Home » Posts tagged 'youth'

Tag Archives: youth

I Vitelloni (1953)

Posted on by | Leave a comment

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.

Glory Days

Posted on by | 2 Comments

There are many possible pathways through a life. For many, the high point of their lives came early, in high school or college. As they settled down into family life, they rarely ever cracked a book or veered in a different direction. When one talks to them, most of their talk is of their glory days—and their present lives are a long comedown.

Although I was a high school valedictorian who was accepted for a four-year scholarship at an Ivy League college, I never felt I had any real laurels upon which to rest. The first seven years of my life were spent in a Hungarian household, where the Magyar language was the only one spoken. This gave me a slightly different outlook from most others. As I learned English and began to see myself as an American, I also saw myself as something of a hyphenated American who had his feet in two cultures.

During my high school and college years, I was walking around with a pituitary tumor that gave me severe headaches as it pressed against the optic nerve. So my glory days of youth were spent mostly in pain. When I was successfully operated on after I graduated in 1966, I looked like an 11-year-old rather than a college graduate. You can imagine how that affected my self-image.

In the intervening years I had two careers: first, as a computer programmer and director of marketing for a demographic data supplier, and then as a computer specialist and office manager for two tax accounting firms. In both professions, I saw myself as a mercenary who was actually after different game.

Now that I am retired, I am coming into my own as a writer here on this WordPress site. Oh, I am no “influencer.” I have no intention of getting you to buy crap, or anything else. If I am selling anything, it is my thoughts and feelings as a human being living in difficult times. I feel good and am considerably happier than I was during my youth.

It looks as if I am now living through my glory days.

Unexpected Angels

Posted on by

Young Volunteers Removing Graffiti

In general, I am not one to praise the younger generation—probably because they have adopted too many aspects of our culture which I find spurious, including smart phones, e-scooters, and in fact the whole gig economy.

Imagine my surprise when I found many young men and women cleaning up the mess in Santa Monica after the looters and other thugs had their way last Sunday. Okay, I guess I was a little tough on them, but after all they shouldn’t ought to have have stepped on my lawn.

More Graffiti Cleanup

I have always loved the look of Santa Monica. In 1966, when I moved into an apartment on Sunset Boulevard near Barrington Avenue, the first trip I took on my own was by bus to Santa Monica and its beach. After having been raised in grungy Cleveland with its dirty red brick, I saw Santa Monica as a pretty town at the edge of the sea. In Cleveland, we had no beach to speak of along the shores of poor, polluted Lake Erie. For many years, I lived in Santa Monica, until I was squeezed out around 1979 when Proposition 13 was adopted by the voters of California. Still, I live within two and a half miles of the ocean and I like to walk there from time to time.