Packing for Mars

June 6, 2015June 16, 2025 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

You may have been asked what one book you would want to have with you if you were stranded on that proverbial desert island, you know, the one with ever ripening fruit falling from the trees and bacteria-less fresh water bubbling from springs and handy flint lying around for sparking palm frond fires, an island where you could kick back and be sedentary rather than spending all day searching for edible grub worms.

My suspension of disbelief won’t allow it. I’ve found a better hypothetical opportunity for selecting a limited library, a trip to Mars. According to Tom Kizzia of the New Yorker, NASA is prepping astronauts for a Martian mission, a voyage that would take them “a hundred million miles from home, no longer in close contact with mission control.”

“Staring into the night for eight monotonous months,” Kizzia asks, “how would they keep their focus? How would they avoid rancor or debilitating melancholy?”

Lauren Leveton heads NASA’s Behavioral Health and Performance program, and if I were to be chosen for the 3-year round trip to Mars (because of planetary motion, you’d be stuck on the surface for months), I’d love for her to allow me to bring three hardback bound books, ancient non-electronic artifacts with paper pages that turn and can be annotated with a sturdy #2 pencil. She might begin by telling me to choose one poem, one novel, and one play. As much as I love non-fiction, I would want works that recreate the Earth and its denizens as vividly as possible, which means dramatization.

The Poem

Of course, you’d want an epic, something worthy of your own journey, and the obvious candidates the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid leap to mind; however, I don’t read Linear B Greek or Latin, so I have to rule those three out. My poem must be in English, so nothing’s lost in translation, and the obvious choice seems to be Paradise Lost, which contains all time and space, justifies the ways of God to men, describes not only Eden’s earthly paradise but also many an exotic non-mythical locale in ravishingly beautiful baroque language. Also, he’s managed to embed much of the Bible and Greek mythology into the mix. You get as much of pre-18th century human history as possible in a mere 10,000 lines.

Dig this epic simile that vivifies the number of fallen angels rolling on the fiery seas of Milton’s hell:

[Satan] stood and call’d

His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intrans’t

Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks

In Vallombrosa, where th’ Etrurian shades

High overarch’t imbowr; or scatterd sedge

Afloat, when with fierce Winds Orion arm’d

Hath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose waves overthrew

Busiris and his Memphian Chivalry,

While with perfidious hatred they pursu’d

The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld

From the safe shore their floating Carkases

And broken Chariot Wheels, so thick bestrown

Abject and lost lay these, covering the Flood,

Under amazement of their hideous change.

The brilliance and beauty of these lines amaze, the fallen angels compared to fallen leaves, then floating sedge on the Red Sea, the setting where Moses escaped the Pharaoh’s army, who like the Fallen Angels dared defied Yahweh.

But no, it’s not Paradise Lost I’m packing but Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself :

The smoke of my own breath,

Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread,

crotch and vine,

My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the

passing of blood and air through my lungs,

The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and

dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,

The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the

eddies of the wind,

A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,

The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs

wag,

The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the

fields and hill-sides,

The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising

from bed and meeting the sun.

Every time I read it, it makes me come more alive, and I absolutely love its catalogues. Walt would remind me of the cities farther and farther away on the out, closer and closer on the way back:

The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of

the promenaders,

The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb,

the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,

The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,

The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs,

The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside borne to the

hospital,

The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,

The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly

working his passage to the centre of the crowd,

The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,

What groans of over-fed or half-starv’d who fall sunstruck or

in fits,

What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry

home and give birth to babes,

What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what

howls restrain’d by decorum,

Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made,

acceptances, rejections with convex lips,

I mind them or the show or resonance of them — I come and I

depart.

And also he’d be right there in the capsule with me:

Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the

stars,

Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and

the diameter of eighty thousand miles,

Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest,

Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in

its belly,

Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,

Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing,

I tread day and night such roads.

The Novel

No time wasted here. Despite Faulkner’s great achievement, it’s Joyce’s Ulysses, which brings to life the human condition like no other work I know. I can shoot the rapids of Stephen Dedalus’ consciousness, or Leopold Bloom’s, or his wife Molly’s. I can walk the vivid streets of Dublin, day and night. I can adjust to and savor each new style as Joyce shifts from one episode of the Odyssey.

Yes!

The Play

Although I virtually have it memorized already, I’d bring along my old pal, the Danish Prince. He’s a lonely sort, and as Harold Bloom says, the most intelligent human ever. I suspect I’d prefer his company to my fellow astronauts, technical folk who remind me of camp counselors, and Hamlet is a worthy companion for Walt and Leopold and plays no small role in Ulysses. And, yes, the poetry!

Uh-oh, Dr. Leveton has informed me I can take only one!

Given the above, which one would you choose?

