A Dizzy Dancing Way to Feel

As we gather on modern-day America’s most representative holiday for the game that is the climax of it all, I remain stuck on last week’s Grammys.

So out of tune with popular music since the heyday of Dire Straits and Warren Zevon, I had no idea what songs were nominated or what any of them sounded like. Truth is, I was writing about a talk I had just heard at a local museum. All I wanted was background with an occasional announcement that would make me look up.

Ordinarily, I’d have put on a football or baseball game, but the Grammys are wisely broadcast on the first Monday night in ten months that has neither. So instead of a raised broadcaster’s voice or roar of a crowd to get my attention, I listened for blast-from-the-past names.

Speaking of things that most represent America, Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” from the 1980s slowly rolled onto stage with the unmistakeable swaying two-note bounce that made me look up before I or anyone else could see the guitarist/songwriter herself emerge from the shadows to sing it. Then it became a duet with a country singer unknown to me who made it a hit yet again just years ago.

Many marvelled at the combination of a radiant black woman folk singer in lyrical conversation with Luke Combs, a relaxed white male country singer. “A fleeting gift of harmony,” as one called it. The reference is, inescapably, to race, and it could as well apply to Stevie Wonder’s tribute to Tony Bennett who was projected on a screen behind the stage as they traded the lyrics of “For Once in My Life.”

To me, both were more generational than racial. True, Wonder is more my age, too old to be receiving a proverbial torch, but with Tony Bennett passing it, Wonder is still in the game. A few friends sent me pictures of Chapman busking in Harvard Square back in the 80s before the cafe owners started inviting her inside. She passed the torch to numerous buskers who perform to this day in the very recessed doorways she once played. As we saw and heard, she‘s still in the game.

Admittedly, I may be yet under the spell of Joni Mitchell’s rendition of “Both Sides Now” near the Grammys’ end. Slowed down, it was resigned yet content, a bookend to the coming-of-age tune seasoned with both whimsy and skepticism that caught our attention back in the turbulant 60s. With young Brandi Carlile on guitar beside her, you could see the torch being passed.

For anyone my age, that phrase, that metaphor, can’t help but recall what may be this country’s most memorable inaugural address, JFK’s “Ask not” challenge aimed at Boomers. Seven years later, I was in a college classroom listening to a youthful English teacher calling that our generation’s commencement address.

Today, I settle in to watch the full-blown American pageantry of a championship game punctuated by multi-million dollar commercials shown for the first time, a loud and flashy half-time show of global superstars, and the romance of a Grammy-winner and a popular, slap-happy star player that fascinates the public much the way that of Jack and Jackie did back in the days of Camelot. Can’t help but wonder:

Was Joni Mitchell’s rendition of “Both Sides Now,” as she sat in a chair and held her cane, my generation’s valedictory address?

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https://genius.com/Joni-mitchell-both-sides-now-lyrics

Zone of Insistence

To say that The Zone of Interest is about the Holocaust would be as misleading as it is true.

From Anne Frank to Oskar Schindler, we expect stories about Nazi Germany to focus on Jewish people and those who hid them or aided their escape. We are taken into the homes they flee, the trains on which they flee, the places to which they flee–or we are stopped where they are caught.

Adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same name, Zone puts us in the home and garden of the Nazi commandant of a concentration camp, his wife, and his four “strong, happy, healthy children.” The film is set not in Auschwitz, but just outside the camp’s 20-foot wall, topped by barbed wire. The only Jewish people we meet are two maids who almost never speak–unless you count the untold thousands on the other side of a 20-foot wall that the commandant’s wife is methodically covering with vines and flowers while saplings take their time to grow as high as that wire.

Nor do we hear the name “Jew” or any description of what happens in the camp until halfway into the film, not even a hint. Instead, we see commandant reading his little girl a bedtime story, one hand brushing his fashy back in place.* We see the wife trying on a fur coat before a mirror and then handing it to the maid with instructions to re-sew the lining–and hearing her tell friends that she found a diamond in a tube of toothpaste. One laughs, “Oh, they are so clever!”

From scene to scene, from garden to kitchen and from porch to barn, they are a normal family with a dog, mostly happy with an occasional hiccup, such as one daughter’s strange dreams. All while we see the smoke rise over and the muffled screams and gunshots surge through that ubiquitous wall. You might wonder why the title is anything but Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.”

Something about the word “zone” might answer this. Not the literal, spacial meaning, but the implied vibrancy of when we say that someone is “in the zone” or “zoned in.” To borrow what we often say of the Nazis, there’s no film that compares to Zone–from the black screen that opens it, through the red screen that divides it, to pulsating blank screen that ends it.

Zone Director Jonathan Glazer draws something out of us rather than putting it in or just showing it. Call it psychological horror, much of it done with sound, color, and camera angles with many long shots that would pass as surveillance tapes. Close-ups of the faces of the commandant and his wife are few and far between.

