Brigham's Blog: March 2011

31 Mar 2011

Yesterday I commented about how little I'm looking forward to a Captain America brought to us on screen by the anti-military denizens of Hollywood. My friend Don read my blog entry and took a quick look at some pre-release stills and noticed this right away. Is anyone on Wilshire or Sunset going to see that Steve Rogers is wearing his combat infantryman badge incorrectly? No. So let's not sweat it.

I may have mentioned this tale before - I don't recall - but I had an observation of the gulf between the filmmakers and the military types and enthusiasts once in October 1987, when my Civil War reenacting regiment was being used as extras in the filming of some camp life scenes in Gore Vidal's Lincoln (1988). We were near the Powhatan prison complex in Southern Virginia, generally mucking around in camp for the cameras. The campfires were kept stoked all day by propane tanks, and various fey second unit producer types were flitting about the tents.

One fellow - I'm almost certain he wore his sweater draped on his shoulders - thought he'd set the scene for us, and proceeded to tell us about the American Civil War. Us! Civil War reenactors! Guys who spend nearly every waking moment reading books on the subject, buying reproduction gear and examining stitching and manufacture to ensure that it looks precisely like a soldier would have worn at Gettysburg or Antietam! I can't remember the exact words of his little speech, but we all found it hilarious. It went something like, "Okay, gather around! This is the Civil War! It was horrible... and brutal... and a terrible, terrible thing. Brothers shooting brothers in a civil... thing... You men are in camp. You might die horribly. Or get sick or shot - I dunno." Somewhere around here or after more of such prose he started to notice reenactors grinning broadly or holding back laughter and got angry, abbreviated his sermon and walked off in a huff. We all cracked up.

Another feature of this shoot I found interesting were the makeup ladies running around patting fake dust and dirt on everyone's faces and uniforms. I have lived in reproduction camps for days at a time; I have never seen anyone as dusty and dirty in camp as I have after the makeup ladies left them. Not even boys at a scout camp! Geez.

I had to pick up some medicine for my daughter yesterday, and so, during the half-hour wait, I decided to dine at the nearby Popeye's. Big mistake. I had a meal that sat like a greasy lump in the pit of my stomach. While there, I saw on the wall what satirist James Lileks would call a Quisling chicken. In case you're not familiar with the term, a Quisling is named after a Norwegian who gave active assistance to the Germans in his country in World War II. A Quisling chicken or pig is an accommodationist. His role in life is to develop your appetite to eat his friends and fellow animals - perhaps even himself. A suspect character.

I watched a unique and interesting work last night, Gang Tapes (2001). I'm not sure how I stumbled across this one on Netflix... I think I must have found it on a search for 1950's juvenile delinquency flicks. Anyway, after the success of The Blair Witch Project in 1999, independent filmmakers noticed that a new, inexpensive aesthetic was in town, that of the do-it-yourself cinema verite style created with the use of small, handheld camcorders. This is one such production.

The plot of Gang Tapes is that a white tourist family, while on vacation in Hollywood, gets lost in Watts or Southeast L.A. and has their camcorder stolen during a car-jacking. The remainder of the film is seen through the viewfinder of the fourteen year-old junior gang member who keeps the camcorder for himself. He records cruising in cars, Watts street life, gang meetings, crack cocaine manufacture, parties, beatings, knifings, hospital visits, shootings and a funeral. Needless to say, things do not turn out well, and a fatal conclusion is assured. Oh, I'll give it away: He records his own shooting. It was quite an engrossing film despite the fact that I only understood about half of the dialogue - I'm too white and nerdy. (By the way, that's uber-Mormon Donny Osmond doing those hilarious dance moves.)

The question is... is Gang Tapes a neo-noir? It has a central crime - more than one, actually - and it also has the fatalistic atmosphere common to many noirs. The life-seen-though-a-camcorder trick substitutes for the spoken narrative style found in film noir. And yet... no, I don't think this is film noir at all. Which is not to say that you can't have a film noir with only black folks in it, you instead have a black interest film - it's not that. (After all, the first Shaft film was neo-noir.) It's that the independent small filmmaker gimmick of using a camcorder denies the "film" part of film noir. This was not meant to look like an edited, assembled film, and it doesn't. I'm going to coin a new phrase specifically for this work: It's found noir, the sort of thing a public defender might find in an evidence box at L.A.P.D. headquarters.

Now let's move onto the polar opposite of Gang Tapes - Joni Mitchell. I digitized her 1977 double Lp Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, only a few of the songs on it I have ever come to appreciate. Guess what? I found others I liked! I still haven't listened to her sixteen minute impromptu Paprika Plains, which takes up an entire Lp side. Maybe I'll save that for a long car ride. But this is the kind of album an artist does to fulfill an expiring contract; it's very freeform and unstructured. A favorite tune on it is Dreamland, where Joni chants to the background vocalizations of Chaka Khan and some conga drumming. I've always liked the lyrics: Walter Raleigh and Chris Columbus/Come marching out of the waves/And claim the beach and all concessions/In the name of the suntan slave/I wrapped that flag around me/Like a Dorothy Lamour sarong/And I lay down thinking national/With dreamland coming on/Dreamland, dreamland/Dreamland, dreamland (Dream on, dream on, dream on)...

30 Mar 2011

On Saturday I did some drywall repair on my garage ceiling. People - including myself - keep stepping though the ceiling when upstairs in the attic. I still have the joints to smooth out - which means kicking up drywall joint compound dust everywhere in the sanding process. I hate that. Drywall repair is not one of my specialities. I can and will do it, but I don't like to and I'm not especially good at it.

I pitched that James Burke book I was reading into a Metro trashcan yesterday; it was unreadably dry. I guess Burke makes much better television specials than books. So now I'm reading L.A. Noir - The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City by John Buntin. Basically, it's the story of L.A. Police Chief William H. Parker (reputedly the coldly cerebral man whom Gene Roddenberry used as the pattern for Mr. Spock) vs. pint-sized gangster Mickey Cohen. Looks like it may have the requisite DAME HUNGRY KILLER COP RUNS BERSERK element I like in film noir movies.

Last night I watched Stravinsky: Once at a Border (1982), a long and in-depth documentary about the man who was arguably the Twentieth Century's greatest composer. (And, frankly, I don't think there is really much argument about it - he was.) As much of his music as I've heard and have come to like, I've never heard the sound of his voice. It's interesting to listen to him talk about his life and his compositions. And what compositions... one masterpiece after another: The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Pulcinella, Apollon Musagete, L'Histoire du Soldat, Orpheus, Les Noces, The Kiss of the Fairy, three symphonies, Oedipus Rex... the list goes on and on.

Oh, look... the movie people are talking about rebooting the Batman franchise - again. I never thought I'd ever write this, but I have become thoroughly sick of Batman, which is a pity because he was my favorite comic book character when I was a kid. It was bad enough that they ruined the character with that campy 1966 Adam West incarnation, just at the time I was interested in reading the comic books. Then a dry spell while DC Comics restored the character back to some credibility in the 1970's - but by then I gave up comics for Poe, Dickens, Steinbeck, Conan Doyle and others. Tim Burton came out with his twisted and loopy exercise in 1989 which was really The Jack Nicholson Show. But it was still fun because my son was old enough to took part, and I reread all the great old 1940's, 1950's and 1960's comic book stories with him. All well and good.

In 1992 a creative team of young turks ignored Burton's goofiness and developed what I still think is the best and purest incarnation of the essential character, the animated Warner television series. I catch an episode every now and then and it still looks good. But even that later morphed into some ridiculous "What if?" series about Batman in the distant future. Meanwhile, the Elseworlds comic books developed a Victorian Batman, a edgy and violent Batman, a Batman as he would have seemed had Zorro not lived, a Scarlet Pimpernel Batman, a gun-toting Batman, etc. And in the movies, Hollywood perv Joel Schumacher put nipples on the Batsuit and dragged the films into the toilet with a campy Robin and a campy Batgirl. Blech.

So in 2005 along came Chris Nolan, a good producer with an impressive feel for neo-noir, with the latest incarnation, Batman Begins, a reboot totally ignoring what had come before. No nipples on the batsuit, hooray! It wasn't bad; we've certainly seen worse. But then came Chris Nolan's grossly over-indulgent sequel which, for a scene, placed Batman in Hong Kong (what is Batman doing in Hong Kong?) after a sequence with his inventor friend Lucius Fox that looked embarrassingly like the set pieces where James Bond flippantly screws around with Q's deadly gadgets. Batman growls in a silly voice during the entire film, and, oh, and let's not forget about Heath Ledger's way overrated turn as the Joker, with smeary makeup. And now there's talk about another reboot.

I give up. They can stick Batman in a pink tutu and have him drive the Ambiguously Gay Duo's phallusmobile for all I care. I'm done. My current favorite Batman media: Wesley Willis' song.

