Stepping Backwards

Kurt Vonnegut once claimed that, because the human race has treated it so badly, “the Earth’s auto-immune system is trying to get rid of us.” He paused for a bare moment before adding:

“Which it should.”

Sounds like he’s commenting on COVID-19 and its variants, but he died in 2007 and likely had in mind climate change, or “global warming” as we were still calling it back then.

Moreover, as the new documentary, Unstuck in Time, makes clear, he was profoundly disheartened by the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq in 2003 and did not hesitate to connect America’s oil-grab to global warming in the short essays he wrote for an on-line magazine. While reading them, you might wonder if he was petitioning the Earth’s auto-immune system to wipe us out.

Unstuck, for all of Vonnegut’s irrepressibly sardonic tales, ends on a positive note by reminding us that those end-of-life essays were published in a collection titled, A Man Without a Country (2005).

Never mind that the very title is the ultimate expression of despair from a man who cared so deeply for his country–a veteran of WWII, an American POW who survived the bombing of Dresden–that he once described his books as “open letters to the president of the United States.”

As for the title of the documentary, “unstuck in time” is the phrase Vonnegut used to introduce Billy Pilgrim, his stand-in protagonist in Slaughterhouse Five, a story that bears witness to the destruction of Dresden while zigzagging from present to and from past and/or future in a way that makes Time itself the book’s main character.

Vonnegut’s fascination with time appears in most of his work. The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat’s Cradle (1963) convinced some of us at the time that time-travel was real, while God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) still makes me wonder if America has yet fully ratified the Declaration of Independence. In Palm Sunday (1981), he called for revising the calendar to show six seasons instead of four (see attachment below).

The recurring theme came to a head in his last novel, Timequake (1997). In it, another Vonnegut stand-in, science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout, predicts a global quake, like an earthquake but a quake of time rather than of earth and water, in 2001:

It is the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience. Should it expand or make a great big bang? It decides to wind the clock back a decade to 1991, making everyone in the world endure ten years of deja-vu and a total loss of free will–not to mention the torture of reliving every nanosecond of one of the tawdriest and most hollow decades.

And didn’t we have a quake in 2001? Didn’t we all become “unstuck in time”?

For those too young to recall global or national events before Vonnegut passed in 2007, but have since picked up on his irresistibly hilarious rage-against-the-machine, the “auto-immune” crack may seem purely prophetic. Just as the “suicide parlors” of Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) foreshadowing Dr. Kevorkian, and as his treatments of automation and hi-tech advances foreshadowing the gig-economy and outsourcing, all seemed to us back in the day. His alarming descriptions of surveillance in the 1950s are now matter of course in America’s 21st Century.

Since he died, movements ranging from Occupy Wall Street to Feel the Bern and Black Lives Matter all find Vonnegut’s warnings in their DNA. And who, in this nation of “never apologize” and “never admit a mistake,” can deny the declaration of his criminally underrated debut novel, Player Piano (1952):

A step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

Today, in a theater watching Unstuck in Time, you can hear an audience collectively chuckle when he says “get rid of us,” and then gasp when he adds “which it should.” As if he were talking about COVID, as if he were talking today in a hall limited to one-third capacity, all of us wearing masks.

If you were anywhere near a college campus in the late-60s and early-70s, you recall seeing them sticking out of students’ bookbags and pockets, as well as on the dashboards or under the back windows of their cars.

You saw them in the cars of students on spring break in Florida, as I kept seeing them in Key West, no matter what the license plate said.

In high-schools, too, whether assigned or not, they were easy to notice with their signature design, every one of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels made to look like Slaughterhouse Five when it rocked an already rocking America in 1969, an antiwar novel during the peak of the antiwar movement.

Cat’s Cradle gave Vonnegut a cult following in 1963, and Slaughterhouse Five made him mainstream, a must-read for book clubs and for anyone interested in current events. College and high-school teachers joked that the word “assignment” was redundant when they put Vonnegut on their reading lists.

Unstuck in Time captures all of this. Directed by Robert B. Weide, best known for his work with Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, the documentary is itself “unstuck in time.” Weide was in high school when he was assigned Breakfast of Champions (1973) and was instantly hooked.

In time, he would write to Vonnegut asking to make a film, and in 1996 he would direct Nick Nolte in an adaptation of Vonnegut’s 1962 novel, Mother Night–a story that predicts the Age of Trump, though Vonnegut was gone eight years before America’s Golden Calf descended the escalator and smashed the tabloids.

Unstuck in Time is a must-see for Vonnegut fans because it reveals so much of how Vonnegut’s work unfolded over time–and a must-see for Americans looking for ways to become unstuck in times gone so wrong.

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From *Palm Sunday* (1981), a book subtitled *An Autobiographical Collage*.

Critical Climate Theory

Last week, Seattle radio station KUOW reported that “climate science” is not taught in some of the Evergreen State’s middle and high schools.

My Seattleite correspondent complained to the station for “not calling it censorship, though that is what it is.”

When she informed me, I typed back a virtual shrug: “At least they are reporting that it isn’t taught.”

But Helen Highwater, true to her name, was having none of it:

Evidently, one tactic is to encourage science teachers to assign students to debate issues related to climate change–a pedagogy that is itself a form of disinformation since scientists are long past debating it.
Community political affiliation is an accurate predictor of how a school district will teach climate science. Level of education is the next best predictor. In Washington, 40% have college degrees. For kids in school now, about 60% will get all their climate science education in middle and high school.

Which is to say that they get none at all. Her concluding statement gave me pause:

The conflict gets more acknowledgment and attention than the crisis.

Isn’t that something we could say about COVID, about race, about voting rights, about gun violence, about economic injustice and disparity?

If that’s how it is in the reliably blue and evergreen state of Washington, imagine how it is in the rest of the country. To think that, in 1988, Seattle was such a global model for recycling and reduced emissions that public planners and engineers from all over the world went there to take a look.

Then-Mayor Charles Royer, who oversaw the efforts he initiated, served as an advisor to Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign that year. Many who followed that campaign expected that he would have been Dukakis’ Secretary of Interior or the head of the EPA because of it.

Instead, we got Vice-President Dan Quayle who solved a dilemma faced by the elder George Bush–how to allow developers free reign on protected coastal lands–by simply changing the federal definition of the word “wetlands.”

