe three --good things coming out of an Obama presidency.

Clearly, the feely-good thing is one. No longer will anyone be able to get away with calling America a horrible racist country. Not if we have a black president. Of course we've known that all along, haven't we?

Actually, my number-one positive thing is an offshoot of that. You see, I came to the realization long ago that if Obama is inaugurated on Jan. 9, 2009 or whenever it is, on January 10, 2009 Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are both going to be out of a job.

And Jackson, for one, has never had a real job in his life. "He's a REVEREND," my friend Jim insisted.

Like I said, he's never had a real job in his life.

Think about it for a minute. Jackson and Sharpton. What are those two guys, basically? Grievance peddlers, that's what. They traffic in grievance, and their little Johnny One-Note message, which gets screamed from the nearest soapbox every time Don Imus opens his mouth or some lying bimbo hired as a stripper gets the whole Duke University lacrosse team crucified in the biggest kangaroo court the media ever whooped up, is "We're VICTIMS! And as VICTIMS, we demand, demand, demand!" Well, with Barack Hussein Obama paring his fingernails in the Oval Office while he waits for Pelosi and Reid to arrive so the three of them can decide what they're going to nationalize next, (and should they check with Hugo Chavez for his advice first?) Jackson and Sharpton's message is all of a sudden going to sound pretty hollow, isn't it?

And wouldn't that be just too bad?

I can see Jackson now, opening a hot dog stand for the tourists on Constitution Avenue (within view of the White House! YESSS!) and counting on his name to build the clientele: "Jesse's Snacks For Snivelers! Best In The City! Get 'Em While They're Hot!"

As for Sharpton, there's no question in my mind as to the best post-Obama career choice for him. That guy has "pimp" written all over him. Right down to the hair.

Now watch him try to sue me. Sorry, Sharpton, I read up on libel. You're a public figure and that makes you fair game.

Now, as for the other salubrious effect I see coming out of an Obama presidency, well, it's the same something that my very best friend, die-hard liberal Jim Provenza used to try and get me to vote for John Kerry in 2004. "If you vote for Kerry," Jim explained, "Hillary will be out of the picture until 2012. Because the party in power always renominates the incumbent." You know, that was actually a good argument. I didn't vote for Kerry, but if I had, that would have been my reason. I couldn't think of another, that's all.

Now here comes that argument again. Same principle, four years later. If Obama wins, we're rid of the Clintons until 2016. Whether Obama gets re-elected in 2012 or not is a moot point. If he's president, the Democrats will renominate him. It's a given. In 2016 Hillary Clinton will be almost 70. Not quite as old as McCain, but getting up there. Someone is sure to bring up her age as a factor, not to mention the fact that she lost the 2008 nomination to Obama.

My point is, if Obama becomes president, we stand a very good chance of not seeing the Clintons again for another eight years. I have no illusions; they're going to keep coming back until someone drives a wooden stake through both their hearts. But eight years without either of them around sure would be nice.

Oh, what am I saying? I won't know whether they're there or not. I'll be in my room with the door locked, reading Tolstoy.

Don't bother me unless it's important. You know, like telling me it's time for my annual checkup. And that I should be there on time. Next November.

What, Me Worry?

2008-10-21T10:13:00.006-04:00

I’ve had nearly two years to think about this, since the current presidential campaign, set to mercifully end in two weeks, began approximately two years ago.

Really, it did, didn’t it? Halfway through the second Bush administration, those who control what we see and hear on TV and in the newspapers became as restive as children on Christmas morning who can’t wait for it to be morning. You remember getting up at 4 a.m. to poke around in the dark under the tree and see what you got? Then your dad thought there might be burglars in the house, came out with a baseball bat and chased you back to bed?

That’s what the media did around mid-2006. They couldn’t wait for it to be Christmas morning, e.g. January, 2009. So they started hawking up Hillary, Barack and the rest of the gang even before the 2006 World Series was over. (For those who have forgotten, the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Detroit Tigers that time, revenge for 1968, when it went the other way.)

This has been the longest presidential campaign anyone has ever seen. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who will be glad to see it over and done with. It feels to me as if Barack Obama has been running for president since I was in college, and I was in college when Jimmy Carter was running for president. You know, back around the time Barack Obama was born.

So I’ve had plenty of time to think about how I’m going to deal with what the media are relentlessly, joyfully, orgasmically telling us is “inevitable:” “President Obama.” Ooh, all I have to do is say the name and I can hear the squeals of joy coming from 1150 15th St. NW. (For those of you who don’t live in Washington, D.C., that’s the address of the Washington Post, which even my friend Holly Inder, a Democrat, admits is so biased that it deserves to be called the official newsletter of the Democratic Party.)

I’m not voting for Obama. And anyone who suggests that it’s because of the color of his skin can wait for me to take my morning dump and then dine heartily on it. Were it not for the fact that he’s a crypto-Marxist whose political dues, if you want to call them that, were paid in the corrupt Chicago wardheeling machine, and who moreover has no problem rubbing elbows with ‘60s bomb-throwers and crazed hatemongering preachers, I probably would vote for him. I’m not voting for Barack Obama because I don’t like his politics. Period. I wish I did. But I don’t.

Furthermore, I expect an Obama presidency to yield little good for America outside of giving bubble-brained white liberals another opportunity to feel good about themselves. And frankly, I don’t care if the Lexus-driving crowd out there in Fairfax County that hasn’t gotten around to scraping the John Kerry stickers off its bumpers feels good about itself or not. I’m concerned about the well-being of the republic as a whole, and I don’t think a reincarnation of Jimmy Carter, the worst president of the 20th century, is what the republic needs, now or ever. And that’s exactly what I see Obama shaping up to be: another Carter. Another dithering feely-goody who smiles and makes speeches while America’s enemies overseas are building nuclear arsenals and sneering defiantly at what they see as the easily-exploitable weaknesses of the Great Satan. Obama thinks he can deal with people like Ahmadinejad by making nice with them? We’ll see what comes of that. I only hope that it isn’t a dirty bomb wiping out downtown Raleigh, NC, followed by the sound of snickering laughter from the shadows. But that’s what I more than half-expect once President Obama has made good on his promise to bring back September 10th and act like the next day never happened, then proceed to approach those whose wettest wet dream is to kill as many Americans as possible by offering them tea and cookies. Good luck.

I spent the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2001 riveted to my TV set with horror, as did millions of others. But when the next September 11 comes around, and Raleigh NC is in ruins, or Des Moines IA or wherever they decide to strike next, I don't want to hear about it. When President Obama has renamed Homeland Security The Peace Department in the name of making us more popular overseas, and made terrorism once again a game in we respond to bombs with subpoenas, don't ring my phone.

I’m serious. I live in Washington. More than likely they will strike again here, not in Raleigh or Des Moines. And when they do, President Obama will be busy signing legislation to raise taxes, not for defending our country from global terrorism, but for more federal giveaway programs and an expanded bureaucracy. It’s going to be 1965 again, which is what all those aging former hippies out there who now teach Comparative Literature and Gender Studies in America’s universities are secretly whispering to themselves. They’ll be young again; it’ll be the summer of love again. Maybe the word “groovy” will come back.

But when President Obama and I both go up in smoke, (I live about four miles from the White House) let my last thinks all be thanks, as W.H. Auden wrote. I don’t want to know. He’ll be busy building socialism while the house burns; I’ll be reading William Blake. On the day Obama is inaugurated, I’m canceling my subscription to the newspaper and all my magazines except Gramophone and IndyCar. I already don’t watch television, so I don’t have to worry about that, but I’m going to change my home page to poetry.com or perhaps catfancier.com. People like Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon are always threatening to leave the country if the Republicans win (and you’ll notice they never do.) I can’t afford to leave the country, and furthermore I live right in the cross-hairs, not in Hollywood where it’s nice and safe.

But for the four years which, I hope, is all it will take for America to get over the idea that life is just one big Oprah Winfrey Show and that if you hear a big kaboom somewhere, all you have to do is hit the “play again?” button and go back to your video screen, I’ll be ensconced with Yeats, Thomas Hardy and perhaps the Venerable Bede, who was writing when the dust of the Roman empire had not yet cleared and it wasn’t safe to go outside.

In one of his earliest songs, written when he was obviously quite young, Paul Simon wrote, “I have my books and my poetry to protect me.” He was thinking of frustrated love, I’m sure. I’m thinking of something much more ominous. I am a rock, I am an island. Knock before you enter. I’ll have the music turned up loud. I always said I wanted Mozart to be the last thing I hear before I depart this earth.

Rabbit Gets Old

2008-10-10T12:04:00.011-04:00

I'm in California at the moment, preparing to leave for a family reunion in Reno, NV this weekend. I flew in from Washington, D.C. on Tuesday so I could spend a couple of days with my old pal Jim Provenza and his wife Donna. They're "empty nesters" now, which I guess is the comfortable euphemism we Baby Boomers have finally managed to come up with for "senior citizen."

For reading on the plane and in those quiet pre-dawn moments that east-to-west jet lag always gives me, I have brought along, and am re-reading John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich, the third installment in his 40-year tetralogy project chronicling the fate of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom which began with Rabbit, Run in 1960, continued through three more full-length novels published between 1971 and 1990, and then rounded off with a fifth installment, the epiloque-ish Rabbit Remembered (2000).

I've read the entire Rabbit series, some of them more than once. But I have an especially personal relationship with this third installment, published in 1981. I was enjoying a brief tenure in the fall of that year as Sunday book reviewer for the Vacaville Reporter, a newspaper in Solano County, California on which I was a staff writer in those days, covering education mostly. Book reviewing was a side thing I did primarily for kicks. But the Sunday features editor was a good friend and she was glad to have my contributions. I reviewed Rabbit Is Rich
when it was first published. I also turned 26 that fall, the exact same age as Harry Angstrom in the first installment of the series, Rabbit, Run.

That review no longer exists. I lost almost all of my book review clippings in the many moves I've made since then. But it doesn't matter; at 26 I remember being most impressed with Updike's chops, as most of his readers are. He was one of the most dazzlingly gifted writers of his generation. But I had a few critical things to say about this novel even when I was 26, and now that the novel is a year older than I was when I first read it, I have a few more. By the way, at the time I reviewed Rabbit Is Rich for the Reporter I was sinking into a clinical depression, one strand of which was that very fact that I had just turned 26. As Truman Capote once said, "Here I am 26, and I wanted always to be 25." Suddenly turning 26 gave me a nauseating sensation of no longer being in my early twenties. I felt encroaching old age rapping on the door, or at least lurking over the next hill. Now I'm re-reading the novel, and I'm exactly twice the age I was when I read it for the first time.

I like to think that I'm aging well, (I recently took up oil painting with a vengeance) but I have to say that this novel has not. It has some features that seem built-in to sabotage any eventual status as a classic, although who knows? Perhaps the tetralogy as a whole will gain "classic" status among the 4,500 people in America who will still be reading novels in 2060 as a cultural artifact of the century before. But I suspect that Rabbit Is Rich will not stand on its own for very many years.