As if to defy the camera, most of the horror is off-screen or behind the wall.

Though there is no violence at all on-screen, this is not for the faint of heart. Entertaining? Well, it was gripping without a hint of a joke. But I can give it one unconditional recommendation: For those who appreciate the sheer craft of filmmaking, The Zone of Interest is must-see, must-hear, must-feel.

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*A hairstyle popular with Nazi men who shaved their heads under a circle above the ears, leaving the hair long on top and combed straight back. We saw a brief revival of this in 2017-18 after it was modeled by Donald Trump’s “very fine people” in Charlottesville.

https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/01/11/the-zone-of-interest-jonathan-glazer-review
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7160372/

A Whale of a Prayer

First weekend after New Year’s is the Moby-Dick Marathon Reading in New Bedford, as close as I come to a religious observance these past five years.

This year, Recuperation Monday was most unusual. For starters, I finished breakfast at 3 p.m.

Also, because it fell on the 8th, I was acutely aware of my cousin John Hyzuk, a longtime Plum Islander far more popular than I realized judging from the condolences sent my way.

Would have been his 73rd birthday as well as my mother’s 99th. She might have stayed up for the livestream of my reading at 1:30 a.m. Sunday, despite tuning in early for my scheduled time at 1 a.m.

John would have laughed at the thought. In fact, in 2020 and each year since, he did exactly that. But he always pressed me to answer a question he found irresistible when I first told him of it.

He had quite a taste for the unusual, the eccentric, the bold. Pretty sure his favorite song was Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” which tells us something.

When I called Ishmael the ultimate “Excitable Boy,” John’s interest piqued. So, upon return from a pilgrimage to Herman Melville’s grave in the Bronx a few years ago, I was eager to tell him of the blank scroll on the tombstone. He immediately asked why?

“It’s a debate that has never been resolved.”

“Debate?”

“Some think it was Melville’s white flag to a hard, cruel world. Others think it was his middle finger.”

John’s reaction left no question as to which side he preferred.

Another local plumber recognized me as soon as I arrived at the Whaling Museum. Was sure to be in the audience for his turn, and like most of the 200-plus readers, he brought the text to life. No matter that he listed the categories of whales, his voice caught the smart-assed mix of whimsy and indignation, humor and reverence we call Ishmael.

When I was in grad school, I wrote a paper on a bold premise: If the Bible is “God talking to man,” then Moby-Dick is man’s response. This fascinated a few English profs at South Dakota State, at least when I laid it out over a few pitchers of Grain Belt at a downtown bar.

Admittedly, pure academic speculation with a few quotes leaning my way. Any great work of art will be open to several interpretations, some inevitably contradictory.

D.H. Lawrence and Somerset Maugham agreed that it was “written by a man in love,” as one called it. According to biographer Michael Shelden, that was a reference to Melville’s affair with Sarah Anne Morewood, a neighbor whose elderly husband’s devotion to business kept him in NYC most of the time that the novel was written at Melville’s Arrowhead Farm in the Berkshires. On the other hand, male relationships in the book, particularly that of Ishmael and Queequeg, have led others to call Moby-Dick a gay tract.

Moby-Dick has also been interpreted as an atheistic, even nihilistic treatise—a far crow’s nest cry from the accepted categorization of adventure story mixed with industrial manual. Also, “proto-Darwinian,” eight years ahead of Origin of the Species, with Ishmael cast as a “blue environmentalist” and “climate refugee.”

Most relevant today is C.L.R. James’ Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1952) calling it a forerunner of the totalitarianism genre long before Brave New World and 1984. James himself is now a forerunner of numerous pundits comparing Trump’s boast of retribution to Ahab’s bent on revenge.

Whether Melville was responding to God or not hardly matters. As his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne worried, “He can neither believe nor be comfortable in his disbelief.” What does matter is that he was and still is speaking to US.America didn’t listen then, and 10 years later sank into Civil War.

Save a few hundred Dick Heads who think that New Bedford offers a great weekend getaway in January, nearly half of America is just as deaf now – while many more pay little or no attention.

That would be more than enough cause for a white flag on a tombstone, but I prefer my cousin’s verdict set to the white whale roar of Warren Zevon.

May sound too aggressive for a church, but that’s why this excitable boy is a congregant. And why I call it prayer.

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Every year I also attend the Old South Presbyteruan church on the Friday night closest to Dec. 10, the birthday of William Lloyd Garrison to hear a talk in his honor right around the corner from the home where he was born. Uncomfortable in my disbelief, I bring questions.
Photo by Richard K. Lodge, my former editor at the local paper and one of the organizers of of the annual Garrison lecture.