A Week of Caitlyns

June 3, 2015June 3, 2015 / wlm3 / 1 Comment

Sampan massacre scene from Apocalypse Now

I don’t remember ever seeing the name Caitlyn spelled with a “y” before this week, but now, this morning it appears in two incarnations on the front page of my local paper, Charleston, SC’s Post and Courier. One “Caitlyn” belongs to the decathlon 1976 Olympic gold medal winner formerly known as Bruce, the other to a 15-month-old Chocolate Staffie mix whose muzzle had been wrapped shut with electric tape right here in Charleston.

Caitlyn, sometimes spelled as Caitlin, is an Irish female given name. It’s a lovely trochee with its long A and liquid L, and I suspect you’d lose a bit of its lilting cadence if you were to Anglicize it to Katelynn, though that would be a killer name for an Americana singer from Natchez.

Caitlyn the dog has become an international phenomenon, and for sure, it ‘s heartbreaking to think of the suffering she must have endured (I can’t bring myself to post a picture of her), and it’s encouraging that the sadist who tortured her has been arrested. I’m reminded of my own recently deceased German longhaired pointer/ border collie/ Cerberus mix, Saisy, who had been starved and tied to a post with a two-foot rope before noble souls rescued her. She ended up fairly okay, though, except for food issues, which never really went away, but over the years, she quit flinching when you leaned over to pet her head or rub her muzzle and quit snapping at you if you petted her for too long.

I miss her every day.

The late, great Saisy

For some reason, many of us tend to care more about pets, especially dogs, than other people. I noted this evolutionary oddity over the years through showing the film Apocalypse Now to high school students as a follow up to their reading Heart of Darkness, the novella the film is loosely based on.

Set in Viet Nam, the film earns its R-rating via violence. In one particularly harrowing scene, known as the Sampan massacre, American soldiers machine gun to death an entire family of Vietnamese transporting produce on a boat – men, women, and children – when the soldiers panic after a Vietnamese girl runs to protect a puppy. As the family is ripped apart by bullets, my students sit there silently; however, when one of the soldiers – Chef – finds the surviving puppy and picks it up roughly by its scruff, the room fills with highly audible disapproving oooohs.

Meanwhile, stories like the one below we hardly hear about, and most of us don’t care about:

[Kansas Governor] Brownback has often characterized his opposition to expanding Medicaid and other poverty programs, in Wright’s words, as a “moral rejection of dependency.” Last June, for example, Brownback told the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal Web site that Kansas had not expanded Medicaid because “We’re trying to push people that are able-bodied right now to get a job.” Similarly, Brownback pledged in his State of the State address this year to continue “helping people move from dependence on the government to independence.”

But, in practice, Brownback’s resistance to Medicaid expansion is causing some people to move from independence to desperation. [Nation editor Kai] Wright spoke with several Kansans who are suffering because of Kansas’s severe eligibility requirements. Far from the right-wing caricature of lazy moochers, they are hard workers who aren’t looking for a handout. One woman, RaDonna, is too sick to hold down food, let alone a full-time job. Yet, as a childless adult, she doesn’t qualify for Medicaid — and the state rejected her application for disability benefits. While RaDonna now lives with her sister, Cathy, she insists on helping with the laundry and dishes to earn her keep. “She can’t do the whole sink full of dishes without stopping and sitting down for a while,” Cathy says.

No, we’re more interested in Bruce Jenner’s transformation into Caitlyn and argue about whether he’s courageous or merely an attention-starved ex-Kardashian in-law. After all, the poor will always be with us.

In the courage department, though, I give the nod to RaDonna.

Adventures in the USSR (featuring Dizzy Gillespie in a cameo appearance)

June 1, 2015July 7, 2021 / wlm3 / 1 Comment

the author back in the day

Chances are I’ll never return to Russia, the country formerly known as the Soviet Union, where I spent twenty-eight days in June of 1989, a quarter of a century ago and counting. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was taking a last peek at an empire on the brink of collapse, and indeed I didn’t experience the police state I thought I’d encounter. My naive expectation was that the KGB would sweep down on jaywalkers and haul them off to some gulag in Irkutsk, but what I found instead were swarms of black-marketers openly operating everywhere I wandered, exchanging money or swapping a Soviet flag for a pair of blue jeans or sunglasses.

During a long sunshiny night on the Gulf of Finland, just west of Leningrad, an East German tourist pulled a knife on me. I had knocked on the door of his room where five men were bellowing patriotic songs at 3 AM. At first, the knife-wielder and his non-English speaking compatriots invited me in to share beer and sausage, but after I communicated that I was from the US, one pulled out a knife. The others quickly quieted him and produced snapshots of their children to establish our brotherhood. I didn’t carry photos of my own boys who were five and four at the time and would have appreciably “aged” when I would see them next.

I was one of four chaperones in charge of twenty high school students and two college freshmen. It was a frenetic trip that took us from Leningrad to Moscow to Siberia, then westward down through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Soviet Georgia, then finally back to Moscow. However, it was Leningrad — now St. Petersburg — the setting of Crime and Punishment — that was the most surreal.

