No, Not Tonight, I Have a Headache

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#OscarsSoPolitical

Usually around the time of the Academy Awards, I write a negative appraisal of the Oscars, if not of all award shows. Here are just some of my negatory yawps in no particular order:

This year I will refrain from casting aspersions on the awards except to say that I have no idea who won what this year, nor do I care.

Instead, I will say that I have not seen any current movies this last year. I am tired of paying an inordinate amount of money to see a bunch of young actors making faces at one another in a vehicle that is devoid of story or cinematic value. The filmmakers I worshiped are all gone: John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Luis Buñuel among others. They have been replaced by people from television, video games, and TikTok.

When people watch films on smart phones and other small screens, it’s pretty much game over.

Perhaps this marks me as an old-timer, but I don’t give a damn. I will continue to watch the great films that have meant so much to me, and to boycott the current product unless it shows signs of genius. So far, there haven’t been many films worth watching.

Fairbanks Hall

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Fairbanks Hall As It Is Today

In the picture above, the left half of the building shown was added some time after I graduated from Dartmouth College in 1966. To see the Fairbanks Hall that I knew and loved, put your hand over the left half of the picture.

When I was a freshman at Dartmouth, I paid a visit to Fairbanks Hall in its old location just north of Baker Library. I heard that Dartmouth Films, which occupied the building, was showing free films. One day, I wondered into the small auditorium and saw Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 masterpiece Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag) about witchcraft in the 17th century. The Danish film electrified me. I had seen a handful of foreign films back in Cleveland, but nothing this good.

That year, the Hopkins Center for the Arts had its grand opening, and the Dartmouth Film Society was able to screen films in the center’s large and fancy auditorium. At the time, I was planning on being an English major; but suddenly new possibilities opened up. The Film Society inaugurated the Hopkins Center auditorium with the world premier of John Huston’s Freud.

In my sophomore year, the college lifted Fairbanks Hall from its north campus location and plunked it down in the middle of the parking lot between Massachusetts Hall and the Hanover, New Hampshire cemetery. I started hanging out there, having long conversations with Blair Watson, who headed up Dartmouth Films, and David Stewart Hull, his assistant.

By my junior year, I was an active member of the Dartmouth Film Society; and the next year, I was its assistant director. By that time, my pituitary tumor was causing intense pain, usually in the form of frontal headaches which started just before noon and (for some reason) ended around midnight. In between those hours, I figured I could screen films for myself on the 16mm projector. I dropped in daily to see what films had been received for screening in classes around campus and threaded the projector if any of them looked interesting. There was a small screening booth I could use for the purpose.

Among the highlights of the films I saw that year were the Frank Capra Why We Fight films made to show Americans why we were fighting in the Second World War; Nelly Kaplan’s great documentary about the films of Abel Gance; René Clair’s French musicals Sous les toits de Paris and Le million; and a whole host of other highly miscellaneous films.

While in Fairbanks, I usually ran into my friend Peter, who was busy editing one of the films he had shot. Today, he lives some twenty-five miles south of me.

Fairbanks Hall had a major influence on my choice of graduate school. I had received a citation for excellence in a class on film history; and I decided to apply to the UCLA film school for an advanced degree in motion picture history and criticism.

Still a Bad Alumnus

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Omigosh, Is It Time for My 60th Reunion Already?

This is a re-posting of my blog from March 18, 2016—ten years ago this month.

On June 3, 1966, I graduated with an A.B. from Dartmouth College. What’s an A.B, you may ask? Well, as my diploma is entirely in Latin, it stands for Artium Baccalaurei, or Bachelor of Arts.

Although I am besieged with mail from the college, asking for money, participation in local and national alumni events (such as my 60th Reunion), and deluxe trips around the world with other alums. Will I participate? Uh, no. That despite the fact that I was awarded a four-year alumni scholarship, for which I am grateful—but not in any material way.

What bothers me is that none of the people I knew and liked at Dartmouth are active with the alumni. Instead, it’s all the same gladhander crew that was active in the fraternity system (which I loathed), student government (for which I was not popular enough), and/or sports (for which I didn’t qualify). I went through four years of Dartmouth with a brain tumor, which was not operated on until September 1966. Until then, I looked like an extraordinarily pale and sickly middle school or high school student.

It’s not that I didn’t make friends easily. My oldest friend was one of my classmates who now lives only 25 miles from me in San Pedro. There are others, but they were all like me in one way or another—and none saw fit to become active with the alums.

Somehow I managed to survive the college years, and even enjoyed them despite a level of pain that would sink me into my grave today. Those frontal headaches were almost constant, the result of a pituitary tumor pressing against my optic nerve. Today I am a different person altogether.

