With the switch from analog to digital Television, Stations wound up with sub channels.For example the NBC affiliate here in Columbus, Ohio is channel 4.After the switch there is channel 4.1, the primary that broadcasts the NBC lineup. There is also channel 4.2. The PBS affiliate WOSU has three channels of programming. With these new outlets, programming had to be found.
For these sub channels new networks sprang up. ME TV, Antennae TV and THIS are the three here in Central Ohio. ME TV and Antennae TV show sitcoms and dramas from the 50's through the 80's. Most cable systems stick these up in the high channels on the box, if they even carry them.
I may be mature but I don't remember a lot of 50's TV. Superman and the Mickey Mouse Club, of course. Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo.Most of the so-called "Golden Age Of Television" aired after I went to bed.
Some were early enough or I got to see them somehow are etched in my memory. "The Honeymooners". "The Twilight Zone". "Perry Mason". "Peter Gunn" with that amazing Mancini theme and Noir sensibilities."The Phil Silvers Show".And of course "I Love Lucy". So if I can really remember only a few well, what better than these?
Since I don't have cable I have rediscovered shows I vaguely remember or those my family didn't watch.
"Perry Mason" in the early seasons had an intriguing pulp feel. I have found the vaunted "Untouchables" OK. "Combat" with the late Vic Morrow had it's moments. For some reason WWII France looks a lot like Southern California. "Wanted Dead Or Alive" is a gritty, formulaic little western with a very young Steve McQueen.
A show I had heard of but had never seen airs in ME TV's Sunday late night Noir block. "The Naked City". The show's ending tag line was "There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them."
This police drama was unusual for being filmed on location instead of a studio back lot. It was also filmed in New York City which became a dominate character, setting the mood and feel.
Looking at these old shows I am struck by the quality of writing and acting. Those are traits that are sorely lacking on a lot of today's offerings. I would much rather watch Jackie Gleason in his prime than say, "Two Broke Girls" which is inexplicably a hit.
In "The Naked City" they used a semi anthology format that highlighted the stories of the guest stars, rather than the regulars. The writing was taut. The black and white cinematography had a gritty feel and was superb by late 50', early 60's standards. Though I owned some of the cars seen there I had forgotten just how big they were. The era of big Detroit Steel. You could impale yourself on the fin of a Sixty Chevy.
The show premiered in 1958 starring a young James Franciscus. He was replaced in 1960 by Paul Burke who played a sensitive, cerebral cop, an anomaly in that era.
Since it was filmed in NYC they used New York actors, many who later become stars. For a lot of them this was their first appearance in a TV drama. The talent exposed by this series is amazing and reads a lot like a who's who in American film.
A partial list.
Robert Duvall. Rip Torn. Telly Savalas (with hair). Jack Klugman. Peter Falk. Gene Hackman. Vic Morrow. Ed Asner. Cecily Tyson. James Caan,. James Coburn. Alan Alda. Robert Redford. Peter Fonda. Bruce Dern. Dennis Hopper. Tuesday Weld. Suzanne Pleshette. Jean Stapleton. Rod Steiger. Dustin Hoffman. William Shatner. Christopher Walken. Simply amazing. It is wonderful to see the early work by these people.
"The Naked City" was respected enough to attract established actors also.
Again, a list.
George C. Scott. Lee J. Cobb. Walter Matthau. Kim Hunter. Eli Wallach. Jack Warden. Claude Rains. Mickey Rooney. Burgess Meredith. Keenan Wynn. In a rare film appearance Sanford Meisner the acting teacher was cast
Without strong scripts many of these established actors would not have come to New York to work in a TV show. I have found this show a delightful diversion. It is always a treat to see actors I respect in their early work. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of whom they will become.
As a Noir fan I am drawn in by the gritty look which is perfect for a police drama set in the Big Apple.
After watching "The Naked City" and other gems this may have truly been a golden era. Too bad many of the live drama anthologies didn't survive to be seen today. I'll enjoy what we have. Take a chance and look the old B & W shows over. You may have a bit of fun.
Showing posts with label memoir. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memoir. Show all posts
Monday, September 9, 2013
Monday, August 26, 2013
Fear and Loathing in a new Millennium: I miss Hunter Thompson
I discovered him in the pages of Rolling Stone.
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. His prose, viewpoint and voice changed in explosive ways the way I viewed the world, politics and writing in general.
To me he was an anarchist unleashed in print, striding the world as a larger than life figure. With laser like precision he lobbed firebombs at convention. He eviscerated celebrity and politicians with intellect, inspired joy and at times, brilliant insanity.
His coverage of the 1972 election cycle was presented in issues of Rolling Stone. The viewpoint was seemingly a drug and alcohol fueled frenzy that belied the prescient despair for America's political future. It is in my opinion the best first person account of the American political process ever penned. The visceral horror he showed us was only shades of what would eventually become the norm.
Those dispatches from the bitter battlefield of modern America was collected and published as "Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail". This book should be required reading for any Historian, Political Science major, pundit wannabe or a sane person trying to understand modern political insanity as it happened in real time.
Doctor Thompson presented as a proud, intellectually secure anarchist. He held all our institutions in disdain. Hunter was alternately, whimsical, vicious, bemused and bewildered by the social ruins he wandered through. Often as a provocateur rather than an observer.
Looking back Hunter Thompson and Richard Nixon were natural enemies. Like the cobra and the mongoose. Together they defined the American experience of 70's America.
