Beach Bums on the Prairie

So Jimmy Buffet lived for a couple years in Brookings, South Dakota. In a trailer court. Can you guess who else once lived a Brookings trailer court?

To this day I can barely explain how I–a Massachusetts boy always called a “Boston boy” because my state’s name ties western tongues–ever landed in that small college town hard by the Minnesota border.

How a native of Mississippi who grew up on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico landed there is beyond me. How I never heard mention of him after my arrival just six years after he left–two years after the release of “Come Monday” and just months before the release of “Margaritaville”–compounds the puzzle.

At a dead end of my own youthful indirection, if not indiscretion, I was tempted by a classified ad in Editor & Publisher, a trade magazine. Attending South Dakota State University’s graduate school of journalism was the pretext, but the real draw was moving someplace where no one knew me and vice versa.

Compare that Buffett’s description of his move in his 1998 memoir, A Pirate Looks at Fifty (a title that plays on his own song, “A Pirate Looks at Forty”):

The Great Plains looked like as good a place as any to get lost in for a while… The next thing I knew, I was headlining Steak ‘n’ Ale joints all over the Midwest, making five hundred bucks a week, with a free salad bar. At first I loved the wide-open spaces, but one afternoon in a trailer park in Brookings, South Dakota, where I was living, the siren in town sounded a tornado warning. Across the flat, open field to the west came not one but two twisters. I, of course, had been in storms at sea, but this was different.

In the 1970s, $500 bought much more in South Dakota than back here in Massachusetts. Add that adjustment to fifty years of inflation, not to mention all those salad bars, and it’s no surprise that Buffett could sing that he “made enough money to buy Miami.”

On the prairie where towns are tiny and spread out, “Steak ‘n’ Ale joints” tend to be quite large with vast parking lots that fill up on weekend nights with cars carrying in people from miles around. Brookings is a full hour north of Sioux Falls, the biggest city in the Dakotas–as well as in neighboring Wyoming and Montana with Idaho to boot. Barely the size of Providence now, Sioux Falls was more the size of Pawtucket then. Many other towns are under 5,000 population, some of them but crossroads.

According to a 2008 report from my SDSU friend Tom Lawrence, now co-editor of The South Dakota Standard, Buffett was immensely popular throughout the region. Lawrence interviewed the owner of Jim’s Tap, a Brookings bar, and a chef at a local supper club who agreed, as the latter put it, that Buffett “did a good job of packing the house.”

Considering that Jim’s was a favorite watering hole of mine in the Carter years, it’s all the more puzzling that I never heard of Buffett in Brookings.

Buffett enjoyed his time in Dakota. Enough so that when Lawrence was sent to cover a concert in Texas, Buffet took him past security and backstage as soon as my friend blurted out his one allotted (by an “unctuous” security guard) question at a distance: “Did you live in South Dakota?”

Lawrence describes Buffett’s dawning smile of recognition as if it was that of a man who just found that lost shaker of salt. Thankfully, the interview is more of a gold mine than a salt mine, and I’ll add the link below.* But not before I chip away at a nugget as galling as it is satisfying to consider:

In Brookings, Buffett lived in a trailer court. If I was wide-eyed when I saw Brookings in the tributes, I was dropped-jawed by this. Trailer court I lived in was on the western edge of town overlooking alfalfa fields that went on forever. Just eight trailers where we all knew each other and often sat together drinking and smoking weed outside.

My then-neighbor and still-friend Bruce dubbed it the “Easy Livin’ Trailer Court,” a name that stuck. Would have been perfect for a singer-songwriter with a laid-back vibe. Had he stayed anywhere in South Dakota, his fans would be known as “Pheasantheads.”

While there’s no question that his music was escapist, Margaritaville a place to be “wasted away again,” Buffett was as aware as any artist of art’s environment. Come any day of the week in the mid-70s, and you’d hear people sing “in a brown LA haze” when residents of many American cities were living in grayish brown and orange clouds, when papers such as the Denver Post put air quality warnings on their front pages every day. The EPA, brand new at the time, had a mandate of public support that “Come Monday” likely helped galvanize. Those clouds were gone by the mid-80s.

No wonder Buffett was alarmed by the view from his trailer of tornadoes touching down on a “flat, open field to the west.” Wish I could ask if it was an alfalfa field he looked over.

Lawrence reminds me that Brookings, a college town after all, has several trailer courts, all of them much larger. By the time I arrived, Buffett was already in California growing into his beach bum persona. By the time I left, perhaps I was chasing him in some unknowing way.

Where did I wash ashore? Plum Island, and I’ve been here ever since, spending as much or more time on a beach all these years as anyone, provided you do not count the winter months.

Buffett, meanwhile, strolled the beaches of Key West, Florida, where there are no winter months. And where the risk of skin cancer must be high. I was probably spared his fate in 1998 when a dermatologist insisted on removing a spot as soon as he saw it, my plans for boiled shrimp and sponge cake be damned.

Some people claim that there’s carelessness to blame. Yes, as Buffett ended his most beloved song, “I know it was my own damn fault.”

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The slogan at the bottom of this touristy postcard perhaps explains why Mr. Parrothead landed there:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/112238215688924441/

*From Tom Lawrence, publisher, editor, and writer for The South Dakota Standard, last week:

https://www.sdstandardnow.com/home/farewell-to-jimmy-buffett-the-true-story-of-the-music-legend-with-a-south-dakota-connection?

Adapted from his 2008 report if you care for more detail:

https://www.sdstandardnow.com/home/heres-another-remembrance-of-the-late-great-musician-jimmy-buffett-who-turned-brookings-sd-into-our-own-margaritaville

The Gas of Price

One of the advantages of workouts at the gym is the view you have of television monitors that line the wall where it meets the ceiling.

