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Monthly Archives: March 2016

“The Stars Are Not Wanted Now”

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Wystan Hugh Auden, by Bill Potter, bromide print, 1972

Wystan Hugh Auden, by Bill Potter, bromide print, 1972

This poem by W. H. Auden, variously called “Funeral Blues” and “Stop All the Clocks, Cut Off the Telephone,” is the second part of “Two Songs for Hedli Anderson.” Antoinette Millicent Hedley Anderson (1907-1990) was an English singer and actor who was a good friend of the poet. As she outlived Auden by some twenty years, it appears the song was written for her to sing in a performance.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public
doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Bad Alumnus

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Omigosh, Is It Time for My 50th Reunion Already?

Omigosh, Is It Time for My 50th Reunion Already?

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 50th 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.

Not the Worst of Men

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Hugo Chavez, the late President of Venezuela

Hugo Chavez, the late President of Venezuela

Not all dictators are uniformly bad. Okay, there were Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao—not to mention the horrendous Kim dynasty of North Korea. But think for a second: Would the world be in this ISIS/ISIL/Daesh mess if Saddam Hussein were still alive? We hanged him for being a bad dude, but worse dudes were to follow.

If there is any country in the Western Hemisphere that is an abysmal basket case, that country would be Haiti. After the 2010 earthquake that leveled half the country, all the NGOs moved in with their shiny SUVs and their air of moral superiority. One country, however, donated money to Haiti—admittedly much of which went into the wrong hands—but the recipients did not have to grovel for it. That was Venezuela, which at the time was basking in oil wealth. Through its Petrocaribe alliance with several other states, Hugo Chavez gave millions to the devastated country.

Now Venezuela is in dire straits and Hugo Chavez is dead of cancer. As much as his regime bad-mouthed the U.S., I salute Chavez for having a heart that was often in the right place.

Living With Bad Paper

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A Ticket to Homelessness?

A Ticket to Homelessness?

Joining the military could be a kind of solution for young men and women who do not have great job prospects upon leaving high school. But what if the desire for “street cred” overrides good judgment, and the GI finds himself or herself with a discharge that is considered to be Other Than Honorable, or simply OTH? Another name for such a discharge is “Bad Paper.”

For over a million former soldiers, sailors, and airmen, Bad Paper is a ticket to homelessness without the possibilities of veterans’ benefits such as education, homelessness prevention, and disability or health care. That’s not even to mention the turned-down job applications and the loss of esteem that follows.

For those who leave the military with a trail of Bad Paper, it would have been better if they were merely felons in the civilian world: The military world is unforgiving and sometimes unduly punitive. When questioned about this, General Martin Dempsey replied:

I wouldn’t suggest that we should in any way reconsider the way we characterize discharges at the time of occurrence…. It is a complex issue and we all make choices in life that then we live with for the rest of our lives and I think we have to understand that as well.

Not much help there.

Ideally, there would be some kind of civilian post-discharge review that could rectify the vagaries of military justice, which varies widely from service to service and from one unit to another.

 

Stubby Fingers Speaks

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Vote for Me or I’ll Sue You

Vote for Me or I’ll Sue You

I want to be President of the United States because I know I can make it as great as I am. And how great am I? I’m not only extremely smart and good-looking, but richer than you can imagine. How many planes and helicopters do you own that have your name all over them? And look at my fingers: They’re not short and stubby; and as for the other thing, once I wrap a couple of hundred dollar bills around it, it’s big enough for any purpose! Even my beautiful daughter would go out on a date with me.

This persecution of my followers has to stop at once! As the Bible says in my favorite book, the Gospel of St. John the Baptist: “If you live by the sword, you’ll die in bad company, where there is the weeping and gnashing of teeth!” That’s Holy Scripture, you know, almost as holy as The Art of the Deal.

One of My Courteous, Alert Followers

One of My Courteous, Alert Followers

So this is what I’m here to tell you today: If you don’t want to make America great again, if you don’t vote for me, I’m going to take you to court. How will I know who you voted for? I’ll know! I know everything because of how smart I am. So watch yourself, or you’ll wind up even more miserable than you already are.

You know that Mexicans and Muslims and dark people are no good for America. I’m beginning to think that Canadians are a bit iffy too, so we’ll have to build a wall across our borders with Canada as well as Mexico. And I’ll make the Canucks pay for it.

In the meantime, come and have some of my special Trump burgers and Trump beer! Don’t crowd, just make sure none of those protesters get their hands on any of it. Huh? … What’s it made of? … You can bet it’s the best meat that the highways of America have to offer.

 

The New Petersen

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The Redesigned Petersen Automotive Museum

The Redesigned Petersen Automotive Museum

The new look takes some getting used to, but it seems to be an astonishing success. Martine and I have visited the Petersen Automotive Museum about once every year. Never did we see such a crowd as we saw today. We had to park on the second floor of the parking structure, for the first time ever.

I always liked the old Petersen, but it had grown a bit tatty over the years. Now both the inside and outside are all new. One starts with the historical exhibits on the third floor, comes down to see the industry exhibits on the second floor, and finally returns to the ground floor to see exhibits of the classic automobile as a fine art form, including cars painted by David Hockney and Alexander Calder.