Nixon showed us the venality of anything goes, end justifies the means and leave your opponents corpse rotting by the road school of American political life. He was a master media manipulator even as it turned on and devoured him. Nixon was the walking dead in the American nightmare. Throughout his life he was repeatedly destroyed politically and left for dead. He always rose, stronger and haunted us anew.
Nixon was destroyed when he lost his run for California Governor in 1962. He displayed a hint of his arrogant, vicious disdain for America as he lashed out. "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore", he promised. He lied.
From '62 to '68 Nixon travelled the US like the Ancient Mariner. A shade seeking salvation while doomed to wander aimlessly.
He attended Republican fundraisers in places most of us didn't realize existed. He collected political IOU's like we collected baseball cards. If it would give him an edge in his quest for the Presidency he would cut the ribbon at a new Pet Store. Again he was reinventing himself. The vicious, venal cold warrior was replaced by a visionary statesman.
After he was hounded from office, one step ahead of impeachment, he was a disgraced Republican pariah. No candidate would be caught dead anywhere near him. Rather than fade away he arose again as an elder statesman. The criminal bastard was treated as if his outlook on world and domestic issues even mattered.
At his funeral he was eulogized as an important personage in American History. That he was. The thug that singlehandedly nearly destroyed the Country. It seems this time they drove a stake through that evil demonic prick's heart. He hasn't risen from the dead like an American vampire as he was wont to do for decades.
For far too long I was a cable TV installer. Once I was hooking up cable for a woman here in Columbus. It was a rather upscale apartment complex of the type Central Ohio is rife with. She was moving in and in one room were framed photos of the Trickster. Autographed. I may have looked askance at them. Obviously she saw I despised the disgraced, not rotting in prison, former President. She looked me in the eyes and said,"You're one of those, aren't you?" i replied than indeed I was. She had helped on his memoirs. She asked me to leave when I asked if she planned to write more fiction.
Hunter Thompson went after Nixon like a terrier after a rat. He exposed to us the underbelly of a man obsessed with power at any cost, A man that would do anything to get it . And anything to keep it.
With Dick, as with everything else he did, Hunter said exactly what he felt about Nixon. He gave voice to a generation that learned to despise RMN. And he put Nixon into context of a nation in a death spiral. Thompson was my Salinger. A worthy successor to Twain as a commentator on the foibles and phantoms of society. He pulled no punches. He was honest in his views. He was intellectually consistent. The prose was a epee in the hands of a master.
Thompson eviscerated the George W. Bush Presidency with the same glee and profanely, precise view he had of Nixon. He showed us that Bush/Cheney was the successor to the corruption Nixon wrote the playbook for. He exposed their hatred for American political convention. He told us how they took a prosperous nation at peace and turned us into a war waging debtor.
When Hunter took his life we lost a genius.
America lost a voice that transcended the petty noise that passes for commentary today. We need a hundred Thompsons today.
I'd settle for one.
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. His prose, viewpoint and voice changed in explosive ways the way I viewed the world, politics and writing in general.
To me he was an anarchist unleashed in print, striding the world as a larger than life figure. With laser like precision he lobbed firebombs at convention. He eviscerated celebrity and politicians with intellect, inspired joy and at times, brilliant insanity.
His coverage of the 1972 election cycle was presented in issues of Rolling Stone. The viewpoint was seemingly a drug and alcohol fueled frenzy that belied the prescient despair for America's political future. It is in my opinion the best first person account of the American political process ever penned. The visceral horror he showed us was only shades of what would eventually become the norm.
Those dispatches from the bitter battlefield of modern America was collected and published as "Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail". This book should be required reading for any Historian, Political Science major, pundit wannabe or a sane person trying to understand modern political insanity as it happened in real time.
Doctor Thompson presented as a proud, intellectually secure anarchist. He held all our institutions in disdain. Hunter was alternately, whimsical, vicious, bemused and bewildered by the social ruins he wandered through. Often as a provocateur rather than an observer.
Looking back Hunter Thompson and Richard Nixon were natural enemies. Like the cobra and the mongoose. Together they defined the American experience of 70's America.
Nixon showed us the venality of anything goes, end justifies the means and leave your opponents corpse rotting by the road school of American political life. He was a master media manipulator even as it turned on and devoured him. Nixon was the walking dead in the American nightmare. Throughout his life he was repeatedly destroyed politically and left for dead. He always rose, stronger and haunted us anew.
Nixon was destroyed when he lost his run for California Governor in 1962. He displayed a hint of his arrogant, vicious disdain for America as he lashed out. "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore", he promised. He lied.
From '62 to '68 Nixon travelled the US like the Ancient Mariner. A shade seeking salvation while doomed to wander aimlessly.
He attended Republican fundraisers in places most of us didn't realize existed. He collected political IOU's like we collected baseball cards. If it would give him an edge in his quest for the Presidency he would cut the ribbon at a new Pet Store. Again he was reinventing himself. The vicious, venal cold warrior was replaced by a visionary statesman.
After he was hounded from office, one step ahead of impeachment, he was a disgraced Republican pariah. No candidate would be caught dead anywhere near him. Rather than fade away he arose again as an elder statesman. The criminal bastard was treated as if his outlook on world and domestic issues even mattered.
At his funeral he was eulogized as an important personage in American History. That he was. The thug that singlehandedly nearly destroyed the Country. It seems this time they drove a stake through that evil demonic prick's heart. He hasn't risen from the dead like an American vampire as he was wont to do for decades.