The one debt I feel I owe Dartmouth is actually to the Catholic Student Center there. When I was lying near death at Fairview General Hospital in Cleveland, my parents were shocked to find that my student insurance had just expired. They told Monsignor William Nolan of the Center to pray for me, which he did—and more. He went to bat for me and bullyragged the insurance company into covering me. Imagine that happening today!

Monsignor Nolan has since gone to join his ancestors, but I still owe him. And he gets paid in full before anyone else at Dartmouth gets dime one from me.

Quatrain

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The Houses of Parliament in Budapest

I felt like posting a Hungarian poem in today’s blog. I know that the English translation is only a pale reflection of the original Magyar. Note, however, that the translation is from George Szirtes, whose name is a guarantee of quality when it comes to turning Hungarian into English. The poem is by Szabolcs Várady, whose unpronounceable name reproaches all of us well-meaning Yankees. It is called:

Quatrain

I stand in a hole between Will Be and Was
waiting for things to change but nothing does
The dust will mount forever. Rain? Unlikely.
Thunder perhaps. But not here, not precisely.

The Book Lover

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Part of My Library

I have always loved books. Perhaps, even, I have loved them too much. My two-bedroom apartment in West Los Angeles contains some six thousand books. Every room in my apartment has at least two bookcases, Although I am not now in a position to buy books the way I used to, I can’t get rid of them as fast as I bought them once upon a time.

Every walk I took ended in a bookstore, and rarely did I step back outside without buying at least one book. I am sure that, if I were not a book collector, I would have been able to buy a house. But then, I never really wanted to buy a house. I would be a terrible homeowner. I had doing yard work. I can’t fix anything. And I can’t imagine living the lifestyle of most homeowners. I am sure my neighbors would have ended up hating me.

On the other hand, books have saved my life. I was a sickly kid walking around for ten years with a pituitary tumor and severe frontal headaches. I was short for my age, pale, and absolutely zero when it came to sports. To compensate for my many deficits, I turned to books. In Cleveland, I took the 56A bus every week to the main branch of the Cleveland Public Library, stopping in on the way at Schroeder’s bookstore on Public Square, where I spent untold hours scanning the covers of the books on display.

My relatives didn’t think much of my being a bookworm. To my parents, books were innately messy unless they were all put away out of sight. Once, when my cousin Emil spotted me reading Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, he grabbed the volume from my hands and threw it on the floor. “That’s what I think of books!” he shouted.

But then I was the first in my family ever to graduate from college. And it was a prestigious Ivy League college to boot. And once I got a computer job in 1968, I was never unemployed for more than three months until the accounting firm where I was working in 2017 closed its doors.

No, in the end, I think I made all the right choices given the cards I was dealt. And I am happier for it.

The Man Who Didn’t Like Chicken

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That man is me. I used to eat chicken every once in a while, but once I got into a relationship with Martine, who loves chicken more than any other meat, I decided to concentrate on being a part-time vegetarian who occasionally eats seafood and pork, and sometimes even beef.

Just to show you how un-American I am in my food tastes, I absolutely hate coffee. I will not touch coffee or anything that is coffee-flavored, including ice cream and tiramisu.

My dislike of chicken started with my father, who also hated chicken. I remember the look of dismay on his face when he had to eat one of his sister-in-law’s home-cooked meals, which usually featured chicken or turkey. (By the way, I also don’t care for turkey or any other feathered creature for that matter.)

Otherwise, my tastes in food are fairly normal. I make sure that Martine gets to eat chicken at her favorite restaurants from time to time. Her all-time favorite is an Armenian rotisserie chicken place in Glendale called Sevan Chicken. While she tears into her favorite legs and thighs, I just have some hummus or moutabal with a pita. It isn’t fair if I just eat what I liked without letting her have the same privilege.

Fortunately, there are some things that both of us like.

I Vitelloni (1953)

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Scene from Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953)

We’ve all been there. In our salad days, we hung out with our buds in the town of our birth. In Federico Fellini’s case, the town was Rimini on the Adriatic Sea, a fading resort town in Emilia-Romagna. We all admired the leader of our band, who married the cute local girl (Miss Mermaid), but whose eyes kept wandering, even when his daughter was born.

Perhaps La Strada was Fellini’s best film, or La Dolce Vita; but my favorite was I Vitelloni, an Italian term that, translated, means “The Layabouts” or “The Slackers.” We see the band slowly break up. The autobiographical Fellini character, Moraldo, leaves Rimini at the end with no specific destination in mind.