E Pluribus Whitewash

Ever notice how we treat history as if it is a disconnected chain of events? Sounds like a contradiction in terms, but historical novelist David Tory’s description is undeniable:

All Americans know that the English landed in Jamestown and Plymouth to form colonies, that a revolution gained American independence, that a Civil War ended in some mess called Reconstruction, and then World War I was followed by World War II. Few of us ever account for more than a century between the first two, and another three-quarters before the third. The last two items skip, respectively, just a half- and less than a quarter-century, so at least we’re getting closer.

Could probably go on, but I’d rather not think of anything that happened in my lifetime as history. No matter, as Tory sure gave us enough to make the point: Americans know what the highlights are, but have no idea how we went from one to the next.

That, folks, may sum up the core of today’s heated debates over the teaching of American history in public schools. There’s a reason that the Labor Movement is never included in history texts, and why the Great Depression and the New Deal are downplayed. And a reason why there’s not a single monument to the Mexican War in Washington DC–and why we so often hear “Remember the Alamo,” but never hear Pres. US Grant’s admission that it was a land-grab–in his phrase, “a wicked war.”

Today’s razor wire fences in the Rio Grande would be hard to justify if the full story of westward expansion were known. Better to think we were offering Christianity and a better way of life from sea to gilded sea. Sounds crazy? How much different is it from Florida schools now teaching that slavery was beneficial to kidnapped Africans forced to work on plantations because it taught them basic employment skills?

A useful example occurred during Washington’s years as president. No, I wasn’t there, but I read more than one account of how Washington and his Secretary of War (now Defense) Henry Knox sent troops to the frontier which, at that time, was Ohio and Kentucky. As we all know, white settlers fought with tribes, and as we are all led to believe, tribes were nomadic, and whites created peaceful settlements that the tribes invaded. So, of course, the US Army rode in.

In fact, the troops sent by Washington were not to protect settlers against the tribes, but to protect the tribes from the settlers–or at least to stop the settlers from encroaching on tribal land. Washington and Knox were intent on honoring treaties they themselves signed, but settlers kept wanting more. Once Washington and Knox were gone, Adams and Jefferson may not have felt the same commitment, and/or their attention was drained by the on-going intrigues of England and France on the other side of the Atlantic.

By 1803, Jefferson could buy a territory called Louisiana that extended from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border between places now called Minnesota and Idaho. That, in turn, sent an avalanche of settlers southwest, and friction with Mexico was inevitable. Pres. Polk’s claim of “American blood on American soil” served as a pretext to make an invasion seem like self-protection–not to mention as a model for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and “weapons of mass destruction” over a century later.

To borrow Tory’s logic, this is a missing link from the well-worn narrative that happily takes American school children from Thanksgiving to Manifest Destiny, a term that implies divine approval. Take it a step further, and it reveals that the “destiny” was not at all “manifest” if the very “Father of Our Country” wanted to put the brakes on it. But the term does suit the insistence of many today who prefer to believe that taking everything save a few reservations was right and just–or, in one impossibly euphemistic word, patriotic.

As we often hear, they were nomads not using the land anyway. Turns out that statement was not entirely true, as many tribes had settlements to which “hunters and gatherers,” as we like to call them, returned for months at a time. That “nomadic” designation for Native Americans is equivalent to the claim that enslaved Africans “were very well treated by plantation owners.”

Tory noted that the first ships that landed in Jamestown and Plymouth and elsewhere in the New World returned to England with Natives whom they taught to speak English and return to serve as negotiators for their settlements with the tribes. This suggests, in Tory’s phrase, that the English–at least the landowners and merchants who remained in England–were “paving the way” for peaceful co-existence and a healthy relationship between trading partners.

This squares with the treaties signed by Washington and Knox and their futile attempts to honor them a century-and-a-half later. Just six years after Washington left office, Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase made our destiny, divine or not, manifest.

Like so many large segments on the timeline of American history, these are the lines, curved as they may be, of connection between the highlights–highlights that, taken out of context, are easily and deliberately distorted.

Because they all involve the history of minorities, of labor, of expansion–to the Mississippi, across the Prairie, to California, and all the way to the Philippines–they are stories that many of us would rather not know.

Of course, no one can admit that, and so people hide behind a claim that it makes their children “uncomfortable.” All while they accuse those who want America’s full story taught as being “Woke.” Not to mention that they cancel history while accusing others of “Cancel Culture.” What they want is not history. It is therapy.

Now there’s your contradiction in terms.

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*American Progress* by John Gast (1872)
https://lewebpedagogique.com/mindthegap/2023/11/17/2-paintings-on-manifest-destiny/

Historical Cozies

By the time he was finished, novelist David Tory whet our appetites for the next installment of his Stanfield Chronicles by reading a passage that has Isaac and Abbie entering a room, sitting by a fireplace, and having “cozies…”

He looked up at us and pronounced the “dot, dot, dot,” leaving the punctuated euphemism to our imagination before crashing his own scene with a fire gone wild. Makes you wonder just what was the temperature of an early-17th Century cozy? And how long were Isaac and Abbie going at it?