A sports fan can keep an eye on three or four games at a time. For a news junkie, there’s CNN, CBS, and NBC. For those who need to feed their fear, paranoia, and prejudices, or who just want a free lobotomy, there’s Fox (so-called) News.

Of course, you can’t hear any of them, which is a blessing in that last case, but most have crawls that my septuagenarian eyes can read from the treadmills three rows back.

Since I joined in January, I’ve been reading on the news stations of severe weather caused by climate change, of attempts to repeal reproductive rights, and of investigations and indictments resulting from an attempt to overthrow an election.

On Fox, of course, it’s all about the president’s son’s questionable business dealings, crime rates in cities, “chaos” at the southern border, and inflation.

There is one story the stations have in common, but according to the crawls, they appear to be quite different. On the news stations, it’s about attempts to censor books in school curricula and libraries, threatening teachers and, yes, even librarians with criminal charges. On Fox, it’s all about “violations” of “parental rights” each time censorship is ruled unconstitutional.

Makes you wonder if the First Amendment protects calls to hang the vice-president but not To Kill a Mockingbird–and if a gallows with a noose at the ready on Capitol grounds is patriotic while a rainbow flag hung from a front porch is anti-American.

Tempting to say that the broadcasts seem to be of different worlds, but all news stations have covered Hunter Biden’s legal problems, including his guilty plea. They also cover news from cities and from the Rio Grande. Unlike Fox, they let us know that crime rates are way down, as is illegal immigration.

Inflation? We may be paying more for food, but folks growing it, harvesting it, picking it, preparing it, packaging it, transporting it, cooking it, serving it, and washing the plates and bowls and pans and containers in which it comes to us are making more and are able to afford more. To them, the last two years have made the difference between what we euphemize as “food insecurity” and what we proudly hail as a “living wage.” What kind of people would erase that for the sake of a favorite cheese returning from the $5.49 a block it is now to the $4.99 it was two years ago?

Unlike Fox, real news outlets also report how unemployment is now at its lowest rate since the 1960s, that wages are up, and that factories have been and continue to be built as a result of the CHIPS & Science Act, an initiative of the Biden Administration signed into law a year ago this month.

CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) is never mentioned on the crawls of Fox. Nor do those crawls say anything of numerous Republican representatives and senators now taking credit for its benefits in their districts–even though every one of them voted against it.

Republicans did the same 13 years ago when Obamacare was passed–taking credit for the benefits after voting against it en mass. But that was long before I joined a gym, so I don’t know how Fox distorted Republican double-talk or if they just ignored it. Like many of my friends, I have over the years made attempts to watch Fox for the sake of understanding it. And, again like friends, I can hold my breath underwater for longer than I can inhale that station’s unrelenting rage. That they mask so much of it as insinuating questions–thereby dodging accountability–just makes it worse.

Fox has been held to account in court. For documented lies about Dominion voting machines, Fox forked out a settlement of $787.5 million. In the world of an “informed citizenry” imagined by Jefferson and Madison, that would be more than enough to put an end to Fox. But when enough of the citizenry depends on Fox to be informed, all the station needs to do is keep the lawsuit off the air. Eventually, the money from advertisements will cover the costs of all guilt–no matter how high the costs or deep the guilt.

As historian Howard Zinn pointed out, the deception is not so much in lies as in emphasis and omission.

Which is why the price of gas is now a dangerous issue. Despite all appearances, gas is not a dependable gauge of inflation. Often, it’s a gauge of corporate greed, as we learn every time Exxon, Mobil, Shell and other companies report record profits as if they are unrelated to the increases at the pump. Also, like the prices of cigarettes and postage stamps, that of gas is subject to geo-political whims and pressures. That’s why it sometimes goes back down.

We’ve all noticed it creeping back up in recent weeks. Those who read the news–from actual, credible sources–know that this is a result of a deal between Russia and Saudi Arabia to squeeze the supply and put pressure on us. Their goal is to keep raising the price to over $5 per gallon next summer when Republicans can ride it as a campaign issue.

Putin wants Trump back in the White House to undo the NATO alliance and let Russia have Ukraine. The Saudi Prince wants Trump back in charge so he can cash in on a loan to son-in-law Jared Kushner so large that it makes Hunter’s laptop look like the shoebox cash register at a child’s lemonade stand.

None of this appears in Fox crawls. Judging from the crawl’s constant attachment of the name Biden to the word inflation–under a barrage of pictures showing signs of prices at gas stations–it’s a safe bet that Fox hosts never talk about it.

Instead, they will emphasize the rising cost while omitting the reason for it. Call it the gas of price.

Their audience will not just believe it, but will grieve about it, loudly and frequently. Problem is that many who don’t watch Fox don’t pay much attention to other sources either. Too many of us won’t hear of higher employment rates if already employed, or of higher wages if working at places where rates are locked in. But the signs will be up at every gas station where the numbers roll up at the pumps.

Only way to counter this is to not let the claim slide.

May be uncomfortable in a group of people you barely know, or at the proverbial holiday dinner table, but there’s no need to attack anyone, any political party, or any bogus news source. No need to raise a voice or argue at all. All we need do is state the reason for the increase in gas prices–and offset complaints of inflation with talk of employment rates, higher wages, and new factories as they appear across the country.

In a word, provide and emphasize what the gas of price omits. Much the way the numbers on a treadmill–distance, time, calories–provide real numbers that all those television monitors tempt us to avoid.

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https://fineartamerica.com/featured/old-time-gas-station-vicki-jauron.html

Comparatively Seeing

Anyone still insisting that no one today can be compared to Hitler needs to see an optometrist. Or a dictionary to tell them that a comparison is not an equation.