The ornate subways of St. Petersburg/Leningrad

Criss-crossed with canals, Leningrad was a beautiful city of 18th century pastel-colored buildings (and, of course, so is St. Petersburg today). However, back then, its citizens were the most morose human beings I’ve ever encountered. To a man and woman (I don’t remember seeing any children), they shuffled along wearing expressions of total, abject despair. Even on the two-story escalators leading to and from the gorgeous subway stations, lovers who faced each other holding both hands wore the expressions of people about to be taken away to be shot.

In fact, the only time I saw anyone smile was on a city bus. I was by myself and had mastered the arcane procedures of dealing with city transportation. You bought a ticket, an unofficial looking thin sheet of paper, from a machine at the station and then punched it yourself on the bus. However, you didn’t give it to the driver; you just held onto it in perpetuity. In other words, the buses operated on the honor system.

Anyway, I was seated next to a woman whose mien made images of Mary at Golgotha look upbeat in comparison. As we sat there in stony silence — no one conversed with each other — a thin East German tourist, a David Byrne lookalike in a dark suit and skinny tie, boarded with a ticket in his hand. He was as jittery, as nervous as I’ve ever seen anyone in my life. He stood there trembling, turning this way and that, holding the ticket up beseechingly, so I got up and showed him what to do. He punched the ticket, and as I turned around, every single person on the bus hit one sarcastic clap in unison, and on their collective faces a pained smile broke through the ice of their glacial unhappiness. It was as if they had forgotten how to smile, as if they were using muscles unaccustomed to exercise.

Moscow was slightly less Kafkaesque, and the further east you travelled, the happier the citizenry and the better the food. I would never have guessed that Siberia would be more upbeat than Leningrad. The Islamic Republics were interesting (and deafeningly quiet). In a hotel in Samarkand one afternoon, I purchased a two-dollar Heineken and handed the bartender a five in US currency. He handed me a twenty pound British note and some kopecks for change. I tried to explain that it was too much, but he misunderstood and thought I was complaining. I explained the situation to Sasha, our Intourist guide, and he said, “Keep it. These people are pigs.”

So we left Samarkand the next day for Bukkara. At dinner that night, Sasha summoned me and explained that he had just talked on the phone with the bartender from Samarkand who “had tears in his voice, tears in his voice.” Unless I reimbursed the £20, the bartender, a father of five, would lose his job. So, of course, I forked it over, not at all sure Sasha was on the up-and-up.

an alleyway in Bukkara 1989

Our final destination was the Republic of Georgia. Two months before, an anti-Soviet demonstration had been brutally crushed by the Soviet Army in what is now known as the Tbilisi Massacre. Soviet troops were still heavily present. Nevertheless, Georgia was the most pleasant place we encountered. People wore colorful clothes and seemed much more prosperous.

Not surprisingly, I was ever so eager to return home to my family, to sidewalks that didn’t need mowing, to signs sporting the Roman alphabet, to well-stocked grocery stores where you didn’t receive your change in mixed combinations of foreign currencies.

Standing waiting in Heathrow for our London to Washington flight, a student asked me if I’d ever heard of Dizzy Gillespie.

“Of course,” I said.

“Well, he’s standing right over there. He just finished an interview.”

And, sure enough, there he was, a tall black man with glasses sporting a jazz dot.

I approached him and said, “Mr. Gillespie. I hate to bother you, but it would be a great honor to shake your hand.”

“Ne parle pas Anglais, he replied.

“Ah, come on, Dizzy,” I said. “I’m from South Carolina.”

He smiled broadly, and in a thick Southern African American accent asked, “Where? Myrtle Beach?”

It was music to my ears.

Dizzy Gillespie, a native of Cheraw, South Carolina

The Not So Advanced Training Institute

May 30, 2015May 30, 2015 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
The Golden Haggadah, c. 1320

Well, when it comes to stanching libidinal urges, in the case of Josh Duggar, the un-spared rod, limited access to secular entertainment, daily devotionals, and home-schooling were to no avail. Despite his family’s full literal embrace of five-thousand-year-old cultural dictates of nomadic sheepherders (no seed-spilling, frontal hugging, uppity females, e.g.), Josh succumbed to, depending on your point of view, Satan’s solicitations and/or the human hard-wired propensity to seek sexual contact.

As Dana Milbank[1] writes in this morning’s Washington Post, it’s somewhat troubling that such a weird ass family (all of the 19 children’s first names begin with J) would receive boot licks from virtually every Republican seeking their party’s nomination for the presidency. As Milbank points out,

A quarter of Americans are evangelical Christians, but only a small fraction of them are like the Duggars. Only 3 percent of American kids are home-schooled, as the Duggars are. Only 7 percent of Americans think using birth control is morally objectionable, as the Duggars do. As for the percentage of Americans who favor arranged-in-all-but-name marriages? The answer is so obvious there’s no need to ask the question.

Josh Duggar and Jeb Bush

So why the kowtowing?