Welcome to the world of historical fiction. Tory was cautious about defining the category that he represents quite well with his first two page-turners: Exploration which takes us from England in 1613 to the landing of the Mayflower, and Retribution which picks up the adventures of Isaac Stanfield in 1620. A third installment, ending in 1635, is already drafted, and for the folks in the Custom House audience who have read the first two (my ears are still ringing), it can’t come soon enough.

Tory is an unlikely writer of any fiction, let alone historical. After following his father’s advice to attend “the University of Life” rather than enrolling anywhere, he eventually took an interest in history and soon questioned why it seemed a string of “events we are supposed to know” without knowing “how we get from one to the other.” Yes, the Mayflower landed in 1620, but why did it set sail to begin with?

Such is the curiosity of an avid sailor with a long career in computer programming where he lost patience with “having everything in front” of him. Research, by his definition, is behind, and so he haunted libraries where he uncovered surprises, such as the two distinct groups of English settlers he identified as Virginians–wealthy Londoners wanting plantations–and New Englanders–merchants along England’s coast looking for trade.

Without having to say it, Tory gives us the origin of the tension between North and South. Nor does he have to remind us of his tale’s implications for efforts around the USA today to curtail connections of dots of “what we already know” in American history. In the lead up to 1620, the year 1619 is unavoidable, after all. And we know what kind of reception the New York Times‘ history of that year gained on its 400th anniversary.

And who has ever been taught that the ships to the New World returned to England with Native Americans who would be taught English and brought back to serve as negotiators between the tribes and the settlers?

This may or may not explain why he preferred not to pin down a definition of historical fiction, which very basically is the invention of characters and dialogue to dramatize actual events.* To make it vivid, Tory created a narrator who took part in the action and told the story in the present tense and first person. Call him Isaac.

Tory made us laugh when he admitted that “Isaac” at times stopped him from writing what he intended and talked him into something else. The realization, when we stopped laughing, is that we weren’t just hearing of historical fact, but of the fiction that brings it to life.

It was a moment most representative of the Custom House Maritime Museum’s “Warm Talks for Cold Winds” series initiated last winter on Sunday afternoons. This year, they appear to be scheduled like films at a cinema–not long in advance. So keep an eye on their website for more to come:

https://customhousemaritimemuseum.org

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* Not to be confused with speculative fiction (aka “alternative history”) which changes an event, as if to ask, “What if?” Many examples, but one that caused a sensation was If the South Had Won the Civil War first published as an entire issue of Look magazine, November 22, 1960. Nine-years-old at the time, I can still see the maps showing Alaska as still part of Russia, an independent Republic of Texas, and the Confederate State of Cuba.

Three years to the day later, a president from Massachusetts was assassinated. All of which has been on my mind lately as we are now just ten months of finding out that maybe the South did win the Civil War.

https://www.portsmouthnh.com/photo/custom-house-way-newburyport/ Photo by Dana Bernier.

https://www.merrimackdesign.com/portfolio-item/newburyport-maritime-museum/

Rose-Colored Goggles

Boston’s mayor dubbed it “Innovation District” when he unveiled the plans 30 years ago, but Mother Nature now drowns that name with something more immediately and visually accurate.

As the title of a new documentary, Inundation District dives deep into the late Mayor Tom Menino’s vision of high-rise office buildings and condominiums with ground-level restaurants and shops, and with arts venues and commuter stops on the city’s long-unused Seaport. Oh, those Jethro Tull and Procol Harum concerts at Harborlights!

Problem wasn’t rose-colored glasses so much as the failure to wear goggles.

As the talking heads in writer/director–and Boston Globe environmental reporter–David Abel’s film make clear, the effects of global warming were already known–one of them, sea-level rise, already forecast. No doubt Menino was blinded by the Dawning of the Age of Algorithims. Hi-tech companies were suddenly very rich and looking to put their wealth on display.

Waterfront property? In Boston, “the Athens of America”? Huge checks were written and 25-floor space was claimed as soon as the shovels broke ground. Some may not have lasted long, as always happens, but at Seaport, they were soon replaced. You may recall just a few years ago when Amazon announced they had chosen Boston for a new installation, and city officials and media types went gaga over the number of jobs that would mean.

Not paying any attention to all the hoopla was–and is–the Atlantic Ocean which kept rising. Inundation District offers interviews with many hydrologists, climate researchers, biologists, city officials, and urban planners who address the problem, but the most lasting impression comes from Nathan, a homeless man who appears in need of a new bridge under which to sleep. He calls the imminent threat of frequent flooding “blatantly obvious.”