The Right likes to call the Left “woke.” How a word for awareness, attention, and intelligence is a bad thing in 21st Century America is an essay, if not a book, all by itself–no matter how ugly they make the word sound. But “woke” is ironic, as the Left has yet to wake up to the fact of how much obstruction and distortion the Right has accomplished merely by language.

Back in the Eighties, Senator Patrick Moynihan of New York warned against “semantic infiltration.” If one side in an argument made up names and phrases that the public started using, they could then control–limit and distort–the argument.

From the Affordable Care Act to “Obamacare,” from reproductive rights to “abortion on demand,” from Estate Tax to “Death Tax,” from fair wages to “socialism,” from Michelle Obama’s call for nutrition in school lunch programs to “nanny state,” from honest history to “cancel culture,” from respect for others to “political correctness,” from gun control to “They’re coming to take your guns away!”

The examples could fill Seattle’s phone book, and the Right doesn’t need to win any of the debates. They need only prolong debate and sow doubt so that nothing can be done. And isn’t social media ideal for sowing doubt, and haven’t the Russians been generous with their seeds?

Martin Luther King had this obstruction in mind–“nullification and interposition” as he wrote in Birmingham’s jail–when he declared: “Justice delayed is justice denied.”

My friend Highwater nailed the method to that maddening stall: The conflict gets more acknowledgment and attention than the crisis.

I’m surprised that the right hasn’t contrived the term “Critical Climate Theory” (yet) to stop any teaching of climate change in America’s jet stream. Maybe they figure they don’t need it, or are saving it for a Donald card when they fear their children are being told that not everything in America is and always has been good and happy.

Why are the rest of us surprised at their refusal to act following school shootings when they prove over and again that they don’t want no education?

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https://mei.nus.edu.sg/think_in/covid-19-and-climate-change-asias-policy-choices-in-the-age-of-crisis/

In an earlier blog on this same semantic theme, I wrote that claims for a “comfort zone” are now “white privilege.” While I was writing this blog, the Washington Post proved it:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/12/06/tennessee-teacher-fired-critical-race-theory/

A Tale of Two Faces

A year before America’s Golden Calf descended the escalator and smashed the tabloids, this headline appeared on the front page of Newburyport Daily News:

“Caleb Cushing tops list of important residents.”

To commemorate the Port’s 250th anniversary, “local historians” had chosen Newburyport’s “most accomplished and most colorful public figure.” Anyone who had read Cushing’s biography, Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union, may have wondered if the choice was an outright repudiation of native son William Lloyd Garrison—whose advocacy of human rights, we must remember, threatened what at the time were regarded as property rights.

If that was the city’s low-point–our “alternative facts” moment as I think of it–then the Annual William Lloyd Garrison Lecture, which began via Zoom just last year, may yet atone for that civic sin.

Initiated as an observance of the city’s most famous citizen–or infamous to some both in his day and, apparently, now–on the anniversary of his birth, the second takes place this Friday (Dec. 10) at the Old South Presbyterian Church. (And Zoom is still an option, see link below.)

On a website to prepare for it, various folks contributed essays answering the questions “Why Here?” and “Why Now?” regarding the need for re-confirming the legacy of the publisher and editorial writer of The Liberator, the leading voice of the Abolitionist cause for over three decades before the Civil War finally did abolish slavery.

After three writers clearly and convincingly covered Now, I offered one entirely devoted to Here. Knowing that no “local historians” involved would want to be reminded of the designation of Cushing as the Port’s number one guy, I began by reminding them of it.

As another nagging gadfly liked to say, here’s the rest of the story:

Why Here? Why Newburyport?

… Cushing’s foremost commitment was to Northern businesses in the triangular slave trade, of which he was part. Unavoidably, that led him to defend the “rights” of slaveholders to protect their “property.” A close friend and political ally of Jefferson Davis, Cushing supported the Slavocracy for years before the war, and maintained secret correspondence with Davis during it.

That violated Lincoln’s wartime order, which, oh by the way, was an act of treason.

Before long, a letter (“Cushing a poor choice”) from one Jay Harris detailed the Mayor/Governor/Mass. Supreme Court Justice/U.S. Rep./U.S. Attorney General’s decades-long “staunch support for the rights of slaveholders.”

In a guest column following that, I called it akin to picking Neville Chamberlain rather than Winston Churchill as Britain’s most “accomplished” prime minister because he served more years in parliament, held more offices.

My headline, “Garrison 51, Cushing 1,” referred to two recent histories of the era: Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (2008), by David S. Reynolds, and Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877 (2013), by Brenda Wineapple. The two books combine for 51 references to Garrison, including five that extend several pages. Cushing’s name appears once.

That might suggest what national historians think of our local choice.

Curiously, the Custom House’s curator and director were the only two living historians quoted in the initial report, one of whom defended Cushing as an advocate of “popular sovereignty,” apparently unaware that the term was a euphemism for “states’ rights,” itself a euphemism at the time for the Slavocracy.

But the Port has far more historians that have written books, held events, served as sources for numerous media reports. Because the 2014 choice was made in their name, they are implicated whether they want to be or not. To date, their silence has been deafening. What say they now?

Moreover, before Newburyport looks to Garrison to stem today’s Confederate tide, shouldn’t we be accountable for our own unwitting, inattentive role in it?

Until then, in a new age when Confederate flags appear not just in the streets of DC, but on porches and on bumpers right here in the Merrimack Valley, Cushing remains Newburyport’s foremost citizen.

What say we?

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Links to all three articles cited above can be found by typing their headlines into the search engine at: https://www.newburyportnews.com/

https://annualwilliamlloydgarrisonlecture.wordpress.com/

Here, Garrison is across the street from and facing the front door of Newburyport City Hall. The inscription is the most frequently quoted excerpt from his many anti-slavery editorials.
Photo courtesy of the Newburyport Daily News.

Angel of the Boardwalk

Nine years ago, I wrote a column for the Daily News teasingly headlined: “You may be downsized, but I’m dinosaured.”

Fittingly, I wrote it on the concession counter of the Screening Room while a film entertained a full house. No need for me to be in the booth waiting for cues to change reels with the newly installed hi-tech equipment.

