Stuff(ed) and Nonsense: The Dreaded Feast, again.

“We all know that Christmas Thanksgiving is the real culprit here, the true source of the mania, depression, and clinical hysteria.”  

-The Dreaded Feast, Taylor Plimpton

I have always managed to gently fade away and enjoy the holidays in an unconventional way. 

Yes, I get like this-insufferable-every year at this time, and it lasts until, oh, February or so, when the urge to become a Jehovah's Witness slowly dissipates and all traces of holiday mania has evaporated.

This year, however, feels distinctly darker. Twentyeleven has not been a happy year on our little planet, there has been much death, doom, destruction and a host of major life changes that knocked us on our derrières.  As a friend mentioned yesterday, self-discovery is a bastard-it's also expensive, boring, depressing, time-consuming, exhausting and scary. And yet, there are little glimmers of hope and progress here and there, and, on occasion-unadulterated joy.  

Which leads me to Benjamin Disraeli-
“I feel a very unusual sensation-if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.”

Whether you celebrate a quiet Thanksgiving at a table for two or a crazy, hectic family feast... ENJOY your day!

“A Shining City upon a Hill”.

Reflections to a lecture on leadership and personal responsibility.

As I listened, John Winthrop's 1630 sermon "A Model of Christian Charity" came to my mind. (Still aboard the ship Arbella, Winthrop admonished the future Massachusetts Bay colonists that their new community would be a "city upon a hill", watched by the world.  Winthrop's sermon gave rise to the widespread belief in American folklore that the United States of America is God's country because metaphorically it is a “Shining City upon a Hill”, an early example of American exceptionalism.)

On 9 January 1961, President-Elect John F. Kennedy returned the phrase to prominence during an address delivered to the General Court of Massachusetts:

…”History will not judge our endeavors—and a government cannot be selected—merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these. For of those to whom much is given, much is required”...

I started scribbling a diagram on a napkin and noted that Los Angeles in not on a hill.  Returning to the napkin, I wrote "You" in the middle, and around it I penned in all the big questions that affect our lives. Among the rays pointing towards us are work, education, utilities, housing, health care, food, natural resources, global interdependence, human rights, arts and entertainment, transportation, infrastructure, security and justice.

The cockeyed bit about all of these critical parts is that we elect or submit ourselves to others to make these big decisions.

Chances are you’re not particularly happy about how that’s working for you. In the shining city on my napkin, you have the right, and responsibility, to make the choices you feel are necessary for your life and your community.

So how is it that we built this new society based on autonomy, equality, self-management, mutual-aid, solidarity, diversity, and participation across all spheres of life and ended up with…?

Personal responsibility was, and I believe should be, a key principle, and if it applies to our spirituality, I see no reason to omit it from all aspects of our life.  That would mean that we need to build and understand our community, and address the pressing issues of our time in the best way that we can, because there is so much to be addressed.

Transcendence . . .

...what else is there to aspire to?

When words fail, there is music. Listening to the music, the orchestra and chorus will take me to that place I want to be today.

Letter to a wife

A week before the Battle of Bull Run, Sullivan Ballou, a Major in the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers, wrote home to his wife in Smithfield.

---

July 14, 1861 Camp Clark, Washington DC

Dear Sarah:

The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days - perhaps tomorrow. And lest I should not be able to write you again I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I am no more.

I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am now engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing - perfectly willing - to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but omnipotence can break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly with all those chains to the battlefield.

The memories of all the blissful moments I have enjoyed with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you, that I have enjoyed them for so long. And how hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes and future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and see our boys grown up to honorable manhood around us.

If I do not return, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, nor that when my last breath escapes me on the battle field, it will whisper your name...

Forgive my many faults, and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless, how foolish I have sometimes been!

But, O Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they love, I shall always be with you, in the brightest day and in the darkest night...always, always. And when the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath, or the cool air your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for me, for we shall meet again...

---

Sullivan Ballou was killed a week later at the 1st Battle of Bull Run.

An Old Kind of Hero…

When George Washington was a young man, he copied out a list of 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.”

The 110^th. read - “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.”

As the biographer Richard Brookhiser has noted, these rules were not just etiquette tips. They were designed to improve inner morals by shaping the outward man.

Washington took them very seriously. He worked hard to follow them. Throughout his life, he remained acutely conscious of his own rectitude.

In so doing, he turned himself into a new kind of hero, not only a military or political hero. As the historian Gordon Wood has written, “Washington was acclaimed as a classical hero because of the way he conducted himself during times of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off from other men.”

Washington absorbed, and later came to personify what you might call the dignity code. The code was based on the same premise as the nation’s Constitution — that human beings are flawed creatures who live in constant peril of falling into disasters caused by their own passions. A system would have to be created to balance and restrain these desires.

The dignity code commanded its followers to be disinterested and to endeavor to put national interests above personal interests. It commanded its followers to be reticent to never degrade intimate emotions by parading them in public and to be dispassionate.  To distrust rashness, zealotry, and fury.

The old dignity code has not survived in modern times. The costs of its demise are there for all of us to see.

My (almost perfect) Berlin weekend.

Some journeys are emotionally too difficult. 

For me, Berlin holds that distinction.

So then, coward that I am, the next best thing to being there, a vicarious journey. 

Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin - Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape.This book is a challenging investigation of the arguments that developed around the demolishing, renovating or rebuilding of Berlin's many contentious buildings, statues, and even commemorative plaques.  

When your recent history is so awful what to do but reach back to a time before, but to do that stirs up feelings and meaning too as it can be argued that this period was what created the atmosphere for the way things developed. Not all the arguments and topics go in such a circular way, but this is all fraught and thought-provoking stuff.  If a book can have the power to influence public debate, then The Ghosts of Berlin is such a book. Among the many new books about Berlin that I have read, Brian Ladd's is certainly the most impressive.

The Good German

Of all the movie classics, in all the towns, in all the world, they had to walk into mine.

Steven Soderbergh and his leading man, George Clooney, have cooked up a monumentally misjudged, self-regarding, cynical take on 1940s thrillers in general, and Casablanca in particular, by making a glossy pastiche noir set in the shattered ruins of 1945 Berlin. Clooney is the lantern-jawed American reporter, attached to cover the Potsdam conference, who stumbles upon a murder and an establishment cover-up; Cate Blanchett is the local shady lady with a secret and a fake accent.  She should make amends to Ingrid (I raygredd zat Ik zpreken in zis zilly mogg-Tscherman agzend).  Tobey Maguire is the creepy American soldier way out of his depth.

Soderbergh has all the technical bells and whistles ... but where's the heart? The script is boring, with fatuous condescension, largely by dropping mismanaged references to The Third Man.  But there's an added level of nastiness. There's the c-word. Women get punched in the stomach. Added to this is an ostentatious and anachronistic debate about whether there are any good Germans at all, and whether the whole country, not just top Nazis, should be put on trial: inspired, I very much I suspect, by Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners.

It just looks like one big film-school pose. Clooney and Soderbergh co-produced Todd Haynes' brilliant Douglas Sirk update Far From Heaven, and they may have intended something similar here. But Haynes's film honored its original with real passion. The Good German is culpably feeble and detached, especially considering that the original was released in 1942, and conceived far earlier: when the future of the world actually was at stake and Hitler's defeat far from cut and dried. Bogart and Bergman really did look as if they were in love; Clooney and Blanchett look like they can't wait to get back to their respective trailers.

Wings of Desire

Berlin’s urban space had frequently been the grim arena for sixties spy noir, but never had I seen Berlin become Berlin so clearly, so eloquently before. (The more sober and evocative German title translates as The Sky over Berlin.)  Of course the city is haunted what German city is not.  But here the city is haunted by angels like Bruno Ganz’s questing hero Damiel, present but unseen, and always listening.  Given the iconography, it’s a passionately humanist film, suggesting by its very texture and rhythm a prescriptive notion of how we should regard our compatriot Homo sapiens, and how we should seize the mundane moments as they catapult by. It’s a soaring anthem for everydayness.  If ever there was a European art film that could be all things to all people, it is Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.  Marking Wenders’ career midpoint like a lightning strike cutting across tree rings, the movie is at once audience-seductive and demanding, holistic and aestheticized.

It has beguiled the Wenders aficionado as reliably as it’s absorbed the spiritually hungry civilian, the rogue film head, the bookish square, the nondenominational seeker, and the vicarious traveller.

... ick hab noch eenen Koffer in Berlin…

Dearest Lady (a cyber letter).

For the polite reason that dictates life, you asking permission to join my table, I shared lunches with you. I said nothing while you explained, very much unprompted, the make-over you had in store for me - because I have such a pretty face.

You suggest a diet, a trope that is recurring in your discourse. In fact, you have followed my weight fluctuations with greater ardour than I ever could muster. Yesterday, you insisted several times, that – grey hair makes me look old and dreary.

My dear lady, you have the spirit of an old aunt, and I was taught to respect my elders.

I have subtly tried to indicate to you that you are being beyond inappropriate, and what is the greater offence, deadly boring. Changed the subject, smiled feebly, and vehemently explained that I like how I am, to no avail.

So, dear lady, and others in this category, I do have something to say to you.

I have lived in different countries, speak their languages, and have managed to learn good lessons from all these places. I travel to countries you do not know exist. I feel passionate about what I do, grateful that people recommend me as a knowledgeable and reliable professional. I am lucky to have access to a wealth of untapped information that reveal individuals struggling with their creative process, their place in the world, the righteousness of their quests – showing me that these essential questions are truly timeless. How comforting to know we are not alone.

I have had the pleasure of being told that I made a difference in the way people see the world. But more importantly, I have had the true delight of telling people that they have changed the way that I see the world, in the way that I love, and work. I work sufficiently hard to ensure that the only reason I will ever need a man is to love and encourage me, not to pay for my face lifts.

I have had the great luck of meeting people with extraordinary stories – some were accidental encounters, all were engaged with the world around them. I also was able to meet and, in some cases, befriend, writers, poets, academics, community leaders, in museums, at university, at friends’ houses, on the street. These were people who took time out of their lives to show me other ways to live, other ways to think, who inspired me by their own willingness to risk the opprobrium of people like you, by exposing themselves, their doubts and their quests, to the world.

I crossed paths with people who are authorities in their fields – most of them true humanists, completely unpretentious; generous with the information they had, absolutely aware that the only knowledge worth having is the one that you share. From meeting them I carry the responsibility of passing on not only their information, but their way of treating it, to others.

The people who truly enrich us are Linux, not Vista. Which one do you think you are?!

I have been flirted with, desired, loved, and made love to by men who were taken by who I am. I can't tell you what their feelings were about my hair, or my weight, as we had other things to talk about. If life only were that simple.

And let me tell you about the women I admire – they are of varying ages, from many places, some are in relationships, some aren’t, some are incredibly stylish, some make me look like Coco Chanel in comparison, some have high power jobs, some just have jobs. Some of them don’t even get along with each other. In common they share a joy for life, creativity for what life throws at them, thirst for new experiences, a sense of loyalty and propriety towards, and unconditional love for, their friends. These women inspire me in the way they live their lives, not in the awesome way in which they coordinate a $500 belt and shoes.

Do you realize how silly your views on my hard earned grey strands of hair sound just about now?

Oh, make no mistake, I love clothes, shoes, and fashion magazines. Although the time I spend on these issues accounts for very little of my time. And never would I dream of, unprompted, informing others of the makeover plans I have for them.

And, what shocks me more, is the waste of time - why don't you tell me about a film, book, documentary, or exhibition that has touched you, changed you, inspired you? I am yet to have a good conversation about the Great Meaulnes, Lady Chatterley, or Glee!

Well then, what I really want to ask is, who the %#@* do you think you are?  I will not.  This being a polite blog, my words would have meant that I was being rude, an occurrence which, by the laws of this blog, void any just claim I would have.

Besides a taste for coffee we have nothing in common. None of your core values correspond to mine. For some hidden reason or insecurity, you have been rude, disrespectful, and insensitive. And, in another demonstration of how truly different we are, you took my polite silence as agreement with your ‘wisdom’.

Unbelievable as it may seem to you, I am well-rounded in more ways than one. I am proud of what I have achieved, relieved that I rely on no man to pay my way, beyond grateful for my friends and mentors, and I look forward excitedly to what lies ahead. Being grey haired doesn’t even compute (go figure! no pun intented).

So, dearest lady, should you be willing to listen to one of the lessons I have learned from others at such a late stage in your life, here goes: if you have nothing pleasant to say, say nothing at all.

à votre santé

Meet a dark and handsome stranger. ☜ ☝ ☞ ☟♫

How on earth do people do this?


The wearing of dark glasses in conditions other than bright sunshine is extremely counter-intuitive. It's hard to pull off when indoors, makes one very self-conscious, not to mention a danger to oneself and passers by at night, and looks incongruous when it's grey and overcast.

However, somewhere hovering around its edges is the idea that it’s also glamorous and enigmatic, and not a little film-starrish. One can't quite help but to stride around confidently yet warily, as if the paparazzi were lurking behind every bush and bollard. But like smoking it’s a faux-allure: neither smoking nor sunglasses effects a Hollywood transformation, it merely makes one faintly ridiculous.

Anyway, my sunglasses aren't welded to my head because I'm trying to develop a mystique. Nor have I become an overnight sensation. I'm merely trying to disguise the grimness of my appearance so I don't frighten small children, perfect strangers, colleagues, clients, or indeeed horses. For the last three weeks, I’ve suffered from a skin allergy afftecting the area of the eyes. I have unimaginable rococo flourishes in the form of monstrous swellings. Huge sunglasses only can disguise the ghastly disfiguring redness and swelling.

Eventually, I ended up at the optician, thinking of making an eccentric virtue out of the wearing of dark glasses forever more. But no, fears were groundless; I have merely to devote myself with vigor to a course of antibiotics until all symptoms have disappeared.

However, as a side story to all of this, the visit to the opticians has yielded quite a different return: having had perfect eyesight all my life, I discover I need reading glasses. And worse, the Optician says cheerily 'Don't worry Ms. Edna, it happens to everyone - it's just to do with getting older'. I restrain myself from clobbering him with something hard and heavy. Reader, you can inject industrial amounts of botox into your forehead, but once reading glasses are prescribed, there’s no disguising your real age.

Someone once remarked that Los Angeles was full of women who’d been 35 for years, and I’ve been inclined to agree. Yet with my fabulous new frames parked on my face as I stare at this screen - delighted to be able to see what I'm typing - appearances are giving the lie to my lies. Ah well.

Nightwatch

Funny, memory is.
In 1964 I was looking over a wall in a suburb of Atlantic City, watching a man quietly getting soaked in his backyard. It was Eddie Fisher heartbroken over Elizabeth Taylor.

Interesting, life is.
They buried Elizabeth Taylor on Thursday a short distance from where I live today.

The movie I enjoyed and remember Ms. Taylor in, is Brian G. Hutton’s Nightwatch, hence the title of this post. I enjoy this film for multiple reasons. First, and foremost, it’s a thriller and I love a good thriller with an unexpected twist ending. The film also stars the late, great Laurence Harvey who had previously appeared with Taylor in the Oscar winning melodrama Butterfield 8 and I enjoy watching Taylor and Harvey together. Not only do they provide some incredible eye-candy, but they also have an interesting chemistry on screen. Taylor deliveres one of her most unusual and unexpected performances in Night Watch that clearly mocks some of her previous roles, while playing smartly with audience expectations. And lastly, Night Watch evokes many of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock films.

Elizabeth Taylor came of age on screen in “A Place In the Sun,” based on Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy.” Notice how the Studio changed the title to something more upbeat than a “tragedy.” However, when that decision was made to change it, the value of Taylor’s name and public image in selling the film was as important as, if not more important than the title of the film (which often ran under the name of the star).

These matters explain the differences between a movie star today versus a Movie Star like Elizabeth Taylor. In the days of the Studio system, stars were products, or as we would say today: brands. This has been borne out with Taylor in the longstanding popularity of her fragrance White Diamonds, which has been a top seller for two decades. They were buying Elizabeth Taylor, the brand. Thank you Mr. Mayer.

The studios had their own brands, with their own looks. And MGM, where Elizabeth Taylor became star was the Tiffany of the Studios. In their heyday, when almost half the population of the country went to the movies every week, people went to see a Bogart picture, or Pickford or Gable and Lombard, or Errol Flynn on a Saturday matinee. They knew what an MGM picture looked like, versus a Warner Brothers, or 20th Century-Fox. They knew the stars attached to those studios. The stars' images and studios cross-referenced each other with these “star brands,” adding prestige and box-office. Elizabeth Taylor was quintessential in the process it is one reason why she ended up rich, admired, and adored.

It was a business model that went out of fashion like a lot of business models over the past century. In the days of the Studio movie, for example, a star or an aspiring star never left the house unless he or she looked like their screen image. It was only after the Studio system dispersed with contract players that the public began to see their stars looking like “real” people, unshaven, stressed out and indifferent to how he or she looks. A Star knew never to do that. They knew they were a “brand,” that they were “marketable.” They knew that looking good was money in the bank. Hollywood was a business, not a fantasy. In Hollywood, public life was always an audtion: you had to do your best. Or lose out. Women like Taylor knew the score when it came to business, right down to how to light themselves for the best results on film. They were pros, and working for a living.

It’s a strange life. Its reality is based on illusion and lighting. Movie stars get a kind of attention that three-year-olds get, except the Stars get it 24/7 for as long as they can stay in the public eye. It goes with the territory. The attention they attract and even create could drive most ordinary people crazy because it is often by its nature intrusive.

I once had a conversation about this with a woman who had grown up in the film industry. We were talking about an old friend of hers, a famous star who later in her life drew speculation that she was a lesbian because she always had a female companion wherever she traveled. And one of those longtime companions happened to be Sapphic by nature. She liked the dishiness of the speculation but didn’t believe it. “You have to understand darling,” she said to me, “she is a movie star. Movie stars need that attention. They’re used to it.”

This is especially true of the female stars who wear their egos often with more charm (like accessories) than do the men. It explains why they often marry men who take advantage of them: they need that male presence, as if to assure their position in the “community.”

Elizabeth Taylor was surely one of those women. She bore many of the traits and characteristics of this category of person.

Meanwhile, if we wish, we can and will always be able to enjoy her in roles the woman played, and played out herself for us to know.

drawing Al Hirschfeld

Ghosts- the lost, the past, the dead.

At age ten, my brother declared he was going to be a geneticist. "Why?" asked I. "So we will never have to die," he replied. Alas, he is long since gone.

In January 1895 Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, "Guy Domville," in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost.

In "The Master " Colm Toibin captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in the grand parlors and palazzos of Europe, who was astonishingly vibrant and alive in his art, and yet whose attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. It is a powerful account of the hazards of putting the life of the mind before affairs of the heart.

…Soon after she died he wrote a story, 'Travelling Companions', in which William, travelling in Italy from Germany, met her by chance in Milan Cathedral, having first seen her in front of Leonardo's The Last Supper. He loved describing her white umbrella with a violet lining and the sense of intelligent pleasure in her movements, her glance and her voice. He could control her destiny now that she was dead, offer her the experiences she would have wanted, and provide drama for a life which had been so cruelly shortened. He wondered if this had happened to other writers who came before him, if Hawthorne or George Eliot had written to make the dead come back to life, had worked all day and all night, like a magician or an alchemist, defying fate and time and all the implacable elements to re-create a sacred life...

(Pavlova with her pet swan)

-The Master, Colm Tóibín



It’s an easy mistake to make, this casual assumption that a person’s resolute avoidance of commitment and their remorseless dedication to work mirrors a non-existing inner life.

Robert S. gifted me the book. It was the first time he had ever recommended I read anything. I dived into it; and as they say, the spell worked.

We both were saddned by failed relationships. We convinced each other that we had enough of love. From now on, we were going to model ourselfs on Henry James: get on with work, and wipe out all thought of further attachments. Contra mundum.

In the preface to The Turn of the Screw, Henry James wrote: "Make him (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications." For evil, read regrets and longings, and for both of them, read this compelling, restrained book by a still young master.