For one thing, Updike was a member of that generation of American writers who suddenly found themselves liberated in the early 1960s by such events as the lifting of the ban on Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer to write just as frankly and candidly about sex as they wanted, using any and all words they wanted. "Fuck" no longer had to be rendered as F***. Understandably, they swam like dolphins in this new freedom, and the watchword of the 1960s in the literary game was sexual freedom. No holds were barred.

By the time Erica Jong published Fear of Flying in 1974, it had been a full five years since Philip Roth had created what might be called bookchat's last sexual scandal when he published the riotous Portnoy's Complaint, an ode to sexual neurosis with a steady ground bass of masturbation. By then sex had just about shot its wad as far as the potential to shock anybody. Fear of Flying's novelty lay in being the first Tropic of Cancer clone written by a woman. When I was paring down the manuscript of my own novel Tower-102 in 1994, assisted by Al Lefcowiz of the Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD, he was particularly insistent that I carve out nearly all descriptions of characters having sex. "We needed this in 1960," Al said. "We don't really need it anymore."

In 1981 that memo had apparently not reached Updike's desk. Harry Angstrom in the novel, who carries the nickname "Rabbit" from his days as a high school basketball star, is by the time this story opens a 48 year-old man, a Toyota dealer with a troubled past, a drunken wife and a more-than-a-little annoying, whiny, nearly grown-up son. But Harry at 48 is as wildly obsessed with sex as any American teenager. This betrays his origins as a 1960s character. By 1981 he seems somehow out of his time. I failed to note that in my 1981 review; we were still too close in time to the novel's origins (the story takes place in 1979) and I didn't quite have the perspective to notice that, although I do remember writing that the author seemed fixated upon the world's genitalia, a quality which, as I pointed out, Updike shared with his contemporary Norman Mailer. The wife-swapping episode in the Caribbean near the end of the novel is so pre-AIDS as to be quaint beyond quaint in 2008.

But the sex-rich sauce that's ladled over Angstrom's tale is only one of the book's flaws. From the long view, it seems to me a little too obvious that by the time Updike wrote Rabbit Is Rich, he was rich enough himself to be able to afford a team of researchers to do his legwork for him. And it shows like a too-loud necktie. The novel wears its research on its sleeve: the snappy to-and-fro between Harry and his employee Charlie Stavros, who handles the used cars while Harry sells the new ones, is just a bit too facile, as if Updike were showing off his recently-gained insider's knowledge of how a Toyota dealership is run.

Also, in each entry of the Rabbit series, Updike becomes increasingly hellbent upon creating a realistic stage for his story and giving the novel contemporary verisimilitude. By the third volume he's throwing around cultural trivia like Jackson Pollock throwing paint. Does anyone really care anymore, outside of Rams and Steelers fans, who won the 1980 Super Bowl game? And his characters spend endless amounts of restaurant and dinner-table chitchat pontificating about what's wrong with the world in 1979. It's like you're constantly being preached at, and the theme of the sermon comes from today's headlines. Only they're not today's headlines, they're the headlines of the late Carter Administration. If Updike had used a conventional first-or-third person narrative in the past tense, this might have been a formula for a period classic as surefire as The Great Gatsby. But this novel, and in fact the entire Rabbit series, is written entirely in the present tense. That's a fine device for making the reader feel that he or she is right in the middle of an unfolding story -- it really keeps the action moving along. The problem arises when Updike's characters begin talking in the present tense about things like Jimmy Carter, standing in gas lines, Three Mile Island and how the Japanese automakers are kicking Detroit's butt. 1979 was a long time ago, and while all of this gave the novel a bracingly "now" feel in 1981, today it gives it the look of a postcard turning yellow.

Imagine if Scott Fitzgerald had written The Great Gatsby in the present tense. I wince to think of it: "Gatsby gets up from his chair and walks across the yard near the pool. He's thinking that this Prohibition business really brings out the contours in the American soul. But what the hell, he decides. It's making him rich, and as for the contours in the American soul, well, someone's always doing something to bring those out, aren't they? Like this new dance everyone's doing, the Charleston. Gatsby actually thinks people dancing the Charleston look fairly idiotic, but then reminds himself that the country is living through times that might be thought idiotic by the same standards with which he's judging the Charleston, what with the flagpole-sitting and raccoon coats and all that. The world is always ending, but new people keep showing up too dumb to know it and thinking that the fun's just getting started."

I doubt whether Gatsby would have become a classic written like that. Rather, it would have become an instant relic-of-an-era, noteworthy today only as a distant mirror on the 1920s. The kind of a book that writers like Updike would be re-assessing 60 years later in think pieces written for The New Yorker and deciding that that it was better than they originally thought when they read it in college for History 432, a survey of the American cultural and social scene between the two world wars.

If I'm still around in another 10 years, I'll be back to see how the next volume, Rabbit At Rest, is holding up. I'm not real optimistic, though. From my last re-reading I remember that he mentions things like Garry Larson's Far Side cartoons and the reruns on the Nickelodeon network, and both of those things seem awfully "'90s" even now.

The Boys of (Indian) Summer

2008-09-22T08:19:00.004-04:00

CONTENT WARNING: THIS BLOG POSTING WILL BE OF INTEREST ONLY TO MY FELLOW BASEBALL FANS. IF YOU'RE THE SORT WHO JUST DOESN'T CARE THAT THIS YEAR THE CHICAGO CUBS MIGHT BE IN THEIR FIRST WORLD SERIES SINCE 1945, OR THAT YANKEE STADIUM JUST CLOSED AFTER 85 YEARS, OR THAT C.C. SABATHIA JUST MIGHT BE THE HOTTEST THING SINCE BOB FELLER, YOU'RE EXCUSED.

Well, here we are again. Today is September 22. Autumn officially begins at 11:44 this morning.

And not a moment too soon, if you ask me. My wife Valerie and I were out at Nationals Park here in Washington, D.C. yesterday watching two-thirds of the Three Stooges of baseball whack each other with custard pies. The hometown Washington Nationals and my hometown San Diego Padres were duking it out to see which team would be the first to board the bus for Palookaville.

The Padres won the game 6-2, actually sweeping the Nationals in a three-game series of Slapstick September Fun. Decision: the Friars get to hold the bus door while the Nats get settled in for the ride. But as soon as they've stowed their gear, they'll be next. Then it's off to Seattle to pick up the even-more pathetic Mariners, and Larry, Moe and Curly are off into the sunset for this year.

How yucko has it been? At the beginning of the game, the two teams had nearly identical win-loss records for the season: 58-97 for the Nats, 60-95 for the Padres. That's baseball's equivalent of driving past an open sewer. As of this bright, cool Monday morning when the hint of fall is just beginning to insinuate itself, the Nationals are 30 games out in the National League eastern division, in dead last place. The Padres are 20 games out in the National League western division, likewise in dead-last place.

This was like watching a war between Burkina Faso and Gabon, two countries that would probably have to float a loan to buy bullets.

The Nats and Padres will both be spending the winter trying to buy bullets, bet on it. But they'll be trying to get them cheap, which has been both teams' problem in recent seasons. The Padres need one thing more than any other: a reliable power hitter. They went shopping for one last winter, but decided all the power hitters were too expensive and acquired more pitching instead, which, with Jake Peavy, Chris Young and company, they already had plenty of. (Picture me pointing my index finger at my temple, a German gesture meaning "MORON(S).")

The result of such parsimony has been on display all season, and nowhere more than at Nationals Park yesterday. The Padres struck out no less than 15 times during the game, mostly against the excellent pitching of Washington's Odalis Perez, whom I was fortunate enough to see last week pitching seven innings of shutout ball against the New York Mets. I had two buddies from out of town, Doug Parker and Jay Arnold, visiting me last week, and we went to the ballpark to see that game. Doug, Jay and I, like all right-thinking people, hate all New York sports teams, and we cheered, if less than lustily, the Nats' 1-0 victory over the Mets. (The best part of watching either the Mets or the Yankees lose is not so much what you get to see as what you get to hear: their obnoxious, loudmouth-gorilla fans growing quieter and quieter as each inning goes by, until there's nothing left but slack jaws and blank, sheepish stares. You gotta love that.)

Yesterday's game put one in mind of two prizefighters trying to slug it out with the lights in the arena shut off. Kevin Kouzmanoff hit a two-run double in the first, then there was no offensive action on either side until Adrian Gonzales' solo homer in the sixth. Ryan Zimmerman, the only National with anything close to a dependable bat, replied with a solo shot of his own in the bottom of the sixth. The Padres scored three more runs in the eighth when Zimmerman committed an error, then Adrian Gonzales walked on a full count, sending Edgar Gonzales to second. There followed a flurry of hits that brought in both Gonzaleses and Kouzmanoff. Zimmerman struck again in the eighth with a single that scored Ryan Langerhans.

There was some grumbling among Nationals fans in our section when umpire Paul Emmel clearly blew a call, ruling Edgar Gonzales safe at first on a play when it was clear, even from where we were sitting along left field, that Aaron Boone had applied the tag before Gonzales stepped on first. But if you ask me, that's a little bit like the crew of the Titanic complaining that they weren't getting paid overtime. One blown call does not a game make, and in this case, on the 21st of September, with your team 30 games out of first place, well, let's just say that it doesn't make much difference whether you drown in 80 feet of water or 90 feet of water. Either way you've drowned. I was astonished two weeks ago to read that one of the Padres' players, I forget who, had told a sportswriter that he was a little disappointed now that the team had been numerically eliminated from postseason contention.

Excuse me. Did I miss something here? I thought this team was out of contention back in May.

But I'm a fan. We fans regard the role of sore loser as an entitlement, and we tend to be bitter.

Anabasis -- Greek for "not quite at the bottom" and the title of Xenophon's inspiring story of the march of the lost patrol of 10,000 Greeks who had to get back to their own territory after an engagement with the Persians. Washington's Anabasis moment this offseason could be getting the No. 1 pick in next summer's draft, an honor baseball awards each season's stinkiest team as a consolation prize. But lo and behold, the Seattle Mariners, over in the other league, who are at this moment playing .368 ball to the Nat's .372 and are 39 games out in their division, just might beat out Washington even for the title of Miss Congeniality.

But there is poetry even in misfortune. Word is that if the Nationals DO get the first draft pick next summer, they might select Stephen Strasburg, a right-handed pitcher from my own alma mater: San Diego State. So the Padres managed to play just rotten enough ball this season to avoid getting to select a hot young prospect from their own backyard. Geeze.

Oh, well. As I said before, it's power hitting the Padres really need, not more pitching. That goes double when they're playing at home, since Petco Park in San Diego has an outfield roughly the size of Wyoming. So I'll be holding my breath during the days of the hot stove league this winter to see if someone manages to persuade Padre ownership to get out a crowbar and pry open its coin purse and try to acquire just one reliable bat.

How many more seasons in Zimmerman's contract, by the way?

It's times like this I wish I liked football.

The Stumbling Gourmet Returns

2008-09-05T08:57:00.007-04:00

With all the bloggers in America screaming about Sarah Palin vs. Joe Biden, I have the following sage observation to add to all of this political flamethrowing:

I have just discovered that Tropicana Blueberry/Pomegranate juice makes a great mix with white rum. Next I'm going to try their Peach/Mango juice with a little Bacardi and see how that tastes.