That was the point: I had gone from projectionist to button-pusher.

Soon after it appeared in print, I received this:

Dear Jack: I knew one day I would read your article about the loss of film projectionists. I have a real darkroom in my house that I have not used for several years, and I do miss it. I always felt as if I was creating art when I worked there.
Now just a button and a few clicks and an image is created.
I share your loss, but what will you do now? Are you the button pusher still? Annie and I still go to the Screening Room but we always liked having a different film each week. I hope to still find you in the booth and behind the counter. I look forward to those few exchanges we have.
Let me know what’s going on.
All the best, Pat
And P.S. I did so enjoy those lollipops. 🙂

Lollipops aside, Pat Bashford and Ann Kemp saw every film we played–showing up in Ann’s 1959 Morris Minor convertible, top down weather permitting–until Ann passed away at 77 in 2014. Both were active in an assortment of community groups ranging from books to horticulture, from the Firehouse to the Unitarian Church.

Ann was always friendly but a bit reserved as befits a native Brit, while Pat was prone to jokes and ever-ready banter. A native Ohioan, she was known for the ever-present twinkle in her eye.

In retrospect, Ann may have seemed reserved only in comparison to Pat. Who wouldn’t?

Pat usually greeted me with a wise-crack about my last newspaper column. When I was critical of the mayor, she offered herself as a reference for a job in City Hall. When I attacked the Newburyport Board of Health, she was less optimistic: “Well, there goes your plan to open a restaurant!”

A faithful reader, she was always encouraging: “I read all the columns almost immediately… You should, you know, gather these bright sparkles and put them in a book.” On occasion, she called me “a bullshitter,” a term of endearment among people of Irish descent.

Her obituary appeared in Newburyport just this weekend following her passing at the home of her son in Western Massachusetts two weeks ago, and it illustrates how and how often she offered such support:

Throughout her life, Pat closely befriended many women, who found in her a steadfast source of strength and joie de vivre, and an exemplar of wisdom, fair-mindedness, and independence. She forged these friendships wherever she lived, and more than a few were with former students. Most of her friendships lasted until the end of her life, stretching back fifty, sixty, and even seventy years in some cases. Her unforced enthusiasm for others was remarkable. So many of Pat’s friends will miss her nearly as much as her sons will. Even those who met or knew Pat only briefly were touched by her kindness, perception, and sparkle.

Pat’s lifelong passions were the visual arts, which, as we sometimes forget, includes theater. When she lived in Reading for some 25 years, she performed, directed, and designed sets for area theater groups. Her performance in Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth won the 1987 New England Theater Conference Best Actress award.

The obituary is full of surprises if only because Newburyport knew her for just the last two decades of a nine-decade life. By that time, photography was foremost in her efforts and attention as she offered exhibits and mini-books with titles such as Courting Nature’s Bliss and The Life of Water.

Indeed, it was the water surrounding Plum Island that drew Pat and her camera to move here. In her own words: “Water sustains us, surrounds us, soothes us, feeds us and works small miracles with our emotions — calming us, thrilling us, frightening us.”

For all that, the photo of hers that has most intrigued me–and was coincidentally chosen to accompany the obituary (link below)–is of a Plum Island dune between the waters of the ocean and the estuary. Many times have I started and stopped along that walk at Parking Lot Three to find the exact spot and recreate for my own eyes Pat’s “Boardwalk Angel.”

When I told her, she was amused: “That would make it ‘Boardwalk Devil’.”

Her last years in Newburyport were not easy. Numerous friends–some half her age, if that–would take her places, but she missed the close companionship of Ann. And along with octogenarian and nonagenarian aches and pains, she took an occasional fall:

Dear Jack, what a delight to see you today and am so sorry I couldn’t stay to visit.
Congratulations on becoming a grandpa. I hope your visit will be just what you desire.
I loved reading your columns. I didn’t get the [newspaper] all of the fall for I was in a rehab center for 7 weeks (!) and then had home PT and OT and a nurse for another 6 weeks. The fall disappeared; I missed half a year all because I don’t know my left foot from my right. But I start out patient therapy next week and hope soon to put the walker in mothballs and me on the road again…
Come by again when you get back and let’s have a chat. I miss talking with you..

As you can tell, I had dropped in unannounced, a whirlwind of last minute visits before getting on a plane to meet my new grandson in Los Angeles. But Pat welcomed that. And she also warned off a visit when it might be a problem for you:

Dear Jack, If you feel like coming out in this icky weather, I am home this afternoon. I’ll even make you a cup o’ tea!
If you don’t wish to slog out, I’ll be here another day. Haven’t given up the ghost yet.😊
Love, Pat
P.S. The door is open, just walk in and up the stairs.

As I recall, that was the visit for which I brought her a collection of eight or nine Tootsie Pops–a dozen would not tolerate the elastic band I used to make it appear as a bouquet–which she so enjoyed at the Screening Room, two per film.

“Love Pat.” Who couldn’t?

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Lot 3 Boardwalk Angel: https://sites.google.com/site/travelswithpat/

“Pat acquired her first camera as a teenager soon after World War II, a gift from her father that she owned all her life.” From: https://www.hampshirecremation.com/post/patricia-ann-bashford-1929-2021?
And from a friend in Seattle who knows far more about photography than I: “I don’t know a lot about Rolleiflex cameras like the one shown in Pat’s hand, but they were highly prized. Several of Imogen Cunningham’s and Vivian Maier’s self-portraits show similar twin-reflex Rolleis (often backwards since shot in a mirror).”

Ann Kemp: https://obituaries.newburyportnews.com/obituary/ann-kemp-772762221

Portrait by Marilu Norden, most of whose work is of the American Southwest (which may explain the earrings): https://marilunorden.com/paintings/

A Tale of One City

In the new film, Belfast, there’s a fire and brimstone Protestant minister who describes a fork in the road. One way is “straight and narrow” and leads to the Lord and grace and everlasting life in Heaven. The other is “a long and winding road” to Satan and depravity and eternal damnation in Hell.

Makes me wonder if the Beatles enjoyed a devilish inside joke with the title of their most heartfelt lament “that leads to your door” on their own way out the door.