To add insult to injury, they're coming out with a film based on my other favorite character of my youth, Captain America. Swell. At least they had the decency to set it in World War II, which might limit the amount of B.S. Can you imagine how leftist Hollywood - in this day and age - would portray Captain America in a production set in contemporary times? Hectoring people about leaving their refrigerator doors open too long, or scolding them about not placing enough emphasis upon diversity, or gassing on about how opposition to same-sex marriage is counter to everything he stands for, etc.? It doesn't bear thinking about.

But it's not like there's a strong cinematic precedent for the character. I've seen both of the previous Captain America treatments - the 1979 TV production and the 1990 film versus the Red Skull - and they both suck very badly. Just about any modern production, given a budget of more than, say, $2,300, an Apple laptop and the use of the director's credit card would have to be better. But my hopes are not up and I'll probably just give this one a big MISS.

29 Mar 2011

Happy Birthday Meredith! My youngest child is now a legal adult. Wow. Where did the years go?

I watched Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Sadko (1896) last night. Great music, but I have to say that at two hours and fifty minutes it kind of dragged. This isn't my first exposure to the story; a few years ago I bought the 1952 Alexander Ptushko film from a Russian company - and have been getting Cyrillic junk e-mail from Russia until fairly recently.

Alexander Ptushko, in case you didn't know, was often called the Soviet Walt Disney; he specialized in films with fantastic themes and otherworldly characters. I saw his Sadko on late late night TV when I was a teenager, cut, dubbed and retitled by Roger Corman as The Magic Voyage of Sinbad. It was unbelievably weird, and I recognized it right away as being a product of Soviet cinema. Some of Ptushko's films made it into America heavily altered as to conceal their Russian origins during the height of the Cold War, and some of his films have received the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment (Sadko/Sinbad included).

Back to Rimsky's Sadko, the opera: At one point a Indian (that is, a Hindu Indian) sings a ballad about how wonderful and magical India is... this is the famous "Song of India," one of Rimsky's prettiest melodies. Oddly enough, I first heard it on one of my father's Lps, in a 1938 jazz orchestration by Tommy Dorsey. I like that version, too.

I'm almost done digitizing my Joni Mitchell Lps. I'm on my last four, which includes Mingus, her ill-advised 1979 foray into full jazz. Nobody liked that Lp very much, myself included. I don't think I'll bother with that one. And then there's Paprika Plains, a sixteen minute improvisatory song taking up a full side of a double record set. I don't think I'll digitize that one, either.

Late Joni has some contributions from Jaco Pastorius, an electric bassist who is often called one of the all-time jazz greats. I don't like him at all. To me his basslines sound obtrusive, out of place and - sorry, but there's no other word for it - farty. He played a Fender fretless jazz bass with the middle register pumped way up, and can be heard sort of off in his own little world, sliding notes like mad and more or less alienated from the rest of the song's arrangement and melody. As I mentioned, however, some people find this a hallmark of originality and genius.

Please excuse these occasional annoying double linefeeds between paragraphs. It looks like somebody changed the coding in blogspot, making it harder for me to make this page look as I want, with only single linefeeds. Extremely annoying.

Piano lesson tonight. I have been monstrously distracted in March - my practices haven't been what they should be.

28 Mar 2011

Not a single yard sale Saturday morning, nada, zip, zilch. But seeing as how the air temp was 38-40 degrees that morning it's hardly surprising. Maybe next weekend.

I saw a bunch of Netflix movies over the weekend:

Overlord (1975): A presentation of the Imperial War College in London, this classy semi-documentary describes the training of a British draftee for the invasion of Normandy (Operation Overlord). I found it moody, poetic and evocative. The Netflix reviews seemed to vary between one star - "It was boring!" - and the five stars I gave it. You either love it or hate it, I guess.

The producers matched the German and British war footage from the museum with new material shot on the same style of Kodak black and white film stock that was used during the war along with cameras fitted with German lenses of the era. The result is a film that has a remarkable visual continuity between the old and new footage. Watching it, you'd swear that it was produced in the Fifties, save for the occasional f-bomb dropped by a Tommy. A remarkable film, and one of my new World War II favorites.

Paul Glass' musical score is deserving of special note - the main theme to this production is haunting. Sounds much like a tune I've heard by Ralph Vaughan-Williams... I wonder if it's based on an English folksong. That would explain it. I spent about an hour figuring out how to save some of it as .mp3 files while playing the film through Netflix. Sadly, it's only a mono mix, and I can't find any of the score available commercially via iTunes.

Car Wash (1976): My wife had mentioned that she liked this Seventies musical and I've always wanted to see it, so we did. Turns out there are two edits of the same material: the original theatrical release (which we saw together) and the television version of the 1980's (which Cari saw which has the swearing removed and some extra scenes). It didn't do especially well when it was first released, but has since become a cult film. I can see why. It's sort of like American Graffiti, but with black folks in the daytime. It depicts a day in the life of a downtown L.A. car wash, with various oddballs stopping by for a wash and vignettes in the lives of the hardworking staff. I quite liked it; very fun. I looked up the location - the car wash has been removed and no longer stands on the corner of 6th and Rampart near the McArthur Park district, but an old market seen in the distance is still there. Google Street View is great!

Games (1967): Starring James Caan, Simone Signoret and Katherine Ross. I saw this one as a thirteen year-old and have wanted to see it again ever since. It was hard to find; apparently it was never released on VHS or DVD. Netflix finally offered it as streaming video. Turns out, it's a murder mystery/triple cross with a pretty obvious solution, but I know why I liked it: the tarot card opening title sequence and a metaphysical angle. Not a good film, not a bad film. Just "eh."

Knife in the Water (1962): A very early Roman Polanski work in Polish with subtitles. Almost the entire film takes place among three people on a small boat. Two men, one woman - the universal cinematic bad situation. The tension builds - such that it is tense. Mildly tense, more like. I was thinking that it was an okay film while I was watching it, but I find myself thinking of it the day afterwards, which is one of my indications of a good film - so it was a good film. The director is a scumbag, however.

National Geographic - Inside the Vatican (2001): Why this isn't required viewing for all Catholics, I don't know. I thought it was faith-promoting and I'm not even a Catholic. Anyway, it looks at how the Vatican is run, from the manufacture of the complex uniforms of the Swiss Guard to the duties of the Official Photographer, with an emphasis on the official duties of Pope John Paul II, a man who I am convinced was one of the truly towering spiritual figures of the Twentieth Century.

Beyond the Time Barrier (1960): An early sci-fi flick that I'd never heard of at all; it came up as recommended by the Netflix viewer preference software. I predicted that I'd like it, and I did, mildly. Oh, it's flawed, but it was certainly watchable. Directed by Edgar Ulmer, a Poverty Row director who struck gold with Decoy (1945), a favorite of noirheads.

Meanwhile, back in Burbank, I pay overdue tribute to a favorite restaurant, the Smoke House, lunch time hang out of various stars and extras working at Warner Brothers across the street. A little Burbank secret is that while the garlic bread is outstanding, you don't have to dine there to have it. You can get it take-out. Another Burbanker insider secret: Due to shared staff, the very same garlic bread is also available at the golf course eatery.

25 Mar 2011

Whoop! Friday! Whoop! Huzzah!

Check out my Burbankia What's New page, addition for 3/24/11. Pete Peterson (shown at left in a photo from my 1974 yearbook) was a wonderful high school teacher, and probably the most influential teacher I have ever had. Thanks to him I'm a Civil War buff, and now live in Northern Virginia.

My pal Mike lives in Burbank; his wife and daughter works at a local library there (a branch I used to frequent as a kid). Whenever he picks up somebody from work he checks the dumpster to see if any good books have been tossed out. One night he found two World War II books, a World War I book and a 1991 history of the Emmanuel church in Burbank by Pete Peterson! Turns out the church had been named for his father - neither of us knew that. So Mike sent me scans of the relevant pages and I converted them into HTML and, with the approval of his daughter via e-mail, posted them on Burbankia as a tribute. Pete's getting on in years and his health isn't what it used to be; I hope he sees it. Church history page here.

Cari and I watched a stunningly good documentary/drama last night, Eroica (2003), about the first rehearsal of Beethoven's Third "Eroica" ("Heroic") Symphony. Netflix five stars, easy. The production is basically a play though of the work, with reactions to it captured by the various actors. While it's true that the stunningly avant-garde art of the 19th C. can put listeners to sleep in the 21st C., so used to harsh sounds have we become, I would have like to have been present at the first rehearsal. It must have thoroughly confused everyone.

For one thing, the Third was abrupt, dissonant and loud in an age when concert listeners would have been used to the structured elegance of Haydn. For another thing, it's long. The first movement alone is about the length of a typical symphony of the era. In fact, Beethoven's Third changed music forever, as the production has Haydn observing. Never before had a composer insisted upon the degree of self-expression that Beethoven had put into this work. He initially called the work "Buonaparte," but it's equally about Beethoven. Prior to this symphony, composers wrote for some occasion or for some patron - they did not think to use the medium to express their own souls. Not only did Beethoven do this with the Third, but he impatiently thrust it into the faces of Europe.