I might be going out on a limb when I say this, but I Vitelloni is my favorite film about surviving one’s youth. I, too, hung out with a bunch of slackers. As I was a graduate student in film history at UCLA, the layabouts I hung out with were all film freaks. We used to get together at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax after a movie and engage in what I called “trading bubble-gum cards.” This involved saying which film was great and which wasn’t. There was seldom any agreement.

In the last few years, I lost two of my vitelloni, Norm Witty and Lee Sanders, who were integral parts of the band. But I left the group long before. I marked my departure by writing an article for the UCLA Daily Bruin entitled “Confessions of an Ex-Film-Freak, or: Slow Death Twenty-Four Times a Second.” Some day I’ll find my copy of that article and put a few quotes from it in a blog post.

No Triumphalism Here

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Wars Go Through Three Phases

It seems that all the wars that involved the United States after 1945 have gone through three phases:

  • “Shock and Awe” and Waving the Flag and Glorifying the Power of Our Armaments.
  • Disenchantment sets in as the carnage continues apace and our boys start coming home in body bags. This is the longest stage of the military engagement.
  • The end where we just walk away call call the mess we have created a Glorious Victory. Followed by recriminations that last as long as the war.

Here is a poem from Lord Dunsany of Ireland, who fought on the British side in the Boer War and the First World War. He is better known as the author of such great fantasy novels as The King of Elfland’s Daughter and The Curse of the Wise Woman—not to mention scores of great short stories.

A Dirge of Victory (Sonnet)

Lift not thy trumpet, Victory, to the sky,
Nor through battalions nor by batteries blow,
But over hollows full of old wire go,
Where among dregs of war the long-dead lie
With wasted iron that the guns passed by.
When they went eastwards like a tide at flow;
There blow thy trumpet that the dead may know,
Who waited for thy coming, Victory.

It is not we that have deserved thy wreath,
They waited there among the towering weeds.
The deep mud burned under the thermite’s breath,
And winter cracked the bones that no man heeds:
Hundreds of nights flamed by: the seasons passed.
And thou last come to them at last, at last!

Enter the Santa Ana Winds

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As Predicted in Yesterday’s Blog Post

There are several ways that Mother Nature punishes Southern California for its (otherwise) mild climate:

  • Earthquakes, such as the giant temblors that hit the San Fernando Valley in 1971 and 1994
  • Wildfires
  • The Santa Ana Winds (sometimes called the Devil Winds)

The Santa Ana Winds and the wildfires are closely connected. In January 2025, the Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires were aided and abetted by dry wind gusts that reached up to 100 miles per hour (161 km per hour). I strongly suspect that earthquakes have a role to play in this devil’s brew of calamities, but I am at this point not sure exactly how.

According to Wikipedia, the Santa Ana Winds are what are called katabatic winds:

A katabatic wind (named from Ancient Greek κατάβασις (katabásis) ‘descent’) is a downslope wind caused by the flow of an elevated, high-density air mass into a lower-density air mass below. The spelling catabatic is also used. Since air density is strongly dependent on temperature, the high-density air mass is usually cooler, and the katabatic winds are relatively cool or cold.

In yesterday’s blog post, I stated that dry weather and gusty winds were predicted for today. The prediction was accurate. I sat around for much of the day sneezing and blowing my nose. Hopefully, the dry winds from the northeast will die down and I will be able to breathe normally.

Takony

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It’s the Hungarian Word for Mucus

For the last couple of days, we have been experiencing a dry Santa Ana offshore wind. It’s like the sirocco in the Mediterranean: When it blows, everyone is uncomfortable. Perhaps the best description of the Santa Ana comes in a story by Raymond Chandler called “Red Wind”:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

In my case, my life turns to outputting mucus, wither through sneezing or extensive nose blowing. My handkerchiefs turn soaking wet in minutes, though they can dry quickly if there is a pause in the snot generation.

By the looks of tomorrow’s weather forecast, tomorrow will not be a good day for me, as there will be only 15% humidity and wind blowing at sixteen miles per hour. It will be a good day to sit around with a pile of clean handkerchiefs and read a good book. (Paper towels tend to irritate my skin.)

A note about the Hungarian term that is the title of this blog. According to Google’s AI summary of the work taknyos:

“Taknyos” is a Hungarian adjective meaning “snotty,” “snivelly,” or having a runny nose, derived from the noun takony (snot). It is commonly used to describe children with cold symptoms, or colloquially as an insult for a young, inexperienced person. 

  • Literal Meaning: Snotty, covered in nasal mucus.
  • Colloquial Usage: Can be used to refer to a brat or a young, snot-nosed kid.
  • Related Term: Takony (noun) = snot/mucus.

Since I was allergic all my life, the words “takony” and “taknyos” were pretty liberally applied to me by my family and Hungarian friends. I’ve never been able to shake the implication.