A Question of Vulgarity.

After the excitement of Memorial Day weekend, I was in much need of what I call a lost day, a.k.a. total veg-out, best accomplished by staying at a friend’s house who boasts one of the largest and most esoteric movie libraries.

I am writing this just after seeing two movies-Cobra and Caravaggio-that forced me to come up with a new law of aesthetics. Sly Stallone’s Cobra, it was said, was the worst film of violence and mayhem Hollywood had ever created-something with no redeeming features. I had to see it. How can you maintain an appreciation for quality if you don’t-sometimes-probe to the nadir? Conversely, I wanted to see the critically acclaimed Caravaggio, directed by the British artist Derek Jarman, because I needed visual inspiration for a project and I love the works of the baroque master, and always was moved by the story of his tempestuous life. He killed a tennis partner in a rage, went on the lam, fled to Malta, was on the run again, got pardoned, returned to Porto Ercole, was arrested and jailed by mistake, and died day later from exhaustion after running down the beach trying to catch the boat carrying his paintings.

I remember the original poster for Cobra. The very image of sleaze. Stallone is depicted with a two-day stubble, eyes hidden by black reflective sunglasses, a safety match stuck in the side of his mouth, a scrimshaw-handled .45 revolver engraved with a spitting cobra plunged into his belt. He brandishes a machine pistol, and the tag line read, “Crime is a disease; meet the cure.”

In the film, Cobra-actually officer Cobretti of the L.A. police-slaughters an army of “psychos” who want to form a new world order by knocking off the rational citizens in America. In the first seconds, a slavering, pockmarked chap elbows his way into a superette and grunts rudely at the friendly manager. Definitely a “psycho,” who quickly proves his evil motives by shooting many of the defenseless shoppers. Cobra arrives, slinks after the “psycho,” and knives him to death. “I don’t wanna be a hero, I just wanna be involved,” he says.

And so it goes. Cobra protects a gorgeous photographer’s model with cheekbones as high as the Hollywood Hills (played very effectively by Brigitte Nielsen) from a platoon of “psychos.” He manages this without disrobing either himself or her. Amazing! He takes her to a marvelous down-and-out motel in the country and, when the gang of “psychos” arrives on motorcycles, dispatches about fifty of the brutes. We know how bad they are by their faces-all snaggle-toothed and scarred. What make-up!

The climax takes place in a steel factory, where Cobra and his girl wipe out the “psychos,” who die in a magnificent choreography of somersaults, plies, and pas de deux, accompanied by great “unngh”s, “aiee”s, and groans. One “psycho” is splashed with liquid that Cobra then ignites with his safety match, seconds after delivering one of the funniest movie lines of the ‘80’s, “You have the right to remain silent.” In the end, Cobra motorcycles placidly away with Brigitte.

I was astonished. Although it sounds it, the film is not vulgar or cynical. It is a straightforward, taut, well-crafted celluloid romp. The slaughter is so clean and unaffected that you cannot take it seriously except as a modern dance. Cobra is like a smart upscale comic book.

I wish I could say as much for Caravaggio. It is true that the photography is often beautiful. And it is true that Nigel Terry, who plays the troubled master, is a brilliant look-alike. Lena, Carravaggio’s prostitute, is serenely portrayed by Tilda Swinton. But no one knows whether Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610) was homosexual, bi-sexual or tri-sexual. Nonetheless, the director has seized upon the speculation as if it was the absolute truth, and the film slithers on from there. Beyond that, the plot, the individual scenes, the pompous monologues forced out of the mouth of the dying Caravaggio (“tearing your last breath from the stars”), are wretched.

The creators had to film in a warehouse in which contemporary street sound could be heard, so they decided to place Caravaggio in the 1940’s and to mix that look with costumes of the Renaissance (even so Caravaggio lived after the Renaissance). Boy, does it not work! Ten minutes into the movie, which looks perfectly late-sixteenth-century, Caravaggio puffs a cigarette. Later, you hear a train whistle. Still later, his sixteenth-century patron, Marchese Giustiniani, uses a pocket calculator. When Caravaggio kills Thomasoni with his knife-not, as it really happened, with a tennis racquet- the violence is worse than anything in Cobra. A drag party in a Vatican charnel house is nothing but tenth-rate Fellini Satyricon material. As for any revelation about the art of Caravaggio, there is a total vacuum. The last scene shows the sixteenth-century genius dead - in a suit with black satin lapels.