For far too long I was a cable TV installer. Once I was hooking up cable for a woman here in Columbus. It was a rather upscale apartment complex of the type Central Ohio is rife with. She was moving in and in one room were framed photos of the Trickster. Autographed. I may have looked askance at them. Obviously she saw I despised the disgraced, not rotting in prison, former President. She looked me in the eyes and said,"You're one of those, aren't you?" i replied than indeed I was. She had helped on his memoirs. She asked me to leave when I asked if she planned to write more fiction.
Hunter Thompson went after Nixon like a terrier after a rat. He exposed to us the underbelly of a man obsessed with power at any cost, A man that would do anything to get it . And anything to keep it.
With Dick, as with everything else he did, Hunter said exactly what he felt about Nixon. He gave voice to a generation that learned to despise RMN. And he put Nixon into context of a nation in a death spiral. Thompson was my Salinger. A worthy successor to Twain as a commentator on the foibles and phantoms of society. He pulled no punches. He was honest in his views. He was intellectually consistent. The prose was a epee in the hands of a master.
Thompson eviscerated the George W. Bush Presidency with the same glee and profanely, precise view he had of Nixon. He showed us that Bush/Cheney was the successor to the corruption Nixon wrote the playbook for. He exposed their hatred for American political convention. He told us how they took a prosperous nation at peace and turned us into a war waging debtor.
When Hunter took his life we lost a genius.
America lost a voice that transcended the petty noise that passes for commentary today. We need a hundred Thompsons today.
I'd settle for one.
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Tin Soldiers and Nixon coming. May 4,1970 (REVISED: Video link added)
I was a High School Senior on May 4,1970.
I was at Whitehall-Yearling High School, in a suburb of Columbus Ohio.
I didn't know the world was going to change.
I came of age in the Sixties. Walter Cronkite showed me the world every night on channel 10, the CBS affiliate. I saw Jack Kennedy speak in Berlin and murdered in Dallas. I saw the dogs, fire hoses and clubs in Selma, Birmingham. Watts and Detroit went up in flames. I watched too many cities burn. I saw Martin Luther King say "I have a dream." I watched the aftermath of his being gunned down in Memphis.
I watched in awe as Bobby Kennedy campaigned for President in 1968. I saw the hope he brought to America. I was moved by the impassioned crowds, the soaring rhetoric. Bobby's speech the night Martin died, in the ghetto of Indianapolis, from the back of a flatbed truck was what may be the best speech of the last half of the twentieth century. In June of '68 Cronkite, like he did with JFK, tried to make sense of Bobby's death in L.A. for a stunned nation.
I saw the Days of Rage at the '68 Democratic Convention as the Chicago Police beat press and protesters alike into the ground.
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The Soviets crushed the Prague Spring. The United States and The Soviet Union were locked in a deadly dance of madness. Walter reported every night. The Sixties were not just fun, sex and music.
And there was Vietnam.
Always Vietnam. It wound itself through the psyche of America like a vicious parasite, dividing the nation. Young versus old. Longhair versus hardhat. Hawks and Doves. If you were white and had some means at all you could beat the draft. If you were poor or black you were in Saigon. The children of privilege supported the war and draft knowing they would never be in harm's way.
We young hit the streets to protest this travesty of a war. We tried to open the eyes of America to issues that festered and needed attention. We were called Commies. Un American. All we heard was Love it or leave it. My country right or wrong. It was the closest a white kid could ever get to being black. Stopped and searched for your looks. The way you were dressed. The music you were listening to. Police violence directed at you without recourse. America.
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The anti-war protests were dismissed by many as the work of the East and West coast elite intellectuals. Columbia and Harvard. UCLA and USC Berkeley. The middle of the nation was rather quiet as the big cities dealt with the anger of their children. There were protests but they were smaller in scale and rather well behaved.
The times they were changing.
Something we have never learned here in the US is when you violently try to crush a movement you risk radicalizing that movement.
There were calls for violent resistance and revolution. There were bombings. There were a few kidnappings. Protests turned into riots as rage built. And the body-count went on.
LBJ was the first President since Lincoln to use the word divisiveness in a speech. America for the first time in a century was poised for a civil war. All the bottled up issues we'd been in denial about were boiling and bubbling to the surface. Like the Civil War, the United States was turning upon itself. Father against son. Brother against brother. Mother against daughter.The racial divide was explosive. The war was not only a foreign policy issue it was a racial issue as well. It was a generational issue. The protests were the largest ever seen. Washington was a city under siege by it's own offspring.
In 1968 Bobby Kennedy may well have won the Presidency. On that night in June, in the Kitchen of The Ambassador Hotel, the future was irrevocably changed. We'll never know how America would be today.
Instead Richard Nixon, consummate politician he was , devised "The Southern Strategy" and "The Silent Majority" riding the politics of race, us versus them and fear to the White House. His vaunted "Secret Plan" was not to end the war but to win power at all costs. It blew up in his face.
There was a convergence of actions that would change the Nation occurring.
The SDS and others were wanting to show that opposition to the war wasn't simply a coastal rebellion by the intelligentsia. A show of widespread support in the heartland was needed.
The other action was Nixon invading Cambodia.
No one knew how badly this was going to end.
At the end of '69 and into 1970 members of the SDS and other groups spread out through the Big 10 talking to and organizing students across the midwest. I met a woman in an apartment just off the Ohio State Campus. All of us talked about the war and stopping it. I left after about an hour or so. It wasn't till years later I realized I had likely been talking to Bernadette Dohrn.
The war and events of '68 had pushed this white kid from a white blue collar suburb far to the left. I'd grown up on John Wayne and the Lone Ranger. We were the good guys I couldn't square that with what was happening in 'Nam. Many of us had that problem. We might be a bunch of naive white kids in the midwest but we were pissed.
The tinder was ready. All we needed was a spark. We just had to wait for Nixon to do something outrageous and arrogant. As usual the Trickster didn't disappoint.
In the spring of 1970 Nixon ordered an incursion into Cambodia. There was heavy resistance from the North Vietnamese Army. We suffered high casualties. A helicopter pilot during that invasion had a life expectancy of about thirty-five seconds. Unfortunately we weren't at war with Cambodia. Nixon also neglected to mention this little invasion to Congress or the American people.
When the story broke there was worldwide outrage. The Nixon administration was doing frantic damage control as college campus' across America exploded into chaos.
Here in Ohio to cope with a Teamster's trucking strike Gov. Jim Rhodes had called up the National Guard. When Ohio State and the other Ohio colleges erupted in protest Rhodes deployed an already exhausted Guard to quell the outcry.
Even in 1970 Ohio State was a huge University dominating a large portion of the north side of Columbus economically and socially.We high school kids went to campus to buy music, clothes and just to hang out with the Hippies. Or get into the bars, with a friends Draft Card, to see bands and maybe learn how to score.
Like most protests the one at Ohio State started as a non violent student strike on April 29,1970. The protests were about the creation of a Black Studies Department and adding Women's Studies to the course offerings. Campus buildings were picketed. The Ohio Highway Patrol(which has authority over State property)barricaded roads and moved in with loaded firearms and mace. The situation went to hell in a handbasket.
The crowd moved off campus and on to High St. A group of about 2000 students(and this High School Senior) gathered at the intersection of North High St. and 15th Avenue, the entrance to the OSU campus. There stood large iron gates that were a gift of an early twentieth century class. The students closed those gates symbolically closing the University. The reaction from the Ohio Highway Patrol and The Columbus Police Department was swift and brutal. The intent was to crush these "radicals"
Bricks and Molotov Cocktails were thrown, store windows were smashed and there was looting.
The protest at Ohio State was now massive and in response to police overreaction turned extremely violent. As usual the Columbus Police Department came in swinging. Badge numbers were concealed. The infamous "D" Platoon cut a bloody swath through the protesters.
A few weeks earlier Vice President Agnew had advised police treat protesters as enemies. He suggested police should imagine protesters as Nazi Brown Shirts or Klansmen wearing white sheets and act accordingly. CPD took Agnew's advice to heart.The CPD used tear gas and live ammo on the crowd.
This was my first experience with tear gas, a billy club and the full force of a nascent police state . It wasn't the last.
This confrontation went on into the night until at 10 PM Governor Jim Rhodes deployed the National Guard.
The sight of tanks and armored personnel carriers rolling down the streets of an American city and on a Major College campus stopped the disturbance that night. An occupying army does seem to have a chilling effect. In the aftermath it was discovered seven people had been shot and wounded.
A little side note During the day OSU Football Coach Woody Hayes tried to stop the violence, unsuccessfully. During the entire student revolt Hayes would be the only member of The Ohio State University's Administration to actually talk to the students in person.
The next day on April 30th 4000 students took to the streets again in response to Nixon and Cambodia. The violence continued throughout the day. There were 400 arrests and 131 were injured in clashes with the Ohio National Guard.
Over the next week there were occasional confrontations as The Guard and law enforcement kept the area shut down. There were checkpoints manned by troops.Tanks and halftracks rumbled down the major north/south thoroughfare of Columbus Ohio. A couple weeks later I was on campus for a State American History Achievement Test competition.(I placed second) The cloying smell of tear gas still hung in the air. The Ohio State University Campus looked like Prague in '68 after the Soviet's moved in. Troops were everywhere, M-1's slung over their shoulders.
Security was stifling as news of the shootings at the much smaller Kent State University broke. On May 6th OSU closed until the 19th.
Like many I was shocked and angry when the killings at Kent State occurred. I became more liberal. (Radical to some of my friends. even today) The culmination of the Sixties had instilled a deep distrust of Government and the GOP. Rhodes and Nixon were responsible for that. I actively disliked Jim Rhodes and despised Richard Nixon.
Nixon's public response was to the KSU shootings was callous and pandered to his "Silent Majority" base. The tone and other comments by members of the Administration implied it was the dead students fault they were gunned down. John Halderman cited Kent State as the start of Nixon's slide into paranoia. It would culminate in Watergate and the attendant shenanigans.
Nixon's hard line pushed me farther and farther left. I made it a point to participate in every action against the war I could. I protested in favor of establishing women;s studies and African American History departments at Ohio State. I joined hundreds of thousands nationwide in the two Moratorium marches.
Kent State galvanized the left. It resulted in the nomination of George McGovern, our version electorally of Barry Goldwater. Nixon's use of race and fear was nearly overt. Massachusetts stood alone in opposing the reelection of Tricky Dick
.http://youtu.be/68g76j9VBvM
The Pentagon Papers were leaked. My Lai and other war crimes became public. America was finally turning against the Vietnam war, slowly, but irrevocably. We signed a peace treaty the day after Lyndon Johnson died. We could have gained the same terms four years earlier but Nixon kept the war going to insure his reelection. The additional names on the wall are his legacy to venal, political fuckery.
The Sixties are remembered for peace, free love, civil rights, the mainstreaming of the Women's Movement and music. It was all of that and more.
Yeah, Rock and Roll changed the day The Beatles hit the States.
America finally responded to the Legacy of Reconstruction and acted to end Jim Crow.
A social upheaval unprecedented in American history unfolded in a decade.
In the space of five years I completely remade myself. I rejected ideas my parents had instilled in me. I embraced equality not as a concept but as a way of life. I rejected war as a first response. I rejected blind patriotism. If you love your nation it is a duty to make it better.
I am liberal. I wear that term as a badge of honor.
I participated fully in that era. I learned lessons that have served me well.
That time has left scars that still affect America today.
We've yet to come to terms with the aftereffects of Vietnam.
The Right today is trying to undo all the advances we made in equality and social safety nets. They condemn that decade for being responsible for all of America's social woes. My response to them is shut the fuck up. We are now fighting new battles in a war I thought we had won. I took beatings then and am prepared to again. Unfortunately, I don't heal as quick as I once did.
The huge violent revolt at Ohio State is largely forgotten now. The State and City tried to play down what happened in the national press. Kent State also pushed all the coverage off the front page.
Kent State, Ohio University and Ohio State cost Jim Rhodes the Republican nomination for Senate in the Tuesday May 8th primary. Rhodes would serve two more terms as Governor. He has a statue and a 30+ story State office tower named after him. Both are on E. Broad St. across from the State House.
The Oval, a large grassy open area in the heart of OSU's campus is crisscrossed with foot paths. The brick walkways were replaced with asphalt because the bricks were thrown in 1970.
The massive iron gates at 15th and High were replaced with two ornamental concrete columns to prevent them from ever being shut again.
The National Guard Unit deployed at Kent State was cleared of wrongdoing in a Grand Jury. No one was disciplined for violations of The Army Field Manual for having loaded weapons in a riot situation. It is still not clear if there was an order to fire. The initial claim of firing in response to a sniper collapsed nearly immediately.
Crosby Stills Nash and Young wrote, recorded and released "Ohio" in about thirty days. The urban legend is Neil knew one of the four killed that dark day.
A monument to the slain and wounded at KSU had been built and dedicated on campus. The Site itself is on the National Historic Register.
I attended an anti war protest when we launched the invasion of Iraq. I took some flack from some young frat rat and managed not to kick his pompous, privileged ass. People who had no intention of serving cheered on the uncalled for invasion. Vietnam redux.
When Occupy Columbus was forming I went to an organizational meeting in the small amphitheater on the Oval at OSU. As I was talking old times with some contemporaries, I overheard a remark from a young woman. She told a companion the people in the Sixties ruined protesting for everyone. I may have told her she was ill informed, pretentious and elitist. She glared at me scornfully as she adjusted her Coach handbag. The protest outfit she was wearing likely cost more than I pay in rent. But she wanted to protest income inequality, bless her heart. Later she made a statement that men's ideas on women's rights were irrelevant since they were the oppressor. I left. Yeah, I am turning into the cranky old guy bitching at the kids for getting on my lawn.
We need to remember the past in order to change the future. That is the forlorn dream of historians.
We need to fight these battles again to restore America's place as a great nation. Unfortunately we are fighting battles today in wars I thought we had won.
America has a rampant resurgent racist rhetoric going mainstream as we are hell bent to reestablish the worst of our past under the guise of tradition and patriotism. Racism is no longer covert as many embrace it calling the 60's as the reason America is now, godless and in decline. We demons on the left are vilified as Un-American.
Love it or leave it? Not so much. I put up with that shit over forty years ago, not going to do it now.
Let's learn our lessons and move forward.
http://columbusneighborhoods.org/video/political-unrest-riots-on-osus-campus/
Remember these people
Allison Krause.
Jeffrey Miller.
Sandra Scheuer.
William Schroeder
From the May 4th Memorial at KSU--"Inquire, Learn, Reflect."
I was at Whitehall-Yearling High School, in a suburb of Columbus Ohio.
I didn't know the world was going to change.
I came of age in the Sixties. Walter Cronkite showed me the world every night on channel 10, the CBS affiliate. I saw Jack Kennedy speak in Berlin and murdered in Dallas. I saw the dogs, fire hoses and clubs in Selma, Birmingham. Watts and Detroit went up in flames. I watched too many cities burn. I saw Martin Luther King say "I have a dream." I watched the aftermath of his being gunned down in Memphis.
I watched in awe as Bobby Kennedy campaigned for President in 1968. I saw the hope he brought to America. I was moved by the impassioned crowds, the soaring rhetoric. Bobby's speech the night Martin died, in the ghetto of Indianapolis, from the back of a flatbed truck was what may be the best speech of the last half of the twentieth century. In June of '68 Cronkite, like he did with JFK, tried to make sense of Bobby's death in L.A. for a stunned nation.
The Soviets crushed the Prague Spring. The United States and The Soviet Union were locked in a deadly dance of madness. Walter reported every night. The Sixties were not just fun, sex and music.
And there was Vietnam.
Always Vietnam. It wound itself through the psyche of America like a vicious parasite, dividing the nation. Young versus old. Longhair versus hardhat. Hawks and Doves. If you were white and had some means at all you could beat the draft. If you were poor or black you were in Saigon. The children of privilege supported the war and draft knowing they would never be in harm's way.
We young hit the streets to protest this travesty of a war. We tried to open the eyes of America to issues that festered and needed attention. We were called Commies. Un American. All we heard was Love it or leave it. My country right or wrong. It was the closest a white kid could ever get to being black. Stopped and searched for your looks. The way you were dressed. The music you were listening to. Police violence directed at you without recourse. America.
The anti-war protests were dismissed by many as the work of the East and West coast elite intellectuals. Columbia and Harvard. UCLA and USC Berkeley. The middle of the nation was rather quiet as the big cities dealt with the anger of their children. There were protests but they were smaller in scale and rather well behaved.
The times they were changing.
Something we have never learned here in the US is when you violently try to crush a movement you risk radicalizing that movement.
There were calls for violent resistance and revolution. There were bombings. There were a few kidnappings. Protests turned into riots as rage built. And the body-count went on.
LBJ was the first President since Lincoln to use the word divisiveness in a speech. America for the first time in a century was poised for a civil war. All the bottled up issues we'd been in denial about were boiling and bubbling to the surface. Like the Civil War, the United States was turning upon itself. Father against son. Brother against brother. Mother against daughter.The racial divide was explosive. The war was not only a foreign policy issue it was a racial issue as well. It was a generational issue. The protests were the largest ever seen. Washington was a city under siege by it's own offspring.
In 1968 Bobby Kennedy may well have won the Presidency. On that night in June, in the Kitchen of The Ambassador Hotel, the future was irrevocably changed. We'll never know how America would be today.
Instead Richard Nixon, consummate politician he was , devised "The Southern Strategy" and "The Silent Majority" riding the politics of race, us versus them and fear to the White House. His vaunted "Secret Plan" was not to end the war but to win power at all costs. It blew up in his face.
There was a convergence of actions that would change the Nation occurring.
The SDS and others were wanting to show that opposition to the war wasn't simply a coastal rebellion by the intelligentsia. A show of widespread support in the heartland was needed.
The other action was Nixon invading Cambodia.
No one knew how badly this was going to end.
At the end of '69 and into 1970 members of the SDS and other groups spread out through the Big 10 talking to and organizing students across the midwest. I met a woman in an apartment just off the Ohio State Campus. All of us talked about the war and stopping it. I left after about an hour or so. It wasn't till years later I realized I had likely been talking to Bernadette Dohrn.
The war and events of '68 had pushed this white kid from a white blue collar suburb far to the left. I'd grown up on John Wayne and the Lone Ranger. We were the good guys I couldn't square that with what was happening in 'Nam. Many of us had that problem. We might be a bunch of naive white kids in the midwest but we were pissed.
The tinder was ready. All we needed was a spark. We just had to wait for Nixon to do something outrageous and arrogant. As usual the Trickster didn't disappoint.
In the spring of 1970 Nixon ordered an incursion into Cambodia. There was heavy resistance from the North Vietnamese Army. We suffered high casualties. A helicopter pilot during that invasion had a life expectancy of about thirty-five seconds. Unfortunately we weren't at war with Cambodia. Nixon also neglected to mention this little invasion to Congress or the American people.
When the story broke there was worldwide outrage. The Nixon administration was doing frantic damage control as college campus' across America exploded into chaos.
Here in Ohio to cope with a Teamster's trucking strike Gov. Jim Rhodes had called up the National Guard. When Ohio State and the other Ohio colleges erupted in protest Rhodes deployed an already exhausted Guard to quell the outcry.
Even in 1970 Ohio State was a huge University dominating a large portion of the north side of Columbus economically and socially.We high school kids went to campus to buy music, clothes and just to hang out with the Hippies. Or get into the bars, with a friends Draft Card, to see bands and maybe learn how to score.
Like most protests the one at Ohio State started as a non violent student strike on April 29,1970. The protests were about the creation of a Black Studies Department and adding Women's Studies to the course offerings. Campus buildings were picketed. The Ohio Highway Patrol(which has authority over State property)barricaded roads and moved in with loaded firearms and mace. The situation went to hell in a handbasket.
The crowd moved off campus and on to High St. A group of about 2000 students(and this High School Senior) gathered at the intersection of North High St. and 15th Avenue, the entrance to the OSU campus. There stood large iron gates that were a gift of an early twentieth century class. The students closed those gates symbolically closing the University. The reaction from the Ohio Highway Patrol and The Columbus Police Department was swift and brutal. The intent was to crush these "radicals"
Bricks and Molotov Cocktails were thrown, store windows were smashed and there was looting.
The protest at Ohio State was now massive and in response to police overreaction turned extremely violent. As usual the Columbus Police Department came in swinging. Badge numbers were concealed. The infamous "D" Platoon cut a bloody swath through the protesters.
A few weeks earlier Vice President Agnew had advised police treat protesters as enemies. He suggested police should imagine protesters as Nazi Brown Shirts or Klansmen wearing white sheets and act accordingly. CPD took Agnew's advice to heart.The CPD used tear gas and live ammo on the crowd.
This was my first experience with tear gas, a billy club and the full force of a nascent police state . It wasn't the last.
This confrontation went on into the night until at 10 PM Governor Jim Rhodes deployed the National Guard.
The sight of tanks and armored personnel carriers rolling down the streets of an American city and on a Major College campus stopped the disturbance that night. An occupying army does seem to have a chilling effect. In the aftermath it was discovered seven people had been shot and wounded.
A little side note During the day OSU Football Coach Woody Hayes tried to stop the violence, unsuccessfully. During the entire student revolt Hayes would be the only member of The Ohio State University's Administration to actually talk to the students in person.
The next day on April 30th 4000 students took to the streets again in response to Nixon and Cambodia. The violence continued throughout the day. There were 400 arrests and 131 were injured in clashes with the Ohio National Guard.
Over the next week there were occasional confrontations as The Guard and law enforcement kept the area shut down. There were checkpoints manned by troops.Tanks and halftracks rumbled down the major north/south thoroughfare of Columbus Ohio. A couple weeks later I was on campus for a State American History Achievement Test competition.(I placed second) The cloying smell of tear gas still hung in the air. The Ohio State University Campus looked like Prague in '68 after the Soviet's moved in. Troops were everywhere, M-1's slung over their shoulders.
Security was stifling as news of the shootings at the much smaller Kent State University broke. On May 6th OSU closed until the 19th.
Like many I was shocked and angry when the killings at Kent State occurred. I became more liberal. (Radical to some of my friends. even today) The culmination of the Sixties had instilled a deep distrust of Government and the GOP. Rhodes and Nixon were responsible for that. I actively disliked Jim Rhodes and despised Richard Nixon.
Nixon's public response was to the KSU shootings was callous and pandered to his "Silent Majority" base. The tone and other comments by members of the Administration implied it was the dead students fault they were gunned down. John Halderman cited Kent State as the start of Nixon's slide into paranoia. It would culminate in Watergate and the attendant shenanigans.
Nixon's hard line pushed me farther and farther left. I made it a point to participate in every action against the war I could. I protested in favor of establishing women;s studies and African American History departments at Ohio State. I joined hundreds of thousands nationwide in the two Moratorium marches.
Kent State galvanized the left. It resulted in the nomination of George McGovern, our version electorally of Barry Goldwater. Nixon's use of race and fear was nearly overt. Massachusetts stood alone in opposing the reelection of Tricky Dick
.http://youtu.be/68g76j9VBvM
The Pentagon Papers were leaked. My Lai and other war crimes became public. America was finally turning against the Vietnam war, slowly, but irrevocably. We signed a peace treaty the day after Lyndon Johnson died. We could have gained the same terms four years earlier but Nixon kept the war going to insure his reelection. The additional names on the wall are his legacy to venal, political fuckery.
The Sixties are remembered for peace, free love, civil rights, the mainstreaming of the Women's Movement and music. It was all of that and more.
Yeah, Rock and Roll changed the day The Beatles hit the States.
America finally responded to the Legacy of Reconstruction and acted to end Jim Crow.
A social upheaval unprecedented in American history unfolded in a decade.
In the space of five years I completely remade myself. I rejected ideas my parents had instilled in me. I embraced equality not as a concept but as a way of life. I rejected war as a first response. I rejected blind patriotism. If you love your nation it is a duty to make it better.
I am liberal. I wear that term as a badge of honor.
I participated fully in that era. I learned lessons that have served me well.
That time has left scars that still affect America today.
We've yet to come to terms with the aftereffects of Vietnam.
The Right today is trying to undo all the advances we made in equality and social safety nets. They condemn that decade for being responsible for all of America's social woes. My response to them is shut the fuck up. We are now fighting new battles in a war I thought we had won. I took beatings then and am prepared to again. Unfortunately, I don't heal as quick as I once did.
The huge violent revolt at Ohio State is largely forgotten now. The State and City tried to play down what happened in the national press. Kent State also pushed all the coverage off the front page.
Kent State, Ohio University and Ohio State cost Jim Rhodes the Republican nomination for Senate in the Tuesday May 8th primary. Rhodes would serve two more terms as Governor. He has a statue and a 30+ story State office tower named after him. Both are on E. Broad St. across from the State House.
The Oval, a large grassy open area in the heart of OSU's campus is crisscrossed with foot paths. The brick walkways were replaced with asphalt because the bricks were thrown in 1970.
The massive iron gates at 15th and High were replaced with two ornamental concrete columns to prevent them from ever being shut again.
The National Guard Unit deployed at Kent State was cleared of wrongdoing in a Grand Jury. No one was disciplined for violations of The Army Field Manual for having loaded weapons in a riot situation. It is still not clear if there was an order to fire. The initial claim of firing in response to a sniper collapsed nearly immediately.
Crosby Stills Nash and Young wrote, recorded and released "Ohio" in about thirty days. The urban legend is Neil knew one of the four killed that dark day.
A monument to the slain and wounded at KSU had been built and dedicated on campus. The Site itself is on the National Historic Register.
I attended an anti war protest when we launched the invasion of Iraq. I took some flack from some young frat rat and managed not to kick his pompous, privileged ass. People who had no intention of serving cheered on the uncalled for invasion. Vietnam redux.
When Occupy Columbus was forming I went to an organizational meeting in the small amphitheater on the Oval at OSU. As I was talking old times with some contemporaries, I overheard a remark from a young woman. She told a companion the people in the Sixties ruined protesting for everyone. I may have told her she was ill informed, pretentious and elitist. She glared at me scornfully as she adjusted her Coach handbag. The protest outfit she was wearing likely cost more than I pay in rent. But she wanted to protest income inequality, bless her heart. Later she made a statement that men's ideas on women's rights were irrelevant since they were the oppressor. I left. Yeah, I am turning into the cranky old guy bitching at the kids for getting on my lawn.
We need to remember the past in order to change the future. That is the forlorn dream of historians.
We need to fight these battles again to restore America's place as a great nation. Unfortunately we are fighting battles today in wars I thought we had won.
America has a rampant resurgent racist rhetoric going mainstream as we are hell bent to reestablish the worst of our past under the guise of tradition and patriotism. Racism is no longer covert as many embrace it calling the 60's as the reason America is now, godless and in decline. We demons on the left are vilified as Un-American.
Love it or leave it? Not so much. I put up with that shit over forty years ago, not going to do it now.
Let's learn our lessons and move forward.
http://columbusneighborhoods.org/video/political-unrest-riots-on-osus-campus/
Remember these people
Allison Krause.
Jeffrey Miller.