So, too, anyone who uses the phrase “apples and oranges” to dismiss comparisons.

Before we get to the mugshot seen round the world, let’s consider these two absurdities that have long passed for conventional wisdom.

Apples and oranges both grow on trees and bear fruit with seeds and peels. Both are nutritious, often the same size, always the same shape (save for the strain of apple called “Delicious” which has a slight taper), and can be turned into juice. The way we use the term “apples and oranges,” you’d think that they were meat loaf and modern drama. Why?

Only reason I can think of is to dismiss comparisons out of hand. Comparisons do require thought, and thought can be taxing. Worst of all, many among us would rather not think at all, resent the very thought of thinking. How else could “woke,” slang for “aware,” become a dirty word?

Reminds me of the English parliament considering a ban on religious satire after a magazine’s Paris offices were bombed due to cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Among those who argued against any ban was Salman Rushdie who carefully but pointedly noted that laughter is a form of thought. Limit laughter and you restrict your ability to think.

Comparisons–whether as metaphors and analogies, or as simple measurements–are likewise a form of thought offering a way to understand a subject. My neighbors who have never been to Annapolis, Maryland, will gain an idea of it when described as “Newburyport on steroids,” as I’ve heard a Newburyport city councilor call it. And if we want to describe home to a friend in New Mexico, we might call our town “Santa Fe with boats,” as did a Chamber of Commerce brochure some years ago.

If I tell you that a tanker on the Great Lakes is 1,000 feet long, you’ll need a moment to conjure up a vague idea. If I say it’s three football fields, including end-zones, it will immediately lengthen right before your mind’s eye.

Of course, this is oversimplified, as these are but hints. Such are comparisons not pretending to be equations. They open doors to understanding and leave us to stand or sit or walk through the room on our own.

The impulse to put Hitler off limits for comparison is understandable. No one has come close to inflicting the horror he brought about. But what of the way he came to power? What of his appeal to so many who followed him no matter what he did? Believed him no matter what he said, no matter how hateful and paranoid his rant and rave?

Would it help to know that, according to his several biographers, he rehearsed his facial expressions and gestures in front of mirrors? Would knowing that have lessened the shock of seeing Donald Trump’s practiced mugshot last week?

Yes or no, it would have prepared us for it.

Just as we might have been prepared for, resisted, and avoided the national nightmare that he has inflicted on us since 2016 had we observed history’s lesson rather than ruling it out of the bounds of polite company. Consider this list:

Not elected by a majority.
Used a direct communication channel to supporters.
Constant blame of others, dividing on racial lines.
Relentless demonization of opponents.
Unceasing attacks on objective truth.
Demonization and ridicule of the press.
Attacks on and distortions of science.
Lies that blur reality–and satisfy bigots who then spread them.
Orchestrations of mass rallies to show status
Extreme nationalism.
Boasting of closing borders.
Embracing mass detentions and deportations.
Using closed borders to protect selected industries.
Cementing rule by enriching elite allies.
Rejecting international norms.
Attacks on democratic processes.
Attacks on the judiciary and rule of law.
Glorify the military and demand loyalty oaths.
Proclaim unchecked power.
Relegate women to subordinate roles.

Now tell me just whom writer Burt Neuborne had in mind when he compiled that list in his book, When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic: Hitler, Trump, or all of the above?

That’s way more in common than apples have with oranges, and still we might add another formidable, tell-tale list:

Alliances with dictators and contempt for elected leaders of free countries.
Suggested threats of violence against opponents at home.
A constant show of machismo rage.
Constant repetition.
Campaigning with a promise of retribution (vergeltung as one kept saying).
Rehearsing poses, expressions, and gestures in front of mirrors…

Just how much more does anyone want? Most unnerving about Neuborne’s book is that it was published four years ago, and yet we were still under this thrall that allowed for no comparison. Perhaps we still are.

So easy to make jokes about the mugshot. Especially now that it is being sold on shirts and coffee mugs with the boast of “Never Surrender!” when we know that it was taken when he literally surrendered to law enforcement at Georgia’s Fulton County Jail.

And just why did they allow him to state his own height and weight as well as posing for what is now a fund-raising PR prop?

Someone on social media likened it to “The Kubrick Stare,” showing it with similar poses of deranged, violent charcters in his films, Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, and The Shining. Yes, that’s good for a harrowing laugh–and laughter serves a purpose–but there’s a more helpful comparison to be made.

Within three years of Hitler’s demise, George Orwell wrote 1984. Clearly a cautionary tale against the rise of another Hitler or Mussolini, it described a nation where a stern image of its leader, Big Brother, was posted everywhere the public might look. The expression conveyed almighty power, strength, and control–not just of action, but of thought.

It also conveyed the claim, “I alone can do it,” yet another boast common to both Hitler and Trump.

A cautionary tale? Hate to say it, but 1984 has been taken as a blueprint. Joke about the mugshot all you want, but realize that it already serves them as propaganda. “Never Surrender”? Forget the obvious lie, forget the 215 lbs., and forget the elevator shoes that make 6’3″ possible.

It’s not what the MAGA crowd actually believes, it’s about what they want to believe. Until we lift all bans on comparisons, as well as on laughter, we will have to endure it.

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https://thenewpress.com/books/when-times-mob-swayed

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/09/leading-civil-rights-lawyer-shows-20-ways-trump-copying-hitlers-early-rhetoric-and

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/08/31/germany-nazis-far-right/608798001/

https://www.fruitfulvineministry.com/relationships-are-like-well-apples-and-oranges/

Bombarbied

By far the busiest film for which I’ve popped, bagged, and sold popcorn since Sean Penn reincarnated Harvey Milk in 2008.

