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False Certitudes

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Norman Rockwell’s Homecoming of a U.S. Marine

Norman Rockwell’s Homecoming of a U.S. Marine

Let me begin by saying right off the bat that there is nothing wrong with the illustrations of Norman Rockwell. It’s just that he spoke for a different America, an America that was predominately small-town or even rural. His work belongs with the Judge Billy Priest stories of Irvin S. Cobb, silent films like King Vidor’s Tol’able David (1921), and the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton. Just about everybody you would be likely to meet on Main Street was White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.

Then the Second World War happened, and people started to move around—a whole lot. African-Americans moved up to the industrial cities of the Northern U.S. Mexican farmers started streaming across the border to help bring in the crops.

And people like me started to pop up. When my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Idell, first saw me in 1950 at Harvey Rice School in Cleveland, it was probably like a portent of the Apocalypse. My friend András and I didn’t speak a work of English. And although she taught at a public school in the heart of the largest Hungarian community outside the Peoples’ Republic of Hungary, she didn’t know a word of Magyar, nor did she feel she had to. When András and I started kicking her in the ankles, I am sure she felt like Joan of Arc among the Barbarian Hordes.

It was just the beginning. In addition to all the black and brown people who were showing up, including a large Puerto Rican neighborhood by Lorain, there were other strange people who came because we chose to fight wars all over the map in places where we had no more inkling of their culture than Mrs. Idell had of mine. I work in Tehrangeles, in a city that has a Thai Town, a Little Seoul, a Little Tokyo, and, of course, “East Los,” a.k.a. East Los Angeles. There are thousands of Armenians, Ethiopians, Hmong, Vietnamese, Arabs, and Chinese—to name just a few. Then, too, there was a whole new type of minority: gays, lesbians, trans-gender individuals.

For many Americans, the odd admixture of cultures leads to a terrible uncertainty. Many people who have been left behind in the “Heartland” feel that America doesn’t belong to them any more. Well it does, and it also belongs to the newcomers. They are or soon will be just as American as any of us. They may be slow to speak our lingo, but their kids’ll pick up on it quickly.

Of one thing I am sure: There is no point in trying to return to the America of Norman Rockwell.

There’s nothing wrong with uncertainty. There is, however, quite a bit wrong with false certitudes. Whatever happens, Norman Rockwell describes an America that is, for the most part, gone. Any attempt to force the Americans of today into a White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant mold will fail, after causing a lot of hard feelings. Even I get pretty sick and tired of Evangelical posturing and the whole Anglo thing which is 0% of my own heritage. If I keep my mouth shut, I might be mistaken for a WASP; but I have no desire to parade around as one. I have no particular respect for WASPs. Their moment has come and gone. There are a whole lot of different people now.

I can live with that. In fact, I rather like it.

Loss

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Norm at a Cinecon Show in Hollywood

Norm at a Cinecon Show in Hollywood

I knew that I was reaching the endgame, but not until today did I realize the suddenness and the finality with which a life can be snuffed out. Norman Witty has been a friend of mine for almost half a century, ever since he picked me up while I was hitchhiking on Wilshire Boulevard. He was a couple of years older than me, a chain smoker of unfiltered Camels, and—like me—a film freak. At the time I was a grad student in the UCLA film department, and Norm—well, he just watched a lot of movies. I had the feeling he had a trust fund or some other family income source that obviated the need for a job.

After a while, we parted ways for a while. I dropped out of the Masters degree program at UCLA because of faculty politics and went into the computer industry so that I could make a living. Norm, on the other hand, moved back East (he was originally from Massachusetts) and opened a comic book and film poster store in Northampton, Mass.

We re-established our friendship when he started coming out to Los Angeles for the Cinecon shows around Labor Day Weekend. By this time, Norm was fast approaching the point of total deafness. He offered Martine some money to help him interact with potential clients in the Cinecon dealer rooms. Martine and Norm communicated by way of a notepad, and Martine usually took the helm when Norm took a smoking break. This worked out well for both, and for me because I got to see a lot of free old movies at the Egyptian Theater down the street. We would go out to dinner together and have one of our annual food fights: Like many people who know nothing about preparing food, Norm had some curious requirements. He hated the ethnic restaurants I would “drag” him to, and Martine and I hated the white tablecloth joints with mediocre Euro food that he patronized.