Just as heartfelt, Kenneth Branagh’s ode to his hometown is as much celebration as lament. Unlike the Beatles’ metaphorical “Road,” however, his title is both real and specific. Perhaps he gave the minister that line as a jest from the port of Belfast across rival Liverpool’s bow.

About when the Beatles were howling “Get Back” from a London rooftop, Branagh was a nine-year-old growing up in Belfast. Before he lets us in to his past, he pans Belfast as it is today in full color–a visual treat of public art, architecture, modern transport, vibrant people. Then again, the sign saying “Hotel Titanic” may have been a bit much.

Switch to black-and-white, and, as seen through Buddy’s nine-year-old eyes, the film’s story opens with a blast of The Troubles–Catholic vs. Protestant violence, a religious conflict that more accurately would have been seen as a class conflict.

How long has it gone on? While writing his epic Irish novel, Trinity (21 weeks on the NYT best-seller list in 1976), Leon Uris was on a commercial flight to the capital of Northern Ireland when he heard this over the plane’s intercom:

We are beginning our descent into Belfast. Please set your watches back 300 years.

Canadian folk-singer Stan Rogers thought that an understatement. In concert, he introduced his protest song, “The House of Orange,” with the quip, I’d say 600 years is long enough to hold a grudge.

Though violence lurks in the film’s margins to its end, Belfast zooms in on the loves, labors, and loss of a family hoping to keep themselves together despite economic and cultural pressures. Buddy’s puppy-love with a brainy classmate is so innocent that it comes as a surprise to learn that she is Catholic when they say “Cheerio” in their final scene together–and sets up a timely laugh when his father tells him that she could be “a vegan anti-Christian” and still “she and her people are welcome in our home.”

Buddy’s mother is a tour de force, and his grandparents are both fonts of wisdom and comic relief. Among them is Judi Dench whose facial expressions leave us with the most lasting impressions.

Not sure how it looks to anyone born after the advent of color-televison circa 1960, but the black-and-white cinematography puts this Boomer right back into the era, reinforced by newscasts of the moon landing that we notice and overhear. When the family goes to the cinema to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the color from that cinema’s screen clashes so loudly with the b&w of that cinema’s audience, that this cinema’s audience gave an audible gasp. May be the most ingenious sight-gag I’ve ever seen.

Screening Room audiences are nearly unanimous in their praise for Belfast. One criticism, also made of Spencer, is that it should have subtitles. At one point, grandpa tells a story about his accent and no one understanding him. I thought the whole audience (29, big these COVID days) was going to rise up and say, “No shit!” Those two words were kept under my breath.

When Belfast ended, I was left wondering what I had in common with anyone in the film. I knew I liked it, but why? A friend, born about when Branagh first appeared on a London stage, didn’t warm to it right away either, but sounded as though she was talking herself into it when she talked me into it:

(T)he story does have its moments. I definitely empathize with the family’s pains in moving away from their homeland, and I appreciate the nostalgia Branagh has for his old neighborhood. Maybe the movie’s simplicity is even forgivable, since it’s focused on the kid’s experience… It’s got a great tone, some good music, some lovely grandparents.

Ah, the music! Throughout the film, we hear Van Morrison, a native of Belfast, a city that reappears in color after Dame Dench gives us her last look and a dedication is made. All of which makes me realize that, just as the title says, it’s not the boy who is the main character, but the city.

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Playing now through Thursday, Dec. 9 at the Newburyport Screening Room. Check for times: https://www.newburyportmovies.com/

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/leon-uris/trinity/

Rip Van Rides Again

After a 20-month layoff, I knew my memory might need some refreshing. Many places would be no trouble since I had delivered to them hundreds of times over twenty years. But what of the once-a-year holiday specials and the connecting routes less travelled?

Having grown up in the Age of Rand McNally, I kept street atlases of five New England states in the company van. Three were well-worn by about 2004, after which I consulted them only when we added a new customer.

That was about when we added one in Rhode Island, and one of my employers came to me with a print-out of step-by-step directions to it. You know, one that begins by telling you which way to turn out your driveway. Maybe it’s because I live on an island with just a single road to the mainland, but these things drive me up a bridge abutment. To reach anyplace you can name on the North American continent, I’m given three instructions to get to a bridge I can see out my living room window. Give me a clutch!

Such had to be the look on my face when he, with all good intention, handed me that drivel. He laughed, but he never made the mistake again. Anyway, the blank back-sides did come in handy as scrap paper when I had lunch later on in Cafe Assisi, so all’s well that ends with eggplant parmesan.

On my second day back since the COVID shutdown, I was dispatched to a new drop, as we call them in shipping and receiving. An address that I vaguely recalled as in an industrial park I knew reasonably well. Wanting to be sure, I started reaching for my maps not long after I drove off, but they were nowhere to be found.

Well, I was in need of coffee, and I had no trouble remembering where I’d find a Starbucks–two, in fact–conveniently just off the interstate before I reached that park. Why not look at the invoice and give them a call?

After some fumbling attempts on the company cellphone, the call went through. Because I’m one of the few remaining Americans who neither has, nor wants, nor will ever shackle myself with a cellphone, it took a while to recall how to call.

A cheery “Hello, this is…” was in my ear after an obligatory minute of phone-menu limbo, and the receptionist was delighted to learn who I was. Who wouldn’t be when you’re about to roll 500 pounds of chocolate and fudge into their offices?

When I mentioned directions, she asked, “Do you have GPS?”

Brand new just before COVID put the brakes on everything, the van probably does have it, but being too proud of my McNally nature to admit I’m unfit for this Age of Alexa, I simply said no.

She then conferred with a woman sitting nearby. From their voices, I’d say both were mid-20s, and it was clear that the second had pulled a map onto her screen and was describing it to the first who repeated it to me. So I heard it all twice. I appreciated their kind effort, but this doesn’t register visually for a McNallian–until I heard a street-name, twice, that triggered my memory. So I thought I’d make it easy:

“Yes,” I cut in, “I know that exit. The one with the rotary, right?”

“That’s it!”

“Okay! Just tell me if I go north or south of the interstate. That’s all I need.”

“Um, north?”

Right. Alexans don’t do north, south, east, or west, but my McNallian memory offered further detail: Stressing a word that now qualifies as bi-geolingual, I asked: “Do I go toward downtown Woburn or toward Wilmington?”