Two weeks ago I learned through doing that you can actually make excellent lasagna in a slow cooker. That's correct. You can make good lasagna in your good old crockpot. And it's not that hard, either.

The recipe calls of course for spaghetti sauce, but I'm proud to say that in the lasagna I made, the sauce was made from tomatoes picked from my own garden. This summer just past I decided to follow in my Dad's footsteps and plant a summer crop of tomatoes, as he used to do every year. And I've gotten a bumper crop: since early August they've been coming in faster than I can eat them. I've already got a batch of spaghetti sauce in the freezer, and I've been passing out tomatoes to my friends and neighbors, as my father and I used to do during those glorious California summers of watching baseball in the living room and tending tomatoes out by the back fence. Truth to tell, the tomatoes have been a godsend this summer; they've helped keep my mind off the stinko year that my San Diego Padres have been having: dead-last place, 17 games out, playing .387 ball.

I have tickets to the Sept. 21 Padres-Nationals game here in Washington, D.C. It ought to be a real Perils-of-Pauline cliffhanger: the Friars and the Nats will be duking it out to see who gets to share the worst record in baseball with the Seattle Mariners over in the other league.

To rub salt in my wounds, every time I turn on MLB Extra Innings, I see ex-Padres all over the tube. Good players that San Diego brain-farted itself out of: Mark Kotsay is with the Boston Red Sox now; Mike Cameron and Ramon Hernandez are both playing for the Milwaukee Brewers; Mark Loretta plays in Houston and Xavier Nady just signed with the New York Yankees. I watched Nady hit the first grand slam of his career against Atlanta three seasons ago. Now he's in pinstripes and the Padres are in the toilet.

Pardon me while I program February 15, the beginning of spring training, into my Microsoft Office alerts, and prepare to hibernate for the winter.

End of digression. You want to know how to make excellent lasagna in your slow cooker, right?

Here's what you do. Get:

A jar of spaghetti sauce (28 oz.)

half-a-dozen or so uncooked lasagna noodles

2 cups mozzarella cheese

15 oz. ricotta cheese

1/4 grated parmesan

1 lb. ground beef (optional)

Spread some of the sauce over the bottom of your crockpot. Bust up the lasagna noodles into 1-2 inch chunks and spread a layer over the sauce. Mix the three kinds of cheese up in a bowl. Sprinkle the cheese over the noodles, then cover with sauce, lay down another layer of busted-up noodles and do the same. If you want meat in your lasagna, brown the ground beef, season with salt, pepper and oregano and lay down a layer of beef between your second or third layer of sauce, noodles and cheese.
Cover your top layer with the last of your sauce and sprinkle with the last of your mozzarella. Cook on low 3-4 hours until cheese melts. When you're getting ready to serve, sprinkle parmesan over the top and cook for another 30 minutes.

I don't know where we all got the idea that Labor Day is the end of the grilling season, even here on the east coast. I walked into my local Safeway over in Hyattsville, MD on Monday, which was Labor Day, and all the charcoal was gone. The check-out cashier asked me, "Are you grilling today?" "I guess not." Labor Day does NOT signal the end of summer, I don't care what any kid moping around in anticipation of the first day of school says. Last year I had a contract job in a government office that required male employees to wear neckties. However they were given a break for the summer: as of Memorial Day you could take your necktie off, but you had to put it back on come Labor Day.

We guys discussed the absurdity of this. Here in Washington, when Labor Day comes around, you're still looking at three or four more weeks of 90-degree heat. We all agreed that Oct. 1 would be a more reasonable date for back-to-noose.

And so it was that last night, Sept. 4, I decided to grill outside. Safeway had replenished its charcoal supply by then. Back-to-School or no, it was 92 Fahrenheit, 33 Celsius here in Washington yesterday and I didn't feel like turning on the oven.

My neighbor Verna Williams, who when it comes to gardening makes me look like Oliver Douglas on Green Acres, gave me two big, beautiful red bell peppers from her garden. Trying to decide how to appropriately honor such a bounty, I decided to try my hand at a simple grilling treat I'd never made before. My Russian friends call it shashlik. We Americans tend to call it shish kebab.

Now, most shish kebab recipes call for beef sirloin tip. That's okay, but I'm kind of a traditionalist: Russian shashlik is made with lamb, not beef. Ideally, I would have found a 2-lb. lamb roast, but all Safeway had were lamb chops, so I bought four of them, trimmed the meat away from the bones and gave my doggies a lamb-bone treat, then diced up the lamb chops.

Another good thing to have handy when you're making shashlik is a box of Band-Aids for when you poke your fingers with those sharp little sticks on which you skewer your meat and vegetables.

But before you even get that far, you should marinate the meat of course. Here's the marinade I used. I can recommend it:

3/4 cup water
5 tbsp. soy sauce
3 tbsp. cooking oil
3 tbsp. vinegar
1 tsp. dry mustard
1 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
2 tbsp. brown sugar

Mix it all up in a bowl and toss in the meat for an hour or so.

The rest (after the meat):

Red bell pepper
Green bell pepper
sliced onion
Sliced large mushrooms

After that I skewered, alternately ("as great Malherbes alternates male and female rhymes,") lamb chunk, red bell pepper, onion, green bell pepper, big fat mushroom. Repeat until everything's gone. You ought to have about six shish kebabs when you're done, and two bandaged fingers. Season to taste with seasoned salt and pepper. Grill, turning regularly, about 20 minutes. Serve on a bed of rice.

Now...For those who missed my, and my friend Chris McDonald's, trip to Kansas City last June to attend the 13th semi-annual Ernest Hemingway conference, here once again is the recipe for Hemingway's famous daquiri known as a "Papa Doble" ("Made a run of 16 in here one night," Hemingway is said to have boasted to an interlocutor at the Floridita Bar in Havana):

2 jiggers (3 oz.) white rum
The juice of two limes
The juice of half a grapefruit
Six drops Grenadine (or cherry brandy)

Fill blender 1/4 with crushed ice. Pour the mixture over the ice and blend until it becomes pink and frothy. Serve in a margarita glass.

Made correctly, these have a fruity taste and are quite delicious. If you find that the grapefruit juice makes the drink a little too tart, you can add more grenadine to make it sweeter. My wife Valerie is a real alcohol wimp, so when I make one of these for her, I cut the rum portion in half. You might want to consider a similar mitigating factor for the alcohol wimps in your life.

I leave you with one of my favorite quotations from Francis Albert Sinatra (1915-1998):

"I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day."

Ring-a-ding-ding.

Growing Up With A Funny Name

2008-08-23T09:44:00.018-04:00

"Lunch is gonna taste awful!"

I had my first name legally changed in 1999. According to the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Social security Administration, my name is Alexander Kelley Dupuis.

But it wasn’t always.

I’ve been blogging for four years, but actually, I was blogging before there were any such things as blogs. I’ve kept a journal all my life.

There were no blogs in 1988. There was no Internet in 1988. But I wrote the following essay in Brasilia, Brazil in the late summer of that year.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret here. Actually, it’s not a secret at all, but a matter of public record. My whole family knows it; anyone who’s known me since I was a child knows it, the State of California knows it and I’m sure the federal government probably knows it, although I have made every effort to expunge all evidence of it from my personal records ever since I entered on duty with the government.

It’s simply this: “Kelley” isn’t my first name. It’s my middle name. I tell people it’s my first name and when they ask me what my middle name is, I tell them I don’t have one. If I’m pressed for my full legal name on an official form, I fill it in surreptitiously, covering the page with one arm so the guy standing next to me won’t see what I’m writing in that space marked “First,” right after “Last” and just before “Middle Initial.”

One time a highway patrolman pulled me over to give me a speeding ticket on Interstate 5 between Sacramento and Red Bluff, California. He wanted to be friendly, and after looking at my driver’s license he addressed me by my legal first name. “Please, be a nice guy and call me ‘Kelley,’” I said.

That’s right: you can take my license, you can run my plates, you can slander my name all over the states, (as long as it’s “Kelley.”) You can write me for going 70 instead of 55, but please, please don’t ever call me “Wirt.”

That syllable makes my neck flush. Every time I hear it (which is seldom anymore, thank God) suddenly I know how Hester Prynne felt. The very sound of it opens a floodgate of bad memories. I had it hung around my neck at birth and there it stayed until I was 15 and finally decided that I was tired of being made to feel like a visitor from another planet every time roll was called in home room. I exerted my adolescent will and forced everyone to the still relatively-unusual but at least not extraterrestrial sound of my middle name.

The transition was actually made quite smoothly. I think I had a lot of sympathizers. My father certainly sympathized; in fact he went so far as to tell me that he had wanted “Kelley” to be my first name to begin with. It comes from one of my dad’s old Border Patrol cronies, Rex Kelley.

My first move to make the change official came when I put in for my Social Security number. I filled out the form as “Kelley Dupuis,” and as far as the SSA is concerned, that’s my name until me and my SSN go up the chimney.

Now, I’ve told you how I came to be called “Kelley,” so I’ll tell you how I came to be called…that other thing. It seems my father just deferred to my mother on the subject. I was the second of three children and he had chosen my older sister’s name, so I guess he figured it was my mother’s turn to choose. She chose badly. She proceeded to stick me with the surname of a Protestant minister she admired, Dr. Williston Wirt. I doubt she had any idea that “Wirt” is the German word for “Tavern-keeper,” and that yoking a name like that to so thoroughly French a surname as “Dupuis” was perfectly idiotic. My mother is innocent of any foreign language, such that I remember one night over dinner she asked my father, who speaks both French and Spanish, the meaning of this word “merde” she kept coming across in novels. My mother wouldn’t say “merde” if she had a mouthful of it, and at the answer she blushed furiously. No, she couldn’t have known she was naming me Barkeep, but she wanted to give a warm fuzzy to the minister who had held her hand through a divorce in an era when women seldom divorced.

It should surprise no one that as soon as I became old enough, I became Catholic. And when I was baptised and they told me I could take a new name, I did. Later I just made it legal, taking my ecclesiastical name as my actual name.

The question I never got around to asking my mother was this: if she was so bound and determined to give Dr. Williston Wirt a warm fuzzy by sticking me with his absurd name, why “Wirt?’ Why not “Williston?” At least that way the kids on the playground would probably have called me “Will” or “Willis,” neither of which is the greatest name in the world, but either of them beats the hell out of “Wirt.” They are at least names used by other people who live on this planet. I’m sure either one would have saved me innumerable taunts, scuffles and fistfights.

I read in a Sunday supplement a few years ago that someone had conducted a study and found that children who are given oddball names at birth have a greater likelihood of growing up to be criminals than those who aren’t. Or if not criminals, at least social outcasts of various kinds. Dweezil Zappa, Cher’s daughter Chastity and Grace Slick’s son God were all spared this because, as the children of celebrities they’ve had to be accustomed all their lives to being set apart. Besides, as old Frank Zappa himself once pointed out, in the San Fernando Valley a name like “Dweezil” or “Moon Unit” isn’t going to get you a second glance anyway.