Only people involved that we do not hear from are execs or anybody from all the companies that moved in, not even Amazon with all those people in so many jobs. I asked director Abel about this during the Q&A. None of them answered his request for an interview.*

A spokesman for the developer, however, has a lot to say in Inundation District. Quite the spinner with sincere sounding assurances that his employer has taken measures to mitigate occasional flooding. When asked about monetary accountability, he passes the buck: It’s all “a public concern.” As vague as anything Orwell ever warned against, and as euphemistic as anything Carlin ever laughed at–as many in the audience did. As the film makes clear, the developer realized that its investment in the project would be recovered in no time, doubled and tripled in a few short years.

Why give a damn, or even a flood-gate, about 2030 when 2003 puts you already in the black and you can keep cashing in?

To counter this, perhaps there will be flood-gates. They figure in one visionary proposal to keep the Atlantic from moving past the Financial District toward Fenway Park and Harvard Square. Another proposal calls for an “Emerald Tutu,” a play on Frederick Law Olsted’s “Emerald Necklace,” that would float small mounds of grass and shrubs off the coast to muffle the force of a storm surge.

Admirable plans, but doomed to be no better than rose-colored unless the larger problem of climate change is addressed, unless coastal development is stopped, and unless some of it is undone or just abandoned.

Inundation District begins and ends with scenes from a global climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, where we see Joe Biden paying rapt attention and John Kerry offering American input, such as it is. Leaving the theater, I might have thought that the film had morphed from a documentary set in Boston into Inundation Nation.

But even that is too limited to capture the scope of sea-level rise and all other symptoms of climate change. As United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the crowd in Glasgow: ”We either take collective action, or we commit collective suicide.”

In the spirit of “Think Globally, Act Locally,” Abel links the film to local groups wherever it plays. Here in Newburyport, they are Storm Surge and the city’s Resiliency Committee.** Elsewhere, my guess is you’ll find a hand-out in the theater’s lobby.

You’ll be thankful for local connections once you’ve visualized the immediacy of Inundation District.

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*Quite a change from his last film, In the Whale, in which everyone was quite happy to talk. But probably very much like his first film, Entangled, about the threat to whales caused by netting used, and often left behind by the fishing industry:

For Entangled: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14384956/

For In the Whale:

Fish Catches Man

**https://www.cityofnewburyport.com/planning-development/resiliency

https://www.storm-surge.org

https://www.inundationdistrict.com/how-to-help

https://www.inundationdistrict.com/
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/city-leaders-need-to-protect-boston-from-sea-level-rise/

Welcome to Attention Span Pub!

On my doorstep yesterday, the 265th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, arrived a brand new book that ends with a quote from “Auld Lang Syne,” his best known song: “We’ll take a cup of kindness yet.”

How do I know how it ends if I just got it? Because I wrote it.

Should be available by Valentine’s Day if you want to give your significant other grounds for divorce. Till then, I’m happy to take orders with prices that cover all shipping and tax:

Once Upon an Attention Span — $20.00

Order it with either of my previous books–Pay the Piper! or Keep Newburyport Weird*–and I’ll send both for $32. Order all three, and they will be yours for $40.

If you already own both Piper and Weird, send a photo like this…

You like irony? First inquiry about a book with “United States” in the subtitle and the Statue of Liberty on the cover comes from a Canadian. Merci, Rob!

… and I’ll send Attention Span for just $12. If you own either one, send a photo like this…

Kinda wish the top half of this had been cropped, although the right side of that screen shows evidence that Rob up in Ontario was first. By pure coincidence, the book at the left of the picture is *The Art of Noticing*. Thanks for the pic, Bob!

… and I’ll send the other along with Attention Span, both for $25. If you have one and are ordering only Attention Span, $17.

If that’s not enough payment options, I’ll barter for dinner and drinks at any Greek, Italian, Mexican, French, Portuguese, Bavarian, Middle Eastern, Chinese, American, Irish, Welsh, English, Polish, or Seafood restaurant, grill, or pub of your choosing.

Also, if for any reason you prefer an anonymous, on-line purchase, I’ll be posting the Amazon link as soon as it is ready.

For descriptions of Piper and Weird, go to the home page of this blog and you’ll see the two titles at the top. Either puts you a click away from a whimsical if not loopy blurb penned by my publicist and friend, Helen Highwater.

Admittedly, she’s biased source, but if Clarence Thomas can sit on the Supreme Court, then conflict of interest is as obsolete in my country as attention spans, which is, after all, the point. Here’s an advance look at Helen’s appetizing blurb:

An advance copy sent out for review. The gray strip across the middle, if you can’t read it (and even if you can), says “Not for resale.” All other copies, as many as possible, will absolutely be for sale.

While others have used the term “United States of Amnesia,” Jack Garvey imagines it as an appetite to satisfy.

His lively new collection of memoirs, vignettes, reviews, and musings, Once Upon an Attention Span, wastes no time setting the table with a first entree titled “Wake-U-Ups.”