The anecdote that must be given whenever writing about the Third: Beethoven originally named this work "Buonaparte," intending it to depict the heroic soul of this friend of the common man (as Beethoven supposed). When Beethoven heard that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor, he angrily scratched out the inscription - "He is no different than the others," he angrily cried.

I have two anecdotes about this work from my youth:

In the 1972 Summer Olympics, Palestinian gunmen killed eleven Israeli athletes in an act which shocked the world, the so-called Munich Massacre. The Olympic committee held a memorial ceremony where the Munich Philharmonic set up in the coliseum and played the Funeral March (the second movement) of Beethoven's Third. When this was broadcast live to the world, we played it on the television on the wall at the little Burbank cafe where Mom and I worked, the "Alibi." I was busy cooking hamburgers for the Lockheed lunch crowd as my mother's short order cook. I had never heard the work before, and could only catch it in bits among the noise of the Lockheed throng. But I became very curious. It seemed odd to me that there was so much noise going on while such an obviously moving piece of music was being played at such a solemn occasion. Dolts! Philestines! I became frustrated and determined to somehow get to know this piece by myself in quiet surroundings.

Almost a year later, after I had gotten to know the symphony by buying a recording of it (the album cover is on the wall of my basement as framed art, by the way), my friend Mike and I were in a biology class together at Burbank High. In fact, that's where we met, 38 years ago. We had just finished dissecting our frog and it was time to dispose of it. Rather than simply dump him in the trash, however, we determined to have a more heroic funeral. So I drew a Confederate flag on a piece of paper - I was becoming interested in the Civil War at the time, taking Pete Peterson's U.S. History class - we wrapped the frog in it, and we buried him in a shrubbery bed behind the classroom. I hummed Beethoven's famous funeral march while we set froggy in the earth. The school has since been renovated with new buildings, but I wonder... did anyone in the construction crew find a frog skeleton in the ground behind the old biology classroom at Burbank High School?

I used the funeral march in a mocking sense as a callow seventeen year-old, but the fact is that it is a profoundly moving piece of music with a powerful emotional wallop. There's one great scene in the film where a musically clueless nobleman, who disparaged the first movement to Beethoven's face, is shown becoming moved almost to tears during the emotional peak of the funeral march. The amazing thing is that, yes, even after over 200 years, this music is still capable of doing that to people.

The Third is my favorite Beethoven symphony.

Here's another pointed except from Kathleen Parker's book Save the Males - this one is about fatherlessness and the truly daft notion that children don't really need fathers. What utter bunk! There is simply no better statistical predictor of teenage pregnancy, drug or alcohol abuse, suicidal tendencies, problems with the law or a host of other problems than fatherlessness. I have a little game I play with my wife. Whenever she reports some teenager gone astray in some significant way, I always ask, "Where's Dad?" The answer is almost always some variation of "Not around." Hooray for Parker for pointing out this problem. (Disclaimer: Do not think that I am disparaging orphans. I am not. They seem to be in a different class. Perhaps they receive blessings from the Lord, I don't know. But Parker's writng about fatherlessness is eloquent.)

By the way, Parker writes a chapter about the drive to put women in front line combat units that should be required reading for any policy maker crazy enough to try to do so.

I am now reading James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed, a book that was released in conjunction with his ten part 1985 PBS series. I found it last week at a yard sale. I just started it, so no report yet.

The weather forecast for tomorrow is partly cloudy, high of 48. Not optimum open top VW convertible yard sale weather, but we shall see. Sunday: Snow. Nooooooooooooo!

Have a great weekend!

24 Mar 2011

Yesterday I mentioned giving up on two 1960's science-fiction movies. Last night the third time was the charm... sort of.

I watched The Angry Red Planet (1959), starring Gerald Mohr, a now generally unknown actor who was a sort of poor man's Humphrey Bogart. Not too long ago I saw him in a hokey film noir - Date With Death (1959) - where he plays a hobo who rolls into town in a boxcar, gets mistaken for the new chief of police and deals with racketeers and city corruption! The film was notable because it attempted to use subliminal messaging to heighten the impact of a fight scene. (While the two men were battling at fisticuffs, the word "danger" and a skull and crossbones were flashed on the screen for a few milliseconds.) No, it didn't work.

The Angry Red Planet was red, all right. The Mars scenes were shot in a high contrast film technique that made the humans look interesting but the animated sequences (they get attacked by a bat-spider creature) look fairly unconvincing and ridiculous. The movie wasn't good, but it wasn't bad enough for me to quit watching.

But there was a benefit to watching this film. In an early scene, taking place in an office at an Air Force base, a map of the solar system was shown on a wall; I immediately recognized it as being the one that hung on the wall next to my bed when I was about six or seven. My mother had glued it to a piece of plywood and drilled holes were the planets were. She then installed flashing Christmas light bulbs - I directed her as to what colors went where: orange for the Sun, red for Mercury, blue for Earth, green for Venus, red for Mars, yellow for Saturn, violet for Uranus, orange for Jupiter, blue for Neptune and violet for Pluto (this being the old, unenlightened time when Pluto was still a planet). When I went to bed I used to love watching the lights go on and off, throwing colors around in my room. What's more, the lights made faint ting-ting-ting sounds; I used to think the planets did as well, if I had the ears to hear them.

Now that I knew what I was looking for I did some Internet research and came up with a better image of the map; it's dated 1959 and was printed by Rand McNally. I can now add it to my Avocado Memories page. Another fond childhood memory preserved!

I also watched the celebrated documentary Freakonomics (2010). I was unimpressed, as it was a fairly lightweight effort with a major "well, duh" factor. Incentives have implications, seemed to be one message of the film. Okay... that's hardly world-shattering news. Watching it was a bit like thumbing through a USA Today.

The most interesting sequence described what happens when black folks give their children distinctively African-American names like Shaniqua, Tyrone and Uneek: they have a somewhat harder time finding jobs than people with less characteristic, "white" names. If this data is indeed true, then some people in Utah are handicapping their children by giving them names that sound a lot like African-American names, as my wife and I noticed while collecting Utah baby names. Somebody in Utah wrote an article about it.

An interesting snopes article about a coin collector who deliberately put three valuable coins into circulation.

I was exchanging email with my friend Don about math yesterday. I think I would be a good math teacher. I've found that the problem with math as it’s taught in the U.S. is that math majors – with limited communication skills – are the ones becoming math teachers. (My son once had a poor math teacher whom my wife and I were convinced had high-functioning autism!) What’s really needed in the teaching of math are solid English and communications skills - the ability to translate complex concepts into understandable ideas. I always did better with more "humanistic" math teachers than the dry, math major ones.

In a college remedial math class I had one math teacher make a simple assertion that forever changed the way I viewed math: "Math is a language. The language of quantities. If you can put an understandable sentence together in English, you can also do it in math. A math equation has grammar and syntax, just like a sentence in English." BINGO! The light came on in my head and I became much better friends with equations, almost instantly overcoming a lifetime of hating math. (It didn’t help that my mother – the World’s Most Impatient Person – "helped" me in math as a child. Geez, I hated those sessions. She’d get angry at me and I got to loath the subject.)

What this teacher had done for me was to equate math with English. I knew I had decent English skills - I always got good grades in that subject - if math is just a language I knew that I could learn it. And while I still struggled with calculus and differential equations, I at least got to realize that what I was doing with the equations was to create statements of numerical fact, just like composing prose in English. I now like math. And, even better, I have the calculus (as they used to say in the 17th century).

That book I'm reading - Save the Males by Kathleen Parker - is a great read. Here's another excerpt, "Midwifing Men into Women." She hit the nail right on the head with this section. Since my kids were born 1983, 1987 and 1990, it was all the feminist fashion ("rage" would be a better word) to have the husband help "coach" his wife through childbirth. Consequently, I endured the Lamaze classes and watched all three of my kids being born. With one kid - I forget which - the doctor let me snip the umbilical cord. What joy. Far from the wonderful, ennobling and awesome experience claimed for it, I would really rather have waited in the waiting room like a 1950's guy with a newspaper or a book, thank you very much. My wife says that she appreciated that I was there. Well, fine. But let's not pretend that I had any real function... I didn't. I was there by and large because strident women demanded that I be there. My advice to young fathers: I have a feeling that, thanks to feminism, you're stuck. But if you can, give this one a big pass.

(Don't get me wrong with the preceding paragraph. Making a home for my three children and raising them through their first eighteen years was the finest thing I have ever done and undoubtedly ever will do. And I love them more than I can express in words. But the childbirth experience - that was different.)

23 Mar 2011

The nice thing about Netflix instant streaming is that you can quickly abandon films you don't like for something more promising. Last night I started with Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires (1965), which I gave up after about twenty minutes. The sets were lame, the costuming unintentionally hilarious, the acting stilted, the plot uninteresting and the theatrical blood way too magenta in hue.