All audiences were overwhelmingly female, from pre-teen to gray hair. Save for the kids and teens, that’s not so far beyond typical for an art cinema where audiences tend to be about 2/3rds female.

Ironically, I heard several men among our regular patrons vow to skip Barbie, apparently thinking it would be nothing but child’s play on a relentlessly pink and day-glow screen. Nostalgia for grown women at best.

We screen films that many dismiss as “chick flicks,” but what any honest, objective person with an attention span not dependent on explosions, fist fights,and high-speed car chases would call food for thought. Hence, the female-dominated demographic.

No doubt director Greta Gerwig hoped to reassure male skeptics as well as feminists when she pitched the film as “for those who love Barbie, and for those who hate Barbie.”

As an American male who never gave the doll any thought apart from provoking and then moderating arguments between freshmen in my college classes years ago, I’ll leave that judgement of the film to others–although I wish my text book had the script for the scenes with Barbie creator Ruth Handler played beatifically by Rhea Perlman. I’d have also gotten much mileage out of the tirade late in the film by Gloria, the receptionist at Mattel played by America Ferrera in full emotional range.

Others can tell–or perhaps you can tell me–of the rest of the acting, the cinematography, the music, the coherence and pace of the plot.

I’m more interested in what Barbie puts on America’s dinner table. If you saw the film, just as if you sat at a banquet, there were bowls of all kinds of delights you spooned or forked onto your plate and others on which you passed. A lot of food for thought to pick from, and you can’t think of everything any more than you can eat everything–unless you see it more than once, which is all too easy for a projectionist (or a chef) to say.

As a projectionist, I get a better view of the table, and now that Barbie has left the Screening Room, all I can do is tell those men–and a few women now that I think of it–what they missed.

A lot of spoofs in Barbie starting with the opening scene, a combination of 2001 and Planet of the Apes. My hunch is that the first sight of a giant Barbie causing little girls to smash their baby dolls triggered the far-right reaction. They could have seen the act as a stand-in for abortion.

If not that, it was surely a visual image of young children becoming what they fear as “woke,” but what the rest of us welcome as aware–assuming that we take it as the visual joke intended and not literally.

Before long, Barbie herself becomes aware and falls into a funk until “Weird Barbie” sends off for the Real World to “the state of Los Angeles in the country of California.” Ken stowaways for an unwelcome ride, and the audience may be laughing too hard to notice the spoof of Genesis‘ account of Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden of Eden. It was Eve, after all, who first bit the apple.

This analogy would cast “Weird Barbie” as God, a non-stop hilarious turn by SNL‘s Kate McKinnon in her few scenes, but by mid-film, Barbie is more analogous to Through the Looking Glass, and Weird Barbie is the Cheshire Cat smiling upon Margot Robbie’s Alice.

A character analogous to both God and the Cheshire Cat may be the foremost of many reasons why Barbie is the most inspired film since the Coen Brothers’ Fargo in 1996.

I could keep going. Among numerous references to classic films, Ken’s “horses are extensions of men” offers a strong dose of Gulliver’s Travels. Also, Barbie’s transition to the Real World (capitalized because that’s how it appears on the sign along the road leading out of Barbieland) is an Ugly Duckling story in reverse–which also allowed for a hilarious “memo to director” interruption.

Anyone might find as many spoofs and references as I missed. Says a friend, Barbie is:

A caricature, of course, and a comedy. Not all trivial and heavy-handed. Several jokes hingeing on The Matrix, and questions concerning whether what we experience is real. In the doll world, nearly all the women are named Barbie and all the men are Ken. So, lots of hi Ken, hi Barbie. Lots of sight-gags, bad jokes, & bad boy patriarchy jokes…

My waggish observations: Barbie is like A Clockwork Orange without the ultraviolence. Who are my friends? Is there a cure for my condition(ings)? Who am I? How do I get out of here?

There’s obvious humorous Kubrick references too.

Barbie might fall into film history near Altman’s Popeye and Brooks’ Spaceballs.

Could just as well place it with The Truman Show and The Grand Budapest Hotel. And if Barbie–the doll or the film character–falls far short of the civil rights activist played by Sean Penn in Milk, Sasha, the as-woke-as-it-gets high-schooler played by Ariana Greenblatt, satisfies the appetite.

We probably shouldn’t use the word “reincarnation” for a film about a toy, but Barbie brings so much to life that it’s a mistake to dismiss it as nostalgia for grown women at best. Whether you hate or love the doll, this film fills every appetite for thought about the human condition today as fully as did Network in 1976.

And you will laugh from beginning to end.

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https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/greta-gerwig-barbie-premiere-alamo-drafthouse-1234793657/

Such Stuff ASAA

I never talk about dreams, maybe because I have so few. Once a month, if that

Back when I was in college, describing and analyzing dreams seemed a fad, often linked to astrology and horoscopes. I rolled my eyes at all of it. Still do.

Exceptions are made when I hear or read about general tendencies of dreams. One category always mentioned, often top of the list, might be called Unfinished Business.

What few dreams I have fit this category. They take shape of performing some task, running some errand, working a job, only to put things on hold, take a detour, attend to something else–followed by a futile, frustrating attempt to return and finish the original task. Simple enough and hardly worth recounting.

Save one at least ten years ago that remains as vivid if implausible as a video game: I’m driving one employer’s delivery van, and I have my other employer’s 35mm projector rolling and whirring film in the back. I’m racing to return to the cinema where an audience I left awaits the rest of the film, as well as to the chocolate company to return the van.

Beautiful scenery, though, as I daringly take the curves of what appears to be California’s coastal highway, a good 3.000 miles from both destinations. Or are these the cliffs of Nova Scotia’s Cabot Trail, a mere 500 from where I need to be?