Entrée? Yes, Garvey has fashioned the book as “Attention Span Pub” with a “Menu” for a table of contents. Open 24/7, reservations are not required. They are redundant.

What better place to play host? What else to serve but food and drink?

And what better bill of fare than something for everyone? From cross-country “Repasts for the Road” with his daughter in the ‘80s, to commentary on current events stirred in “Teas that Tease,” and from the rock-and-roll of “Boomer Libations” to the “Dangerplay” of “Nostalgia’s Nightcaps,” the book comes as advertised in its subtitle.

An All-Purpose Pub for the United States of Amnesia addresses the book’s intended audience while hinting at its point: It is of, by, and for America—from the heartland to the bayou, from the World Series to the National Mall, from Moby-Dick to the Electoral College, from Ellis Island to the Rio Grande, from Paul Revere to Bernie Sanders, from colonial times to Covid-19, from a sandbar on the New England coast to the skyscrapers of Los Angeles.

Just as he cast his last collection, Keep Newburyport Weird, as an atlas with chapters as maps, and his busking memoir, Pay the Piper!, as a musical score with movements, Once Upon an Attention Span offers fare in every tempo from every region of the USA.

Whether you’re in for a feast or just a quick bite, you can return as often as you want. Go “Living in the Pasta” where Garvey connects history to the present just as a chef might season a sauce or layer a casserole. The analysis of “Old World Breakfast” and “New World Crunch” will satisfy any appetite that craves food for thought.

Prefer nutrition if you want, but good luck resisting the rich personal accounts of Garvey’s past life as an apple-picker or the high-calorie accounts that span fifty years in “Nostalgia’s Nightcaps,” including his farewell addresses in college student newspapers.

The kitchen closes with a “Midnight Toast” set at a Renaissance faire to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” Make your acquaintance with Once Upon an Attention Span, and any amnesia you may now have will be forgot and never brought to mind.

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*New Cover:

E Pluribus Fiction

When done laughing at its boffo irony and marveling at its seething satire, I wished for a moment that I was still teaching college freshman writing classes for the sake of giving a specific assignment:

In 700 words or less: Why is this film titled American Fiction?

Here’s a hint: Double-entendre. And here’s a challenge that doubles as a spoiler alert: If you’ve seen the film, answer the question yourself before reading any further. If you haven’t seen it, then log off, go out, and come back with an answer.

Now, after seeing the ads for it, were you surprised to find out that it opens in a college classroom? The only scene in which we see Monk (Jeffery Wright) as a teacher unless we count the next, equally brief scene where he’s called onto an administrative carpet for making a student “uncomfortable.”

And so it is, before the opening credits roll with the fanfare of a fittingly provocative soundtrack, American Fiction offers race relations in the USA today in a nutshell. As Monk’s literary agent will tell him in mid-film, white people don’t want truth, they want to be absolved.

Through its remaining 100 minutes, American Fiction more that earns its billing as both comedy and drama. Many scenes of characters making unwitting fools of themselves with misinterpreted dialogue punctuated by one-liners. At times, Director Cord Jefferson does it with extended sight-gags: A newscaster seriously intones “the African-American experience” to plug an upcoming report while the screen shows nothing but a gaping bullet wound on bloody body falling to the ground.

That’s but one of several moments in the film where we laugh in spite of ourselves. Yet, there are as many scenes where race recedes into the background of character study. Though we admire his integrity, Monk is flawed. His relationships with his over-stressed sister, his gay brother, and a woman he meets while attending to his mother (the years have been good to Leslie Uggams) are all strained. Comedy turns tragic when his sister dies mid-film, but quickly turns comic again when Monk reads her farewell letter to the family as they scatter the ashes.

Perhaps the film’s most representative moment: Wright plays it with such a straight face we can’t tell if he’s repressing laughter or rage. Given the fantasies she described, it could be either.

Fact or fiction? Fundamentally, this is a film about a writer of fiction who considers himself a realist and is appalled by the popular fiction based on stereotypes to feed market trends and low-brow tastes. So he writes a novel to satirize the genre only to land a multi-million dollar offer, movie rights and all. Now appalled by himself, he tries to sabotage the deal to prevent his anonymous creation from becoming public.

The publishers love his title, My Pafology, and there’s no doubt they would have preferred the misspelling over Monk’s original, “My Pathology,” as it reinforces the stereotype. And so, over the phone, Monk attempts a deal breaker, insisting on a change. Worriedly, they ask “What?”

At first they think he just dropped an F-bomb. But there is no bottom to the hole Monk has dug. Soon afterward, he finds that his new love interest, a lawyer who had read his serious books and praised them, has a copy of Fuck. It was the end of their relationship. Like the marketplace he disdained, Monk couldn’t accept an entirety, but only the part he found comfortable.