Republican primary voters tend to be really ~~conservative~~ radical.

Now that I’ve answered Dana’s question, I thought I’d shift to what I find more interesting, the Duggar family’s homeschool curriculum, the Advanced Training Institute, founded by someone called Bill Gothard (not making up the name) who himself is currently on “indefinite administrative leave” because 34 women have accused him of sexual harassment. Be that as it may, thanks to the website Gawker, I have obtained a work sheet from the ATI, which I would like to share for your entertainment.

According to Gawker,

The lessons themselves consist of bizarre, forced attempts at inserting some type of traditional education into biblical passages. Which is where you get questions such as: “How did the ‘Socratic method’ of reasoning come from a sodomite manner of living?” “How can graphs help to visualize the consequences of lust?” And “How do prime numbers illustrate the principle of ‘one flesh’ in marriage?”

For example, here are three examples from “Wisdom Worksheet” On Matthew 5:27-28. (Click on Images for larger viewing)

Obviously, photography is also a manifestation of modernism that the institute finds dangerous.

[1] Milbank claims not to “join in the schadenfreude on the left over the latest case of hypocrisy among family-value conservatives,” but I’d love to see the results of a polygraph strapped to him as he was typing that statement. But come to think of it, Denny Hastert has bumped the Duggars from “the latest case of hypocrisy among family-value conservatives.” Remember during Clinton’s impeachment when Hastert was railing against him?

A Lonely Impulse of Delight

May 20, 2015 / wlm3 / 1 Comment

I suspect that I’m approaching the Guinness World Record for the highest number of adolescent behavioral modification assemblies attended by a member of the species homo sapiens sapiens. I saw my very first around 1970 when I was a high school student myself. It was an anti recreational drug film with a plot about as believable as Plan 9 from Outer Space’s scenario of ETs resurrecting the Earth’s dead to prevent scientists from producing a doomsday weapon that would destroy the universe.

The high school film featured predatory pushers who give away cannabis so they can hook their victims on “harder stuff,” more lucrative drugs like LSD. They snare two victims, air-traffic controllers. Of course, eventually in the control tower during the descent of two planes, our acid-addicted protagonists suffer flashbacks featuring vintage psychedelic special effects – woo-WOO-woo-WOO . . .

Note the year, 1970. Some kids in my high school were not unfamiliar with cannabis when they were herded into the auditorium to watch the film. The idea of people giving it away would have been a fantasy-come-true for them. Not surprisingly, feeding students inaccurate information tends to make them dismiss the entire message, even aspects that are true.

Like that 1970 didactic school assembly, many of the school assemblies I’ve sat through in my 29 years as a high school teacher have been misguided. Over the years, I’ve been bombarded with slides of chancre-encrusted genitalia as the physician describing the abominations reminded us that he didn’t take Medicaid patients, I’ve squirmed in my seat as a highway patrolman walked us through horrific photographs of mangled corpses who would have been lucky to have been pulled over for a DUI, I’ve listened attentively as a paraplegic described the sickening feeling of realizing he had no feeling in his lower body, and perhaps worst of all, I’ve suffered through forty-five minutes of a one-armed woman in a tank top running up and down the aisles of the auditorium to show and tell us just how one “bad decision” had robbed her of not only an arm (thanks to the tank top we could see all too plainly the gnarled stumplet at her armpit) but of a promising volleyball career.

On the other hand, I have also witnessed a very effective anti-recreational drug assembly conducted by a neurologist from MUSC who leveled with the students and admitted that cannabis did not necessarily lead to harder drugs and the odds of their dying from smoking it were negligible. However, she did convincingly portray via x-ray images how recreational drugs can adversely affect the amygdala, that wonderful compact cluster of neurons “up there” that triggers pleasant feelings. She argued that prolonged use of drugs like marijuana essentially destroys a person’s ability to feel joy. In fact, mighty Keith Richards more or less says the same thing in his autobiography. He quit heroin, he says, because he spent almost all of his time figuring out how to score but didn’t even get off anymore. To get off, the abuser needs more frequent and stronger doses and eventually ends up incapable of experiencing pleasure, and even if the abuser were to quit, his ability to experience joy may be forever impaired.

Dean Potter 1972-2016

I thought of that assembly when I learned Sunday of the death of Dean Potter, a dare devil extraordinaire who got his kicks free-climbing precipitous rock faces, often solo, using only his hands and feet, i.e., unaided by ropes, safety harnesses, etc. He did carry a parachute in case he fell. Once he reached a summit, he might leap off and parachute down or jump off in a suit equipped with Rocky-the Squirrel wings and glide through the air like a superhero until he had to yank the ripcord and parachute to safety. This very extreme sport is called “wingsuit-flying,” and if you’re unfamiliar with it, check out the video below of Potter in action and the next one of someone named Alexander Polli threading the needle so to speak.