No one needs to explain to me how or why the German word for dream, traum, gives us the English word, trauma.

Luckily, I always awake before any real trauma, and I’m almost always glad to be done with it. On rare occasions, the dream’s plot twists more in my favor, perhaps a romance long ago, real or imagined, and I try to remain asleep even when I’m waking up and know it’s but a dream.

Only one exception to unfinished dreams that I can recall. About twenty years ago, I dreamt of the Thanksgiving table where I’d be sitting in a few months among a dozen friends and family. But one chair was empty. Days later I learned of the grandmother who passed peacefully, perhaps five years before her husband who joined us for as many more Thanksgiving feasts.

Call it a dream of premonition. I had another last week,

Once again, I was driving a delivery van, but this time without absurdly impossible cargo such as a movie projector about the size and weight of a family refrigerator. Instead, I was transporting several 60 lb. buckets of corn syrup. Thick, white plastic buckets, about two-feet high. You’ve seen them if you’ve ever been in a restaurant’s kitchen or in the alley by its back door.

Though entirely plausible, since confectioners use it, and since I sometimes pick things up to bring back to the company, this is quite unusual. In fact, I’ve never handled those buckets without having plenty of boxes among and between which to secure them. Last time that happened, the vice-president of the United States was frequenting undisclosed locations.

Disaster began that dream. At least one bucket flipped over, its top flipped off, and waves of thick, gold liquid splashing side to side like the seiche waves that bounce from shore to shore all the way across Lake Michigan. Yes, my dream was in color. Rich color. So rich I thought it real, and wondered how I could conceal it, deny that it ever happened. Started driving home where I’d raid my closet of every article of clothing that hasn’t fit since the previous vice-president was doing the Macarena.

That’s when I awoke and left the problem behind. Or thought I did.

Three days later I arrived for an easy day, just two stops, but one had a post-it note attached: “Pick up corn syrup in Rockport.” Laughed at the coincidence until I realized that the van would be empty once I unloaded in Rockport. Figured I could secure them against the back of the seats with the two-wheeler, but there were four buckets and the wheeler was barely wide enough for two.

So I put them all on one side, letting two lean against a side door in the drop for the step down. The two wheeler, placed sideways, would secure the other two. Also, the covers of these buckets are always quite tight before opened, and three of the four had never been. No choice but to take a chance with the fourth.

What I did not account for were the two rotaries that you take to bypass the city of Gloucester out to the tip of Cape Ann where Rockport sits. Swerve one way, swerve the other, hear the two-wheeler slide, hear a bucket or two slide, hear a bump, a bang, a knock. But don’t turn your head on this road. And anyway, what can you do if it’s spilled? So I wonder, driving in terror to the next stop.

Lucky me! All four buckets remained upright even though two did travel from the seats halfway to the back doors. Perhaps my placement of the two-wheeler saved me on the two rotaries and the tight ramps on and off the Old Yankee Highway known as Rt. 128.

I’ll still erase dreams of disaster ASAA (as soon as awake), but I’ll heed the premonitions.

Must admit that any dream that combines both may well spell the end of me. If not, I’ll tell you all about it.

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Stanley Tucci as Puck in the 1999 film adaptation of *A Midsummer Night’s Dream*.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0140379/mediaviewer/rm65578241

Weeding Shakespeare

Sounds like a statewide lobotomy.

Shockwaves continue to ripple north following reports of Florida teachers censoring Romeo & Juliet to comply with the recent mandates of Gov. Ron DeSenseless to whitewash and dumb down history and literature taught in the state’s public schools, K thru Post-Grad.

Most reactions do little more than exclaim two words that should never be heard together: Censor and Shakespeare. But I wonder if liberal reaction is due more to the choice of play.

Romeo & Juliet, fair to say, is the English-speaking world’s ultimate love story–which masks the fact that it is also the ultimate statement against vengeance. For both reasons, it has had countless adaptations to fit various nations, ethnic groups, and as many generations as have been since 1595 when it first appeared on a London stage.

That includes, of course, West Side Story, as American a tale as any, which itself has spawned a healthy, colorful, vibrant share of adaptations for both stage and film. Conceived and written by my Lawrence homeboy, Leonard Berstein, its songs have lives of their own, something that British rocker Keith Emerson noted when he compiled his “America” pastiche.

His band, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, included everything from the theme of the classic television westerm, Bonanza, to the opening of Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” from “Camptown Races” to clips of John Philip Sousa. For the warp and woof holding it all together, we keep hearing “Maria” and “I Want to Live in America.”*

To most Americans since 1960, those songs and others from West Side Story–“I Feel Pretty” and the “Jet Song”–are like the very names, “Romeo” and “Juliet,” known even by those unfamiliar with the full story.

Which is why I wonder: Would we be so shocked if the reports from Florida named one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, say, Titus Andronicus or King John, or even Twelfth Night or Love’s Labor’s Lost? Would our reaction be mixed if it were a play now deemed tainted by “political incorrectness” such as The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant of Venice?

Forgive me. My perception has been warped by recent trips to public libraries well north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Up here, “censorship” is a dirty word, and “dumbing down” a crime against humanity, as they should be. Problem is that, when you call them by a harmless sounding name and give them the veneer of technology, the result gives you the very thing you profess to be against.

That name is “weeding,” and it is now a term of art for librarians nationwide as they depend on the algorithms to tell them the frequency of circulation of each book to determine what they keep and what they discard, no thought required.

If you doubt this, here’s a challenge for you: Pick the writer you consider the most consequential in American history (say, pre-1970), walk into a public library, and count the number of volumes by that writer. Then pick a present day author who caters to pop culture and count his or her volumes.