But if you’re just an average kid, and don’t have a parent who regularly turns up in People magazine, having a strange name hung on you at birth is almost like being born with an eye where your ear is supposed to be. From your very first day of kindergarten you have it drilled into your head every morning that you are strange, fundamentally different from all the other kids.

I can still hear my kindergarten teacher, a red-haired beauty named Cydne Roberts (she’d be in her sixties now) calling roll. Seaside Elementary School, Torrance, California. Autumn, 1960. “Jimmy Anderson?” “Sally Burnett?” “Tommy Condit?” “Wirt Dupuis?”

Pardon me while I have a hot flash. Well, at least Miss Roberts knew how to pronounce my last name. It was bad enough being called “Wirt,” but as often as not on the first day of school I would also have to listen to my American teachers mangling my French last name: “Doo-pwah,” “Doo-pew,” “Doo-pewis,” “Doopis,” “Duppis.” These mispronunciations invariably prompted a chorus of giggles and head-turnings in my direction, which in turn would make me wish I were “on some Australian mountain range,” as Bob Dylan put it.

I spent a lot of time during my young years wishing I were on some Australian mountain range or the equivalent.

My teachers thought I had an attitude problem. Jesus, wouldn’t you? They were forever complaining to my parents about what a sullen little smart-aleck I was. Well, yeah. I mean, what the hell did they know about it? Their names were all Donna and William and Robert and Larry and Betty and Diane. They had never been cornered on the playground by little thugs named Frank and Billy and taunted with cries of “Ha-ha, Wirt the squirt.”

Were they kidding with that “bad attitude” stuff? They’re lucky I didn’t grow up and become the neighborhood chainsaw slayer. Children get spanked, as well they should, when they make fun of handicapped people. But I never saw a kid get spanked for making fun of another kid's name, and if you ask me, having a goofy name is just a subtler form of being disabled. Forgive my strong feelings about this, but I think the little bastards should be boiled in oil, especially if their names are Frank or Billy.

I’m not trying to say that my name lay at the root of all the problems I had when I was growing up, but there were a few areas where being thus set apart from my peers made me feel that I was at an authentic disadvantage from the start and hence, my confidence wasn’t what it might have been.

And you know what I’m talking about now. Yes. Girls. Until I was in my twenties I could never get anywhere with girls. I think in high school I went out on one date. I skipped my senior prom, stayed home and watched The Tonight Show. Of course, by the time I was a high school senior I had already made the transition to “Kelley,” but the damage had been done long before. Imagine what it’s like to be in the sixth grade and in the throes of the first great crush of your life, and when you finally manage to muster the courage to walk up to the object of your adoration and so thoroughly take the ultimate fate of the universe into your hands as to utter a syllable to her, say, “Hello” for instance: “Hello, Patty.” “Hi, Wirt.” The exchange might as well have been “Hello, Earthling,” “Hi, Martian.”

It set the tone for the entire next decade. Until my second year of college all my relationships with girls were one-sided. I thought unrequited love was just going to be the way it was for me. My first name wasn’t solely to blame for this, but it was the little ur-embarrassment at the bottom of it all. Even after I became “Kelley,” “Wirt” remained my nerdy little Doppelgaenger, shadowing me everywhere, ready to jump out from behind a bush at any moment and whisper in my ear, “Who do you think you are, talking to girls, freak?”

The other boys interested in Patty had names like Bobby and Wesley. Wesley was the one she really liked. His father was the coach of the Ream Field Navy boxing team, and Wesley talked and acted just like his father. A little tough guy. He was always warning me to stay away from Patty. You’re damn right I was afraid of him, the little asshole. He needn’t have bothered with the threats, though. Patty had no interest in anything so exotic as a boy named Wirt. She had health oozing out of every pore, in fact it had spilled over and created a second one of her—she and her sister Penny were identical twins. I never could decide which of them I was crazier about. But Patty was in my class, so I saw her more often. Incidentally if you want to know the meaning of true suffering, and I mean suffering right up there in the big leagues with Van Gogh and Dostoevsky, try having a horrific crush on twin sisters, neither of whom will give you the time of day.

I used to watch Wesley and Patty walk off the playground together at the end of the day. To this day I wonder what they talked about; Wesley just barely had the power of speech. But there they were: Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm, if you know that story. Well, yeah, Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroeger also had a “name problem;” I suppose being named “Tonio” in northern Germany 130 years ago was as bad as being named “Wirt” in California during the 1960s. But if you had given me the choice, there would have been no contest. As “Tonio” I would have been called “Tony” on the playground, and I had a friend named Tony who was quite popular.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably rolling your eyeballs by now. ‘He’s too sensitive,” you’re saying. “He’s too thin-skinned.” “He’s making a big deal out of nothing.” Well, let me put it this way: if I had been a champion debater or a hellacious quarterback or president of the student council, perhaps I might not be writing this now. Indeed, perhaps I might not have switched to my middle name in the middle of the 10th grade. I wouldn’t have found it necessary. But I was a kid who was average or below average in almost every way. I got B’s and C’s in most subjects at school, and F’s in math. The only subject in which I ever got an “A” was English. I was a substandard athlete and, in the pecking order of elementary, junior high and high school, I ranked somewhere down there with stewed prunes. I’m not saying I would have been a big man on the campus if my parents had named me James or Robert, but if you don’t have any particularly outstanding abilities to begin with, being stuck with a wacky name on top of everything else certainly doesn’t help any.

So what do you do? Some people compensate for their liabilities by becoming overachievers. I have wondered, for example, how much taunting millionaire Armand Hammer had to put up with as a child. I like to think that amassing his tremendous fortune was one way of getting back at the little schoolyard scumbags who no doubt danced around him in a circle chanting, “Baking Soda! Baking Soda! You’re a loada Baking Soda!” Now he could buy any one of them ten times over and sign the check “Armand Hammer” with a flourish (and a $1,000 Montblanc pen.)

A lot of people try to overcome a handicap by excelling at something. I read somewhere that Somerset Maugham took up writing novels because he had a speech impediment. But some people allow it to beat them, allow their “otherness” to snowball and bring them to grief. As my high school psychology teacher used to say, “It isn’t what happens to you that’s important,” it’s how you react to it.” Boy, would I like to meet the optimist who cooked up that line of baloney! The same guy, no doubt, who came up with the cliché “When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade.” I go with Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes on this one: when life deals me a lemon, I chuck it back and add a few of my own.

I wonder how many people actually succeed at turning their liabilities into assets? Stephen Hawking didn’t become a great physicist because he had Lou Gehrig’s disease, but in spite of it. But something like Lou Gehrig’s disease, or being born with no arms, or Somerset Maugham’s speech impediment for that matter, is an act of nature and there isn’t much you can do about it except carry on as best as you can. And I suppose the same can be said of being named “Marlwark.” But the difference, and what a difference it is, is that physical disabilities are acts of nature. Wacky first names are not.

Which leads me to my main point: WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH PARENTS? Don’t they realize what they’re doing to a child when they name it Dorcas or Cadwalladr? Sometimes I think it’s just sadism, pure and simple, and I find it disturbing that anyone could be rotten enough to give a newborn baby the appelatory equivalent of a hot-foot. But I’ve seen some cases that definitely smack of the seltzer bottle in the delivery room, such as the man named Dover whose parents named him Ben, and who moreover had a sister named Eileen. My mother had a friend who was unfortunate enough to have the surname Pigg, and her parents named her Ima. Who could hate a baby that much? Admittedly, babies are noisy and expensive and few people get a bang out of yellow poo-poo, but the kid didn’t ask to be born, and I think if you treat him/her like the rubber chicken in a vaudeville sketch, you’re not just a bad parent, but a sick s.o.b.

Yes, Jolly Joker parents are exceptions. Most people regard the birth of an heir as something simultaneously more solemn and more joyous than an occasion for some great gags. I think much more often parents just don’t think, or their good intentions are misdirected. Who among us, on first viewing that adorable little bundle who looks like Yoda the Jedi Master for the first few days, is consciously thinking about what day-to-day life is going to be like for the little tyke when he’s in the seventh grade? Not very many, I’ll bet. Surely not my mother, who was thinking of Dr. Wirt and not of me. I think usually parents are thinking along the lines of A. What name would sound good with Smith, Jones or Garcia, or B. Are we going to name this child after Great Uncle Willard so he’ll put him in his will?

My sympathies, for understandable reason, lie more with aesthetic consideration. But that, too, has its pitfalls, as in this particularly ridiculous case in point, which, as Dave Barry used to say, I am not making up. A girl with whom I went to high school got married three years after graduation. Her husband’s name was Steve Bourgeois. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being named “Bourgeois” unless you’re planning to go after Mikhail Gorbachev’s job. But when her first child came along, this young woman decided that, having acquired a French name through marriage, she would give the situation a good, solid underscoring in the naming of her new daughter. She decided to give the poor little girl a name as French as a plateful of escargot swimming in butter. Unfortunately, in choosing the name, she displayed all the taste of someone who buys a portrait of Elvis painted on black velvet.

“Desiree.”

Can you imagine? “Desiree Bourgeois.” Remember that scene in Woody Allen's Radio Days when Julie Kavner, eight months pregnant, tells her husband she’s mulling the name “Lola” for their daughter?

“Lola? What do you, want her to be a stripper?” he replies.

Eek. In 1988, the year this essay was originally written, that little girl would have been 12 years old (Desiree, not the kid in the movie) and it’s my fervent hope that she had a happy childhood, but I’ll bet you a personalized license plate that that name didn’t help any. Not only did it sound like one-third of a Las Vegas lounge act, but you can imagine what those dumbbell teachers did with it on the first day of school each year from kindergarten to senior year. I can just hear the roll call now: “Jennifer Adams, Jennifer Anderson, Jennifer Ashworth, Jennifer Bentwell, and so on down through the Jennifers and Ashleys until they got to “De-sire Bor-jiss!” And I can picture the poor little girl shrinking to the size of a pack of Gitanes or a Renault Le Car from sheer mortification.

I can’t say what impact that horrible first name had on the early years of my life, probably not very much in truth. Because the truth is that kids in general are little shitheads and if they can’t turn you into an object of ridicule because of your name, they’ll find something else about you to ridicule. But I have made one rather comforting discovery in the past couple of years, and I don’t know why it never occurred to me before.

It’s simple: we are legion, we “midnight masqueraders” who go by our middle names. I am just one of millions who find their legal name so unpalatable that they have substituted something else for it. I have a friend whose legal name is “Elzey,” and if you call him that he just might punch your lights out depending on what sort of mood he’s in. His name, by his own say-so, is “Bob.” And where I work, at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, we have a Clarence who goes by “Gene” and a Julius who goes by “Art.” I don’t blame either of them, nor do I blame the foreign service officer I knew in Frankfurt whose driver’s license said “Clyde,” but who signed his name “Buck.” If my name were Clyde, I’d want to be called “Buck” too. And I’m just as sure that if his name were “Wirt,” he’d want to be called “Kelley.”