Alas, with his friend, fellow wingsuit flyer, Graham Hunt, Mr. Potter died last Saturday trying to replicate a “flight” they had taken earlier. Like the video just above, they attempted to negotiate a notch, and according to news reports, Hunt hit the side of the wall while Potter cleared the notch, but then crashed. A witness reports hearing “disconcerting, loud sounds in succession that suggested impact.”

I know very little about adrenaline rushes outside of the relatively safe experience of dropping down the face of an overhead wave in a hurricane swell, but to Potter that would be the drug equivalent of a cup of decaf. Did each accomplished unbelievable feat with its requisite adrenaline rush spur Potter on to attempt even more audacious exploits? Was his thrill-seeking analogous to needing stronger and stronger fixes?

Maybe not. Potter had done the flight before, but whatever the case, he died doing what he loved, and how many of us can claim that?

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

~WB Yeats

Celebrity Calvacade

May 5, 2015May 6, 2015 / wlm3 / 2 Comments

Richard Avedon’s 1972 photograph of Oscar Levant

Back in the day, I prided myself on my prowess as a popular entertainment trivia master, both in the contemporary and vintage categories, though, admittedly, I’m talking way back in the day when there was no such thing as trivia nights at bars or reality tv — not to mention personal computers or the Internet.

We’re talking the Late Fifties, Sixties and Early Seventies when they were fewer bands, movie and television stars, and gameshow hosts. Back in the day when someone might be billed as “a comic sidekick.”

One of the reasons for my encyclopedic knowledge was my grandparents’ letting me at a wee age stay up to the wee hours to watch the Tonight Show — we’re talking before the mighty Johnny Carson, we’re talking Steve Allen and Jack Paar.

Back during the live era, celebrities sometimes came on “doped up” as my grandfather put it — people like Judy Garland and Oscar Levant, whose presence both troubled and fascinated me. The quaint phrase “all hepped up on goofballs” comes to mind. Note how cavalier Paar is about Levant’s condition.

On one of his appearances Oscar Levant’s hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t light his cigarette. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.

Back then, late night television wasn’t a constant corporate Hollywood movie marketing inside joke fest. Truman Capote would show up on Johnny Carson to impugn Brando’s intelligence or Sammy Davis, Jr’s singing chops.

Also, I watched a helluva lot of old movies on weekdays during the summer in the mornings and late at night on the weekends in those pre-cable days when movies constituted a goodly chunk of broadcast television’s abbreviated 6 am to 2 am day, movies that featured George Raft, Myrna Loy, William Powell, the Marx Brothers, Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers, Micky Rooney, Humphrey Bogart — you know the TCM MGM line-up.

The game show What’s My Line was one of my favorites with its sophisticated panel that included Bennett Cerf, James Joyce’s American publisher. Each week they’d blindfold the panelists and bring out a celebrity whom the panelists would try to identify through a series of questions — celebrities like Salvador Dali or Carl Sandberg. Descendants of Oscar Wilde, these witty New York sophisticates on the panel were fun to hang out with, even for a nine-year-old.

Well, boys and girls, my days of trivia supremacy are over. When I flip through an issue of Vanity Fair, I’ve never heard of 80% of the swells captured in various parties. This morning, the imp of the perverse bade me hit the Red Carpet Met Gala LINK on the Times, and I realize that when it comes to celebrities, I don’t know a Ethan Hawke from a Shankshaw Redemption.

I recognized a few — I hadn’t realized that surfer Kelly Slater was a patron of the arts – but what really surprised me was how many of these celebrities go by just one name, like they’re walking brand names. Of course, I’ve heard of Beyonce, Rihanna, and Usher, but who in tarnation are Solange, Grimes, Common, and Miguel?

Call me a square, a crotchety old man (who else would use the word “tarnation” ) shaking his cane at these new celebrities, but something tells me I’d rather hang out with Judy Garland and Oscar Levant than Christopher Kane and FKA Twigs.

Gimme a D, Gimme a U, Gimme a H. What does that spell?

1973 Versus 2015

April 29, 2015April 30, 2015 / wlm3 / 2 Comments

Sunday, as I was [cue robotic voice] circuiting through satellite channel choices, I ran across Woody Allen’s Sleeper, a movie I found hilarious when I first saw it in 1973 at the Ultravision Theater. The Ultravision is now long gone but in those days was a part of a shopping center located on the corner of Ashley River Road and Highway 7, about five miles north of the downtown peninsula of Charleston, South Carolina.

In the forty-two years since, much has changed around Charleston. For example, Highway 7 in those days was still wooded in spots but now has been renamed Sam Rittenberg Boulevard. We’re talking five lanes of suburban sameness, what James Hillman aptly describes as “the nowhere that is everywhere,” that ubiquitous stretch of fast food franchises, retail outlets, and convenience stores leading into virtually every city in the USA.