Caravaggio is touted to be innovative, shocking, cutting edge, and très chic, this according to art house audiences, but for me it slips into self-indulgence and bastardization. Cobra aims low and, in its shallow way, transcends its genre. The moral- never judge a movie by its covers.

For Frenchtoast.

“Aloha”…

On a recent trip to the Islands, I recalled my first trip to Honolulu in 1964-

“Aloha” is a powerful word in Honolulu. Say “Aloha”, and doors open. “Believe me, you not only can say ‘Aloha’ at all times of day and night, and for practically all purposes, but you find that you do say ‘Aloha’ at all times of day and night,” a resident of Honolulu told this visitor.

“Aloha”, I said, and a door opened.

I found myself walking into the lobby of an old-fashioned high ceilinged, white-pillared, Maugham-type hotel. “Aloha,” said a young woman wearing a dazzling red muumuu. A three-ring lei of pastel orchids was draped around her neck. She draped a similar lei around my neck. “I am to be your chaperone,” she said. “You are in beautiful Waikiki, a few miles from downtown Honolulu, on the beautiful island of Oahu, Honolulu County, U.S.A. All around you are glittering hotels, fine shops, and international restaurants, and makai-toward the sea-you can hear the soft sound of the turquoise combers breaking gently on beautiful Waikiki Beach. Behind us are the maunas-mountains-topped with swiftly moving gossamer rain clouds. Shiny white high-rise-buildings have become the trademark of our progress on this volcanic island that rises from the sea: the twenty-seven-story condominium apartment house, the Ilikai, which is the largest ever built of fee-simple land, and the Ala Moana Building, twenty-five stories high, with a revolving restaurant on the top, which adjoins the Ala Moana Shopping Center-fifty acres, ninety stores, two levels, a parking area for five thousand cars, and trash baskets that read ‘Mahalo,’ or ‘Thank you.”
She drew a deep breath. “Aloha,” she said.

“Aloha” I said.

Someone in the lobby was plucking a ukulele. The scent of suntan oil was overpowering. Swarms of men and women, many of them elderly and all of them wearing bright-colored sports costumes, flowed endlessly back and forth through the lobby, as though propelled by some strong tide. “Most of the people you see here are just happy visitors,” said the young woman. “You find yourself in the heart of one of the most famous hotel strips on the face of the earth. We may be in the small, choice Waikikian, with its authentic Polynesian architecture and its hyperbolic paraboloid lobby and its Tahitian Lanai, or at the Princess Kaiulani, or at the Halekulani, or at the Royal Hawaiian, or at the Surfrider, or at the Hawaiian Village, but we are at the Moana, one of the older hotels. And we are about to attend a Na Kapuna.”

“Aloha”, said I.

“Come with me,” said the woman, directing me makai-toward the sea-through the lobby and into an open courtyard dominated by a large banyan tree. The sound of the ukulele followed us, as did the scent of suntan oil. Several hundred persons, counterparts of those milling through the lobby, were seated at tables eating.

“First we will get our food,” said my guide, leading me to a long buffet table covered with what before 1959 could certainly been described as Stateside food: ham, corned beef, cold chicken, assorted cold cuts, potato salad, coleslaw, celery, olives, pickles, radishes, and so on. My guide and I filled our plates and took seats on one of the long tables, “Na Kapuna really means an Old-Timers’ Night, a night for the old folks, something out of the Gay Nineties, the days of the monarchy, shades of Kalakaua and Liliuokalani,” the guide continued.

“Aloha”, I said.