As soon as I heard the one-name answer, I preempted the step-by-step Alexan litany that she was already starting: “Thank you! Thank you both! I’ll recognize it from there. See you in a bit.”

And I did recognize the turn to the industrial park, which isn’t that large, so an extra turn around the block due to one wrong guess didn’t delay me more than a minute. As an unintended benefit, the call may have been the reason a couple young guys were standing out on the loading dock. For all I know, I was their excuse to have a cigarette break, but that’s fine by me. They come in quite handy when you’re rolling into a place with 500 pounds of cargo.

Rip Van Winkle may have been baffled after his 20-year snooze, so I shouldn’t worry over twenty months of sleeping in. Such tricks as calling ahead–even when I know damn well exactly where I’m going–will make this easy.

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I’d use the word mini-van to describe these low-to-the-ground Ford Transits, but that word is for something else quite different.

On the very first day I drove it, a Mendon policeman stopped me on a back road, probably doing 45 past signs saying 30. He seemed forgiving, no doubt because he had watched me go by in the larger vans on that same road many times.

No, he wouldn’t remember me, but words like “fudge” and “chocolate” have a way of sticking in the memory no matter the size of the vehicle carrying it. As surely as being asked every day, more than once, if you are “giving away free samples.” But I could tell he didn’t pull me over to ask for buttercrunch or coconut cream.

“Sorry, I got carried away,” I began. (Always begin with Sorry, and always keep talking until they interrupt.) Quickly, I told him it was so much easier to handle than the full-size cargo vans I had been driving for some twelve years, that it felt like a sports van.

He lit up with a smile when I used–coined?–that term, and interrupted to let me know he was issuing just a warning. Since then, I have waved to him as I go by, but never hit the horn. That would be pressing my luck as well as the horn.

In Marshfield, a policeman pulled up aside me while I was stopped in a parking lot consulting a map. The cafe where I liked to consult maps over falafel wraps was itself wrapped by a chain-link fence and yellow tape, and when a police cruiser suddenly appeared right next to me with its window sliding down and the cop leaning over for a talk… Well, let’s just say your mind can go awry when that happens.

Did he think I had done whatever had done in the building, that this was a classic case of “returning to the scene of the crime”? I didn’t wait for him to speak:

“Sorry! Dispatch told me to get here ASAP, and I guess I didn’t.”

He started laughing. That’s an even better time to stop. No, I hadn’t screeched in too fast or failed to use a signal. He just wanted a photograph.

By this time, I was already used to it. Cars pull up beside me on the interstates for as long as it takes for passengers to snap the pics they want. Other cars race by with people laughing, pointing, giving thumbs up. People are photographing it when I return from a delivery. If I’m there, they’ll ask permission.

More than once, some guy or gal will be squatting by the van’s side, adjusting lenses for some desired angle, then shifting for another, readjusting, and so on. Quietly, I’ll stop and stand behind them with the two-wheeler until they stand up–and are startled by my presence. As dryly as I can, I always speak first:

“Are you finished?”

Some will start to apologize, so you quickly laugh it off. Thankfully, most get the joke, so you crack another:

“May I go now?”

What they want, of course, is the sign my employers put on it. Two of them are volunteer fire-fighters, one a former ambulance driver, and they may have thought it an inside joke for their fellow first-responders. They even put a backward “chocolate” between the headlights. Wonder if the only reason it doesn’t have a siren and a bubble gum light is because they figured I might use them.

Also wonder if it occurred to them that it would be I, not they, who would absorb all the laughter their shiny new object would cause.

Whatever the case, “Emergency Fudge Response Vehicle” now challenges the fish shack in Rockport out on the tip of Cape Ann–Massachusetts’ other cape–as the most photographed object in the state.

For artists with their canvases, the shack is known as “Motif #1.” That would make the van “Motif #2,” but it moves too fast to be painted. And you better believe I’ll keep pedal to the metal to keep it that way because the term number two has a most unfortunate other meaning.

Kinda like mini-van.

Painted on Downtown Walls

Been years since I travelled overland west of the Mississippi.

In 2003 I delivered a car to Los Angeles, Amtraked to Seattle, took a leisurely ride with a friend in his van to Minneapolis/St. Paul (including Wyoming’s matter-of-factly-named “Oh My God Highway”), and got back on the train to Poughkeepsie where my car was waiting to take me home.

In 2005, I made it to Louisville, and in 2008 to Chicago. Both of those included weekend stays in Akron with family, and from there who could resist a short trek north to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland?

Those trips are like postscripts to numerous cross-country drives in the ’90s and late-’80s. Before that, during my Prodigal Son years starting all the way back in the Ford Administration, I was able to spend days, sometimes months at a time, in one place. Long enough to receive mail in the capitals of three states–Colorado, North Dakota, and Oregon–though some of it would be forwarded to Brookings, South Dakota, where I lived on three different occasions during those seven years.

In retrospect, Brookings served me as a retreat. Each time I left one of those capitals, I landed back in that modest college town. As unlike as college towns and full-sized cities may be, I noticed something in common that took me by surprise.

Before I get to it, notice that every other place named above is a city. As small as Bismarck to as large as LA, from the rust of Northeast Ohio to the lush Pacific Northwest, from staid St. Paul to raucous Lou’ville. They all have that same thing I never noticed until I moved to Denver and, out of necessity, became a street-musician. As someone working outdoors, moving from place to place downtown, I was bound to notice:

Wall murals.

More specifically, the murals often included a scene of musicians jamming in a park, at a block party, or on an outdoor stage. What made me take note was the ethnic make-up: The guitarists and fiddlers might be anyone, but–apart from Native Americans in groups of their own–the drummers were always Black and Hispanic while the wind players were always Asian and White.

As I say, this was a previous lifetime, and perhaps things have changed. There’s nothing racist about the images, as a good time was being had by all. And all were clearly enjoying each other’s company (and accompaniment) in each one I ever saw.

Moreover, I myself was an example. A white flautist who frequently played with an African-American drummer who wore robes and bright colors that may not have been noticeable in Havana or Kinshasa, but which I’m sure increased our take in Denver’s historic Larimer Square. Not only that, but I saw it in other cities in both planned events and spontaneous gatherings–both in the murals and in the actual events and gatherings: Black and brown percussion; white and yellow wind.