Then there are those who start out in life with such strikes against them that they might just throw in the towel and head for Superior Court with that petition before they get the diapers off. Remember Ben Dover and Ima Pigg? I can top those. Not long ago my supervisor walked into the office waving a local Brazilian newspaper and called my attention to an article about a spectacular traffic accident. He was laughing, telling us we just weren’t gonna BELIEVE this. He opened the paper, found the article, ran his finger over to the spot and said, “Here! Read that!”
“Arthur, this paper is in Portuguese,” I said. “I can’t read Portuguese.” (Arthur has a Brazilian wife and speaks the local lingo)

“You don’t have to read Portuguese,” he said. “Just look there! Look at the name of that witness they’re quoting!”

I looked. Bracketed in quotation marks was an eyewitness description of the accident’s aftermath by a local resident who saw the whole thing happen. He was identified as “Hitler Mussolini, 46.”

Unless he was hiding from his wife under an assumed name…well, and I thought I had problems.

Papa's Got A Brand-New Bag

2008-08-18T08:23:00.005-04:00

Godfrey Blow and Thierry Bisch, look out.

Yeah, I know you've never heard of them. You've never of me either.

They're PAINTERS. You know, people who paint. And I don't mean living rooms and bathrooms. I'm talking about ART. That about which none of us knows anything, but we all know what we like. Right?

Now, these two folks may be obscure, (I never heard of them either) but at least they're alive. One was born in 1948 and the other in '53. Two years before me, in other words. Same year as my wife. Obviously I didn't want to begin a blog posting with the words, "Leonardo da Vinci and Paul Cezanne, look out." Those guys are dead. There ain't nothing for them to look out for. Except maybe the mind-boggling price tags on their canvases when they go up for auction or get stolen from some museum in Switzerland.

That is correct. Old K.D. has taken up painting.

We will now pause for a moment while the art world shakes to its foundations.

Now, I've been dabbling in painting off and on for years. I'm one hell of a dabbler. At first I wanted to dabble in watercolors. That's because some of my favorite writers were watercolor-dabblers. D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, to name two. Lawrence was actually a pretty fair draftsman. He could draw. His watercolors are generally figurative and carefully-crafted. Miller, somewhat more to my taste, couldn't draw worth a damn and he didn't care. Some of his watercolors look like they were executed by a kid getting through a bad day at kindergarten. And I think he would be highly flattered to hear me say that. The angel was his watermark, exuberance his hallmark and "Paint as you like and die happy" his trademark. Miller painted for fun, and you can sure tell. He had nothing to say except S'agapo.

That's Greek for "I love you."

I'm with Miller. I just throw paint around. And I'm having a ball.

Down in my basement I have some of my old efforts. One or two aren't bad. There's a watercolor I excecuted in 1986, a still-life of my kitchen in Frankfurt, Germany. There's an oil canvas I did last winter, "Still Life With Radio," on which I toiled for three months. It's not very good.

The problem has been that I've been trying to do more-or-less traditional figurative art, and I'm not much better a draftsman than Miller. I can draw, I just can't draw very well. And it's not for lack of practice, either. Once upon a time I had a sketchbook and used to draw up a storm. But that was a long time ago.

I think the real problem is that drawing is work. If I want to work, I'll go outside and mow the lawn. When I paint I want to have fun.

So I decided to set figurative painting aside, for the moment anyway, and get a little crazy. I've executed two canvases in the past ten days. They appear above. To make up for the fact that I don't draw very well, I've incorporated collage technique into both of them, pulling recognizable images relevant to the theme I have in mind off the Internet, pasting them on the canvas and then painting around, and over them. Artists have been doing this for years. What the hell do I care that the idea didn't originate with me? I'm not looking to become the next Robert Rauchenberg. I'm looking to have myself a good old time on Saturday afternoon.

If you're interested, they do have themes, they do have ideas and they do have titles. I'm basically a writer. I can't tell a story without telling a story. The one predominated by bright reds, oranges and other colors is a tribute to the music of one of my favorite composers, Claudio Monteverdi. I call it "Homage to Claudio Monteverdi." Clever, huh?

The more subdued one, dominated by blues and greens and featuring collage-images of forests, rivers, great blue herons, the moon and stars is entitled "River Elegy." It's in memory of my younger sister Lynn, whose ashes were scattered in the Spokane River in Washington State in 2004.

And I must say that, original or not, I like what I've done so far. What the hell do I care if Art World wouldn't say the same? They can go choke on their pickled sharks and brie.

My sun room, which I use as an office, book depository, smoking room and now painting studio, is a cramped mess. It stinks of turpentine. I've already ruined the counter because I was dumb enough to put paint thinner in a plastic drinking cup and it ate right through the cup.

But clear the way nonetheless, all you gallery-mongers and chardonnay sippers out there trying to decide what the hell the person who stuffed that mayonnaise jar with horse dung and sunflower seeds is trying to say to the world.

My message to the world couldn't be clearer.

Paint as you like and die happy!

See ya.

Circle For A Landing

2008-08-08T08:30:00.004-04:00

Boy, you sure can tell it's August, can't you?

Congress is on its five-week paid vacation, the nation's capital is wheezing through the dog days of limpid heat and violent afternoon thunderstorms, and the news media just don't know what to do with themselves.

I have some experience in journalism myself, and I can tell you that reporters go nuts in August for lack of anything to write about. In England August is known as the "silly season," the month when the papers will play up any idiotic story they can find just to fill space.

Just in case anyone has forgotten, (and I'm sure plenty have) the run-up to September 11, 2001 was a real snoozer. Right up until the moment those airplanes slammed into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania, we consumers of news were being tube-fed one shark attack after another, the vicissitudes of the Dow-Jones Industrial Average (it passed 10,000 for the first time that summer) and Chandra Levy, Chandra Levy, Chandra Levy.

Does anyone remember Chandra Levy now? We had her in 24-hour tape loop for weeks before 9/11. She was the Washington intern who vanished in Rock Creek Park, then turned up dead, and for a while (an endless while) all eyes were on the congressman she worked for, Gary Condit, whose priapic propensities were such that many wags called him "Gary Condom."

Then Al Qaida struck, and we all had something else to worry about.

Happens all the time. In the Soviet Union, coups tended to happen in August. With all the party big shots in Moscow out of town, swatting mosquitoes at their dachas in the countryside, August was the time to strike if you wanted to topple the government. I remember the last time it happened. I was swatting mosquitoes in Warrenton, Virginia, preparing to be transferred to my next Foreign Service post, Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. August 19, 1991. The news cycle was in such a downturn that that week's issue of Newsweek featured a cover story entitled "Busybodies and Crybabies: What's happening To the American Character?"

Then the following morning, when the Washington Post was delivered to the door of my room at the Warrenton Comfort Inn, the blazing headline read that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev had been deposed in a coup.

That coup collapsed after three days, but things sure were exciting there for a while. Then we all went back to wishing September would hurry up and get here, with its cooler temperatures and the NFL on Sundays.

I think I have identified the "shark attack" of 2008. Or the Chandra Levy, if you prefer.

A couple of weeks ago there was a story in the news about a Quantas jumbo jet having to make an emergency landing in Australia after a mystery explosion blew out a hunk of its fuselage in mid-flight.

Hot damn! Shark attack! Has anyone else noticed that in the days since, we have been virtually inundated with "emergency landing" stories? There was another one just this morning, about a plane having to make a forced landing at an airport in Orange, California after some sort of equipment problem.

Truth to tell, small planes probably have to make emergency landings more often than most non-pilots would guess. Generally such a thing would only make the news if it involved a Qantas jumbo jet. But this is August, and there ain't much else going on. And given the habit reporters have of reflexively (one might say slavishly) imitating each other, I'm going to go out on a limb and make a fearless forecast here: in the weeks between now and the time the autumn winds begin to blow (or something truly newsworthy happens, on the level of a terrorist attack, coup d'etat in Russia, massive earthquake in Pakistan or breast augmentation surgery for Paris Hilton)look to see lots and lots of stories about planes of all shapes and sizes making forced landings at podunk airports you couldn't find on a map.

Oh, and watch for that big interview Ted Koppel is going to have with his dog, Winky.

It's August, folks. Showtime.

The Soul That Barbed Wire Was No Match for

2008-08-04T19:13:00.031-04:00

An interesting coincidence: last Sunday the world got the news of the death of Alexander Isaievich Solzhenitsyn at the age of 89.

When the news came about Solzhenitsyn, I was roughly three-fourths of the way through a summer re-read of Tolstoy's War & Peace.

I'd just reached the chapters where Napoleon's army has entered Moscow and the city is burning.

I have a message for all of my friends back in Russia who, on the occasion of Solzhenitsyn's death this week, would deride his memory, downplay his greatness, dismiss him as an eccentric and a scold, or in the worst case, vilify him as a traitor to his country.

I love you all. And you can all shove it up your shuba.

The title of this posting is borrowed from Solzhenitsyn's most significant work, the massive "experiment in literary investigation" which was published in 1973 as The Gulag Archipelago. The late Kenneth Tynan called it "The most devastating attack on a political system to be leveled in modern times." Gulag, published in English in three volumes, traced in minute detail the evolution of the Soviet Union's massive chain of forced labor camps and bore witness to the fates of the millions who were imprisoned in them. Solzhenitsyn himself was what Russians call a "zek," an alumnus of the Gulag Archipelago who spent eight years in the Siberian labor camps, was released, shortly thereafter survived cancer, and went on to generate a body of literary work that would be instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago was the centerpiece of that body of work.

Although Solzhenitsyn only dabbled in theater, among his works was a play entitled Candle In The Wind. When I heard that Elton John had borrowed that title for a song about Marilyn Monroe, I was at first utterly disgusted at such a vulgar gesture. Solzhenitsyn's play was concerned with much higher and more serious business than the fate of a blonde movie idol. But the more I thought about it, the more I was inclined to just let it go. I can't say to what extent Marilyn Monroe could be described as a "candle in the wind." Some say she was tougher than she appeared. But I do know this: "candle in the wind" was an appelation that could never be applied to Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was a tower of granite in the wind.

He drove Leonid Brezhnev and the gerontocracy who ran the Kremlin from 1964 to 1985 absolutely bonkers. For that alone we should be grateful. Ultimately they didn't know what to do with him. They couldn't kill him or throw him back in prison; once he had won the Nobel Prize in 1970, his world fame was too great for that to be an option. Contrary to what some may think, the Soviets were concerned about world opinion, as would be anyone whose political system was based on a revolutionary, if crack-brained, idea that their ideology told them they were to spread to the world. He didn't dare go to Sweden in 1970 to collect his prize; he knew that the ancient thugs running the show in Moscow wouldn't let him come home if he did. He played a game of cat-and-mouse with them, and he was much smarter than they were.

But by 1973 the jig was up. Solzhenitsyn had intended to postpone publication of his enormous broadside against the Soviet security organs and their "archipelago" of prison camps spread over Russia's far east until the right moment. But he learned that the KGB had interrogated his typist and gotten hold of a copy of the manuscript. He had already smuggled copies of it on microfilm out of the USSR, and he gave the green light for it to be published, in Russian, in West Berlin.

Almost immediately he was picked up by the KGB, bundled into an airplane and exiled. His Soviet citizenship was revoked. He lived in Switzerland for a time, was the guest of German novelist Heinrich Boell for a short while, and then ultimately came to the United States and settled in Cavendish, Vermont. There he stayed in relative solitude for most of the next 20 years, emerging now and then to condemn both the totalitarian Soviet Union and what he saw as its probable victim, the morally spineless west, and got on with what he regarded to be his mission in life: chronicling the entire Soviet catastrophe.

That's the historical context, which everyone knows. But blogs are about personal context, and this is mine.

1973, the year in which the Russian-language edition of The Gulag Archipelago appeared in Berlin, was also the year I graduated from high school. It was the year I turned 18. For most of us, our teen years are the time of life when we are most inclined toward hero-worship. In our teens we're defining the sort of people we want ultimately to be, and we put our best models for that purpose on pedestals.

Solzhenitsyn was one of my heroes. In my pantheon of heroes he was right up there with Beethoven and Lord Byron.

I came of age during the cold war, and in my own eyes, no more fierce anti-communist existed in the world than myself. Also, I wanted to be a writer. One day when I was about 17, I was roaming the stacks in the old Chula Vista Public Library when I came across a title that somehow rang a bell: One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by someone named Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I had never read a word of his, but somewhere, somehow, even at that tender age, I had heard of this book. No surprise there, as I would learn later. The publication of One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, in a single issue of the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir, had been hailed as a major event in the Soviet Union. Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschchev had personally authorized the publication of this searing novella about one day in the life of a prisoner in one of Stalin's forced-labor camps. Kruschchev had several years earlier embarked on a campaign of attacking the memory of the murderous Stalin, and the publication of Solzhenitsyn's first book was part of that campaign. No doubt I'd seen a reference to it in a newspaper somewhere.

In any case, I took it home and read it. As a dedicated anti-communist I was outraged by the narrative, and as a wannabee writer I was stunned by the tour-de-force of it.

As only a high-school senior can, I had a new hero.

Ironic though it may sound to some, I was both an anti-communist and a Russophile. As much as I hated the Soviet regime and everything it stood for, I had been fascinated by Russia and everything Russian since my early teens. When I was in the eighth grade I got some Russian-language phonograph records out of my school library and decided I was going to teach myself Russian. I didn't get very far, but it stood me in good stead a few years later when I enrolled in a Russian-language class in college and didn't have to bother learning the cyrillic alphabet; I already knew it. I read War & Peace (an abridged version) at age 13 and wrote a book report about it for my reading class. In the ninth grade, my friend Mark and I collaborated on a comprehensive report for our social studies class about Russia. We each addressed a series of topics and took turns making our presentations to the class. I remember one of my topics was the Soviet space program, which was a toughie because everything the Russians did in those days, they kept it a secret, and therefore information about the Soviet space program was hard to come by, but I did my best.

So I was a russophile, a commie-hater, and now a fan of Solzhenitsyn. In the months that followed I read everything by Solzhenitsyn I could get my hands on. Cancer Ward. The First Circle. The recently-published August, 1914, the first volume of his huge cycle of novels called The Red Wheel which would trace the history of the Soviet experience through the decades. A new biography of Solzhenitsyn appeared in the library. I greedily snatched and devoured it.

Most of my heroes were dead. This one was still alive and kicking, somewhere in Russia. With all the zeal of a 17-year-old fan, I wrote to Harper & Row, his American publishers, and asked if they had an address where I could send him fan mail. They answered in the negative of course; all of their dealings with him were in the third person.

It goes without saying that I kept an eye on the newspapers for anything having to do with my guy. When, early in 1974, I saw a headline in the old San Diego Union that read, "New Solzhenitsyn Book Accuses Secret Police," I grabbed it right away and read every word. Something big was going on.

Indeed. Just a few weeks later another headline hit the front page of the Union: "Soviet Exiles Solzhenitsyn To West, Ends Citizenship."

I carried that newspaper clipping in my wallet for years.

A few days later a wrenching photograph appeared in the paper, a truly great moment in photojournalism. Solzhenitsyn, eyes lowered in sorrow, faced the cameras, giving a press conference in Zurich. Immediately behind him, with a wrenching look of sadness and pity on his face, was his fellow Nobel Prize laureate and temporary host, German novelist Heinrich Boell, whose own masterpiece, Group Portrait With Lady, I had just recently read. I clipped that, too.

The Kremlin thought it had solved the problem of Solzhenitsyn by removing him and declaring him what George Orwell called an "un-person." Had the KGB assassinated him, the anti-communist cause would have had a martyr and Brezhnev knew it. So they flicked him away as you would a troublesome flea, hoping that he would sink into obscurity somewhere in the west and never be heard of again.

And oh, what an embarrassment he was to my liberal friends, accustomed as they were to glossing over or politely ignoring any criticism of the Soviet Union or of Communism in general. Since the 1950s, anti-communism had been perceived as a "Republican" thing, never mind that one of the most dedicated cold warriors of all time was JFK. To criticize Communism, liberals reflexively feared, would make one sound too much like a Republican. And besides, there was that thing going on in Vietnam. You wouldn't hear a Democrat mention the USSR unless it was in the context of a visit by the Bolshoi Ballet to the U.S. or of Van Cliburn to Moscow. Bring up Stalin and they'd change the subject, or remind you that the U.S. had once embraced him as an ally against Hitler.

But Solzhensitsyn was too big an elephant in the living room even for them to ignore. My former high school civics teacher, Mr. McLean, was a genuine '70s lefty, from the big sideburns to the vote for McGovern in '72. But I went back to visit my old high school that spring, and I showed that newspaper clipping about Solzhenitsyn's exile from Russia to Mr. McLean.

"We may differ on this or that," I said, "but don't you think this is revolting?"

"I think that's revolting," he said candidly.

Gradually, over the years, many of Mr. McLean's fellow lefties on both sides of the Atlantic would ruefully admit that Solzhenitsyn's case against the Soviets was too big to brush away, and sympathy for Communism, particularly in Europe, largely evaporated.

The news media rushed in. Solzhenitsyn gave a one-hour interview through an interpreter which was broadcast all over the non-Communist world. In the spring of 1974 my family formed a circle around the television set to watch it. There was my hero, on camera, talking to the world. I was thrilled. "What a charming man!" my older sister declared when it was over.

A budding poet, I sat down and wrote some verses. A Song For Solzhenitsyn. Lost now, thank God.

Later that spring, word came out that The Gulag Archipelago was soon to be published in English. With all the zeal of an 18 year-old, I called the book department at Walker Scott (no Amazon.com in those days, no Barnes & Noble either) and, unnecessarily, reserved a copy. On June 20, 1974 I drove out to Lemon Grove in my mother's old Chevy and picked up my copy of Gulag. I still have it -- a genuine first edition, so marked. 660 pages in all, in 1974 it cost $12.50 brand-new.

I took it home and plunged into it. I must say it certainly wasn't entertaining reading; the documentation was exhaustive, the case histories told in detail. Entertaining no, but harrowing. I stayed with it all the way through to the end and emerged from the experience an even more fiercely-convinced enemy of Communism than I was when I began.

By the following year Solzhenitsyn had taken up residence in Cavendish, Vermont, 147 miles from St. Albans, where I was born. Word was that he chose Vermont as a place to live because its plenitude of birch trees reminded him of home. (Russians consider the birch tree to be their national symbol.)

As the world knows, the curmudgeonly Solzhenitsyn had no interest in acclimating to life in America. He kept to himself, ventured out only now and then to give a speech like the notorious barn-burner he delivered at Harvard's commencement ceremonies in 1978, declined to become an American citizen, refused even to learn English. Clearly, he didn't see himself as an expatriate, but as a sort of Russian government-in-exile. And of course he became something of an embarrassment to his host government and to western liberals in general, because it turned out that he had no more particular use for bourgeois democracy than he had for Marx and Lenin. Solzhenitsyn saw the west as weak, decadent, morally flabby and no doubt destined to be overrun by the barbarous forces from east of the Iron Curtain if someone didn't do something about it. As far as he was concerned, someone was going to do something about it. He would. If the America of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter didn’t have the balls to stand up to the Soviets, Solzhenitsyn did. “How many divisions has the pope?” Stalin famously joked. Like the pope, Solzhenitsyn commanded no divisions. But he didn’t need them to fight his particular enemy. Solzhenitsyn wasn’t fighting the USSR’s military might. He was fighting the gigantic network of lies, lies and more lies that the entire communist edifice was built on.

Someone once asked Solzhenitsyn what he regarded as the world’s greatest evil. “Falsehood!” he snapped. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are the two political figures most often associated with the west’s victory in the cold war. But Solzhenitsyn was also a key player in that his relentless exposure of Soviet lies, oppression and injustice did much to undermine the moral authority of communism throughout Europe. Eurocommunism, a viable political movement in the 1970s and early ‘80s, gradually dissolved, while in eastern Europe, and even in Russia, democracy movements became bolder and louder until the velvet revolutions of 1989 and the spectacular fall of the Berlin Wall. Then finally the collapse of the USSR itself in 1991 brought about the final triumph of what an obscure mathematics teacher in a little town called Ryazan, 100 miles or so southeast of Moscow, had initiated when Novy Mir published a novella in 1962 based on his own prison experiences.

Like all oversized personalities, he was difficult. He had an almost messianic sense of mission (having applied the word “messianic” to Solzhenitsyn, one almost can’t help but smile hearing it applied to Barack Obama) and was focused on it to the exclusion of almost all else. He alienated friends, took people for granted, and was frequently downright rude. His old friend Lev Kopelev, the model for the character Lev Rubin in The First Circle, broke with him in 1985. He had simply had enough of his old friend’s prickly personality.

In 1990 Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev moved to have Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet citizenship restored. When I saw the announcement on the front page of the Washington Post, I went back into my notebooks and scrapbooks and dug up that other newspaper clipping, the one I had been saving for 16 years, announcing his 1974 exile from the Soviet Union. I scotch-taped the two newspaper clippings next to each other in my journal, the old one in black-and-white, the new one in color, and wrote underneath, “Change is glacial, but change is change.” (Again, I think of Obama and how he’s bandying about the word “change,” and I want to laugh.)

Solzhenitsyn had a contrarian streak in him. He was a Russian nationalist, some say even a monarchist. Russian liberals were disappointed by his approval of Vladimir Putin’s hamfisted rule. I have no doubt that, if Solzhenitsyn had ever stumbled upon H.G. Wells’ time machine, he would have climbed in, set the ol’ Wayback for 1812, and climbed out to go and fight for Tsar Alexander I against Napoleon.

“You were silly like us; your gift survived it all,” W.H. Auden wrote on the passing of William Butler Yeats. Solzhenitsyn, too, could be silly, and in a much more outsized way than “us.” Because he wasn’t “us.” No more than Tolstoy, Pushkin or Beethoven were. His life, personality, times and achievement were as big as theirs. He was called by his contemporaries in the 1960s, “our classic.” And he was the only one. He may have been the last one.

My Favorite Scene In All The Movies

2008-07-30T12:24:00.015-04:00

Today's question is directed at all of my fellow old-movie buffs out there:

Do you have a scene from the movies that you love so much you just wish you could somehow have been in it?

I'm going to take a shot here at guessing what are probably the highest-rated movie scenes of all time. My guess would be that the list begins with something like this:

1. The final scene of Casablanca, when Humphrey Bogart says to Ingrid Bergman, "Here's looking at you, kid," just before she gets on the plane with Paul Henreid and leaves Bogey forever.

2. The scene in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm in the middle of a crowded restaurant.

3. The scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Paul Newman and Robert Redford are stranded on a cliff about 150 feet above a river, with a posse closing in on them and no way of escape, and they get into an argument about whether or not they should jump into the river. After they go back and forth about it, Redford finally bursts out with "I can't swim!" Whereupon Newman goes into a laughing fit and replies, "What are you, crazy? The FALL'll probably kill you!" And over they go.

Let's analyze each of these.

Casablanca is probably the "date flick" all of all time. Made in 1942, it's one of those movies that finds a perfect "blend," and I don't mean only in the flawless casting. The character Rick Blaine in this movie, played by Humphrey Bogart, is every heterosexual woman's dream man, by which I mean he is 50 percent macho tough guy and 50 percent sensitive, hurt creature who needs healing. Rick anticipates that treacly Alan Alda "sensitive guy" persona by 30 years, but manages not to be so queasily ... sensitive.

For the three people out there who don't know the plot, most of it is back-story. As the film opens, World War II is underway, and Rick is running a cafe in Casablanca, in German-occupied French Morocco. It's the most popular evening spot in a town filled with war-displaced refugees from Europe, trying to get to America. One night Ilse, played by Ingrid Bergman, walks in with her husband Victor Lazslo, played by Paul Henreid.

Bogey then utters my favorite line in all the movies: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

It turns out that Bogey and Bergman had been lovers in Paris, just as the war was starting. But she was harboring a secret, that she was already married to Henreid, a famous resistance-fighter against the Nazis who was reputed to have perished in a concentration camp. Only he hadn't. It turned out that he was alive and had been brought, wounded and sick, back to Paris. Discovering that her husband was not dead after all, Ilse had abandoned Rick without explaining anything, just as they were to leave Paris together. We find out later that she thought she was protecting him, knowing that if he knew the truth, he would refuse to leave and the Germans would surely apprehend him, since he had been active before the war in the anti-fascist cause.

Bogey's character, Rick, has been sitting in Casablanca licking his wounds ever since. Ilse broke Rick's heart, and he's bitter and angry. Then she shows up in his cafe. As the movie spins out, Bogey gradually learns the truth about Ilse and his anger and bitterness turns to deep, intense conflict. He still loves her, and she, as it turns out, still loves him as well. But now he has to decide which is more important, his love for Ilse or Lazslo's need for her in the face of the tremendous anti-Nazi resistance movement of which he's part.

It's the perfect private-desire-versus-public-duty conflict. Rick eventually surprises Ilse (and possibly himself) by deciding to do the unselfish thing and send Ilse away with her husband to America, despite his love for her, to continue fighting the good fight. And everyone knows how the film ends: Bogey and Claude Rains, the corrupt French police official who has been his friend throughout the film, walk off into the fog together as the "Marseillaise" swells on the soundtrack.

Great stuff. No wonder that last scene inspired Woody Allen to write his own tribute to the film in Play it Again, Sam.

When Harry Met Sally, directed by Rob Reiner in 1989, is the ultimate postfeminist romantic comedy, by which I mean its plot revolves around a guy (Billy Crystal) who is very arrogant about his sexual potency, and who gets his comeuppance in the form of Meg Ryan, with whom he develops a prickly friendship over the decades that doesn't turn into romance until the very end of the film. When this film first came out it was, and on DVD still is, what my friend Kathleen Parker would call "a huge bonding agent" for women. In one scene after another Billy Crystal gets that comeuppance that must tickle women so: Meg Ryan puts him down with snappy comebacks, and then his wife dumps him, and there's that scene every woman loves, in which Meg Ryan gives him the humiliation of all time by showing him, in the middle of a crowded restaurant, how easy it is for a woman to fake an orgasm. She does so, loudly, at the table, drawing everyone's attention, giving millions of women out there in movie-land the satisfaction of imagining Billy Crystal's dick shrinking to the size of a bloodworm.

Of course the scene does have a funny punchline, as everyone knows. When Meg is through bucking and moaning and panting in her chair, an old lady in a neighboring booth (who I understand was Rob Reiner's real-life mother) points to her and says, "I'll have what she's having." This is all good old Jewish-American gagwriting of course, but it's a classic, if somewhat mean-spirited moment. And to Marilu Henner, whom I saw chortling over this scene in a TV Land special, and all her feminist pals out there who relish this scene because it humiliates men, I invite you all to go fake orgasms with each other. I'll watch the World Series, thank you.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid (1969) is a classic of another kind, the "buddy" genre. A lot of critics disliked it for the same reason they disliked Bonnie and Clyde two years earlier: it takes a couple of criminals and makes them likable. This was part of that whole 1960s "anti-establishment" thing: Hollywood decided to chuck out the hero-vs.-villain paradigm and pitch "moral relativity," which promptly led to something called an "anti-hero," as exemplified by the character Jack Nicholson played in Five Easy Pieces (1970). What makes the formula entertaining, and the scene on the cliff so unforgettable, is the way Newman and Redford managed to interact in this western as a vaudeville team. Newman got the laughs; Redford was the straight man. He played the Sundance Kid as a macho dimwit who had that one talent going for him: he was a lightning-fast, deadly shot with a gun. Beyond that he's essentially clueless, and one gets the impression that if the character played by Katharine Ross weren't already his girlfriend, he might have trouble with women once they'd gotten past his good looks because there isn't much beyond his good looks except his prowess with a six-shooter. He follows Butch like the dumb cat follows the smart cat in a cartoon. ("When are we gonna catch the mouse, George?") When they get cornered on that cliff, the repartee starts going back and forth machine-gun quick. Butch isn't that much smarter than Sundance, but he's more glib ("You just keep thinkin' Butch, what's what you're good at!" "Man, I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals!" -- This after Butch has just hatched a scheme for the two of them to go off and rob banks in Bolivia, a country whose location he isn't even sure about.) Of course the "punchline" of this scene is not so much Butch's ridicule of Sundance's fear of drowning, when they're facing much worse danger on the way down, but Sundance's eloquent response: "Oh, oh, oh, SSHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTT!" As he launches himself off the cliff and into the river below.

But my favorite scene in all of the movies is the "Doc, we gotta make some scotch" scene from Joshua's Logan's Mister Roberts (1955.) Mr. Roberts is just about my favorite film anyway; when my wife Valerie and I were engaged and I came to Washington for a visit, she took me out for a big treat: a revival at the Kennedy Center of Thomas Heggen's 1948 Broadway play on which the movie was based.

This scene is a perfectly wonderful example of mini-ensemble acting. Henry Fonda, William Powell and the very young Jack Lemmon are here, interacting as three officers on a rusty Navy cargo ship doing its dull, boring job in a safe area of the South Pacific during the waning days of World War II. Henry Fonda is Mr. Roberts, an idealistic young man who quit medical school to join the Navy and participate in the great crusade against fascism, only to find himself stuck on a sorry old bucket, The U.S.S. Reluctant, hauling toothpaste and toilet paper around in non-combat areas, and bullied by a tyrannical captain played by James Cagney on top of that. William Powell is the ship's doctor, an older and wiser source of dry wit and wisdom, and Jack Lemmon is Ensign Frank Thurlow Pulver, a shiftless, lazy and above all lecherous young man who's trying to get through the war without leaving his bunk.

In this scene, Henry's Fonda's character has decided he's going to try and get liberty for the crew. "You gotta get these men a liberty, Mr. Roberts! They're goin' asiatic!" cries an exasperated chief played by Ward Bond after breaking up a nasty fight. The problem of course is the captain. The mean old bastard won't let the crew have a liberty because...well, just because he's a mean old bastard.

Roberts decides to do an end-run around the captain. When he learns that the port director of the island where they've been rotting in the sunny harbor for God-knows-how-long used to be a big scotch drinker before the war, Roberts takes a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label that he's been hoarding in a shoebox to celebrate the day he gets off that rustbucket of a cargo ship, and gives it to the port director, "compliments of the captain," in order to get the port director to send the Reluctant to Elysium island, which is known as a great liberty port.

Pulver, meanwhile, has learned that a planeload of nurses just arrived the night before at the island's hospital. With that for incentive, he pries himself out of his bunk and goes ashore on an errand to pick up aspirin for Doc as an excuse to check out the chicks. He hits on one of them and lures her out to the ship with the promise of some of Doug Roberts' scotch, only to return and find out that Roberts has already used the bottle of whiskey for another purpose. The following dialogue ensues:

Pulver: You didn't give that shoebox to that
port director?

Roberts: I did, compliments of the Captain.

Doc: You've been hoarding a quart of scotch
in a shoebox?

Roberts: I was gonna break it out
the day l get off this ship. Resurrection day!

Pulver: You wasted that bottle of scotch
On a……on a man?

Roberts: Will you name me another sex
within 5000 miles? What's eating you anyway, Frank?

Doc: Well, look at the fancy pillows! Somebody expecting company?

Roberts: Good Lord! '' Toujours l'amour.'' ''Souvenir of San Diego.''
''Oh, you kid! '' ''Tonight or never.' ''Compliments of
the American Harvester Company.'' ''We plow deep while others sleep.'' Doc, that new hospital hasn't got nurses, has it?

Doc: It didn't have yesterday.

Pulver: It has today.

Roberts: How did you find out that they were there?

Pulver: It just came to me all of a sudden. I was lying on my bunk here
this morning, thinking. And there wasn't a breath of air. All of a sudden a funny thing happened. A little breeze came up. I took a big deep breath and said to myself: ''Pulver boy, there's women on that island!

Roberts: Doc, you know a thing like that could make
a bird dog real self-conscious.

Pulver: They flew in last night. Knockouts! And one big blonde especially. Of course, she went for me right away. Naturally.So I started to turn on the old personality,and I said: ''Will nothing make you come out to the ship with me?'
And she said, ''Yes, there is one thing and one thing only: ''A good stiff drink of scotch! ''

Roberts: I'm sorry, Frank. l'm really sorry. Your first assignment in a year.

Roberts and Doc proceed to try and make amends with Pulver, and aid him in his romantic pursuit, by making a bottle of fake "scotch." Rummaging around for whatever they can find, they come up with clear grain alcohol, to which they add Coca-Cola for color, iodine for flavor and hair tonic for aging. Then they taste it. Pulling a horrible face, Roberts says, "You know, Doc? It does taste a little like scotch."

I won't spoil the ending. Get the DVD. Enjoy.

More Points to Ponder

2008-07-28T10:46:00.008-04:00

Greetings, woolgatherers...

Today we're going to play another round of that fun game, "Questions to which there are probably no good answers."

Ever wonder about this (I have, which gives you an indication of how much time I often have on my hands) Why is it that big shots in the FBI and CIA so often go by names that begin with an initial? Count 'em: J. Edgar Hoover. L. Patrick Gray. W. Mark Felts (aka Deep Throat.) E. Howard Hunt. G Gordon Liddy. What's up with that, anyway?

And while we're on the subject of initials, why don't we call presidents by their initials any more? We had FDR, JFK and LBJ, but since then we haven't had any ABCs, M&Ms or PDQs (Although we've had plenty of SOBs.) And by the way, who decided in those days which presidents would get "initial" designation and which wouldn't? FDR was always FDR. But his successor, Harry Truman, was rarely if ever referred to as "HST," and no one ever called Eisenhower DDE, although in his case, they'd already been using "Ike" for years. Clinton might have been "WFJ," although the Democratic party bosses might just as easily have nixed that for sounding too much like "WFB," the common moniker of the late, great William F. Buckley Jr., who generally had little praise for Democrats. As for Bush the younger, I'd be just as welling to bet that the media would not go along with "GWB," since around Washington, "GW" implies "George Washington," as in "GWU," and you can just bet the media wouldn't want people associating Dubya with the Father of His Country.

The lids on German beer steins are a pretty decoration, but what function do they serve? To keep the beer warm? Maybe in Great Britain, where they like their beer warm, but as far as I know they don't use them there.

Bumpers on cars used to be made of metal. That was to protect you in the case of a collision. What bloody good do plastic bumpers do anybody?

Some of my friends in radio will send me flaming e-mails for saying this, but what function do disc jockeys actually serve? Most people I know who turn on the radio to listen to music want to listen to music, not some moron hyperventilating between the tunes. If you want to listen to hyperventilating, go over to AM and tune in talkity-talk radio. At least over there, they're hyperventilating about something.

Whenever I attend a symphony concert, I always find myself wondering why anyone would want to become a professional bassoon player. Percussionists have fun, and double-bass players can work night jobs in jazz clubs, but what's the attraction of the bassoon? I'd think double-reed players would gravitate toward something a little sexier. Even the oboe once appeared in a Sonny and Cher song.(Remember? "Babe...Mmmp-ahh-ahh-mmp-ahh-ahh-mmp-ahh-ahh-mmp-ahh-ahh...I got you, babe!" Those "Mmp-aah-ahhs" were made by an oboe.)

I think Andy Rooney asked this one once, but why do the makers of bathroom fixtures construct bathtub-shower combinations in such a way that the built-in soap dish is directly in the line of fire of the shower nozzle? The water cascades directly down on to the soap, drastically shortening its soap-life.

Speaking of manufacturing, I can understand why automobile manufacturers would equip the dashboards of cars with gauges showing your speed and engine temperature. You need to know how fast you're going, and anyone would want to know if their car was getting ready to overheat. But why do they include a separate gauge for RPMs? When was the last time you worried about your RPMs? I suspect this is a sop to us guys, made on the assumption that we're all fantasising as we drive about being Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Tony Kanaan. Not me, guys. I'm fantasising about retirement and my dream life as an aging surfer dude on the coast of Baja California.

For 40 years now I've been looking at the disclaimers on boxes of cereal and crackers
that say, "This package is sold by weight, not by volume. If it does not appear full when opened, it is because the contents have settled during shipping and handling." Well, duh. When was the last time you saw someone in the check-out line at Safeway yelling that the box of Triscuits they bought yesterday wasn't full? I think this controversy was laid to rest during the Kennedy Administration, guys. Can we move on?

Has anyone ever really looked up the word "Aardvark" in the dictionary? Or its opposite number, "Zymosan?"

How come the idea of a universal remote control has yet to catch on? It seems like a no-brainer to me. Wouldn't you rather have one remote control in your family room than 52 of the goddamn things?

Here's one I have pondered on the telephone with my good friend Holly, who is raising teenagers. Why is that we adults tend to slow down at the end of the day, while kids seem to start revving up at sundown?

iPods are well and good if you're talking about listening to some tunes while you're running on the treadmill at the gym, but what kind of nitwit would want to watch a Bruce Willis movie on a two-inch screen? Never mind, I think I just answered that one.

Cold air goes down. Warm air goes up. So why is my heating unit in the attic and my air conditioner outside on the lawn?

Whenever I go to Starbucks (which I seldom do) I see all those pretty little ceramic espresso cups lined up behind the counter. Does anyone ever get to use them? They always hand me my coffee in a cardboard cup.

Speaking of a/c, Congress used to take off the whole month of August because Washington was unbearable in August with its heat and humidity. But every federal building in this town is air-conditioned now. Why do we still let Congress take August off?

Does anyone really CARE that Reese Witherspoon's new boyfriend has MOVED IN WITH HER, pant, pant pant? Geeze.

The Germans pioneered lots of things, from counterpoint in music to ballistic missile technology. Why can't they make a toilet? I spent four years in Germany, and anyone who's been there knows what I'm talking about. German toilets come in two models. I call them the ski-slope and the shelf. The ski slope requires scrubbing every time you use it because the water forms a little pool at the bottom and what gets dumped into it tends to stick to the sides. As for the shelf, well, as the kids are saying now, we won't go there.

Why are used cars no longer called used cars? Now they're all "pre-owned." It's the same thing, isn't it? Calling a spade a diamond doesn't make it a diamond, and a lemon by any other name...

Why don't Americans take siestas after lunch? I've lived and worked in countries where they do, including Brazil and Ivory Coast. It's a wonderful custom, but goes against the old Protestant work ethic, I guess. When I was a federal employee, I used to take a siesta every afternoon, sometimes right at my desk, and nobody noticed. That was probably the greatest thing about being a federal employee.

And finally, why do the newspapers make a big deal about a total solar eclipse when it's only going to be visible in Chile, Lesotho or Inner Mongolia? I don't get that.

If anyone has answers to any of these queries, post 'em here.

The Obsolesence Olympics

2008-07-22T09:54:00.006-04:00

Somebody remind me to buy an old-fashioned can opener, will you?

Some of you will know what I'm talking about: the old-fashioned "church key" can opener that beer drinkers used to use before they invented pull-tabs. It was about four inches long. At one end it had a rounded do-hickey, a hole the size of a bottle cap with a little nub underneath for popping the tops off soda bottles. At the other end it had a curved, pointed end, also with a nub underneath for grabbing the lip of a can while you poked a hole in it.

Yes, I know they stopped making the kind of beer cans that require a "church key" in 1963 or so. (That's in America, by the way. When I was in Brazil, from 1988 to 1991, you needed one in order to open cans of Antarctica and Brahma, the local brews.)

But there are other beverages out there besides beer, you know, and I have found that technology has left the beverage industry behind. I went to open a can of grapefruit juice this morning and found that I had completely forgotten what happened the last time I went to open a can of grapefruit juice, which was that I had to go and find a hammer and a phillips screwdriver and pound two holes in the top of the can so I could get some grapefruit juice out of it.

Why does industry do this to people? I mean, it's a given that once we get used to a certain product they'll stop making it. That never fails. But what is this business with the Pied Piper of Progress tootling his way merrily down the road and completely ignoring whether or not the consumer-rats are keeping up with him?

Take Bill Gates for example. (Please!) I wanted to cold-cock that s.o.b. when I heard he had announced that Microsoft was no longer going to include floppy-disc drives on its computers. Why? "They're obsolete," we were informed from on high.

Maybe for you, Mr. Haircut-that-looks-like-it-was-performed-with-a-$30-hedge-trimmer, but not for me. Not only was I accustomed to using them, but I happen to have boxes and boxes of floppy discs to which I have been archiving important files for years. What do you suggest I do, ask Martha Stewart how to turn them into a decorative wall-hanging? What would have been the harm in just leaving the damn floppy drives in place? People who don't want to use them don't have to.

I tell you, it's nothing but an abuse of power. Gates threw millions of computer-users a Jim Palmer Slurveball just because he could.

I have something in my basement of which I would not be the slightest bit surprised to learn that you have the counterpart in yours: I call it the Kelley Dupuis Memorial Power Supply Collection, AKA the AC/DC graveyard. It's an entire cardboard box filled with power supplies for computers, monitors, cell phones, boomboxes, digital cameras and whathaveyou, all of which are totally useless. Why? Because the manufacturers of all those computers, monitors, cellphones, boomboxes, digital cameras and whathaveyou, do NOT want you to be able to use their power supply with any other appliance. They want you to have to go buy a new one, so every last one of these damn things is proprietary, the male end of the Sony model just a zillionth of a millimeter too small for the female end of your Canon digital camera.

I can tell you what's going to happen: one of these days everyone's going to start throwing these things out because they can't use them anymore, and we're going to have city councils across the land passing emergency ordinances forbidding the placement of used, obsolete power supplies in your trash.

Now everyone's being told that if you haven't yet gone out and bought a digital TV set, come February, 2009 you're going to be basically S.O.L. I'm not getting too excited about this myself, since we already have a flat-screen digital TV at our house, and even if we didn't, I never watch the damn thing anyway. But it's the same story as with the power supplies. Americans have been watching analogue-style, curved-screen TV sets for more than fifty years. There must be millions of them in attics, basements and guest rooms all over the country. And it's not going to be the way it was when television supplanted radio in the 1950s. Old radios could still be used, after all, people were watching Jack Benny now instead of listening to him, but radio itself was still out there. Even today, collecting old radios is a popular hobby. You can fix them up and listen to them. Who's going to collect old TV sets if they're nothing but big doorstops?

Occasionally there's a healthy backlash against all of this "progress." Last week I spotted an article in the Washington Express about a group calling itself the Vinyl Preservation Society of Idaho. This is a gathering of audiophiles who have awakened to the fact that the 40-or-so-years of the vinyl LP era in the recording industry had yielded countless treasures which had more-or-less gotten shoved off the poop deck and into the drink when Compact Discs and then downloads came along and took over the recording industry. As a dedicated lover of vinyl (as opposed to a dedicated follower of fashion) I fired off an e-mail to these guys, applauding their efforts and inquiring as to how one might start one's own chapter of vinyl-preservers. Just as immediately, I posted a message on Washington, D.C. Craigslist seeking other vinyl-LP buffs out there who might be interested in joining up with the cause.

I got a mighty blast of silence in reply.

But I'm not giving up. The Idaho society is going to send me its start-up kit, and by hook or by crook I'm going to find some like-mided souls here in the mid-Atlantic region. I know they're out there. They have to be. Because just as I know there are boatloads of soon-to-be-obsolete TV sets out there, I'm also aware that in the dusty alcoves of homes all over the land there are cardboard boxes tucked away containing everything from an out-of-print pressing of Die Goetterdaemerung from the 1954 Bayreuth Wagner Festival to Boots Randolph Plays Guy Lombardo.

Oops. Here's the hammer and screwdriver I was looking for. I think I'll go make a grapefruit daiquiri.