Insofar as I know, Southern California now has three world class auto museums:

  • The Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire Boulevard’s Museum Row
  • The Nethercutt Collection in Sylmar in the San Fernando Valley, a free museum that charges no admission and is easily as extensive as the Petersen
  • The Murphy Auto Museum in Oxnard, which Martine and I have not visited yet (but hope to see next monh after tax season)

Since L.A. is a city made possible by the automobile, it makes sense to study the phenomenon here.

Where the old Petersen thematically separated their vehicles in mutually exclusive areas, the new layout intermixes such items as famous cars used in movies, old horseless carriages, motorcycles, and one-of-a-kind fantasy cars so that one doesn’t just skip around. It is possible to see the same technological and design ideas cross-fertilizing the different kinds of vehicles on the road.

It is quite evident that the Petersen got a large influx of money (some $90 million I understand). The new chairman, Peter Mullin, has run his own auto museum in Oxnard, which may have merged with the Petersen.

 

Hidden in the Credits

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Production Designer Sir Ken Adam

Production Designer Sir Ken Adam

Above all, we tend to give credit to the actors in a movie. Those who know a little more about how films will tend to credit the director. But it doesn’t stop there. What about producers like Val Lewton and Henry Blanke, cinematographers like Gregg Toland and Gabriel Figueroa, editors like Slavko Vorkapich, and—more to the point here—production designers like Sir Ken Adam?

I remember having a Dartmouth Film Society dinner with Hollywood producer Max Youngstein in the mid 1960s. He had just produced Fail-Safe (1964). When I asked him if the production had been designed by Ken Adam, he positively beamed at me. He prided himself for having found someone else who gave the film a Ken Adam touch.

Why? Ken Adam was responsible for film designs which will forever be associated in our minds with the best of the 1960s, such as Doctor No (1962) and Doctor Strangelove (1964).

Doctor No’s “Reception Room” in the Film of the Same Name

Doctor No’s “Reception Room” in the Film of the Same Name

In addition there was the War Room in Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964):

 

Kubrick’s War Room in Doctor Strangelove

Model for Kubrick’s War Room in Doctor Strangelove

As one who lived through that anxious time, I will always remember Ken Adam’s sets for these and other films. Perhaps he is unknown to the general film-going public, but now that we lost him, his vision will be missed.

Berezina in a Dish

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My Least Favorite Hungarian Food

My Least Favorite Hungarian Food

Whenever my mother made it, I always ran out of the house and stayed away until the smell dissipated. What made things difficult is that she always made kocsonya (pronounced KOH-chone-yah) in the winter. As my Uncle Emil used to say, he couldn’t eat any unless there was snow on the ground. I did him one better: I couldn’t eat kocsonya if there was any in the Western Hemisphere.

I’ve always said that a serving of the noxious stuff reminded me of a frozen river with mangled human and animal remains—very like the Berezina River in Belarus where Napoleon lost thousands of his remaining forces after retreating from Moscow.

Apparently there’s a Russian equivalent. In a short story entitled “Aspic,” Tatyana Tolstoya describes cooking up a batch very like the recipe I’m describing:

Now it’s boiling, raging. Now the surface is coated with gray, dirty ripples: all that’s bad, all that’s weighty, all that’s fearful, all that suffered, darted, and tried to break loose, oinked and mooed, couldn’t understand, resisted, and gasped for breath—all of it turns to muck. All the pain and death are gone, congealed into repugnant fluffy felt. Finito. Placidity, forgiveness.

Kind of makes vegetarianism attractive, no? And that’s about all I could say without retching….

 

Not Immune from Prosecution

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In Iceland 26 Bankers Are Serving Time Behind Bars

In Iceland 26 Bankers Are Serving Time Behind Bars

In the United States, bankers seem to have received “Get Out of Jail Free” cards for their transgressions. In tiny Iceland, on the other hand, a group of bankers are serving a combined seventy-four years of hard time. And today, five more bankers from Glitnir Bank are being charged.

Here are four more stories from The Iceland Review of that spunky little country’s unwillingness to put up with banking fraud:

Now those felonious clowns who packaged all those weird mortgage securities in 2008 and earlier should be doing hard time in stir in one of our fine prisons, where protecting one’s ass is a full-time occupation. Why Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have not hauled them in is a travesty of justice.

 

Thunder and Lightning and Rain

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This Never Happens in L.A., Does It?

This Never Happens in L.A., Does It?

It is a well-known fact that I have become openly contemptuous of all he hoopla about this year’s El Niño predictions. Well, early this morning, we were hit by a major thunderstorm that abated just as I started dressing up to go to work. There was, in addition to the thunder, considerable lightning and rain. In Altadena, my friend Bill Korn showed pictures of his vegetable garden under a layer of fall hail.

I guess, better late than never. I wouldn’t mind seeing a few more of these storms over the next couple of months. We still need to fill those reservoirs and deepen that Sierra snow pack.