We all know or know of so many exceptions to that rule that it is hardly a rule at all, perhaps something peculiar to those of us who play in streets and parks, who form impromptu gatherings. Perhaps the murals that have been painted on downtown buildings since the Carter-into-Reagan years have desegregated urban music as depicted on downtown walls.

That was when most of my jam sessions included Native Americans on drums and guitars. Since then, at King Richard’s Faire, I’ve jammed with numerous white drummers; an Ecuadorian piper occasionally joined me in downtown Salem; and it was an African-American flautist (half my age, I might add) who taught me how to play Mozart’s “Turkish March.”

Next time I trek past the Mississippi, or past the Hudson, I’ll be looking to see if the muralists have caught up to us.

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A detail from a wall of the Lafayette Building in Detroit taken in 2008. The building has since been demolished.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/71288712@N00/2342588854

Dancing with Scarecrows

There are films that try a projectionist’s soul.

Or at least my nerves, as happened last night when I first showed Spencer, the new biopic of Princess Diana.

Before the first scene, credits for production and distribution never include the film’s title while listing mostly German names. Long names, long credits until we are treated to a flat landscape, farmland, rather bleak and hazy, with no voice-over.

Nor are there any visible characters or dialogue as we watch a convoy of military vehicles roll down a very straight, tree-lined country road toward an estate. Soldiers get out to deliver large crates that you might think are coffins.

By this time, I’m panicking that I’ve started the wrong film. Is there a new German film installed in the projector that would fit this bill?

Finally, at least five minutes in, a convoy of limousines arrives, and footmen approach to open the doors of each. From one gushes a dozen or so corgis all in a pack, tails wagging.

My sigh of relief may have reached the front row. Only the Brits would do that.

Spencer is a must-hear film.

No, that’s not a typo. Unless you count musicals with soundtracks, there’s no other film with a score that explores characters as deeply as this one. A string quartet plays when the royals are on the screen–we briefly see them in the manor–while a jazz combo plays for Diana.

The result is mesmerizing. As family tensions mount, the classical music becomes maudlin and rigid. As Diana lurches toward a nervous breakdown, the jazz becomes increasingly dissonant. When she does join and suffer her exacting husband and in-laws, the two sounds clash.

Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991) comes to mind, but we hear Stevie Wonder only during the scenes with Black characters while Frank Sinatra sings only during the Italian scenes. In Spencer, the music expresses the characters’ inner as much as outer states. Moreover, this is taken up a notch when Diana renders an extended scene in interpretive dance.

If Spencer intended this “battle of the bands” to parallel Diana’s discontent vs. the queen’s iron will, the winner when it ends comes as a complete surprise.

Everything about Spencer is surprise.

Following her death in 1997, Diana Spencer, who grew up on a middle-rung of England’s fixed class ladder before marrying into royalty, was immediately and unanimously regarded a saint. Without dispelling that notion, this film counters it with a portrait of a woman chafing at royal restrictions with hate-stares, sarcasm, and an f-bomb or two. When you need wire-cutters to open your window curtains, you can be forgiven.

Before long, Diana starts seeing the ghost of Anne Boleyn, the queen beheaded by Henry VIII, who tells her what happened and what she must beware. Soon afterward, Diana will talk of it to herself. Anyone familiar with English lore will recall the ghost of the assassinated king and father of Hamlet telling him the same. Followed by Hamlet’s soliloquies.

Scenes with her sons and her maid remind us of the Diana we recall and expected to see throughout the film. While serving as relief, at times comic, they also heighten the conflict. When maid Maggie–played by Sally Hawkins, best known for falling in love with a fish in 2017’s The Shape of Water–offers her advice in an early scene, she could as well be loyal friend Horatio telling Hamlet, “Don’t think too curiously on it, my Lord.”

It was the day before Christmas when, all at the manor, the royal family gathered, missing Diana. Or, as the queen mentions to her head servant, her problematic daughter-in-law is late. And that’s when Diana makes her entrance in the film if not the manor.

Instead, she’s tooling around in her sports car, scandalously driving it herself and all alone. Late? Who cares? Played by Kristen Stewart–a “crafty and impressively authentic” Joan Jett in 2010’s The Runaways says a friend who knows much more about Joan Jett than I do–Diana stops to check out that brick-colored coat on a scarecrow. The coat will later prove as practical as metaphorical.

Such is the free-form jazz scene that follows the rigidly composed arrivals of crates carrying meats and vegetables, followed by the royals and their corgis who would feast on them. By this time, we know that this is not at all the film that we expected, and many patrons let me know it as they left.

“A surprise full of surprises,” exhaled one woman as if catching her breath.

Billing it as “a fable based on a true tragedy,” the film’s promos tell us that it is set during a Christmas holiday months before Diana’s tragedy and instantaneous sainthood. If you miss that, then the ending may be a surprise verging on shock. Apart from that, surprise may depend on the viewer’s age and memory. Diana is already in emotional turmoil when the film starts, and we are left to glean from the manor what put her there.

Just as we are left to speculate on why she is wearing an Ontario Provincial Police cap in the final scene, a colorful, whimsical counterpoint to the film’s grim opening. Wasn’t Kate Middleton the one who defected to Canada?

Like mother, like daughter-in-law? Like princess, like duchess? There’s plenty to glean and speculate on, which makes Spencer as much must-see as must-hear.

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Trump-Manchin 2024

HIGHWATER, W. Va. — An apparent plan to return Donald Trump to the White House was revealed today in this remote mountain village after local police discovered a late-model Maserati reported stolen early this week.

Everyone knew that the car belonged to the state’s US Sen. Joe Manchin, but Highwater’s police chief is a stickler for detail and proof, and so she insisted on going through the files contained in a briefcase found in the trunk.

A dozen other briefcases were left empty, all of them smelling “like freshly printed money” according to Chief Helen Highwater, for whose great-grandfather the hamlet is named. She added that a note was left on the dashboard indicating that the briefcases were to be used again.

But the files were left behind, and Manchin’s name was prominent on all of them–including at the top of newly printed stationary for an as yet unannounced political campaign:

“Trump-Manchin 2024”

Asked to comment, Manchin appeared not to hear the question. Speaking on the deck of “Almost Heaven,” his 65-foot houseboat that floats in the Potomac, Manchin insisted instead that “the thieves must be caught on a bipartisan basis and my money and Maserati returned to me.”

Highwater took that to mean that she could do what she thought best in the public interest with the documents, and, with little to police in a sleepy mountain outpost, she read them all and wrote, in Manchin’s voice, a summary of the proposed campaign’s strategy.

In the whimsical style characteristic of an Appalachian hollow, the title describes both form and content–with an asterisk that makes it a triple-entendre:

Roundup*
Covid-19: We can use our spin on this as a model for how we spin climate crisis and political paralysis.
“Supply chain issues.” Blame Covid for rising cost of fossil fuels etc. Never allow that climate crisis itself is to blame.
“Labor shortages.” Blame Covid, not low wages & high travel costs. Immigration policies are seldom seriously discussed as a factor. Deny that desperate immigrants are at least partly led north by climate issues.
“Inflation.” As song-writing team Cummings & Bachman put it: ‘You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.‘ Blame the other Joe. Blame it on the socialist Joe & China, not on me, the oil & coal Joe.
Cast me as “the bipartisan Joe,” as much a gaslighter as DT but without the insults, hysteria, crudity, etc. Always calm and ready to smile, a role I’ve been playing for years, a role I’ve become. Only path back to the WH for DT? Claim “bipartisanship.” How? Select me for VP!

To that summary, Highwater added her own notes:

*Roundup: poison invented by Monsanto, known for fraudulent safety studies, causing cancer, and rationales for marketing genetically modified patented seeds.
Monsanto was purchased by Bayer in 2018 or so. Big pharma in the poison business? Say it ain’t so, Joe! And Joe–the other Joe, the China Joe–can’t say it because he’s tied to the Clintons, and Monsanto owns Hillary.
Joe–the first Joe, the oil & coal Joe–could add Hillary’s connection to Monsanto to DT’s campaign. What goes aRoundup comes aRoundup.
Bayer? Never mind that C&O Joe’s daughter, the CEO of a pharmaceutical co. and former DC lobbyist for them all, played an active and years-long role in keeping high and eventually spiking the price of the EpiPen as court documents revealed earlier this year.

Another document from the briefcase turned over to the Highwater Hellfire appears to anticipate the 2024 presidential election from the Democratic perspective.

Here it is in full:

“Wrong Joe” is the one who claims (and is assigned) to be the centrist but is really the defender of the dark ages, the advocate of coal soot and other carbon-based fossils that simply must be extracted for the sake of keeping West Virginians underground.
“Right Joe” is the real centrist, caught in the cross-hairs and headlights of every freedom-lover who has neither patience nor ambition to study the Constitution to suss out what it says either directly or between the lines. Freedom is like ignorance: bliss! Hence Right Joe is seldom perceived as being correct about anything (especially things beyond Presidential control) and is possibly only “right” to the progressive wing of his party.

When asked for comment, Manchin said only, “I haven’t seen it yet. I’ll comment after I’ve had a chance to see it, read it, think about it, analyze it, ponder it, go over it with my staff, draw doodles in the margins, and see if it has bipartisan support.”

Before Hellfire‘s reporter could ask a follow-up question, Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia injected a question on another subject:

Senator, are you more committed to the filibuster than you are to voting rights?*

Manchin answered with no change in his expression or in the inflection of his voice:

I haven’t seen the full bill yet. I’ll comment after I’ve had a chance to see it, read it, think about it, analyze it, ponder it, go over it with my staff, draw doodles in the margins, and see if it has bipartisan support.

Chief Highwater has named a panel to investigate the crime. At Manchin’s request, the panel is bipartisan. Three prominent West Virginia Democrats arrived in Highwater late today to serve. As of press time, the three Republicans have not answered phone or text messages.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/joe-manchin-tries-to-repair-his-relationship-with-trump

*Senator, are you more committed to the filibuster than you are to voting rights? Not sure of the exact wording, but Warnock recently put this yes-or-no question to both Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. What he got from both, rather than a single word, was itself a filibuster.

All the Faire’s a Stage

“Welcome, good people! (Pause.) And welcome bad people! We’ll take anyone we can get here!“

Such is my greeting to patrons as they approach the front gate upon opening. Since I first joined in 1999, I’ve been telling friends and family who have never been near one that Renaissance faires are a product of the Sixties.

According to Well Met: Renaissance Faires & The American Counterculture (2012), it’s the other way around. True, other more obvious influences such as The Pill, The Beats, and Rock & Roll helped shape that decade. But the first Renaissance Pleasure Faires in California–Southern and Northern in that order–were the breeding grounds and models for things about to explode on campuses and elsewhere from coast to coast.

Call them enclaves of the past in the present–with a Sixties Zeitgeist described best by lyrics written at the time:

It’s wonderful to be here, it’s certainly a thrill
You’re such a lovely audience
We’d like to take you home with us
We’d love to take you home

Except that we’re already home, not just in place but in time, eagerly inviting patrons already coming in, “playtrons” wearing garb and “mundanes” in street clothes, readily and mischievously engaging both.

As author Rachel Lee Rubin titles her first chapter, “Welcome to the Sixties!”

During the Fifties, actors and comics were blacklisted from Hollywood during Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare. Writers and directors could continue working with pseudonyms, but the rest were looking for things to do, one of which was a make-shift wagon inspired by Renaissance Italy’s Commedia dell’Arte that rolled into backyards in Laurel Canyon to entertain children.

As more jokers and jugglers joined the troupe, it expanded. Gamers with knives and axes to throw at painted targets added interaction for all ages. Brief skits became became shows with actors, and musicians joined both as accompaniment and as shows of their own until 1963 when the first “Renaissance Pleasure Faire and May Market” opened outdoors in North Hollywood as a fundraiser for Pacifica radio.

Echoing Shakespeare, their motto, “All the faire’s a stage,” promised something quite apart from any place you might see him, or where you might hear an early music consort, or watch acrobats and jugglers. Patrons were part of the show as soon as they entered the gate–in the case of King Richard’s, when they emerge from the parking lot within sight of the gate.

From its roots as an American commedia dell’arte into an established faire, it was very much like Pacifica in its political and cultural leanings. While Pacifica was airing serious exposes of what went on in Washington and Sacramento, the faire treated it with satire, ridicule, and barbs all around.