Here, for example, in this northeast corner of deep blue Massachusetts, Danielle Steele wipes the floor with Herman Melville every time: Ipswich PL, 88-6; Newburyport PL, 82-4, Methuen PL, 65-5; Topsfield PL, 62-4; Newbury PL, 49-1.

That one, of course, is Moby-Dick, the only title of Melville’s nine novels that you can count on finding. Likewise, if you pick Willa Cather, you have a fair chance of finding My Antonia, but Death Comes for the Archbishop? Forget it. Steinbeck? Good chance you’ll find Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, but you’ll likely need interlibrary loan to get In Dubious Battle or The Winter of Our Discontent. So much for browsing.

That last title, coincidentally, is a line from Shakespeare’s Richard III, which brings us back to the question. Good chance that DeSenseless and his thought-police might back off from, or at least distance themselves from that particular play. Far more than any chance of libraries bringing back Cather’s Archbishop, Steinbeck’s Battle, or Melville’s Redburn, the most eloquent, humane, and irrefutable description, explanation, and defense of immigration to America I’ve ever read.

So the question remains: What is the difference between sanitizing Florida schools and weeding American libraries?

The answer, my friend, is negligible, but the implication is huge. Call it a national lobotomy.

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*I first heard ELP’s “America” played by Jethro Tull in a concert in Connecticut 16 years ago. Tull added several quotes that are not in the original. Here’s a recording of it on the same tour, followed by ELP’s own much wilder, hyperventilating version made longer by a drum solo.

Pie O’Clock Somewhere

Today, I trekked to Methuen, a town not quite 25 miles inland, referred for a medical appointment that proved harmless enough.

Had I gone 25 miles in any other direction, I might have come right back, but Methuen sits on the northern border of the city where I was born and raised, a section of it called Tower Hill which sits right on that border within a mile of the doctor’s office.

So I took a nostalgic tour, indulging in memories both fond and melancholy, when I realized that there would be one touchstone of my own distant past that I could find, buy, and take with on the ride home.

Between my junior and senior high school years, I was a clerk at the Harris & Moore Delicatessen in downtown Lawrence, Mass., my first real job unless you count newspaper boy.

Even back in 1967, the store was what today would be called “a treasure,” established in 1904, featuring sausages, meat pies and loaves crafted from recipies just off the boats from Hamburg and Liverpool at the time. Not to mention a German-styled potato salad I make to this day that delights my guests here on Plum Island and has delighted my hosts as far as Colorado–never mind that hard boiled eggs take forever to peel at that altitude. Though I never once made it at Harris & Moore, I watched it put together so often that, twenty years later when I finally had a nostalgic craving, I knew what to do.

But I did make, or at least bake our biggest seller, the item for which we were renowned: Pork Pies. Not much bigger than a baseball, they formed in tin cups that fit 30 on a tray in our large ovens. We had a machine that punched out the dough, another to grind the pork, and spoons to measure the seasoning. I’d tell you what the seasoning was, but I was a 16-year-old who never thought to ask, who thought “Scarborough Fair” was a coming-of-age song about four young women.

On busy days we sold hundreds of them. Lawrence was still a fairly vibrant city in the late 60s with a large and busy downtown, a county courthouse and a city hall just blocks away. A pork pie and a half-pint of potato salad–or a sandwich on Kasanoff’s pumpernickel and a side of coleslaw–made for a quick and satisfying lunch for many retailers, lawyers, secretaries, public officials, clerks. Inexpensive, too; those pies went two for 49 cents.

Harris & Moore, along with much of downtown Lawrence, closed shop in the mid-70s. I was long gone by then, but I stayed in touch with the legendary Joe Collins who worked for the original owners for at least twenty years before he bought the place in the mid-30s. He told me that a mom & pop grocery named Thwaite’s had purchased all of the pork pie tins and trays, as well as the machines that punched out the dough and ground the pork. I would have expected him to say it with regret, but he was genuinely happy to leave it all in good hands.

Located just over the border in Methuen, Thwaite’s has been going strong all these years. When I taught at UMass Lowell back in the 90s, it was hardly a detour to stop there. Since then, not so much, and since the pandemic’s shut down, not at all.

Today, the light bulb was as sudden as it was bright.

If Lake Wobegon is the little town that time forgot, Thwaite’s is the corner store that makes time laugh out loud.

A parking lot for about ten cars has green signs that look rather serious until you read them: “Parking for Pies and Sausage Only.” On the wall: “It’s Pie O’Clock Somewhere.” Small hand-written signs appear on the window, and if that’s not living in the past, the “banker’s hours,” posted at the entry, sure are–as most businesses did back in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, Thwaite’s closes at noon on Wednesdays.

Luckily, there was a tray of pies just out of the oven, nostalgia’s smell so much more vibrant than all its sights. I figured I was picking up dinner and wouldn’t mind re-heating in the oven on this rainy day. Two would do it, as they did on my way home from Lowell years ago.

After I paid, I couldn’t help but tell the woman at the counter of Harris & Moore and how I once made the pies I just then bought. But I could see she was too young for an old man’s sentiment, so I withheld the detail that she might have mistaken for criticism or complaint and paid the bill without comment:

Two pies for $8.54.

To arrive at the doctor’s on time, I managed no more than a banana and an English muffin for breakfast. Leaving Methuen, it seemed way too early for lunch, but yes, I was hungry, and there I was taking whiffs of two warm pies in a bag beside me.

But that’s for tonight to have with a couple IPAs while watching the Red Sox. Maybe I’ll nibble at the crust…

And just like that, I’m 16 years-old, ready to eat anything within reach. The pies are gone before I’m less than a mile past the doctor’s office, so I consider turning around and going back for more. Well, I said only that they were to take with on the ride home, not that they would necessarily make it home.