The plot of Sleeper tracks Miles Monroe, a latter-day Rip Van Winkle who subjected unwillingly to cryopreservation in 1973 awakens 200 years later to confront the brave new world of the future. In case you haven’t seen it, the movie’s a sort of conflation of Huxley and Hemingway, sci-fi futurism meets the Spanish Civil War, at once a farce and homage to Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and Charlie Chaplin — a dystopian comedy.

Seeing the film again got me thinking about the tricky business of trying to predict the future, an exercise fraught with potential failure. Brave New World missed the monorail at times; 1984, perhaps a more accurate prophecy, nevertheless got some aspects of the future wrong as well.

Watching Sleeper, I started wondering, “How different is a day in 1973 when the movie was released to a day in 2015?” We’re talking 42, not 200 years, but that’s almost half a century, and we’re in a new millennium.

Pretend you’re an anthropologist, detached from our culture. Remember, younger readers, that 1973 was pre-digital, the age of the 8-track cassette, the first non-radio music available for cars and trucks. No email, no personal computers, though some people did have touchtone phones.

What would it be like to have been in suspended animation for the last 42 years and suddenly to find yourself in the year 2015?

* * *

Awakening in 2015 versus 1973

Dick Tracy’s Two-Way Radio Watch

Rather than an ac/dc alarm clock radio chiming you into consciousness, chances are your wake-up mechanism is a small computer roughly the size of a pack of cigarettes but much thinner. This device also offers the ability for you to look at your friends while you communicate with them, whether they’re across the street or half a world away — it’s the “picture phone” futurists used to dream of as a earthshaking marvel — but the truth is that you virtually never use its visual capabilities to communicate with your friends or family, nor do you, in fact, use it to talk to people as you would on a more conventional phone. You prefer to “text” them, to type super-abbreviated messages, like “OMG, CSL!”

Dressing for Work

Surprisingly, dress hasn’t changed all that much at all. No unitard suits with rocket logos hang in the closet. In fact, half the young people you see at the college could be either Bob Dylan or Joan Baez circa ’65.

Dylan ’65

2015 hipster

Preparing Breakfast

Although invented in 1946 and marketed as Radarange, microwaves weren’t widely available for residential use until the late-70’s, so the unfrozen-you might be surprised that you can zap a bowl of oatmeal in a minute and a half, but chances are you’d rather pull into the drive-thru lane at Bojangles for some artery-clogging ham biscuits because retrieving the oatmeal from the cabinet, pulling the milk from the fridge, and punching in the cooking time of the oatmeal is way too much trouble.

In fact, one of the significant differences you might notice if you were to awaken after a 42-year nap is the epidemic in obesity that characterizes your 21st century community.

Commuting

Same ol’, same ol’ — no flying cars, no monorails, no individual jetpacks.

Mass transit hasn’t progressed at all. The T in Boston is even dingier than it was in ’73.

In fact, the coolest vehicles on the roads are the oldest, e.g. that 1973 VW microbus that you just passed driven by some old man with a ponytail.

Here in Charleston, you find routes have widened lane-wise and a skinny lane on the shoulder is reserved for bicycle traffic but that the traffic is terrible, Manhattan-like, bumper-to-[fiberglass]- bumper.

DUI non-licensed drivers still putt around on mopeds with cardboard license “plates” that read “Moped.”

The mini-computer we carry can give us directions while we drive, which truly seems futuristic. Road maps are obsolescent. You can choose either a male or female voice and actually speak into the mini-computer and ask the voice for information.

On the Job

Whether you’re an employee at Boeing, a Seven-Eleven, or a school district, cameras record your comings and goings. Your mini-computer is also equipped with a camera, so it’s not only Orwell’s Big Brother keeping tabs but also corporate brother and little brother — literally, your little brother might record a video of you committing some act of malfeasance.

Chances are, if you work indoors, you spend hours dealing with email, and if you don’t delete them on a daily basis, they proliferate like tapeworms, and even if you’re framing houses in the great outdoors, emails ping in your pocket like pinball machines as your mini-computer receives messages, from not only friends but also from corporations and even conmen.

TMI.

Writing

Oh my God! No more retyping a page because you typed too close to the bottom, no more correction tape, no more spelling errors! You can cut passages and paste them into your document. Virtually any fact can be looked up on a computer, vital information like Lumpy Rutherford’s actual first name on the ’60’s sitcom Leave It to Beaver. It’s the information Age.

Happy Hour

After work, you still go to a bar, but chances are you can’t smoke in there, and the number of different beers is staggering. The 25 cent happy hour Bud has given way to the $8 “Avery, the Maharaja Imperial India Pale Ale.” Beer experts slosh malted beverages around their palates distinguishing piney aftertastes and assessing the wattage of the hops.

Evening Entertainment

Broadcast news has not changed one iota – a white male reads to you in between reports from far flung locales.

On the other hand, you can suck virtually any movie you want to see out of the sky instantaneously, even old flicks like the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, a film impossible to see in ’73 unless it miraculously appeared at an arthouse cinema or on the late late show on TV.

You can also record television programs and stop them to go to the toilet, which still looks essentially like it did in 1973.

1973 toilet

2015 toilet

Or you can groove to music you can purchase 24/7 and listen to immediately. Wanna hear “Working Class Hero” by John and Yoko? No problem. You can download it on your mini-computer for a dollar and a quarter.

A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

(As far as entertainment goes you’re a king or queen).

Keep you doped with religion, and sex, and T.V.

Politics

Here’s something that might surprise you. The nation has lurched way way rightward. The Republicans running for president today would consider Richard Nixon a commie. He after he wrote this in 1973:

It is time to bring comprehensive, high quality health care within the reach of every American. [We should] assure comprehensive health insurance protection to millions who cannot now obtain it or afford it, with improved protection against catastrophic illnesses. This will be a plan that maintains the high standards of quality in America’s health care. And it will not require additional taxes.

The current president, although a centrist by European standards, is branded a socialist by his opponents.

Despite the rightward shift in the country, when it comes to social issues, people are much more open-minded. A majority believe gays should have the right to marry, a concept that was as alien in 1973 as the idea that many leading candidates running for the presidency in the 21st century would reject science, not only evolution but also objective data documenting rising temperatures.

Religion

Many have left traditional churches that conduct liturgical services and have also abandoned fire-and-brimstone preachers. Instead, they hang out in jeans at megachurches on Sundays and listen to Christian rock performed by live bands.

Many others have abandoned religion altogether.

Still fewer proclaim, as they have for the last 2,000 years, that the end time is near.

Overall

These changes have all occurred in my adulthood and therefore I take them for granted. What would seem like a miracle in ’73 – for example to freeze the live broadcast of a football game, back track, and watch a play again in slow motion — seems mundane.

We’re distracted, alienated, walk down the street with our earbuds booming as we stare into that ubiquitous device that we think we can’t live without while songbirds fly over us unheard and unseen.

Still, I can watch a Shakespearean performance virtually whenever I want to, which in a way makes me richer than Nebuchadnezzar.

Whispers of Schadenfreude, Mike Pence Edition

April 1, 2015April 1, 2015 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

As the self-proclaimed Jimmy Swaggart of Buddhism, I openly admit where I fall short of the ideal established by the Enlightened One, and certainly the cultivation of compassion is an area in which I fall way —make that — abysmally short.

I do sincerely wish that through meditation I could relax the tight little angry fist of my heart and show some empathy for those I dislike when they stumble, rather than luxuriating in a warm, soothing, spiteful bath of schadenfreude.

For example, rather than empathizing with Governor Mike Pence of Indiana as he made a gargantuan ass out of himself on national television, I smirked derisively, enjoying every drop of perspiration forming on his quivering upper lip as if they were karmic pearls bestowed upon me by a benevolent universe. Certainly, I’m no stranger to making a complete ass out of myself, though, of course, I haven’t had the opportunity as yet to elevate my asshoodness to a level worthy of the adjective gargantuan, never having been interviewed by a local broadcast reporter much less by George Stephanopoulous. However, given the chance, I think I’m capable of it.

And certainly, Pence is worthy of compassion if we consider wretches worthy of compassion. I suspect that Pence hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep since deep into last week. Perhaps his problem lay in his admittedly not-exactly-heroic condition of not being able to lie well extemporaneously. In case you’re just now emerging from a coma, Pence refused to answer Stephanopolous’s yes-or-no question as to whether under Pence’s new Indiana Restoration of Religious Freedom Act, a florist (i.e., a business) could refuse to provide flowers for the wedding of a gay couple. (If you haven’t seen it, you can watch an edited version here:

A more practiced liar would have hissed, “Of course, not,” but then again, I suspect that the bill’s raisin de etre is to have “the base” at least think fundamentalists can refuse to cater or provide flowers to gay weddings, coming as it does right after the SCOTUS nixed Indiana’s ban on gay marriage. So rather than telling a lie, he ineffectually tried to dodge the question, transforming himself from a possible presidential candidate to an international laughing stock, the plump bourgeoise target of many a comedian’s acid-laced arrows.

(Not to worry, he made up for his refusal to lie by providing a tractor trailer load in subsequent days)

And, of course, Indiana’s super-majority Republican government would have gotten away with it, as my native South Carolina did with its law, if it had not been for certain segments of corporate America, including NASCAR, deriding the law as bad for business, which just goes to show, as Bob Dylan pointed out lo so many years ago, “Money doesn’t talk; it screams.”

Well, perhaps this confession is a first, halting step from my detour from the golden 8th-fold path, or maybe not. I hear Pence made Letterman’s Top 10 list. Maybe I’ll check that out instead.

Let’s Get Real

March 7, 2015 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

A few years back, I contemplated moving to western or southern Ireland for retirement, maybe to the Beara Peninsula down in County Cork or up to County Mayo on the coast, perhaps purchasing a rustic cottage with a glimpse of distant mountains or of the sea.

Have you ever witnessed a rainbow in Ireland? I don’t know if it’s the air up there or the angle of the sun, but the rainbow Judy Birdsong and I saw in ’79 mesmerized us. It was so misty-shimmering wonderful that it could almost make you believe in leprechauns, in magic, in Lir.

Beara’s and Mayo’s landscape is gorgeous, their people gregarious. The Irish and my kinsmen, folk from the South Carolina Lowcountry, share a love for the oral tradition of story-telling. We’d get along fine I think. The Irish love music and poetry and literature. For example, before the Euro, James Joyce himself appeared on Ireland’s ten-pound note, which would be like having Walt Whitman on a US fifty. We Americans might put our beloved authors on stamps, but they don’t rank high enough in our estimation to appear on legal tender. Of course, Irish currency doesn’t have “In God We Trust” printed on it, which would not go all that well thematically with Mr. Joyce’s bespectacled mug nor with Herman Melville’s otherwise presidential countenance.

But I digress. When I mentioned this silly romantic notion to Judy, she reminded me that my three trips to the Emerald Isle occurred in May or June, not December or February, and she reckoned that in those dark and dreary months the odor of burning peat might very well lose its allure as building a fire transitioned from exoticism to drudgery.

Miss Birdsong knows all too well that dreary weather and Wesley don’t get along. In fact, a shrink back in the day suggested that I could very well suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (which I have immortalized in a poem you can listen to me read in my golden Lowcountry baritone HERE). No, day after day of leaden skies, the sun setting by three or four, would be bad for my state of mind.

Take this winter, for example. We might as well be in Ireland — or Ingmar Bergman’s Sweden. A glance at the five-day forecast, more often than not, has yielded a succession of cartoon clouds, dark, with resiquite raindrops slanting down.

Max Von Sydow

My neighborhood “pub,” Chico Feo, roofless as it is, has been closed for days at a time, often for rain, less often for cold, but closed nonetheless. As I have driven to work morning after morning through fog, I have half expected to see Max Von Sydow and/or Liv Ullman trudging along the side of Folly Road.

But as PB Shelley famously put it, “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” Sure enough, the sun peeped out on consecutive days this week, so I popped in at Chico Feo. On the first day, I got to witness a book burning and on the second some low wattage police brutality.

Perhaps I underestimate Folly as a retirement locale.

But, before I go, let me assure you that the book burning wasn’t Fahrenheit 451.1.0 but part of a very indie film noir murder mystery starring the Chico crew, my hobo hero Greg, and prolific Chris, a graphic artist and novelist who works at Bert’s.

And the “police brutality” merely consisted of a very, very, very drunk man having his arms twisted behind his back and then being slammed rather roughly to the pavement of Second Street. Alas, I had absentmindedly left my phone at work, so I didn’t get to capture the disturbance, which was quite a spectacle taking place as it did in front of the mural of Bert done up like a smiling, squinting, dismembered pirate.

Fat Tuesday

February 17, 2015February 25, 2020 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

It’s Fat Tuesday in the Protestant State of South Carolina, so not much is going on carnivalwise except on Folly Beach, which celebrates Fat/Shrove Tuesday not in the context of the Christian calendar but as another excuse to lure consumers onto the island so they can get rip-roaring drunk. This lack of a Catholic context is underscored by Folly’s postponing its big celebration — Folly Gras — until the more pecuniarily advantageous weekend, this Saturday, the fourth day of Lent.*

*When this post was published in 2015, Follygras was still a thing. It was banned in 2019 because, as they say, things for out-of-hand.

Folly Gras 2019 1.0

The origins of Carnival are obscure; some anthropologists tie the festivities to the ancient Italian tradition of Bacchanalia (see Livy for some hyper-ventilated descriptions of the festivities) while others dismiss the connection as spurious. Etymologically, most agree that carne — meat — comprises to the root for the celebration, which features feasting and in some cases nudity — chili con carne and carnal knowledge.

Queen Victoria

Sophie Tucker

The ancient celebration of Bacchanalia embraced — if Livy can be believed — a leveling of the social playing field, allowing plebeians to run free through the streets mixing with their so-called social superiors, and Carnival’s tendency for disguise might be akin to this earlier democratization of social hierarchy. Who is that behind that elaborate mask, Rush Limbaugh or the Leatherman, Queen Victoria or Sophie Tucker?

Although I’m not Catholic nor have given up anything for Lent since the ’60’s, I like the counterbalancing of Carnival and Lent as mythic antitheses — each in its way helping us to come to terms with death and therefore life.

Between extremities

Man runs his course;

A brand, or flaming breath.

Comes to destroy

All those antinomies

Of day and night;

The body calls it death,

The heart remorse.

But if these be right

What is joy?

Yeats “Vacillation”

So, on that bright note, I’m headed down to Center Street to see what’s going down. Who knows, maybe the Leatherman will show up.

The Leatherman

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You Do Hoodoo

bare ruined choir practice

non-fiction