The awards scenes and the planning of a film adaptation at the end return us to the racial stereotyping. The alternative endings, much like the technique used in Little Women, may have us wondering how it ended, but the film’s point is that the fiction of race never ends–that it isn’t just fiction that is “fiction.”

Audiences–mostly white here at the Screening Room–are still laughing when they tell me, their projectionist, “great film!” in tones that clearly convey the film’s satirical weight. As we say today, they got it.

During a week when presidential candidate Nikki Haley was just a few miles across the state border telling New Hampshire voters that “America has never been a racist country,” there’s at least one reason to call the title of American Fiction a double-entendre.

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https://www.newburyportmovies.com/

Rightly Or Wrongly

Saturday, Jan. 20–Honestly thought I had hunkered down beyond reach of reality. Well after dark and long logged-off of the world-wide web and all its local pages, I was watching a closely-contested football game played on the other side of the continent. Deep freeze here, downpour there.

My own split-pea soup hit the spot, and the cheese and garlic croutons just enough to go with it, along with a few Ipswich English-styyled Pale Ales to wash it down and serve as dessert. Yes, when I’m not busy fighting city hall, saving the world, or nitpicking the habits or speech of our hopelessly devolving United States of Algorithims, I’m your stereotypical American guy, never more content than when kicked back watching sports and drinking beer.

And so I was last night, reclining on my bed when the phone rang and I made the mistake of hitting the mute and picking up:

“Hey, John! It’s Chaz!”

He always intros himself as if he’s trying to get my attention from across a very wide street. If he didn’t live in New Hampshire, he might not need a phone. His use of my formal name indicates he’s known me for over 40 years, 55 in his case. Hadn’t talked to him since Christmas Day.

“Just wanted to wish you a Happy Final Year of Constitutional Democracy!”

I laugh: “May well be just that.” He can talk as loud as he wants, he speaks my language.

“If Trump wins, this will be the day a year from now that he becomes president.”

I’ve been hunkered down almost all of four days of a Dakota-like cold spell and tend to lose track of days even when I am not, so I glance at the calendar.

“Oh! Inauguration–“ Television shows a Packer defender dropping a pass right between his numbers with an open field in front of him, and I stifle a groan. ”You think Joe and Jill will attend it?”

“You mean turn themselves in?” He went on to say he knows a lot of people in and around Peterborough–a place that in past elections has been kind to Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, and Bernie Sanders–planning to take Republican ballots and vote for Nikki Haley.

“May be a mistake. I think she has a better chance of beating Biden than Trump.” I then noted how Haley’s ads paint Biden and Trump as the same side of a scale that she has swapped to serve her purpose: Changing young voters’ perception of the election from Republican vs. Democrat or right vs. left to young vs. old. Pretty much a summary of my recent blog.

Chaz’ response was something I had missed: ”Have you noticed how she says that ‘chaos follows Trump rightly or wrongly wherever he goes’?”

“A lot of pundits”–those I hear when there are no football games to be seen–“have noted that phrase. It’s a mealy mouthed attempt not to offend Trump voters.”

“It’s more than that.”

“How so?”

“How can chaos follow anyone or anything rightly? It makes no sense.”

I look at the unexplained chaos on the television, feeling like a defender who dropped a pass put right between my numbers. ”Shit! How did I miss that?”

We commiserate awhile longer, and he entices me with mention of a St. Patrick’s Day gig that his trio, Grove Street, has landed, likely to be joined by a bassoonist that I’ve been craving to hear again since I last was up that way last spring. They play several tunes I know, so it’ll be a quintet for a few green and gold numbers if I make it.

Meanwhile, Green Bay’s green and gold went down the gold-rushing panhandles of the San Francisco 49ers. Had it not been for my friend’s call, this would have upset me. Instead, I’m pre-occupied. Not by the realization that I missed Haley’s double-talking finesse, but by a realization that will never allow me to get entirely beyond the reach of reality no matter how hunkered down I may think I am:

Planning for St. Patrick’s Day in the middle of January is a sign of final years. Not of Constitutional Democracy, and maybe not the final year, but for a guy who has dissed plans and improvised his entire adult life, and who will turn 73 the day after–Hangover Day, as I have long called it–old age can no longer be denied.

And why should it? I ask as I hunker down on this bone-chilling Sunday afternoon, about to inhabit my kitchen where I’ll make a shepherd’s pie before kicking back to watch the Lions host the Buccaneers followed by the Bills–if they have their stadium shoveled out–and the Chiefs.

As another New England joker once wrote, I still believe that I “have miles to go before I sleep.” But along the way, I have a mute button. And it works both ways.

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The shirt has nothing to do with the ale, obviously, but it does serve as a variation on the mute button that is central to the story. Photos by Lenovo.

Get Up, Jack! John, Sit Down!