This Labor Day, Norm did not come out for Cinecon. I have been in touch with him only by e-mail, and through a joint friend who visited him at his New York cooperative apartment on West 57th Street. Several New Yorkers whom we knew in common were concerned about Norm not seeing any of his friends and acquaintances any more.

Then the bombshell hit when I received an e-mail from Norman’s sister announcing that he had died early this morning of an aortic aneurism. Fortunately, she had been visiting with him and, in fact, was with him when he fell ill last night. He was able to get fast access to the medical care he needed, but his luck had run out.

I’ve written about Norm before, though not by name. You can see my blog from September 4, 2012 entitled “A Prickly Individual,” in which I expressed growing concern about his health.

In truth, Norm was prickly, but he was also generous and funny. He also had a store of knowledge about films which only began to wane as his hearing disappeared. At that point, he switched to silent movies and would buy and sell at the silent film festival in Pordenone, Italy.

Texts: A Boyhood in Algeria

Albert Camus

Albert Camus

This night inside him, yes these tangled hidden roots that bound him to this magnificent and frightening land, as much to its scorching days as to its heartbreakingly rapid twilights, and that was like a second life, truer perhaps than the everyday surface of his outward life; its history would be told as a series of obscure yearnings and powerful indescribable sensations, the odor of the schools, of the neighborhood stables, of laundry on his mother’s hands, of jasmine and honeysuckle in the upper neighborhoods, of the pages of the dictionary and the books he devoured, and the sour smell of the toilets at home and at the hardware store, the smell of the big cold classrooms where he would sometimes go alone before or after class, the warmth of his favorite classmates, the odor of warm wool and feces that Didier carried around with him, of the cologne big Marconi’s mother doused him with so profusely that Jacques, sitting on the bench in class, wanted to move still closer to his friend … the longing, yes, to live, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth this earth could give him, which is what he without knowing it hoped for from his mother.—Albert Camus, The First Man

Lost in the Twitterverse

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Johannes Gutenberg

Johannes Gutenberg (1399-1468)

It being the fiftieth anniversary of The New York Review of Books, I read a great article by Timothy Garton Ash entitled “From the Lighthouse: The World and the NYR After Fifty Years.” There is no one I would trust more to write such an article, as Garton Ash is the author of History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s. Shortly after the collapse of Russian Communism, he traveled across the continent interviewing all the major players and trying (rather successfully, I thought) to put it all into perspective.

Probably what I remember most from the NYR article is his term “Post-Gutenberg.” That hit me right between the eyes and brought a whole lot of images into mind. I was sitting down at Bibigo in Westwood  drinking a cup of hot barley tea when a young co-ed asked me a question. I was so startled that I couldn’t hear a word she said. She inhabited a different universe than I did, a universe defined by smart phones, Twitter, and various other digital accoutrements. I couldn’t imagine a person young enough to be my granddaughter even addressing me directly in the first place, unless she held a clipboard and was soliciting long-term donations for some charity. (Part of the problem was a combination of the restaurant’s noise level and partial hearing loss caused by Ménières Disease.)

Getting back to that term “Post-Gutenberg.” If anyone is a Gutenbergian, I am one. Even though I have read three books on a Kindle e-reader this month alone, I do most of my reading in print form. In the morning, I scan through the Los Angeles Times. During lunch, I read either The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books, with resulting damage to my shirtfronts as various sauces attach themselves to me. During the working day, I visit various news websites, such as those of CNN, NBC, The Raw Story, Salon.Com, and Truthdig.Com. Home from work, I cook or warm up our dinner; and, while Martine watches television, I read a good deep-dish book.

In other words, a rather substantial portion of my day is concerned with the written word: usually in print, but occasionally in digital format. I thought  briefly of signing up for Twitter, but then I realized that my congenital verborrhea prevents me from limiting myself to 140 characters. And, being the dinosaur that I am, I prefer to use complete sentences and unabbreviated terms. Hell, I’m even a nut about the exact diacritical marks when quoting foreign words and names. (Like Ménières Disease in the first paragraph.)

So here I am, a Gutenbergian in a Post-Gutenberg universe—a Twitterverse, as it were. You know what? I am not only a Gutenbergian, but an unregenerate one at that. If you want to change me, you’ll have to send me to a cultural re-education camp where I will be forced to finger-f*ck with a smartphone all my waking hours—like everybody else.

“Vive Boulanger! Vive la France!”

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General Georges Boulanger, “The man on Horseback”

General Georges Boulanger, “The Man on Horseback”

The period between the Revolution and the First World War in France is virtually unknown to the Anglo-American world.I am currently reading Frederick Brown’s For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus. It is an excellent book that has helped me to “connect the dots” from French literature and films. For instance, I knew about France’s humiliation at the hands of the German army in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which it lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. I knew about the Commune and its destruction at the hands of Adolph Thiers’s government at Versailles. What I did not know was that France was left a deeply divided country. On one hand stood Paris and the larger cities; on the other, La France Profonde, what we in America would refer to as “The Heartland” or “Flyover Country.”

It was a period reminiscent of 21st century America, with its war between religion and liberalism—except in France, religion meant the Catholic Church. Liberalism was associated with those Commie Communards who were shot to death by the French army at the Mur des Fédérés at Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. As the 1870s shaded into the 1880s, Paris was not unlike present-day Washington in its seemingly irreconcilable divisions.

At this time, there arose a would-be Messiah, General Georges Boulanger, “The Man on Horseback,” beyond whom many of the irreconcilables were mysteriously reconciled. As Maurice Barrès said, “The important thing about popular heroes is not so much their own intentions but the picture of them that people create in their own minds.”

It is not that Boulanger had an undistinguished military career. He fought successfully in Algeria, Tunisia, Viet Nam, and Italy. He was wounded (and addicted to the morphine used to relieve him from the pain). And he enjoyed the adulation of crowds. As Frederick Brown writes:

While Boulanger marked time, Boulangism marched forward and continued to raise alarms. Jules Ferry, who understood the revolutionary impetu of revanchism in what was becoming a widespread movement, deplored its brutish character. “For some time we have been witnessing the development of a species of patriotism hitherto unknown in France,“ Ferry declared. “It is a noisy despicable creed that seeks not to unify and appease but to set citizens against one another…. If one believes its spokesmen, love of country belongs to one party alone, or to one sect within that party, and all who do not think as they do, who would not wish to substitute … the impulse of irresponsible crowds for the free and reflective action of public powers, all who do not worship their idols and trot alongside behind the the chariot … are all held indiscriminately to be partisans of the foreigner!”

How like our own time! We may not have a “Man on Horseback” to support, but the prevalent disgust at the divisions between left and right are, I feel, ripe for exploitation.

What ever happened to Boulanger? Although he seemed to be the coming thing, he was outmaneuvered politically by a nobody named Ernest Constans and forced to flee to Belgium. The charge was “plotting to subvert the legally constituted government.” From Belgium, Boulanger exiled himself to Saint-Hélier on the Isle of Jersey. When his wife Marguerite sickened and died, Boulanger blew his brains out in front of the headstone of her grave at Ixelles Cemetery in Brussels.

As one of his former adherents proclaimed, “General Boulanger didn’t deceive us. It was we who deceived ourselves. Boulangism is failed Bonapartism. To succeed, it needs a Bonaparte, and Boulanger as Bonaparte was a figment of our imagination.”

Isn’t that the way it always is?

HallowThanksMas

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Don’t Let Retailers Set Your Agenda

Don’t Let Retailers Set Your Agenda

We are currently on that Snakes & Ladders descent from Halloween through Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years to Super Bowl Sunday. That’s a goodly chunk of the year being anxious as to whether one has satisfied all one’s loved ones. Because we watch television so many wasted hours each day, we are very conscious of what all the brick-and-mortar retailers want us to do. They endlessly supply us with suggestions as to what to buy for whom. And if the TV isn’t bad enough, there are also the radio, newspapers, e-mail, and FaceBook to remind us.

Because I am in the accounting profession (for the time being), I see this time of year primarily as the run-up to tax season. It means printing and sending out tax organizers, frequent installation of new versions of the tax software, constant re-indexing of the tax database, printing Form 1096 and 1099 for our clients (as needed), and dozens of other tasks. The worst part is the entry and processing of the actual tax returns, which builds up in a slow crescendo to the frantic last weeks before the April 15 deadline. In accounting, one doesn’t look at the Holidays so much as one looks past them.

Enough Already!

Enough Already!

As a result, I don’t go in for holiday decorations. I skip Halloween altogether—there’s never any Trick-or-Treaters who come to our door any more. We get together with our friends for Thanksgiving. We go to a couple of Christmas events, usually a concert of holiday music, and then we visit friends and family. On New Year’s, we stay in to avoid the drunk and drugged motorists. And Super Bowl Sunday? A great time to visit an otherwise crowded museum. Instead of joining the throngs at a shopping center on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), I am thinking of suggesting Martine that we go instead to the Getty Villa to enjoy the serenity of ancient Greek and Roman art.

In fact, serenity is the key. If you don’t feel this serenity during the holiday season, I think you are probably doing something wrong. There’s little that we can do in the way of material goods to show our love. The batteries will run down, the gizmos will fail to work—but the love behind them still runs strong. At least, it should!

Yesterday, I saw my best friends and learned a lesson. Last year, I bought their youngest son a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which wound up being enjoyed primarily by the father. When I asked the son what should I get him, he told me not to worry about it. I don’t have any children of my own, so the children of my friends are particularly important to me. I won’t worry about it, but I will find something nice for him.

 

Hire This Man!

Matt Bramble

Matt Bramble

‘Suppose I was inclined to take you into my service (said he) what are your qualifications? what are you good for?’ ‘An please your honour (answered this original) I can read and write, and do the business of the stable indifferent well — I can dress a horse, and shoe him, and bleed and rowel him; and, as for the practice of sow-gelding, I won’t turn my back on e’er a he in the county of Wilts — Then I can make hog’s puddings and hob-nails, mend kettles and tin sauce-pans.’ — Here uncle burst out a-laughing; and inquired what other accomplishments he was master of — ‘I know something of single-stick, and psalmody (proceeded Clinker); I can play upon the Jew’s-harp, sing Black-ey’d Susan, Arthur-o’Bradley, and divers other songs; I can dance a Welsh jig, and Nancy Dawson; wrestle a fall with any lad of my inches, when I’m in heart; and, under correction, I can find a hare when your honour wants a bit of game.’—Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

The Curse of the Cat People

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Simone Simon and Anne Carter in Curse of the Cat People (1944)

Simone Simon and Ann Carter in The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

All the ingredients for horror are there: Tarrytown, New York, with its legend of the headless horseman; a seemingly haunted house; a woman come back from the dead; and a lonely little girl who will do anything for a friend. Except that this is a Val Lewton film. The horrors are all there in the background, waiting to pounce. That they never do makes the film more profound in a way, as if all the darkness we imagine in life were really just the result of looking at things the wrong way.

The headless horseman never shows up, although at one point we think we will. The haunted house isn’t really haunted: It’s inhabited by an unhappy mother who doesn’t acknowledge the daughter who loves her. The woman come back from the dead (above) is a loving and friendly ghost who wants nothing but good for Amy, the lonely little girl who keeps getting in trouble for being lost in her dreams.

Lobby Card for Curse of the Cat People

Lobby Card for Curse of the Cat People

Oh, and by the way, there is no menacing black cat as shown on the lobby card above. There is a black cat who appears on a tree branch briefly at the beginning, but jumps away to avoid a mischievous boy.

There is one beautiful little French Christmas carol sung by the ghost Irena, played by Simone Simon, that runs through the film—a song without menace of any kind. Here is a link to the carol—“Il Est Né le Divin Enfant”—as sung by Edith Piaf:

So, The Curse of the Cat People is either a total failure, or it’s not quite what it’s advertised to be. My vote is for the latter.

That is so typical of Val Lewton, who produced a series of films in the 1940s that are still being seen and loved. Thousands have been seduced by the prospect of horror that never quite emerges. It is suggested, but is rarely what it seems. There is a death in The Leopard Man, but it happens off screen. There is plague on The Isle of the Dead; grave-robbing in The Body Snatcher; devil worship in The 7th Victim; a real zombie (though not the brain-eating variety) in I Walked with a Zombie; and a menacing panther at a swimming pool in The Cat People. We are brought close to the edge of our seats, but in the end are protected from any direct contact with anything vile: Instead what at first promised to have a terrifying dimension winds up with more of a psychological dimension.

One interesting fact about Lewton is that he never directed any of these films: He produced them. Yet his stamp on these pictures—which are directed by excellent directors such as Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson, and Robert Wise—is as decisive as the stamp of an Alfred Hitchcock or a John Ford.

I had purchased a collection of Val Lewton films on DVD from Turner Classic Movies (TCM). It arrived yesterday, so I decided to watch The Curse of the Cat People this afternoon. I look forward to re-acquainting myself with the other eight titles in the series as well.

Pundits for the Feeble-Minded

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“Ditto-Head”—Another Term for the Brainless?

“Ditto-Head”—Another Term for the Brainless?

I am weary of expending my energy reacting to people who say stupid things in public for the purpose of self-aggrandizement, either in the form of fame or money. This has become an age of talking heads who flood the media in order to appeal to the feeble-minded, the left behind, the village idiots. Here, in alphabetical order by last name, are sixteen chronic offenders:

  • Michele Bachmann, Congressman (R-Minnesota). If you can stand to look at her gorgon eyes without turning to stone, you are a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
  • Glenn Beck, Pundit. The rodeo clown of the right wing.
  • Patrick Buchanan, Pundit. Occasionally lucid, usually not.
  • Dick Cheney, Former Vice President. Mean and scary. One of the Beasts of the Apocalypse.
  • Ann Coulter, Pundit. So vicious that she gets in the way of her own message. May be a transsexual.
  • Ted Cruz (and his father Rafael Cruz), Senator (R-Texas). Deceptively smooth rightist ideologue.
  • Newt Gingrich, Former Speaker of the House (R-Georgia). Smart enough to know better, but wants the right wing to win to protect his own shaky legacy.
  • Louis Gohmert, Congressman (R-Texas). His crazy quotes liven many press stories.
  • Sean Hannity, Fox News Pundit. Smarmy and fascistic.
  • Wayne La Pierre, NRA Spokesman. Wants to arm everybody. A shill for the arms industry.
  • Rush Limbaugh, Pundit. If you do the opposite of what he advocates, you’ll probably be okay.
  • Bill O’Reilly, Fox News Pundit. Showers with falafel.
  • Sarah Palin, Ex-Governor (R-Alaska) and Pundit. The only pundit I know who may be more stupid than her followers.
  • Rand Paul, Senator (R-Kentucky). What happens when you mate a libertarian with a Brillo Pad ®?
  • Pat Robertson, Televangelist. Probably can be forgiven for his advanced age, during which he has surprisingly not been struck by lightning once for his pronouncements.
  • Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice U.S. Supreme Court. If there’s something evil that a judge can say, it’ll be Scalia saying it.

Let me quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Let the doors be shut upon him that he may play the fool nowhere but in’s own house.”

Birthday of an Island

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The Island of Surtsey as It Is Today

The Island of Surtsey as It Is Today

Fifty years ago today, the Island of Surtsey was born as the result of an undersea volcanic eruption in Iceland’s Westmann (Vestmannæyjar) Islands. Named after Surtr, one of the giants of Norse mythology, the island was at one time one square mile, but as a result of erosion has over the last fifty years been whittled down to a little more than half that size.

Did I visit Surtsey on my trip to Iceland this summer? I would have if it weren’t forbidden. Only scientists can visit the island, and only under restrictive conditions. For instance, they must not carry seeds to the island. One time, tomato plants started to grow as a result of a tomato seeds being in one of the researchers’ excreta. All biota on the island must have come there naturally as a result of wind or transport by birds. There are few places on earth which are unaffected by human habitation: The intent is to see what happens when we humans don’t have our thumbs resting on the scales.

The photo above is from Páll Stefánsson of The Iceland Review.