Visually fast-forwarding through the remainder I am convinced that I am missing nothing. I will mention in passing, however, that the original Italian title, Terrore Nello Spazio, amuses me, and that I have only seen one Bava film I've liked, the stylish Black Sunday (1960), with Barbara Steele.

Some perverse Muse kept at me, however, so I tried out an American International Pictures (AIP) stinker, Queen of Blood (1966). I have read about this one and was mildly curious. It was marginally better than Terrore Nello Spazio, but not enough so to hold my interest as a viewer. It takes place in the distant future, 1990. A favorite actor, Basil Rathbone, makes a totally unwarranted appearance. What's he doing in this? Was he so hard up for money and roles? After fast forwarding to the part where the blood sucker of the title makes her appearance - Czech-born Florence Marly was visually fascinating in the role (there she is above) - I gave up. It was a crummy film redeemed somewhat by an interesting character. And, once again, more way too magenta theatrical blood.

Looking at the IMDb, I see Marly was in a 1967 film I've wanted to see ever since I saw it on television in 1969, Games. (It has tarot cards in it, a past interest of mine.) It has never been released on videocassette or DVD. Video Vault never had it and neither does Netflix.

I finally settled upon a one hour documentary, Stones in Exile (2010), a look at the construction of the Rolling Stones' 1972 "Exile on Main Street" two record set (which I've never owned or heard). In it, the Stones hang out at Keith Richards' pad in the south of France, get drunk and high, mope around shirtless, crash, and occasionally play music. It's like Spinal Tap without the laughs. I understand that this recording was critically panned upon initial release but has since gone on to attain a following and critical raves. Whatever. I have never gotten the Rolling Stones (just as I have never gotten Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen). There's a tune or two I like - Gimme Shelter comes to mind - but, in general, I can't see what all the hubbub is about. I've always thought the Beatles much more creatively interesting, and that Their Satanic Majesties more or less just followed in their wake.

Feeling restless literarily as well as cinematically, I also gave up on Neptune's Inferno, the book about the U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal. I got 100 pages into it. Sorry, Don! I'm not totally into World War II studies yet (I'm interested, but only in small dollops) and the Naval jargon somewhat puts me off. I suppose had I served any time upon a Navy vessel I'd find it a lot more compelling, but it's kind of like reading about a battlefield that you haven't visited. Too abstract. I don't have a feel for conning towers, gun turrets, command and control centers, etc.

So I did what I've enjoyed doing all my life - visiting the library and picking out a book on whatever topic I fancy. I selected Save the Males - Why Men Matter and Why Women Should Care by Kathleen Parker (2008). I am consuming it in great gulps - it's excellent. I do enjoy reading the pointed prose of witty females, whether they be Cari Clark, Danielle Crittenden, Anne Coulter, Peggy Noonan or, now, Kathleen Parker.

You might wonder, why a book entitled "Save the Males?" Are we in any sort of danger? Indeed. Masculinity and fatherhood ain't what they used to be, and Parker thoroughly skewers the tropes and orthodoxies of modern feminist thought. I call the current American zeitgeist The Era of Misandry, and Parker perfectly describes it.

("Misandry?" Wait, are you familiar with that word? It's the opposite of misogyny, which I'm certain you've heard thanks to the feminists and gender equality types who have popularized it. If you haven't heard the term misandry - male-hating - you can be forgiven. Officially, in the liberal media, it doesn't exist. In fact, the blogspot spelling checker I'm using for this article doesn't recognize the word, although it knows misogyny. We all know misogyny, good heavens, yes.)

The subject is way too big to be covered by me in a blog entry, but here are a few good excerpts from the book that illustrate its humor, relevance and wit. I am looking forward to the sections where Parker addresses modern advertising (the male is always a nitwit, the female always cool and intelligent - even in computer ads!) and perhaps even women managers in the workplace.

Women managers in the workplace... want to be let in on a little secret? Something you won't find in any googled articles, doesn't officially exist as an issue in corporate America and is only spoken of in hushed tones between men? Come closer. (Whispered): Guys my age usually find working for women to be a colossal pain. Every guy I've spoken to agrees: women managers are the biggest Nazis in the workplace, far more despotic than men have ever been allowed to become. Sure, there are male workplace tyrants and there always has been. But the promise of first wave feminist writers was that once women cracked the glass ceilings and began making their way into positions of leadership, a more knowing, gentler and more progressive leadership style would be seen across America. Bunk! To quote Pete Townshend, Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss.

But... I'm giving away too much Male Lore for one blog. I have to save it up for my own book.

22 Mar 2011

Okay, word of the day: formication. No, this is not fornication - I spelled it properly. Definition here. Weird, huh? And how did I stumble across this odd word? I mentioned yesterday that I was considering digitizing Joni Mitchell Lps - I have since started. Using wikipedia to look up the years her albums were released on wikipedia, I came across this bizarre entry for Joni Mitchell's present state of health, from April 2010:

"I have this weird, incurable disease that seems like it's from outer space, but my health's the best it's been in a while. Two nights ago, I went out for the first time since Dec. 23: I don't look so bad under incandescent light, but I look scary under daylight. Garbo and Dietrich hid away just because people became so upset watching them age, but this is worse. Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer — a terrorist disease: it will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year. ... In America, the Morgellons is always diagnosed as 'delusion of parasites,' and they send you to a psychiatrist. I'm actually trying to get out of the music business to battle for Morgellons sufferers to receive the credibility that's owed to them."

"Delusion of parasites" - hence the term formication. I have no idea if Morgellons is legit or not (there are skeptics), and, apparently, neither do the doctors. Weird.

Joni is described as "one of the world's last great smokers"; she's been a smoker since age nine. She is also active in environmental affairs - which raises a question: Should I take advice about the environment from one of the world's last great smokers? Nevertheless, I like her records and have started digitizing them.

Speaking of vinyl, this: Young people prefer vinyl Lps. I like records as much as anyone - in fact, I have about a thousand Lps with no plans to ever give them up - but come on. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a young man at a Guitar Center once. He insisted that vinyl records sounded better than CDs. Perhaps they do to some people with hearing different than mine, but I have never heard an analog-recorded classical piece on a vinyl Lp that compares with a decent digitally-recorded orchestral piece. For one thing, with symphonic music there is nothing to compare with the almost total absence of noise. Symphonic music is all about the dynamics, and if vinyl crackle is competing with the oboe solo, where's the quality?

For another, I've never bought that psycho-acoustical argument that sample and hold digitization techniques degrade a natural sound - I can't hear it. From the article: "Listening to old music remastered to a newer format is almost comical," Sarah said. "They weren't meant to be digitalized. Listening to Jimi Hendrix on my iPod doesn't capture his endlessly deep guitar solos quite like a 33 LP of 'Blues' does." My internal B.S. alarm went off at that one.

I finally got around to watching the rugby film Invictus (2009) last night. When people know you play rugby they always ask if you've seen it. (The same thing happened with Ken Burns' Civil War series and Glory when I did Civil War reenacting. People expect it of you.) It was... okay, but too long. My wife left at the one hour and fifteen minute mark, claiming that it was boring.

And I noticed some odd rugby things in it - stuff that didn't make visual sense. The most curious feature of the film, however, was depicting 1995 South African rugby as being some second rate, come-from-behind effort. The fact is, the Springboks have been and are always a threat and South Africa is one of the world rugby powerhouses. In fact, right now the Springboks are rated as being the third best squad in the world (they are almost always in the top five). So I question this depiction. It's like director Clint Eastwood is trying to pull the wool over Americans' eyes to enhance an already good story. (What sort of a team are the Springboks? Read this.)

The ending is pure Hollywood: the Springboks win, the Rainbow Nation is off to a great start and the future is bright. (It somewhat reminded me of the silly ending to Born on the Fourth of July, where we're supposed to breathe a sigh of relief when Jimmy Carter gets elected president - Har!) While a discussion of South African politics is beyond my interest in this blog, I will encourage anyone curious as to what came next to talk to white South Africans, as I have. In fact, South Africans I have spoken to about this film don't like it because it so simplifies and makes politically correct South African politics.

All of which reminds me... there's a book I once glossed through and want to read: The Hollywood History of the World by George MacDonald Fraser. I wonder if my library system has it...

21 Mar 2011

As I type it is 44 degrees outside, thundering and pouring down rain. Ugh. Welcome, Spring.

There was only one yard sale Saturday morning, but I drove to it and bought a James Burke book I found there for a dollar. (James Burke is an interesting British journalist who does television series like Connections, which examines how technology has influenced history at points of time.)

Today I go back to the dentist for Premolar Tooth Repair Part 2 of 3. Last week, Part One, was the root canal. Today is the preparation for a crown, a long visit. The last visit is cementing the final crown in place.

Good news! I learned that my son Ethan got a paid summer internship in Georgetown, so he'll be arriving in late April and leaving in mid-August. We'll have him around for the pool season. The bad part about this is that he'll have to leave his wife in Utah, who is working and also going to school. We'll have to get her out here for a visit or two.

Over the weekend I made my prints and formatted them onto seven pages in the family scrapbook, so the trip to London now officially happened. (As every driven hobbyist knows, unless it appears in the scrapbook, it didn't really happen.)

Speaking of London, I wrote that letter of complaint to the Tower of London people as the Beefeater asked me to do. It's linked here. My gripe is the use of color-changing LED display technology in an 11th C. Norman stronghold. It's just not appropriate.

I also only watched crappy films over the weekend. I didn't intend for it to be that way, but that's what happened.

The Young Captives (1959): This one started out promisingly, with a hep cat daddy-o young guy with a switch blade murdering a co-worker at an oil rig and then terrorizing a young couple, but it quickly lost interest. It was only 65 minutes, but even at that I was watching the clock.

Short Cut to Hell (1957): A remake of the classic Alan Ladd/Veronica Lake film noir This Gun for Hire (1942), it shows no points of superiority over the original. It doesn't even match it. This was the only film ever directed by James Cagney. Still, I have to give credit to the title...

ABBA - The Movie (1977): It sucked in 1977, it still sucks today. I had suggested it as a film my wife and I could watch together, but I didn't think she'd take me up on it. The star of the film was Agnetha Faltskog's celebrated rear end.

I also finished digitizing my John Lennon Lps. You know what? I liked him as a solo recording artist a whole lot more when I was in my Twenties than I do now. Listening to his stuff after some decades have passed, I recognize that his songwriting bag of tricks wasn't as deep by himself as when he was writing with Paul McCartney. They seemed to bring the best out of one another. With the shrieky Yoko Ono as an artistic collaborator he became a political pamphleteer rather than a song writer. And I don't care what the critics say, his 1970 primal scream inspired Plastic Ono Band Lp didn't age especially well. It seems excessively self-absorbed. John the Artiste. It's like Neil Young's drug deal gone bad opus Tonight's the Night. Critics think well of it for its "uncompromising truthfulness," but how many people listen to it frequently?

Well. I don't know how many more of my Lps I'm going to turn into mp3s; I'm getting rather tired of the process, and the turntable is taking up room by my computer that normally goes to the printer. Maybe do my Joni Mitchell Lps and George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, which I've never properly listened to due to its length, then call it quits.

A friend of mine is struggling with a battle of the head versus the heart. He needs to replace a car, and is debating between the 2011 Hyundai Sonata like I have which satisfies his head, and the new Mustang convertible, which is what he's always wanted. I counseled him to get the Mustang. If you're in your fifties and the kids have moved out, why not?

18 Mar 2011

Check out this property in the Trump World Tower in Manhattan in the United Nations Plaza, Apartment #88B. Hit the "View photos in full screen" button. Look at the views out those windows! EGAD. Yours for a cool $20 million. Of course there are more modest properties. You can still see the Chrysler Building from Apartment 18-F for only $748,000. I guess that's a sofa bed shown - no bedroom... Location, location, location.

Dick Whittington (1354-1423), four times Lord Mayor of London, is an interesting character. One of the great figures of the City of London (that is, the "square mile" and not what is known today as Greater London), I learned an interesting thing about him from an informative guide at the Guildhall Art Museum. Born into the gentry class so not poor but not wealthy, he was sent to the City to learn a trade; he became a mercer (cloth merchant). Eventually he became very wealthy, and gave liberally to many civic institutions.

Here's the kicker, from this website: "Amazingly, Sir Richard Whittington's charitable bequests are still benefiting people today. The almshouses were entrusted to the management of the Mercers Company who still administers them. Originally they were built on College Hill in the City of London. In the 19th century they were moved to Highgate and then in 1966, the almhouses were rebuilt in Felbridge, West Sussex. Sixty elderly women and a few married couples live in them. The charitable bequest has grown so much over the centuries that in 1822 the work of the trust was extended to cover paying an allowance to people on very low incomes. The beneficiaries of these out-pensions, as they are known, now number 300."

The Mercers Company, which still exists as a financial entity, distributes the interest from Whittington's money. Our guide told us that the amount of money today accumulated from Whittington's initial bequests 600 years ago now total in the billions of pounds! (Ethan, did I hear that right?)

Last week I learned another interesting fact: there are, in fact, two mayors in London. There is the Lord Mayor of the City of London, who has duties and responsibilities for the "square mile" called The City and who lives in the Mansion House, and there is the Mayor of London, who controls a much larger area. (He's currently an amusing fellow named Boris Johnson who was once a guest on Top Gear.) I, of course, would rather be the Lord Mayor!

When Ethan and I were at the Museum of London we saw the Lord Mayor's Coach, a very elaborate affair used every year for the Mayor's procession. Our guide told us that it was the worst ride in London, as it isn't sprung very well and with every bump gives a bone-rattling shake.

Last night I started watching a funny little European flick called Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky (2009). It's okay; the acting is pretty cool and it's hard to generate much sympathy for the main characters. It's noteworthy for depicting the scandalous premier of Stravinsky's ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) in 1913, but the film errs in some details. For one thing, the noise, hisses and tumult began almost immediately and built to fisticuffs - the film shows a slow rebellion to the music. The piece begins with a Russian folksong melody played in the extreme upper register of the bassoon. A story which may or may not be true: composer Camille Saint-Saens, hearing the opening notes, asked, affronted (Frenchmen are easy to affront), "What instrument is that?" When told it was a bassoon, he replied, "If that is a bassoon then I am a baboon!" (Guess what, Camille?)

Another thing: I've always read that Stravinsky was watching the piece performed from the wings - in the film he's in the audience. Well, no matter. I give the film credit for showing this curious bit of classical music history I've read about many times but have never seen depicted.

I posted an interesting photo my friend Mike found via his contact at the Burbank Aviation Museum: Four Famous Airplanes (parked at the Burbank airport). I didn't know that Hal Roach - the creator of the Little Rascals shorts - was an aviator, let alone a record holder.

I was very morose yesterday. After a farewell lunch in Alexandria with my wife and I, Ethan flew back to his home in Utah. I'm tired of being 2,100 miles away from my kids... My Webelos Den meeting last night was running kids around and having them do sit ups and push ups for an athletic requirement. I am now convinced that the main talent needed for running a Webelos Den is vocal volume. I really didn't want to be there and wasn't enjoying myself at all, but the kids seemed to enjoy it nonetheless.

Tomorrow may or may not be the start of what I call the yard sale season, which runs from sometime in March to around November (it peaks in May/June). As tomorrow is supposed to be mainly sunny and with a high near 59, I look forward to cruising around in my VW with the top down!

Have a great weekend!

17 May 2011

My son Ethan gets on a plane and returns to Utah later today after his nearly two week Spring break. I always become glum when one of my kids leaves after a visit. I wish they lived in Virginia so that I could see them more often.

Tonight I have a Webelos scouts den meeting to run, but, frankly, I don't really feel capable of giving any service. It'll be a fill-up-an-hour-of-time kind of thing, I'm afraid. Run 'em around for the Athlete activity pin...

Last night I watched an fascinating short documentary, The London Nobody Knows (1967), with James Mason. I saw it on a DVD for sale for some outrageous price at the London Museum and took a note to see if I could find it on Netflix. (I keep a stubby pencil and some small Post-It notes in wallet for this exact purpose.) Turned out, it was on youtube for free! In it, Mason visited one of the remaining Victorian public loos (c. 1897) still in operation in London - I'll make seeking one out an activity for the next time I visit. Funny quote: "All men are equal in the eyes of a lavatory attendant."

And in it Mason also visited one of the sites in Spitalfields where a Jack the Ripper murder took place. He said that some of the local old timers remembered the murders... as there as 79 years between 1967 and 1888, he must have met somebody who recalls some talk about it as a very young child. One of the reasons why I haven't yet bothered to visit the Whitechapel section of London where the Ripper murders took place is because the area has changed dramatically from what it was (slums) in 1888. I'm not sure it would be worth a visit. Frankly, just looking at the photos on this page is adequate for me.

It's interesting that Mason mentions the artist Walter Sickert (my son and I saw one of his paintings on display last week); according to crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, Sickert was really Jack the Ripper. I read her Jack the Ripper book where she asserts this - it's not very convincing. The case she makes is pretty much that Sickert was Jack the Ripper because she insists he was.

I also learned a new term from watching this documentary, "meths." In it, lower-class, drunken Londoners are seen drinking a pinkish drink which I assumed was gin. Turns out it's meths, or methylated spirits, or denatured alcohol. You'd have to be pretty desperate to drink the stuff. I guess, being a solvent, it's cheaper than ordinary booze.

The production also shows some of the Summer of Love beautiful people in Chelsea holding flowers and self-consciously looking groovy. For a brief, embarrassing moment in time in the Sixties, ancient London was "swinging." ("England swings like a pendulum do/Bobbies on bicycles two by two/Westminster Abbey, the Tower of Big Ben/The rosy red cheeks of the little children...") Paugh.

I am now reading Neptune's Inferno -- The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal by James M. Hornfischer, a two-fisted, exciting, Death to the Japs! he-man tale of American sailors at war in the South Pacific lent to me by my pard Don, a two-fisted, he-man ex-sailor who now occasionally "fights" with Mister Lincoln's (reenacted) Army. I'm only sixteen pages into it but so far it's promising.

Yesterday I mentioned Amway and a reader commented upon it. Having gone to BYU in central Utah, I have some knowledge of it as well as other multi-level marketing (MLM) entities. They're popular there. It has always been odd to me that an area which is characterized by religious faith seems to be so unconcerned about the Law of the Harvest - As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap. Everyone wants to make the fast bucks. Either that or they entirely misinterpret the Law.

By the time I had spent four years at BYU getting my engineering degree and we were preparing to leave the area, my wife and I took stock of all the wacky MLM and product approaches we had been hit up for and came up with fifteen or so. From Amway to powdered milk to little canisters of mace which fit in purses to impossibly low prices on new cars to switching from whole life to term insurance plans (A.L. Williams - now rebranded as Primerica) - it was unrelenting. In order to survive you really have to learn how to say "I'm not interested" and mean it.

Anyway, while I have occasionally seen Amway products for sale at yard sales (by disappointed Amway marketers, I'm guessing), I never knew anyone other than Amway dealers who ever used the stuff. My primary complaint about the Amway system (and other MLMs) is that it encourages people to view their friends as potential employees. And it's also responsible for the creation of some truly horrible motivational music. (I'd link to some examples, but it appears that April Winchell took down her wonderful mp3 site.)

Your first clue that Amway is dodgy is usually by the way it's introduced to you. From an actual conversation my wife once had with an acquaintance in Utah back in 1980:

Gal: Hi, Cari! Say... there's a seminar I'd like to invite you to later this week. It's about how to manage your money and build your dreams. Are you interested?
Cari: I don't know. Maybe. Who's giving it?
Gal: A multi-national corporation who specializes in helping people to attain wealth.
Cari: (Pause) Is this Amway?
Gal: (Longer pause) Yes.
Cari: No, thanks.

The Amway brand became somewhat tarnished via word of mouth so they went online as "Quixtar" in the Nineties; I think this is now their primary marketing vehicle, but I'm not sure. I haven't checked the website. Frankly, I'm a little afraid to!

Want some fun? Google "amway exposed" and check out the various "I used to be an Amway upline" stories. It's a really interesting view of this odd cult of affluence.

16 Mar 2011

I am now reading a facile little book about pursuing your dreams, The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. A woman at work lent it to me when I saw it on her bookshelf... I asked to borrow it because the illustrations are by Jean "Moebius" Giraud, a French artist whose work I like.

It reads like something handed out at an Amway convention. I call it facile because its truths - insofar as they are represented as being such, perhaps they're not - seem too simplistic and pat. While I suspect that truth is simple and what scientists call "elegant," I also think it's profound. Perhaps I've been exposed to way too much "pursue your dreams" language in our Oprahsized America (especially when the Olympics roll around) to really like this book much. I also tried to read The Richest Man in Babylon but gave that one up for pretty much the same reasons.

Re: Moebius. I used to read Heavy Metal when I was in the Marines and always looked forward to Moebius' art. He did odd stories like The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius and other sci-fi stories whose plot was often told by his excellent line drawings alone.

One continuing tale I liked was called 1996 by Chantal Montellier; it depicted the adventures of a young man driving through a post apocalyptic urban wasteland in search of a junkyard called "Belpav" for fog lights for his Checker cab. An attraction of this strip was its use of extremely colloquial English rendered in an almost indecipherable phonetic spelling - this frame gives a good idea of what I'm talking about. Part of the challenge in this strip was trying to figure out what people were saying! My pal Mike and I took to calling the Sun Valley junkyards we went to to keep our Lincoln Continentals running "Belpav" out of respect to this work. I wonder if 1996 has been reprinted in a book... I recall the kid getting getting to Belpav (where rotting corpses sat in decaying cars), but I don't recall what happened after that.

When I first visited the Antietam battlefield in 1984 I learned something important (in addition to "war is hell"): You can read about a battle all you like, but until you actually visit the site and walk around where the troops maneuvered and fought, you won't really have a clear idea of what happened there. So it was with expectation that Ethan and I visited Senlac Ridge in Battle, Sussex, England - the site of the Battle of Hastings fought in 1066 between Duke William of Normandy and King Harold II of England. (The name is something of a misnomer since the actual battlefield is about six miles north of Hastings, in the little town of Battle.)

We walked the long battlefield route from the base of the hill where the Normans staged their attacks to the ridge along which Harold's Saxons set up their shield wall. (My photos of the battlefield start here.) But in doing this a puzzle emerged, what I call the Hastings Problem.

After the battle, when Duke William consolidated his gains and became King William of England, he ordered that a church be established on the site of the battle; tradition holds that the site of the altar is where Harold was killed, whether by an arrow in the eye or by being cut down by swordsmen or both, we do not know. One of the sights I insisted upon seeing was the plaque set into the ground that describes this spot. But there's a problem. This spot is considerably away from where the park interpretative plaques and material claim the battle took place. In fact, the spot is considerably left of where the center of the Saxon line would have been - according to the materials at the park. I can only come up with a number of possibilities:

Possibility #1.) Harold waged the battle from the Saxon left, where he fell. And the battlefield is where the park says it was, in the fields and slopes down from the 13th C. monastery. But this doesn't make sense. A commander trying to control his forces stages himself more or less in the center so as to be more aware of what's going on and to minimize the amount of time it takes to get his instructions to the ends of his line. Harold famously fought with his men in the ranks, which was probably a mistake as it lessened the amount of control he could exert on his deployment. After all, if you're busy plunging your axe repeatedly into attacking Normans it's hard to concern yourself with or control what's going on elsewhere on the battlefield. Was Harold this bad of a captain?

Possibility #2.) Did Harold start off in the Saxon center and wind up on the left because of pressure from the Norman attacks? This suggests that the attacks on the Norman left were more successful than the attacks on the Norman right, and that tactically the Normans were able to push the shield wall back on a sort of a pivot. But there's a problem with this as well: William's left was composed of Breton troops, not Normans, who faltered early in the battle. It seems hard to believe that tactical success would come from this side.

Possibility #3.) The battlefield in fact was much bigger than what is represented by the park, and where Harold fell was the Saxon center. But there's a problem with this, too. I've seen how much space is taken up by 4,000 men (the approximate number of both Harold and William's forces) on a field from Civil War reenacting. If you stretched 4,000 men across a field to form a shield wall with the traditional spot of where Harold fell as the center, you'd have a very thin shield wall indeed.

Possibility #4.) That whole business about where Harold fell is bogus and he fell elsewhere, more towards the Saxon right of the present spot. But the 1066 battle became famous just after it concluded, and it is very likely that at least some of the men who fought there returned and pointed out where things happened on what was likely the most memorable day of their lives. (This sort of thing happened all the time at Gettysburg.) It's hard to believe that they'd get the spot of where an English king fell wrong. But then, these are people who believed that a sliver of wood was a fragment of The Real Cross, or that a tiny bit of bone from a saint could miraculously cure illnesses. In a word, they were gullible. No telling what mistruths circulated after the battle.

Well. I'm going to have to read a detailed account of the battle - as detailed as can be established from the scant contemporary accounts - and try to make up my own mind. I've read many books about this battle, decades ago. Having visited the site, however, it seems I need to start all over again. Or leave the Hastings Puzzle unresolved - which isn't in my nature.

15 Mar 2011

My dental coverage with Blue Cross/Blue Shield sucks! I have to have a root canal and a crown fitted to the premolar tooth that broke in London: $2K, three office visits (the first of which was yesterday). But at least that part of my mouth is no longer sensitive to cold, as it has been for a long time; I've been putting this off for years. The dentist looked at the x-ray and said, "You haven't felt any pain? It looks like the nerve is almost exposed. You must have a low sensitivity to tooth pain." I assured her that I knew by past experience I did not.

"There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently." - Shakespeare

But I at least missed a staff meeting at work while I was having the root canal. If I had to have a preference, I'd actually choose the root canal. Why? Despite the discomfort, one feels at least that something positive results from it.

And that, Cari, is how much I dislike meetings.

Since arriving back from London I've been going through tub after tub of childhood artifacts with my son, as I did with my daughters on previous visits. Bottle caps, pogs, reams of art, class assignments, key fobs, action figures, commemorative glass Coke bottles, diaries, etc. The idea is to throw stuff out that's not needed or wanted and to lessen the load on the rafters of the garage attic if I can. I've also repatriated baby stacking cups and Matchbox cars with one another, and thrown out newspapers that we thought would prove to be historic 10+ years ago, but aren't. (We kept the Washington Times issue from 9/12/01 that says INFAMY in big letters.) There are only a relative handful of goods that I still have from my childhood - this is not the case with my children! There are about 18 tubs of goods between the three of them.

Also, no more yard sale Lego sets for grandchildren who do not presently exist! Moratorium on the used Lego set purchases!

I made the mistake of allowing my son up the stairs and into the attic to look around. As he climbed up he complained that I always tell him to be careful where he steps so as to not put his foot through the drywall garage ceiling. Needless to say, he put his foot through the garage drywall ceiling, so there's another #%!^%@! drywall patch I need to do. I HATE doing drywall repair. I've done this twice myself. Grrrr. I think I may install some pieces of plywood up there so this doesn't happen again.

Alice Cooper to reunite with his surviving 1970's band mates. Glam rock was all the style in 1972-1974 when I was in high school, so that's what I listened to (in addition to classical). Alice was an especial favorite. I see that he's been inducted into that contradiction in terms, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Isn't rock supposed to be about flouting authority and things like Halls of Fame? No matter - good for him, I suppose. Getting his former band mates to take part in the celebrations is a touch of class, I think. Well... insofar as a guy who made a career out of staged violence and gruesomeness can be consider classy. Whatever. While on that Caribbean cruise a few months back I listened to Alice's School's Out Lp on my iPod and found it nostalgically amusing and even pleasurable to listen to. Can't say that for anything by Boston and Led Zeppelin, who were insufferably overplayed thirty years ago. I liked Kashmir and More Than a Feeling the first 4,327 times I heard it.

My good lady wife and I drove to the library the other day and saw that the forsythia is once again blooming in the parking lot, and will soon be a riot of bold yellow color. This never fails to cheer me. I love Northern Virginia... we get four proper seasons here, and April in this part of the country is beautiful indeed. This place is so delightful that even the air smells sweet, what with the honeysuckle and lavender.

I am now watching Phaedra, a 1962 movie adaptation of Euripides' play Hippolytus. It's set in the modern day, that is, 1962. It's okay. I would have preferred it set in ancient Greece. It stars Melina Mercouri, a Greek actress who is somewhat like Irene Pappas in that she is not beautiful in the way we normally define the term, but is nonetheless compelling. She was politically active, and was a strong advocate for the return of the Parthenon marbles, known as the Elgin Marbles (after Lord Elgin, who removed them to the British Museum). Ethan and I saw these last week. While on the face of it I am an advocate of Greek art being kept in Greece, look what happened to some of the Egyptian art held in Cairo!

Some flags are being flown at half-staff today in memory of Army Corporal W. Frank Buckles, the last surviving American veteran of World War I, and in remembrance of the generation of American veterans of World War I. Corporal Buckles is being buried today at Arlington National Cemetery. Rest in peace, old soldier.

14 Mar 2011

I'm back! Ethan and I had a wonderful time... it was really a lot of fun. And I think I surpassed my own high standards for seeing as many things as possible in a short amount of time.

I have finished my LONDON 2011 PICASA PHOTO ALBUM - I added stuff to it and reformatted things, etc. It's a nice keepsake. I wonder how long it'll be online... (Ethan once built a website in 1999 and then abandoned it. It's still up.) Anyway, check it out. I like that I was able to get an in-flight shot of Heathrow as we left and Cape Cod as we arrived in the United States - 21st C. Pilgrims.

A number of things struck me on this visit:

- The staff at the museums are wonderful people. I get the impression that they live for an educated, interested visitor to strike up a conversation about the things on display. At Guildhall we encountered a delightful Canadian woman who seemed to love talking about the paintings and of London in general, and at the British Museum we found a docent who enthusiastically gave us some tips about mudlarking on the Thames. At the V&A Museum an older fellow let us into the base of the reproduction of Trajan's Column so we could see how the Victorians built the structure. This is an entirely different experience from the great majority of the museum staff in the D.C. attractions, who seem uninterested and/or busy or don't know what's in the facility at all.

- A London Tourism Tip: If you want to see London from high up (I personally like being at high, windy places), there are a number of ways to do it. The most flashy, touristy and expensive way to do it is via the British Airways "Eye," an enormous Ferris Wheel that makes a rotation every half hour. You get a great view - close to Big Ben/Parliament. But this ride is about 15 quid (about $24 right now) and lasts only 30 minutes. Far better, I thought, was the hike up to the St. Paul dome "golden walkway." For somewhat less than that price you get admission to all of St. Paul's (which is an incredible place), access to the lower dome walkway and "whispering gallery," and, when the golden walkway is open, a spectacular, open-air view.

It was also very cool to see the construction of the dome superstructure as I climbed; I reflected upon the story I once saw related in a video about an incendiary bomb being wedged in some rafters during the Blitz. Fortunately, it went out on its own, causing no damage. You also get a major physical workout going up those circular stairs. But you can get a great view of London on the cheap, too, by paying only 3 quid and hiking the 311 stairs up to the observation deck of the Monument. Good photo ops! Not quite as spectacular as the golden walkway of St. Paul's but still very nice. And you get a handsome, frameable cardstock certificate when you get back down - mine is going in my office. I had it inside the front of my shirt all day long, to keep it from getting rumpled (a trick I learned in Marine Corps boot camp).

- Last time I was in London with my daughter I noticed stairs on the embankment leading down to the Thames shore, and knew something about the "mudlarkers," the people who walk about the shore looking for objects, usually clay pipes. (I once read a book which took place in Victorian London; in it the mudlarkers were depicted as the lowest form of social life. They combed the shore and sewer systems - a dangerous thing since the tides change rapidly - looking for dropped coins.) So Ethan and I took some time when the Thames was low (tidal heights are published on the web) to walk about looking for stuff. A docent at the British Museum suggested we try the north banks near where London Bridge was anciently, and I was surprised to see literally hundreds of clay pipe fragments and stem sections all around. I took perhaps twenty, and some various bits of blue and white delft tiles and pottery. Ethan found a couple of bowl fragments. How old is this stuff? I read that disposable clay pipes were first manufactured in the 1500's, and can date from then to the late 1700's. All sorts of things wash up... bronze age daggers, medieval silver coins, pilgrim badges, pottery, buckles, etc. It was fun, and I shall add mudlarking to my list of things to do in this grand city.

- If you go to the Tate Modern museum you can send a fifteen second video greeting to somebody via email. (You can send multiple greetings, actually.) I like this kind of thing; it's fun. The actual artwork in the Tate I was less impressed with... in general, I find that big, silly canvasses work better as portrait color and backgrounds than as art. (Another example.)

- A fun and cheap little Thames river expedition is the Tate Boat from Tate Britain to Tate Modern. It's only three quid ($5) if you use an Oyster card - and why wouldn't you? - and it provides great views of Parliament and the Eye.

I'll post more London stuff later this week as I think of it, I'm sure. Suffice to say that I'm 3 1/2 pounds lighter due to all the walking I did last week and now finally over the effects of jet-lag and the conversation to daylight saving time. Whew. I felt groggy all day Saturday and yesterday.

Later today I go to the dentist to get my broken tooth fixed, or, more probably, crowned. Joy. Chewing on food and finding bits of what feels like sand is not pleasant. Ethan gave me the U.K. equivalent of a Good-N-Plenty at Westminster Abbey and I wondered why the crackly candy coating was so hard... later that evening during dinner at Convent Garden I again chomped on some tooth fragment when I forgot to chew on the other side of my mouth. Good thing there was no pain - that would have messed up the trip somewhat.

10 Mar 2011

Went to the London Museum and the British Museum today. Posted photos here.

The British Museum is huge... you can't go there and expect to see everything. The largest and best museum I have ever seen. Superlatives, superlatives, superlatives.

9 Mar 2011

Posted more photos. Had an awesome day. Took illegal photos in Westminster Abbey where we prayed to Edward the Confessor (died in 1066) in a little private ceremony (it was cool because we saw his shrine), got rained on a little in Covent Garden when we ate dinner on the curb and I cracked off bits of a tooth twice. Ethan saw prints by Stanley Donwood, who does Radiohead's art. And no, I can't pretend that I have heard anything by Radiohead.

8 Mar 2011

Visited the Battle of Hastings site in Battle, Sussex, England today. Wow. I've wanted to visit this place ever since I was a teenager. (See topical link below for an account of how obsessed I was.) Posted lots of photos here. It was something of a spiritual experience for me. We also did about an hour at the National Gallery as it closed. We shall return.

Tomorrow Ethan and I visit another fabulous English history site, Westminster Abbey - the site of an upcoming wedding on 29 April. The guy at St. Paul's told me, "I wish they would have had it here. Why couldn't they have had it here?"

7 Mar 2011

Lots of tourism today! I surpassed my own high standards for getting around and seeing things...

6 Mar 2011

Added new photos to my Picasa Photo Album. The Tower of London was, as always, incredible. Tate Modern less so.

5 Mar 2011

Hooray! We're in London having arrived safely. I posted some photos of Saturday's tourism on my Picasa Photo Page. (Link below.)

4 Mar 2011

Right now I'm digitizing John Lennon's 1974 Lp Walls and Bridges. I had forgotten how good it is... I've always liked #9 Dream, especially Ken Ascher's string arrangement, which makes the song. It's his third "dream" song, after I'm Only Sleeping and I'm So Tired. He claimed that the idea of two women calling out to him came in a dream, and he identified these as Yoko Ono and May Pang (with whom he was living at the time, estranged from Yoko). Significantly not his Aunt Mimi, the authority figure from his youth.

I just learned that there was another John Lennon, a British sailor who lived from 1768-1846. He was involved in our War of 1812; in fact, he was involved in a naval action with Maryland hero Joshua Barney. (And that last paragraph was for the benefit of my pard Don, who likes American naval history.) I wonder if the two Lennons were in any way related...

In fact John Lennon (the Beatle) was also something of a sailor. In June 1980 he took an interesting sea voyage - you can read about it here. I liked this account: "...the sail from Newport, R.I., to Hamilton, Bermuda, was an epic voyage for Lennon. On day three, the Megan Jaye ran into rough weather and, one by one, the crew fell ill from pitching seas. Lennon, after 15 minutes at the wheel in his foul-weather gear, began to get his sea legs. He said the feeling was just like going on stage. “At first you panic and then you’re ready to throw up your guts,” Lennon recalled in a Playboy interview after his trip. “But once you got out there and start doing all the stuff, you forget your fears and you got high on your performance. So there I was at the wheel with the wind and sea lashing out at me. At first I was terrified, but Captain Hank was at my side so I felt relatively safe because I knew he wouldn’t let me do anything stupid. After a while Captain Hank wasn’t feeling too well so he went to the cabin below. Once I accepted the reality of the situation, something greater than me took over and all of a sudden I lost my fear. I actually began to enjoy the experience and I started to shout out old sea shanties in the face of the storm, screaming at the thundering sky.” John Lennon! The Beatle! In a Lennon biography I read a year or so ago, the writer speculated that deep within every Liverpudlian is a seafaring soul. Indeed, Lennon's father spent a career on the sea.

In another few days I shall walk where John Lennon walked, in front of the EMI Studios in London. There's a low wall where people write things like "Strawberry Fields Forever," etc. I think I'll scrawl a favorite saying of my father: "Fools' names and fools' faces often appear in public places."

I posted a cool old photo of a Ford dealership in Burbank yesterday. How can I date it to the early 1960's? Note the Thunderbird at the far left side of the photo. It's one of the 1961-1963 "surfboard" body styled ones - I was crazy for those when I was a kid. Note also the little flags suspended by a wire strung over the lot; that's an enduring memory of car lots in the 1960's, those flags flapping in the wind. I loved looking at cars at night, the glare of the neon signs, the sound of those little flags... very evocative.

Total and complete awesomeness. My son Ethan flew in to town yesterday and tonight we board a British Airways jet (no bed bugs, I hope) and fly to London for a week. We fly all night and arrive early Saturday morning. Since I can't sleep on planes, especially the BA ones which are really cramped, I'm considering dropping a couple of Benadryls when I get seated to get some sleep. The first time I did London I got very little sleep but spent the entire day and well into the night sightseeing anyway, running on adrenalin. One my first day I arrived back at the flat at 1 AM after a late jaunt to look at the Tower of London; I recall walking down High Street Kensington in a haze.

The only blog updates I will make next week, if any, will be to point to my Picasa Web Album where I will post captioned photos of our London sightseeing. Ethan is bringing his laptop and I'm planning to once again use the public WAN at the McDonald's across the street, so I'll try to keep in touch. (Really, I'm in the wrong line of work. I should have been a reporter or a foreign correspondent. I like doing that kind of thing.)

The weather forecast doesn't look bad at all for the coming week in London: Generally in the mid to high 40's, usually sunny, at the most a 20% probability of rain on one day. Wow. But I'll believe it when I see it.

Have a great weekend... I certainly will!

3 Mar 2011

Elvis the Impaler. (A visual joke for those of you who know something about Wallachian history.)

Yesterday I heard somebody in the elevator say to someone else, "Could you name all the presidents of the United States? I couldn't." Wondering if I could, I sat down with a piece of paper to try.

In about ten minutes I got them all except for William Harrison, Benjamin Harrison, Chester A. Arthur and Zachary Taylor. The first three are rather undistinguished, I think, but I was really annoyed with myself for missing "Old Rough and Ready" Taylor as he figured in American military history - and his careless, informal sartorial style influenced Ulysses S. Grant.

Martin Van Buren is memorable to me for two reasons: 1.) He famously told Mormon leaders suffering injustice under the infamous Missouri Extermination Law that, "Gentlemen, your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you." Weasel. 2.) I read in a genealogical article once that all of the English-Scots-Irish stock U.S. Presidents are distantly related to one another with the exception of Van Buren, who was Dutch. But that was before Barack Obama took office. I'm guessing that he's related to none of them. (Time passes as I do research): Nope. Looks like Van Buren and Obama are also distantly related in some way.

Now here's something interesting (from the link above): "...according to Genealogics and Roglo, HM Queen Elizabeth II is among the closest living relatives of George Washington, through their descent from Augustus Warner, Burgess of Virginia." And what do Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama have in common (nothing political, obviously)? They are both descendants of Irish king Brian Boru!

By the way, one of the things we Mormons excel at is genealogy, and we often present family histories to American presidents. I'm guessing that the church leadership thinks not only is it a really nice thing to do, but that it engenders good feelings towards us. Whatever. Here's our President Monson presenting President Obama with five leather-bound volumes of his ancestors. FIVE volumes! Gee, I wish somebody had done that for me - I'd be pick-me-off-the-floor flabbergasted. But, I've done that kind of thing for myself. And every now and then somebody gives me a stunning lead. A few years back one French-Canadian researcher linked my mother's line with a bunch of notable Canadians - and, sadly, Madonna. But you take the bad with the good. It's cool to be related to Jack Kerouac and the inventor of the snowmobile.

Last night I watched The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story (2009), about the songwriting team of Richard and Robert Sherman. Never heard of them? You've heard their music: they wrote scads of songs and scores for Disney productions (Mary Poppins, Jungle Book) and theme parks. Yes, they were the ones who inflicted It's a Small World After All upon a hapless theme park visiting public. The documentary was excellent in that it highlighted their amazing career, but a flat failure at explaining why the brothers - and, weirdly, their families - became badly estranged. From a review of the documentary: "Then the most compelling question - if the Shermans hated each other so much, why have they worked together for more than 50 years? - becomes the center of the movie." Becomes the center, yes, but this question is never answered. The viewer is left to guess. A really bad case of sibling rivalry? Unfulfilled career desires? Resentment over some meaningful personal incident? A simple personality mismatch? We never learn.

A Village Voice review of this documentary makes a good point: "Disney musicals from the '50s and '60s have a push-pull effect on many folks who grew up loving the stuff, then felt a need to distance themselves from it as young adults, only to rediscover the poignancy, sophistication, and melancholy of the music once again as adults." How true! I have become familiar with a lot of music since I saw Mary Poppins as a child with my mother in 1964. Classical, pop, rock, subtle, explosive, hyper-emotional, gentle... there are many other adjectives I could employ for all the music I've grown to like. And yet when I hear that heart-breaking minor key orchestral middle part in 3/4 time in "Feed the Birds," I am amazed that I never regarded this song as the masterwork it is. I remember crying in the movie theater when I first heard it when I was eight - I was often affected strongly by music - but afterwards it became a part of my childhood, to be put away while I pursued more grown-up things.

Feed the Birds was Walt Disney's favorite Sherman Brothers song; when he visited the boys in their office he'd simply say, "Play it." It's mentioned in the 45th anniversary DVD release that Feed the Birds is the emotional center of the movie. I know why; I had a revelation about it when I last visited St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

You may recall that the little boy has saved tuppence. His father, who works at the Bank of England (just down the street from St. Paul's) wants him to save it and start responsible fiscal habits. His nanny Mary Poppins, however, sings to him about feeding the birds. Being young and tender-hearted, he disappoints his father by declaring that he wants to use his tuppence feed the birds. Despite the fact that the two sites are but a short walk away, there's a wide gap in symbolic meaning between them. St. Paul's, where the poor woman looks after the birds, represents the spiritual capital of a great nation, and the Bank of England represents its financial power. St. Paul's is an incredibly beautiful building; one is invited to look up at the dome and consider God. The Bank of England is, for the most part, a featureless gray wall inhabiting an entire city block. It is ugly; indeed, it's known as the "Old Lady of Threadneedle Street."

The Bank of England represents the father, who is in thrall to his job and barely knows his own children - a wretched state of affairs. St. Paul's represents the things of the spirit and the remedy that Mary Poppins seeks to instill in the family, a reconnection of the father to his family. By the end of the film the father, having lost his job, finds his family. And thank goodness for that. Sometimes we find what's really important in the simplest of acts, like flying a kite or feeding the birds, tuppence a bag.

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