Here in 1967, it’s always Pie O’Clock.

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https://www.thwaitesmarket.com/index.php

https://visitingnewengland.com/thwaites-market-methuen.html

The large trays of 30 are gone in favor of what appear to be conveyor belts, but those are the same tins that I filled, emptied, and then scraped clean and oiled (repeat, repeat) 55 years ago.

Forever Young on Dove Street

If you love block parties and already have a 2024 calendar, mark the first Saturday in August to put yourself in Newburyport, Mass., specifically on Dove Street, along the road that leads west from downtown past the US 1 bridge.

The entire street will be blocked off, so you’ll need to park at some distance, but be sure to wear or bring your dancing shoes. The band that played last night had everyone of all ages romping so long, so so fast, and so joyously, that, before they went home, the Dove St. resident who booked them rebooked them for next year.

By now, I should give you the name of the band, but what we heard last night was the birth of one. And it’s fair to say that anyone on Dove St. last night is hoping they’ll soon have a name we’ll hear for a long time to come.

Five students from Berklee College of Music who barely know each other arrived in three cars and played for the first time as an ensemble. My friend on Dove St. teaches at Berklee and months ago asked one of her students, a guitarist, to form a band. Apparently, he took his sweet time. At least two of his recruits had to be introduced while setting up their mics and amplifiers. No doubt if I heard this ahead of time, I’d give you a flippant, “What can go wrong?”

Answer: Nothing, nothing at all and far from it. The repertoire featured irresistible dance tunes of Michael Jackson, the Bee Gees, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, and many 80s hits that this Boomer vaguely recognized but could never identify. Friends gave me titles such as “Up Town” and “Pump You Up” that may have made me feel as old forty years ago as they made me feel young last night.

Lead guitarist Fletcher Medler, Drummer Nick White, and Bassist Leo Weisskoff were steady, precise, and vibrant from start to finish. White & Weisskoff offered solos satisfying and sharp, as did Medler on several songs while maintaining eye-contact with his new band-mates to call shots that would make anyone think they’d been together for years.

Two vocalists, Christian Donayre & Sophia Griswold kept their eyes on us, swapping leads or singing duets, with gestures, mannerisms, and inflections reminiscent of the 60s Motown groups, as did Donayre’s vocal range, from “Billie Jean” to “Stayin’ Alive.” But what sets this as-yet unnamed band apart from all others I’ve ever heard was Griswold ‘s trombone.

Yes, a trombone! She didn’t play it on every song, or even on most of them. When she did, she mostly accented Weisskoff’s bass or Donayre’s voice. But she had a few astonishing solos and on two occasions pranced her way into the dancers, mugging if she was going to move that slide right past their ears or stab their feet.

Behind the band, a driveway led to a fence, past which you could see people in the backyard of a home on Kent Street moving around. When Griswold launched into her first solo on “Party On,” they all gathered to look over the fence and down the driveway wondering what on earth they were hearing.

For a moment I thought I was at a Renaissance festival. The little kids started bouncing toward her as if to put their faces in the bell. A girl in a small wheelchair mimicked Griswold’s arm motion with the slide as her dad swayed the chair from side to side. One small boy got down on the pavement and started breakdancing. A young mother and her four-year-old daughter, in identical dresses, danced on both sides as the hopping trombonist literally blew past them. When the band launched into the always rousing Bay State favorite, “Sweet Caroline,” there were as many fists pumping the air as I’ve seen at any of King Richard’s jousts

This is the last night of the annual Yankee Homecoming celebration, and so the city is flush with visitors here to see the fireworks. For me the pyrotechnics were anti-climactic, even if the finale was the most intense and bright white I’ve ever heard or seen. But the Berklee Five did resume for just a few numbers when they sky went dark and the crowd came back up Dove Street, ending with a just-as-bright but soothing mix of “Everybody Wants to Save the World” and “Isn’t She Lovely?”

Before that, as the partiers returned, they surprised us with the Bob Dylan song that begins, “May God bless and keep you always.” A brilliant choice, the only slow dance of the night, to which the children and their young parents may not attach any emotional or generational significance. How could they?

For one who heard that song when it was new, the title strikes me as the ideal name for this unique, upbeat, makeshift band:

Forever Young.

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Sophia Griswold, wearing a headband given her by the small girl seen over her left shoulder, trombones her way across Dove Street.
All photos by Patricia Peknik.

Dove Street and friends awaiting the next tune.

Sound Check. L2R: Nick White’s nose, Fletcher Medler’s back and right forearm, and then all of Leo Weisskoff, Sophia Griswold, and Christian Donayre.

From Oppenheimer to Vonnegut

Sitting outside the Screening Room before the afternoon showing of Oppenheimer, a fellow stops and asks the dunce-cap question:

“Is this movie any good?”

For years, I’ve made a point or either pretending that I do not hear it or launching into a litany of “best evers”–acting, plot, cinematography, dialogue, music, comedy, suspense, emotional impact, costumes, make-up, special effects, any and everything I can think of–until he or she gets the point.

The point being that, as an employee of the theater showing it, I’m going to recommend it no matter what my personal opinion is.

But I happen to know that this fellow is a scientist, and is actually asking if the film conveys actual science or glosses over it for the sake of fast-paced drama. Well, yes, Oppenheimer is very fast-paced, but with a running time of three-hours, nothing is glossed over.

So I tell him that, and then compare Oppenheimer, not to another film, but to a book, a dual biography: The Brothers Vonnegut: Science Fiction in the House of Magic (2015).

“Fiction”? That was Kurt. The scientist was his older brother, Bernard, whose star rose just as Oppenheimer’s was shot down at the end of the Truman years. Not developing any bombs but seeding clouds for the Department of Agriculture to make it rain in arid areas of the American west.

He and his colleagues at Cornell and at General Electric had some success. Time and Life and other national magazines covered them with hopeful stories. In a booming country with US highways just beginning to connect the coasts so you could “see the USA in your Chevrolet.” And just as pro baseball and football began singing “California, here I come,” it all seemed not just possible, but inevitable, a God-given right belted out by Dinah Shore.

How to make it rain? Bernard Vonnegut and his fellow scientists were knocked off their Cloud Nine when they realized that the Pentagon wanted an answer as much as the DoA. I’ll leave what happened next to Ginger Strand’s book–except to say that Bernard’s conflict serves as a sequel to the film, Oppenheimer.

From Cloud Nine to Slaughterhouse Five, he also served as a model for Billy Pilgrim and other conflicted characters in Kurt’s early fiction. Conceived in the 50s and 60s, those characters could just as well been modeled on J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Kurt himself got into the act when Bernard got him a job in the PR department at GE. It didn’t go well, but it did make for a memorable story in the Welcome to the Monkey House collection, “Deer in the Works.”

So, I answered the hideous question after all. Not only is the film very good, but there’s a fascinating sequel already waiting at a bookstore or library near you.

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/07/brothers-vonnegut-science-fiction-ginger-strand-review

Unwise Words to the Wise

Once upon a dine, the Port Tavern offered a chicken-curry dish that I not only ordered every time, but recommended to anyone dining with me.

Until one day when a waiter told us it was no longer on the menu. Asked why, he said the restaurant had “a new chef who doesn’t make it.”

The End.

Wait! What the knife and fork was that all about? A fair question from those whose appetites for food I may have whet only to serve up verbal linguine. Rather than describe my disappointment or recall what I had instead, I offer the vignette to pose a few questions:

Did I simply report something that happened, an easily verifiable fact? Or would you describe those few lines as “bad-mouthing” a local restaurant?

Answering this may not be easy for some. One the one hand, it did happen, so you can’t dismiss it as unfavorable opinion. On the other, it does tell of loss, so you can’t call it favorable.

How about the direct quote from the waiter? Have I violated his privacy? Should I report a result without a cause? Or should I include the cause but without quote or attribution? Maybe I could make the reader think there was a notice of the change on the menu:

After searching the menu twice, I took the hint from the new guy with the Greek name and ordered spinach pie instead…

Be that as it may, no one ever accused me of “bad-mouthing” Port Tavern, perhaps because I have continued to dine there with friends, as well as mention it to out-of-towners asking for recommendations in the lobby of the Screening Room conveniently right next door.
,
That was then.

In recent years, increasingly, we hear the word ” bad-mouth” applied, as an active, aggressive verb, to anything that the object of it would prefer to keep quiet. Truth and accuracy have nothing to do with it.

When reporters tell us that Russian jets have bombed Kiev, do we accuse them of “bad-mouthing” Russia? When a Kremlin official justifies the attack, do we expect reporters to ask permission to quote him?

The thought of either is preposterous. Why, then, do we hear the charge on local levels where they turn attention to problems that might be solved into disdain for those calling for attention in the first place?

Paving the way for the recent rise of bad-mouth the verb was–and still is–bashing the noun and verb.

“Bashing” reared its empty head back in the 90s. Don’t know where it began, but it caught on everywhere all at once and across all walks of life. Democrats and Republicans alike have used it as an all-purpose shield. No matter what the criticism, no matter how well-founded, it can be dismissed as “bashing,” which implies that the problem is not the problem, the person calling attention to it is. Yes, the National Rifle Association would be proud.

More recently, the word hater, a noun, has widened the highway of narrow-minded thought, though every lane’s a breakdown lane. What makes it so jarring to people of my generation is that “hate” was always a word to avoid, as negative as it gets.

Notice, too, the parallel proliferation of love. For years, Madison Ave. has conditioned us to “love” certain cars, beers, cereals, laxatives, even insurance companies, and we always knew it was an exaggerated version of “like.” Now we hear political and sports commentators say they “love” or “don’t love” a candidate’s remark or a coach’s decision.

And we wonder why the emotional so often trumps the rational?

What makes “hater” yet more jarring is that this new usage is not limited to describe deep dislike and aversion, but anything less than enthusiastic approval. Once upon an attention span, you could say that you favored The Beatles over The Rolling Stones, and it was understood you still liked The Stones–or vice-versa.

Now it means you “hate” them, which may be a trivial matter regarding musical tastes, but has been a killer in a political system designed for consensus with primaries to winnow out extremists in favor of those with broader appeal. Anything less than 100% approval is all vice, no versa.

Result? Extremists win primaries, and some make it to Congress where they can condemn Jewish space lasers and ask the National Parks Service if it can change the tilt of the Earth’s axis to offset climate change. An entire political party can skip any commitment to a platform at its national convention and instead offer us a terse declaration that can be honestly summed up as Trump uber Alles!

Debasement of language is what George Orwell warned against in 1984 and what George Carlin harped on till the day he died in 2008. Orwell described Newspeak, a dumbed down language that made it impossible to think critically. Carlin traced the devolution of the WWI term shell-shock (“You can hear the bombs falling”) to today’s post-traumatic stress-disorder to illustrate how antiseptic words can numb us to urgent needs.

Where are they when we need them? Oh, say, can we read or hear them when we bemoan today’s “polarization” and “deep division”?

Might they tell us that the very language we use–badmouth, bash, hater, and more–polarizes us to the point that we see everything as all or nothing?

Politics? You can’t even regret out loud the absence of an item on a menu without some people thinking you want to burn the restaurant down.

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