Socially, faire was welcoming to gays long before most anywhere else. According to Rubin, this is foremost among the reasons why there remains to this day a resistance to Renaissance faires among a shrinking, but still significant percentage of Americans. In the stereotype that we “prance around” in tights while munching on our turkey legs, it’s the verb prance that serves as a coded smear while the nouns tights and turkey legs serve as easy, immediate jokes. If nothing else, the lack of barriers between performers and audience makes such people uncomfortable.

Notice my use of the word faire without an article at the start of the previous paragraph, something common among Rennies. Rubin explains that this is the difference between regarding any single faire as a mere place or event, and, instead, regarding it as a state of mind, a way of being.

Must admit that all these years, I have made a point of saying and writing “the faire,” although I have never chided much less corrected anyone for saying that he or she did something “at faire” or “going to faire.” Now, I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you what happens “at faire” from cast-call to the apothecary’s final bell.

While faire, as Rubin emphasizes, offers an outlet for performers of most every stripe, it offers the public an alternative to the walled-in shopping malls with sterile indoor settings and mass-produced, mostly imported and plastic merchandise that also emerged in the Sixties. And by doing so, it was a boon to artisans of both practical and decorative items ranging from leather goods to pottery, from wooden play swords to sparkly tiaras.

In those pre-Internet days, artisans were hard to find for Phyllis and Ron Patterson, the founding family of that first faire in SoCal, but they eventually tapped into a network in and near Santa Rosa, way up north of San Francisco. A long commute to LA’s suburbs, but before long they all agreed to two festivals, and the Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire opened in Novato.

To this day, many artisans make their crafts right their in their booths in view of patrons, and so they become to some degree performers themselves. Oli, a glassblower at King Richard’s, would draw audiences of two dozen or so who would watch him as he hovered over flames that gave him an irresistible, devilish look behind his thick shades while he raised and twisted glass on long sticks always with a flourish.

Whether the artisan performs or not, the public always has the chance, most always a pleasure (hence, the name), to meet and talk to him or her about what they buy and how it was made.

For food the Pattersons went to street vendors. They were picky, trying the food first, making certain that it would be made on-site, never pre-packaged or frozen. This was true of most all faires for years, and it included local cuisine–tacos and tamales in Texas, crab cakes in Maryland, clam chowder in Massachusetts. Food had been a main draw of renfaires before they grew so large that contracts started going to “food service” companies. Now you take your chances.

This recalls folk music festivals I attended in the late-70s where the food was superb. (I can still taste the pierogies I had at Winnipeg.) You can easily draw the line to farmers’ markets that have become popular in the decades since.

Eventually, entertainers with a focus on other interests got the idea. Buskers went from faire to the streets where they (we) were a novelty. In the early Seventies, aided by historic preservation, we were in cities and tourist towns across the country.

Musicians who made it big took note of faire garb, much of which was anachronistic but became popular at faire for its flamboyance. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, David Bowie, and others wore it, as did the Beatles for the cover of Sgt. Pepper in which they sing of “such a lovely audience.”

Taking advantage of an old English spelling of a common word, the Byrds named themselves for the English Renaissance composer, William Byrd, and turned some of the tunes they played at the Southern California Pleasure Faire into album tracks. (That “jingly-jangly” sound that Bob Dylan never liked? Renfaire!)

The Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, Styx, and Crosby, Stills, & Nash all played faire music, while bands such as Jethro Tull, King Crimson, and Yes put a rock-and-roll charge into it. (Rubin adds Led Zepplin to that list. Maybe my hearing was shot by that time.)

Well Met covers the now-58-year-old debate over authenticity, between the purists on one end of the spectrum to what are called “RINOs” on the other who delve more into fantasy than anything you’ll find in a history book. Thankfully, most faires fall somewhere in the middle, and with a repertoire that is at least 75% Baroque, starting half a century after the last Renaissance lights went out, I have a bell-vested interest in King Richard’s being among them.

Oddly, in the nine years since Well Met was published, no one at King Richard’s has mentioned it to me. Could be a case of someone reading it right away and giving it a bad review. In some walks of life, anything less than 100% happy talk is outright treason. (Here’s looking at you, Newburyport Chamber of Commerce!)

Rubin does give voice to performers who have quit faires due to their commercialization since the Eighties. Sexuality is still present–at least down in Camp Cleveage–but the political barbs have been sanitized. Closest I come to one is telling patrons as they leave to come back next year “when we put Galileo on trial!” For years a safe laugh, but this year, I added under my breath, “That’s not a joke anymore, is it?” Most got the no-joke joke.

My Rennie friends may have missed Well Met due to the academic jacket blurbs. It is a scholarly work of “deep research” as they claim. At times Rubin’s prose is rough (“originalcy”?) and the in-text footnotes are often distracting, which could well be the result of a doctoral thesis turned into a book.

Too bad, as my friends at faire would enjoy the many stories told by and scenes with countless Rennies, some of whom they know well, including juggler Paolo Garbanzo, hammer-dulcimer player Vince Conaway, jouster Kent Shelton, and Rush Pearson who was one of the original mud beggars at King Richard’s (then in Illinois). Writes Rubin of Pearson and his friends from Northwestern:

At first, they would cling to a patron’s leg and refuse to let go until she or he gave them a quarter. One day, there was serendipitously mud, and the mud seemed to be a “wonderful medium.” What Pearson calls a “You Asked for It” show developed, one that was not in the program, in which the beggars create a mud puddle, and patrons would give them money to do things in the mud.

She then turns the narrative over to Pearson:

A friend of ours who was the Archbishop would “baptize” us in the pond, to clean us up. My character was mute, so he’d perform a miracle: he’d give me speech… He’d have [patrons and cast members] all kneeling… It was really a wonderful organic piece of street theater… I’d open my eyes, pretend to sneeze, and I’d say, “Does anyone have a hanky?” And then, “Oh, my God! I can talk!”

Rubin returns to conclude the passage with a comment that describes all of faire:

[T]he Mud Show, ridiculous as it is, flashes a mirror on the audience and gets them to examine, if only briefly, their own spectatorial desires.

In Well Met, you’ll meet anyone faire can get.

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