“Aloha,” she said. “Hear the surf,” she went on, holding aloft a drumstick. “Diamond Head twinkles beyond us, but we can’t see it from here. Above us is the clear Pacific sky. Our days are balmy and our nights tempered by the caresses of the trade winds. But we can get kona weather, too-two or three day of hot, damp winds from the Big Island, known as Hawaii, when people sulk and become short-tempered and depressed. But tonight we have the spirit of aloha. You can say ‘Aloha’ for hello or good-bye, or when inquiring to the health of your uncle or asking for the loan of a surfboard, or even a wake. It is OK to say ‘Aloha’ at a wake. The guests here tonight are, of course, haoles, or Caucasians, but Honolulu is made of up of Portuguese, Puerto Ricans, Negroes, Filipinos, Hawaiians, Chinese, and Japanese as well. They are all said to live together in a spirit of great harmony, in a spirit of aloha, but the Japanese and the Chinese do not always get along, and many people do not seem to like the Portuguese. The stars are out. Aloha.”

“Aloha,” said I.

The entertainment was about to begin. On the small stage, several grass-skirted women performed the hula. Ukeleles tinkled. The haoles applauded wildly. Hawaii had been only a wish away, and the wish was being fulfilled. The guide whispered into my ear. “Now you will watch an authentic hula lesson,” she said. “This always brings down the house at a Na Kapuna.” An enormous elderly woman, who appeared to be a cross between Sophie Tucker and Bloody Mary, mounted the stage. She wore a grass skirt and was surrounded by a group of young men with ukuleles. A hush fell over the vast throng of haoles eating potato salad. The woman suddenly began to sing, fervently and throatily, in a voice that could easily have been heard over the maunas. Her grass skirt rustled slightly. The song had a seductive, hypnotic cadence. My guide felt compelled to translate for me. “She is singing of a love most precious,” she whispered. “She says, ‘It is like an appealing perfume in the heart; your eyes are flirtatious, and I feel that you are adequate to fulfill our joy.”

“Na na lea lea,” sang the woman.

“She is coming to the end of her song,” whispered the guide. “She is saying, “This is the end of my story,” and she is talking of aloha (who would have guessed?), or love. When the woman had finished singing, the haoles were silent for a moment, and then burst into applause. The wish had been fulfilled; they had heard a song of love under the stars on the island of their dreams.

The old woman had not even begun to fight. “Now we will have the hula lesson,” she said, in English, and called upon half a dozen male members of the audience. Some coaxing was required, but not much, and an assorted group of middle-aged men, with an assortment of middle-aged paunches, mounted the stage.

“I can see why your Na Kapuna evenings are so popular,” said I. “But I must say ‘Aloha’. I returned to my hotel room, overlooking the turquoise combers breaking gently on Waikiki Beach. On the bed, I found a tiny pink orchid. “Aloha”, I said to myself as I drifted into slumber.

The hula is almost as powerful as the “Aloha.” As I drove through the dense traffic of Honolulu I was constantly surprised to see hands fluttering from windows of cars in front and alongside of me. At Sea Life Park, just beyond Diamond Head, the dolphins had been taught to perform the hula. It was one of the least of their attainments. Sea Life dolphins were trilingual-they responded to commands in English, Hawaiian, and Japanese. They did the hula in a small lagoon called Whaler’s Cove-near a replica of the New England whaling ship Essex-accompanied by a native woman called Puanani.

Every day, hundreds of people boarded small sightseeing boats in Kewalo Basin, near central Honolulu, and headed for Pearl Harbor. I boarded one of the boats, which sailed past the breakwater and headed into the open sea. From the deck, you could enjoy a broad panorama of the leeward side of Oahu-Diamond Head far behind, the beach at Waikiki, the high-rise buildings, the volcanic mountains, the tall Aloha Tower guarding the harbor, the pineapple-shaped tower of the Dole Company, and the International Airport. During the first part of the boat ride, Oahu seemed an unreal island in an unreal sea, but then, as the boat approached Pearl Harbor, it suddenly became a pinpoint target-a tiny volcanic mass of brown, green, and yellow earth. The boat passed Bishops Point, to starboard, and Iroquois Point, to port, and stopped at Drydock No. 4. Naval Police came aboard, briefly. It was a perfunctory boarding-part of the haunting past and the instinctive precaution. The passengers wore puzzled looks. Cameras were gathered up. Ahead lay giant cranes and huge drydocks, submarines and destroyers, parade grounds and the neatly tended lawns of barracks. A giant troopship swung by, heading out to sea. In the distance were fields of sugarcane, and the ever-present clouds of rain hung over the mountains. The announcer was a controlled man. It was not in him lightly to hurt the sensibilities of anyone aboard, Caucasian or Oriental. At one moment, he spoke softly of a Japanese decision not to bomb a hospital ship lying in Pearl Harbor, but then he lowered his voice slightly, and took on a metallic tone, as he mentioned the harbor entrance, guarded by nets, through which Japanese submarines made their way in December 1941. The boat chucked slowly past Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor. The announcer’s voice became chillier, more impersonal. History, he seemed to be saying, is history, and history is worth remembering. “Streaking in over Oahu from the west at 7:40 A.M., Japanese planes struck at Schofield Barracks…

The tiny vessel swung into Battleship Row and came alongside the Utah, crippled in the water. Perhaps a fifth of the Utah’s decks were still visible, the water washing up and down and across their rusted surfaces. The little boat rounded the northern tip of Ford Island, turned east, and turned south, gliding almost noiselessly now past hunks and chunks and pieces of other submerged vessels-bits of bulkhead, bits of deck, scraps of superstructures lying quietly in the water. There was rust and sea and memory in this strange graveyard, where the grotesque shapes of silent ships lay on their sides. The boat paused briefly alongside the Arizona, here fore and aft still showing, her midships covered with a memorial concrete canopy. There was nothing for anybody to say, and nobody said anything. We slid past the remains of the West Virginia, the Tennessee, and the Oklahoma, and headed back into the open sea, turning in the direction of Waikiki and the gleaming high-rise buildings.
Everyone sat quietly along the upper deck, enjoying the Pacific breezes, and nobody said, “Aloha."

Inspiration

When I ask someone about their inspiration, my hope is for a long answer. A vivid, rambling, dissertation with tangents and eloquent departures-the kind of conversation that begins in one place and then veers off into its own exuberant, immortal, frisky rave. I want to know everything and so I ask.

The side effect off all these sparkling divulgences is their transformation on me, knee deep in notes and whirling with ideas. Particularly when the first images shape in the mind and I lick my lips scheming over a few radical possibilities. There are also wistful moments when it becomes apparent that no, most of this will not be possible in a space of 900 square feet. All that fantasy shaped with poignant details and presented in a striking way after many sleepless nights. I succeed and emerge permanently, magically altered by the sublime flashes of a few unconventional minds. It is this continuum of muses and illuminations that shape my ideas.

For now, here is a picture from Paris, sent today by Sylvia, to bring a little sunshine to a rainy California winter day.

See you on the internet…

At Paris’ Salon du Chocolat lovers of fashion and frivolity embrace higher forms of devotion. For fifteen years, these chocolatiers have used only their sweetest dreams to craft their couture. Embodied in the sashays of sugar and spice, these candy-coated manifestos reveal the boundlessness of curiosity and courage-unwrapped.

Joanne Molina/photo Marc Susset-Lacroix

The Magic Boxes

It is the shape, not the circuits, that makes a computer classic.

I reminisced with a fellow passenger last night on the flight back from Las Vegas, as we sat with our sleek, superslimm, forever tasking notebooks. We tried to recall (memory not what it used to be) the early eighties, pre mouse, pre “PC in every pot”, era.  A ‘286’ was our machine, “DOS” nighttime reading, floppies came in size 5 ¼, word-processing an adventure in combination keystrokes, and the C drive was king. Generating wiring diagrams, schematics and circuit board layouts took hours (pre mouse, how did we ever manage), and “Al Gore’s Internet” was an infant. E-mail and going on-line a marvel. The rest is an amazing history.

So much for the circuits.

“No one will ever collect computers,” a Silicon Valley computer entrepreneur once declared to me. “Computers are just boxes.”  The entrepreneur, who collected automobiles, was wrong. His company went bankrupt, and the computer he produced is now a collectible.

Computers are just boxes, but the shape of the box, like the shape of a car, is important in selling the machines. When computer hackers talk of the “architecture” of a computer, they are referring to the organization of its circuits, not the box. To the rest of us, the look is important.

The traditional designer’s ambition of expressing function in aesthetic form giving a car an aerodynamic shape, for instance-is particularly challenging for computer designers. By their nature, these machines are charged with connotation of power and control, but their functions are silent, subtle, and abstract. The expressive side of the design saying what the machine is all about-is the designer’s hardest task.

Unlike the automobile industry, where “styling” did not appear until the public had bought fifteen million simple black Model-T’s, the murderously competitive computer business achieved a level of design in its infancy remarkable for an industry. These have become the classics of today’s collectors.

The Grid Compass and the Mindset have been for many years in the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

However, who remembers these? –

The Digital Equipment Rainbow monitor, little more than a stripped-down picture tube, it sat on the desk with the tenuous dramatic balance of a Brancusi head. Digital Equipment used the fact that the computer won international design awards in their advertising.

Memotech’s cool brushed-metal black box. Memotech contrasted itself to plastic computers by touting its “extruded aluminum casing,” for protecting the chips, acting as “a heat sink,” and serving a “a Faraday cage, completely sealing off radio-frequency interference that could impair picture quality.”

Kaypro acted as if it did not care about design, but the crude metal box that housed its bargain-basement computer made it look as basic and no-nonsense as a WWII Jeep did. Referred to by engineers as “Darth Vader’s lunch box”.

Radio Shack’s TRS-80, the silver plastic housing led computer buffs nickname them “Trash-80’s.”

And finally, a German company called Frogdesign opened an office in Campbell, California, near the Apple Headquarters, in Cuptertino. Soon it had produced the Apple IIc, a pure white machine with a ridged, squarish box, combining keyboard and system unit, “unsculptured keys”, and a futuristic looking monitor. Ah, those Germans and their machines.

Designers approached the first personal computers with the science fiction models of Buck Rogers and 2001 fixed firmly in their minds. Those images-visions of what a computer would look like if it existed-inspired the shape the machine took when it finally became a reality, and what an incredible journey it was, is, and will be.

Composed on an antique Mac II (I know, it does not compete with Charles’ ancient Osborne I).

Don’t Charles…

…when friends are arriving

By airplane, motor, and train

Retire to bed

With an aching head

And that famous redundant “migraine”.

Happy Birthday

A Perfect Travelling Pleasure

The human race was designed, in my opinion, not to run for its physical recreation, but to walk. Most people look silly running, but one can walk with swank, one can walk with style, one can walk and feel wonderful parading down the Champs-Elysees. One can observe with dignity the passing scene, one can converse without panting, smile without strain, and take one’s exercise with the composure evolution evidently intended, when it stood us on two legs and made us lords of nature.

Once, on a French national holiday, I really did walk down the middle of the Champs-Elysees, feeling terrifically Gaullist, and I have felt distinctly exalted walking over the Brooklyn Bridge on a fine Sunday evening.

Few pleasures I know are more perfectly proportioned than a single night upon the Venetian island of Torcello, the one whose stalwart campanile you see, beyond the leaning tower of Burano, farthest away of all in the northern reaches of the lagoon. It is one of life’s rules that most pleasures are too much of a good thing. Only the very best of them come and go lightly, leaving you satisfied but not sated, with the sweet aftertaste in the mind that follows your awakening from a happy dream.

For me, such a pleasure is the pleasure of a night in Torcello, even in these times of touristic overkill. By definition it cannot last too long and by geography it cannot be too overwhelming, for the island is only about a mile around, has a permanent population of less than a hundred, and contains at the most a couple of dozen buildings. There are no cars on it, and no paved roads. That campanile greets its visitors with an easygoing tolerance still, knowing that though they may be here today, they will almost certainly be gone before tomorrow.

What I like to do is board the slinky excursion launch that takes the tourists out from Venice for lunch at the Locanda Cipriani, the islands long celebrated hotel. This gives me a flashy reentry to Torcello.

The experience offers a piquant mixture of sensations. The launch sails cautiously up the long narrow creek which is the main street of Torcello, beneath a bridge without parapet (alleged to have been designed by the devil) until it reaches the fulcrum of relative bustle-a moored boat or two, a few spectators hanging around-which marks the presence of the locanda.

It looks like a modest country tavern from the outside, but inside you will overhear confident accents in Parisian, Japanese, or New Yorker, gin fizzes and scampi and laughter between tables. When I watch the great pleasure launch sail away again, all sunglasses, designer pants and now vinous badinage, it is as though the great hard world itself is departing the island, leaving me naïve upon its shore.

On the green piazza beyond the restaurant women in straw hats, sell lace from a parade of canopied stalls. There is the rough-hewn stone seat once popularly supposed to have been the throne of Attila the Hun. Now occupied by a sprawling, lazy, spoilt feline, sic transit…

Tourists come and go in waves all afternoon. By the early evening, everybody is gone. Attila’s throne is empty too. A hush descends upon the island and the few score souls that remain upon it. It is time to go for an evening walk.

A man told me once that he found Torcello “dead as old bones.” He was speaking, though, as a Los Angelinos, to whom such a half-abandoned place, once a thriving municipality with heaps of money, may well offer funereal vibrations. Actually, by the standard of these generally sterile waters Torcello is like an animated oasis.

Dusty lanes take me through its fields, past brackish back canals, through plantations of sunflowers sagging with the weight of their blossoms, besides meadows of indeterminable vegetables and indefinable salad plants, where solitary men are still laboring away. Up a reedy creek, a fisherman rows his boat from the lagoon, standing cross-oared in the old Venetian way.

Dead as bones indeed! Tadpoles squirm in the little rivulets, beetles stalk the grasses, seabirds squawk, hens and pigeons scrabble in yards, cats eye and dogs gaze at me, lizards flick on fencing posts, tall asphodels stir in the breeze from the Adriatic. A distant bell rings across the lagoon, perhaps from the cypress-shrouded monastery of San Francesco del Deserto, and with a laborious gasp, the great bell of Torcello itself awakens to boom mellow and melancholy through the twilight.

So night falls, and I feel myself enfolded in velvet privacy among the waters. All alone I wander after dinner through the quiet shadowy monuments of Torcello’s lost consequence, its domes and its arcades, its crumbled pillars and indecipherable plaques, its campanile half-hidden in the darkness above. There is nobody about but me, unless some of the backpackers have unrolled their sleeping bags beneath the cathedral cloister; only me, the mosquitoes, the frogs, which leap around my feet and the little bats that forage in and out of the lamplight.

In the morning, the swallows have taken over, whirling dizzily around the bell tower and the chimney pots. Now, after breakfast, I look once more at the buildings. I have known this island for over 40 years, but I feel it my duty. Besides, they are not only few, but also marvelous. It was to this sedgy island, fifteen centuries ago, that the first off all the Venetians came as fugitives; the little cluster of buildings that is Torcello now represents the true beginning of all that we mean, all the dazzle and the beauty, all the power and the fizz and the sadness, when we speak the name of Venice.

What a claim! And what monuments, concentrated as they are within the space of a couple of hundred yards! Cool and calm in the simple domed form of the church of Santa Fosca, a though a princely stable has been converted for holy use. Infinitely touching is the lonely figure of the Madonna, high in her mosaic apse, which greets you in the bleached stoniness of the cathedral. Peculiar stone objects of unimaginable age litter the sacred purlieus, and it is a fine thing to sit on Attila’s throne, before the cat arrives, looking across the tiled domes to the mighty tower above. From time to time the bell assembles its energies again to announce that another Torcello hour has passed.

Noon, time for another meal. I ate my way into Torcello with the jet set; I eat my way out with the Italians, for the people who order their seafood or spaghetti at the Osteria al Ponte del Diavolo come mostly from Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, or Venice. This gives the restaurant an organic, family feel, very pleasant to take with a glass of wine and one of the rough rolls that, distributed from table to table out of big wicker baskets, constitutes Torcello’s very bread of life. The conversation and wine flow. Imperceptibly turns the cycle of the island’s life. I am hardly through the cheese when looking up across the patio, I catch sight of today’s boatload of cosmopolitans, looking just like yesterday’s, sailing well-fed back to Venice from the locanda up the way.

Heavens, my own vaporetto leaves at any moment. I pay my bill, grab my bag, and sprint to the landing stage just in time to see the humped shape of the Number 12 foaming up from Burano. And if I’m not in time? Well, I can always catch the next one; or I can start all over again, stay another night, with the frogs, the swallows, the mosquitoes and the great bell of the cathedral, and see how far a rule of life can be stretched.

itchy feet caravan weekend