There’s a band that roves all over New England called The Penniless Jacks, a “purveyor of pub music” according to their own description, friends of mine from the Renaissance faire circuit, and a real treat if you can catch them while sipping coffee or quaffing ale in any venue be it indoor or out.

They take their name from “Get Up, Jack! John, Sit Down,” a sea-shanty that describes the sailors who took their leaves in seaports where women awaited them on the docks and brought them to brothels for an hour or more. Sailors would be paid their wages before going to shore, and with money in their pockets they were coaxingly called “Johns”–the origin of the term used to this day. Often, they would run out of money while still at the brothel, whereupon their hosts began harshly calling them “Jacks” and ushered them out the door to make room for more Johns. The chorus is giddily philosophical about it:

Singing, Hey! laddie, Ho! laddie,
Swing the capstan 'round,'round,'round
When the money is gone it's the same old song,
Get up, Jack! John, sit down!
https://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/folk-song-lyrics/Get_Up_Jack!_John_Sit_Down!.htm

When the Jacks belted that out, this old roustabout was instantly bound, bound, bound to his jolly roving past. Here’s a soundtrack for the trip:

https://www.thepennilessjacks.com/?

My formal name is John, but so was my father’s, and so was his uncle’s who lived just around the corner. Three Johns wouldn’t have been a problem if not for my mother having a brother named John who named his son John, as did both of my mother’s sisters.

Seven was a problem that had to be solved with variations on the theme. Since my father’s uncle and my mother’s brother were never in the same place at the same time, they both kept the given name preceded by “uncle.” My cousins, in order of birth, were Big John, Johnny, and Little John.

My father was Jack. Back then, at least in New England, Jack was always understood as a nickname for John, and we elected a president in 1960 who used both interchangeably. Since most adult names have kiddie versions, I, a “Junior,” got stuck with the horribly dreadful “Jackie,” a name made even more regrettable by my mother’s habit of accenting the second syllable: ”ja-KEE!”

Luckily, that was within the family, and by the time I was old enough to care, all my friends were in the habit of calling each other by the first syllable of our last names. There’s a woman in Florida who still calls me “Garv,” but she grew up 20 miles south of the Merrimack Valley, so I know this happened elsewhere circa 1964. By that time, I was able to turn the family from “Jackie” to Jack–except, of course, for “ja-KEE!”

When I entered Salem State College (now University) in 1968, professors calling the rolls in each first class meeting read “John” aloud, and I simply said “here,” not bothering to correct them. Classmates who became new friends heard that and called me John, and I just let it happen.* And so, at age 17, I lived with two different names, one for family up here in The Valley, the other for Salem and wherever it took me.

Graduation eventually took me to the St. John Valley at the very top of Maine, the border with New Brunswick, with many French-speaking people who called me Jean in an accent to which I’d never say no. That was short-lived. Within a year I was in South Dakota where everyone called me John either right before they asked me to say “Park the car” (gleefully expecting to hear pahk the cah) or right after I dodged the question with “Arrest the progress of the automobile.” That’s how it went for seven years as I bounced around between Oregon, Colorado, and Dakota Territory.

When I came rolling home, I landed back in the Merrimack Valley where my parents, a few aunts and uncles, and many of my numerous cousins still lived. When I started writing guest columns for the Newburyport Daily News, it occurred to me that my byline should be the name by which my family knows me. Call it deference. Or call it a case of “get up, Jack! John, sit down.” I was back in their world.

Before long, I realized that “Jack” has the advantage of a trick that makes it hard to forget. Anytime I’m introduced to anyone, I’ll add, “like in the trunk of your car.” Quite unlike the unfortunate association of “John” as sung by the Jacks and written on police blotters from coast to coast.

The move was made in 1982, and before long, “John or Jack” replaced “park the car” as the most frequent, nagging question put to me.** Just as I offered an evasive answer west of the Mississippi, I now offer one here on the New England coast:

“As long as it begins with J, any four-letter word will do.”

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https://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/mandolin-tab/Get_Up_Jack_John_Sit_Down.htm

The Penniless Jacks at the 2023 New Hampshire Renaissance Festival. L2R: Dori French, guitar; Amanda Neves, fiddle; Andrew Prete, guitar and harmonica; and JD Lauriat on West African djembe, a drum that offers more tones and notes than single-note conga.
Photo by Angela Cook

*Years later, I would learn that the 18th American president did the same thing when he arrived at West Point, a very young man fresh out of rural Illinois. He was always called by his middle name. Not knowing that, his sponsor who filled out the forms put “Ulysses” as his first name and, for a middle name, guessed “Simpson”–his mother’s maiden name, a common practice at the time. Since the young cadet never bothered to correct it, “Hiram” was never heard again, and US Grant was born.

**In third place: ”Do you call yourself a flutist or a flautist?” Answer: ”Depends on how much I’m being paid.” Kidding aside, I call myself a “piper,” or “Hamm Lynn, Hyper-Piper” as in: