Did this before, clicked badly, argh! and lost a couple hours' invention, and they wonder why I'm wary of electronic banking. Or why we want to protect our computers. Desultory is like water dropped into an oiled skillet to test the heat--it should bounce around--or a chrome ball careening through a pinball-machine obstacle course to reach its cozy home-base rut or a teenager mall shopping or a tot with too many toys. I'd been thinking of some endings, Jerry Orbach, Artie Shaw, Willie J. I'd seen Jerome Orbach in his Tony-award-winning Promises, Promises role from the nosebleed balcony on a spontaneous whim the night before I flew to Europe. Artie Shaw, born Arthur Arshawlsky, recorded his Porter hit, "Begin the Beguine," in 1938 (my birthyear) and quit playing his clarinet in 1954 (my h.s. graduation). (I liked better his theme song, "Nightmare," and "Frenesi.") Willie J. was a year behind me in h.s., a tall, good-looking basketball player actually a year older, as his obituary told me, Indian, with a beautiful, gracious mother who made sure her four boys had college educations. Two of them had troubled lives, Willie one of those. But it was Janus' Day, the two- or four-faced god of doors, not the hypocritical "two-faced" but the one warily watching backward and forward, like those India peasants who wear masks on the backs of their heads to ward off tiger attacks. Julius Caesar declared January 1st started a new year. Which set me off on the calendar and our arbitrary time fiddling over the centuries. As the O W-H's "Random Facts" column pointed out, the Romans--and Americans are nothing if not Romans culturally--kept a calendar only for the agricultural year, planting through harvest; the Roman Catholic Council of Tours in 567 A.D. reverted "to celebrating the new year in late March to coincide with the vernal equinox," Eastertime, a pagan festival time like Christmas and Valentine's Day. (A.D., anno domini, "[in] the year of our Lord," and the more current C.E., Christian Era, demonstrate amply Religious Historical Power.) Our present calendar has been around only 400 years, and a Sunday (Jan. 2nd) newspaper article said Richard Conn Henry, a Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist, is out to change that in the interests of busy-little-bee bureaucratic conformity, efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. The last time I found efficiency experts funny was in Cheaper by the Dozen. He's created a calendar in which "30 days hath January, February, April, May, July, August, October and November. [See those Janus pairs?] All the rest have 31." And every five or six years he'd add a 7-day Newton Week to make up for our uneven Earth year now managed with Leap Year's extra day. An awkward addition, Newton Week should be simply for "a good time." Henry's calendar puts everything on the same weekday every year: under it your birthday will always be the same day, forever a Wednesday, say, as will your anniversary, holidays, and election days. No more fooling around with three-day-weekend finagling or a one-day mid-week holiday. No more being born on Good Friday and having my birthday on Good Friday every eleven years--which only lasted through my 33rd anyway. What efficiency! What knee-jerk conformity! Makes you want to salute. But then why not? As an infuriating Sideways Look at Time did register arbitrary time patterns on me, think of weeks. As long as we match the monthly lunar cycle, weeks can be totally arbitary. Why not three weeks of ten days, ten weeks of three days, two weeks of fifteen days? Who decides this stuff? It ain't the Bible. And if we can play around with time illusions, years ago Einstein turned time into a warped curved space[-time] surface of potholes and mounds, and quantum physics has since made time a potential playground of simultaneous lives, a hotly contested theory, very Twilight Zone, a theoretical funhouse of mirrors. Give a minute to the greatest illusion of all. Sitting down? The earth spins in space at about 1040 miles an hour while rushing around the sun at about 18.5 miles a second, 66,600 mph, as the solar (sun) system is ripping along at about 155 miles a second, 556,000 mph, in the Milky Way Galaxy, itself breaking the speed limit at about 185 miles a second, 666,000 mph. How's that for sitting still? It puts our media-spinning illusions to shame. But, then, ever since Forrest Gump, even those who forgot how easily tapes were spliced and diced in Nixon times know how easily electronic media are manipulated, whether by sounds or sights, by lengths or any other dimensions. So we have carefully arranged photo ops, often phony, as "news." As an Oz episode pointed out, ABC may give a story 5 seconds, NBC a minute, CBS nothing, and the editing is everything. In the December 20th Time, Leonard diCaprio said:
It's difficult to give certain types of performances, but most of the time you're in character for about 10 seconds, and editing makes it look complete. The toughest part is sustaining a career, and that's about choices. It's the choices you make that decide your longevity and the type of actor you are. You just have to be smart, dawg.
In musical history one reason the piano lost its premier place in the home was because it couldn't begin to match electronic sound effects most notably of rock music, as I discovered way back in the Fifties with the 77-pound-weakling sheet music of rock hits. It also couldn't reach 100 decibels without electronic help. (Actually, the nonrocker Les Paul is usually credited with multitrack recording, turning his guitar and his wife Mary's voice into orchestras and choirs.) But we should've been Paying Attention earlier yet to media duplicity instead of being merely engrossed with media magicians' sleight-of-mind entertainment. That's what I was thinking after I blundered into an Alias Smith and Jones marathon, a series I'd forgotten entirely, nor did their episodes prevent my surfing away. (Strange word, surfing: I always think of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys and "California Dreaming," which have absolutely nothing to do with my well-worn remote rifling through 170+ channels.) The ads for future Encore Western channel movies were Chuck Connors as Geronimo and Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in the 1993 Tombstone, the sort of ads that make me cross-eyed. However did Hollywood manage to palm off (sleight of hand and eye) 6'5" Nordic blond blue-eyed Hollywood-Handsome The Rifleman for the stocky, homely Chiricahua Apache "terrorist" Geronimo, Spanish for Jerome, described in San Antonio newspapers as "something like five foot eight inches in height and about 9,000 feet in meanness"? I've been to the inhospitable southeast-corner rockpile where Arizona's fiercest tribe, the Chiricahua, lived and fought the invaders of their homeland. I've also been to Tombstone, its sun-scorched, barren, rocky landscape as hostile as the Apaches in protecting its mineral riches (a bit like Iraq), a surprising aridity for the fertile imaginations creating, first, dime novels for the folks back East and then movies and later television stories for everyone, repeating and retelling the homegrown effort at Homeric legends with characters like the Earps family and their friend, Doc Holliday, in as many versions as Billy the Kid acquired, William Henry McCarty-Antrim Bonney, a homely, scrawny New York-born teenager handy with a gun and so dead at 21, a plotline taken over by blacks and Hispanics currently. (Wyatt Earp was born in Monmouth, Illinois, not far from where I taught at WIU; Jesse James, killed at home 138 miles from Omaha in St. Joseph, Missouri, held up his first train near Adair, Iowa, 85 miles straight east of Omaha, and most of the James Gang robberies occurred in Missouri, no western movie landscapes of Wyoming, Colorado, the Southwest. The first train robbery, by the way, was in 1866 in Indiana, the inspiration for our very first movie, silent The Great Train Robbery, 1903, which I've also seen, several times.) I've been to Lincoln, New Mexico, where the Lincoln County War put Billy the Kid on the mythical map forever, in the courthouse from which he made his final famous break; also to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, to his gravesite near where he was killed by one-time friend, Pat Garrett, his grave cemented over and jailed in to prevent tombstone-stealing, grave-robbing fans. Really. (Sometime I'll have to learn how to stick photos into my text.) James Joyce, my top novelist in our language, liked a peculiar word I associate instead with the Three Magi and a cousin's birthday on January 6th, their day, when this Zoroastrian trio followed some star happening to a stable, allegedly. To Joyce's biographical self, Stephen Daedalus (yes, named after the Greek artificer but in Ulysses standing in for Telemachos, Ulysses' son), epiphany
meant a sudden spiritual manifestaton, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.
So I guess my epiphany about how ludicrous our Hollywood/New York magicians' tricks had become was with a huge closeup of Eva Marie Saint in The Stalking Moon (1968). Ten years a prisoner of her Apache "husband" modeled after Geronimo/Jerome, she escaped with her handsome young half-breed son from his ferocious father determined for the rest of the movie to get his son back (and described in movie reviews of the time as "psychotic"). Out of a desert landscape of wind and blistering sun floats this beautiful pampered face of neatly mascaraed eyebrows, false mink eyelashes, eyeliner, so blatantly phony I've never gotten over my disgust. And I happen to like the movie, a fairly good thriller, with Gregory Peck the rescuer-protector. The only movie that's resonated with wrongness more wildly is John Ford's creative version of the Custer Massacre--which, as now recognized, should be Sitting Bull's Victory--set with the wrong tribe in the Southwest of deserts and buttes, Fort Apache, Omaha's Henry Fonda in the Custer role, the star Marion Michael Morrison a/k/a John Wayne of Winterset, Iowa, home of those Bridges of Madison County. (I've been to all those places.) Of course, we have as many Custers as we do Jesse Jameses as we do Billy the Kids as we do Wyatt Earps as we almost do Jesuses, all movie Beautiful People except possibly Michael J. Pollard's Dirty Little Billy (1972), Pollard resembling Billy more than any other actor. But that who-is-this-guy-really is a different spin from our TV news now; it is a dizzying spin, if not quite like the dizziness thinking about the total speed we're whizzing through an unknown universe of Black Hole mysteries and gorgeous galaxies captured in ravishing photos in The Universe: 365 Days, a book every school should own. I mean the spin of what years and years of "received history" like Washington and his cherry tree have stored in our rote cultural memories, the accumulated false versions, misstated facts, trumpeted as "true stories," not that Stone's "awesomely awful Alexander" claims truth. What have we done in condoning history perversely mistold for profit, selling Hollywood beauties for the Real Stuff, Paul Newman and Robert Redford for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--could you make robbers funnier or more attractive?--or Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway for Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, a homely impotent perhaps bisexual and his so-so machine-gun-toting married girlfriend. As Don Kaye described the perversely affecting Bonnie and Clyde (1967) in a condensed NYT movie review, a movie that puts its audience firmly on the side of its outlaw heroes with their shocking death scene: "Its combination of sex and violence with dynamic stars, social relevance, a traditional Hollywood genre, and an appeal to hip young audiences set the pace for many American movies to come." But everybody knows these are just movies. Uh-huh. How do we learn in elementary school again? Write it on the board 100 times. What has Catholic education accomplished by daily drilling? Repeat images often enough, they stick in the brain. Repeat bad stories often enough, they become history. Which is also why no one should for a minute accept the legal arguments of, say, cigarette companies or Hollywood producers of violent films who whine defensively their myriad repetitions don't damage the young. And so we spin on. I spun on New Year's Day next to happier mid-day hours, when I caught the Norwegian Blue Parrot skit of a Monty Python marathon, my favorite, this-parrot-is-dead-no-it's-not-it's-just-resting; and Gaudi Afternoon (2003), a fair thriller, albeit Marcia Gay Harden doesn't pass as a pre-op transsexual-to-be in this gender-bending story of ambiguous sexuality, with a magician who does disappearing tricks. She has no Adam's apple, the way to spot any transgender character. The movie is mainly interesting for its three major Gaudi landmarks--Park Guell, La Familia Sagrada (The Holy Family) Cathedral, La Pedrera apartment house--all fairytale products of an archconservative Roman Catholic's uniquely exotic creativity, all seen during Barcelona's Olympics. (I think I've already mentioned that I started college wanting to be an architect.) New Year's Day ended happily with classic Casablanca : "Here's lookin' at you, kid." After not having seen it in years--that's part of movie power, the rote cultural memories of seeing and seeing and seeing these deceptions--I found the 1942 film reminiscent suddenly of blackout drills in Center during World War II when we had to buy black-out shades for home windows and took refuge in the courthouse as bombers flew over our darkened town, streetlights out, in dead-serious war exercises. The movie surprised me with its art-fine film noir photography, all sharp black-and-white shadows more often associated with crime/mystery films of the Thirties and Forties. A surgeon's son of disputed birthdate who first said, "Tennis, anyone?" onstage, a half-inch taller than Geronimo's five-foot-eight, in his iconic tough phase as poster boy for cancer (never without a cigarette), Humphrey DeForest Bogart has a splendid cast up to his Richard/Rick Blaine: Swedish Ingrid Bergman as crossword puzzle love interest Ilsa (before she scandalized American puritans with her out-of-wedlock children and was ostracized for decades); English Paul Henreid as Bergman's husband in the film's central menage a trois, "two's company, three's a crowd"; the fine character actors, Hungarian S.Z. Sakall's plump Carl, Bogart's majordomo, and Canadian John Qualen's fez-wearing Berger, Greenstreet's majordomo, like hometown neighbors, seen in dozens of films I grew up with; the witty partner-in-cynicism closet patriot, English Claude Rains, with at least half the memorable lines; Hungarian Peter Lorre, born Lazlo Lowenstein, and English Sydney Greenstreet of Bogart's later Sam Spade The Maltese Falcon; Arthur "Dooley" Wilson as Sam, like a 1942 Bobby Short, as Rick's Cafe Americain pianist, a role intended originally for Hazel Scott or Lena Horne or Ella Fitzgerald, given the theme song, "As Time Goes By." And the great tired-cynicism lines you can look up at IMDb's "Memorable Quotes from Casablanca," which never did include "Play it again, Sam," but several close variations. The lines I copied down:
"Go ahead and shoot. You'll be doing me a favor." "As I suspected, you're a rank sentimentalist." "You're trying to escape from yourself. You'll never suceed." "Serves me right for not being musical." "Who are you really, and what were you before? What did you do, and what did you think, huh?" "Here's lookin' at you, kid" (twice). "Round up the usual suspects," the source of a later brilliant film's title. "Louis [pronounced Lou-ee, French style], I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
Matching the memorable dialogue is a score right out of one of my Remick's/Witmark's/Harms' Hits Through the Years, all of which Mom sang often except "Parlez Moi d'Amour/Speak to Me of Love," and the next entry will be Grandma and Mom singing as we motor Up West. A very desultory day indeed.
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