Sandra Scheuer.
William Schroeder
From the May 4th Memorial at KSU--"Inquire, Learn, Reflect."
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Down these mean streets.. Raymond Chandler "wrote like a slumming angel." (REVISED)
Summer in Ohio. Warm. Muggy. Overcast. The air was humid and thick as a politician's skin. Oppressive as my past
Sorry. I've been reading Chandler and seem to have gone full Noir.
Why am I reading a crime novelist who died over a half century ago? One whose last major work dates from the early Fifties? Well, because I love how the English language works in the hands of a master. Raymond Chandler was a master if nothing else.
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler took the crime novel out of Christie's English Country Estates where the corpse was served up with tea and crumpets and put it back in the gritty, dark corrupt urban environs where it belonged. No gimmick like a detective who works from bed or never leaves the house. Spade and Marlowe were men. Human. Damaged guys with a sense that law and justice were at times not even nodding acquaintances. Men with situational ethics long before the phrase.
Chandler is a long standing favorite of mine. An early influence. Hell I read "The Little Sister" when I was eleven or twelve, poolside during rest periods. There was something there that engaged my developing love of a well written novel. The use of language the way an artist wields a brush. Literary landscapes. Prose portraits .A world as far removed from Sixties Columbus as modern Britain is from The Shire unfolded in my imagination.
Chandler, more than anyone, perfected a uniquely American genre. The hard boiled Private Eye with the tough exterior and thoughtful, compassionate center. A man alone but undaunted. A man that walks in the shadows and still sees the stars.
Chandler's Mother, after her divorce, took Raymond home to Ireland where they lived with her Mother.Chandler's Father had married "Lace Curtain Irish".After the family relocated to England, He attended upscale British public schools.There he excelled in the classics and learned a code of honor he never lost. After graduation he wrote essay's, poetry and critiques.
Wanting to write, Chandler took a job in the civil service thinking it would provide stability and time.. Unable to deal with the rigid environment he went back to the States.
Ray settled in L.A. He was an educated man for the time and held various white collar jobs. When WW1 started he Joined The Canadian Expeditionary Force. Serving with distinction in fierce engagements he was wounded and was the sole survivor of his unit. He was decorated and discharged.
Raymond returned to Los Angeles. Prior to the war he had fallen in love with a woman eighteen years his senior. Following the war she divorced. Chandler put her up in an apartment in Hermosa Beach near where he lived. His mother was living with him at the time. Following her death he married the love of his life, Cissy Pascal.
He took a position with an Oil Syndicate in L.A. The oil business there was rather wild west. Chandler met all sort of characters. The rich and obscenely rich. Pickpockets, crooked politicians, corrupt cops and others that would surface later in his work.
Chandler was drinking heavily as he would off and on for the rest of hos life. He was fired. He wandered up and down the Pacific coast. As he did so he started reading pulps. This was the peak of the pulp industry. Reading "Black mask" he decided he could do the crime genre, learn to really write as he did it and make a little money while he was at it.With his Classical education Chandler thought he could bring something new and unique to these stories.
He set his fiction in Los Angeles. The City Of Angels had exploded in population with the rise of the Film industry. With the explosive growth came money, power, vices of every description, crime and corruption. A perfect back drop straight out of a studio lot.
He sold his first story to "Black Mask". At one cent a word. He soon got a raise to a nickle a word. He wrote slowly and meticulously crafting these tales of L.A.'s seamy underside. Thus his output was never high. Especially when compared to prolific writers like Cain, MacDonald and Stout. Chandler was correct though. He was learning to really write.
Chandler had developed an uniquely Southern Californian voice. The hot dry Santa Ana winds drove the narrative at times. That wind pushed the characters over their moral boundaries. The unthinkable became logical. Desirable. Needed, His characters wandered up and down the coast. Venice Beach. Santa Monica. Into the desert. The harsh unrelenting sunshine exposed things best left in shadow. Los Angeles was the major recurring character in his work. The Dame. The Seductress. The nemesis pulling all the strings.
Knowing if he were to make any money he needed to write a novel he cannibalized and reworked three short stories into "The Big Sleep". Here we meet Phillip Marlowe and the mature writer Raymond Chandler.
Chandler had perfected his use of dialogue to drive the narrative, Subtle wordplay. Wry humor. Smartass interactions. This was layered over a cynicism that veiled a hopeful Marlowe. One who had seen the worst of humanity and did not despair. He still believed. In justice and people. He was a knight errant saving the village from the dragon and losing innocence along the way. The heroic sacrifice.
Chandler's and Marlowe's vision of right and wrong wasn't weighted by black and white. He embraced shades of grey as Marlowe embraced a femme fatale. Ray's use description created the Noir world of the Los Angeles not promoted by Studio flacks.
Chandler's use of devices like simile and metaphor was poetry in prose form. You feel the dry hot air moving through the Los Angeles basin. You recognize the venality of the wealthy. Unlike film and novels of the time Chandler didn't aggrandize the rich. He showed them as they are. Powerful, entitled, spoiled and demanding feudal Lords. He showed us the rich are different. He did it with a word, A well turned scathing phrase and an egalitarian point of view.
Chandler showed the corruption of our ideals. The American Dream as nightmare.
Raymond Chandler wrote more novels and had a love hate relationship with the Hollywood Studios. They adapted his novels to varying degrees of success. He received two Oscar nominations for screenplays. Billy Wilder allowed him to write drunk.He realized a loaded Chandler wrote better than most sober screenwriters.
In 1953 "The Long Goodbye" was published. Chandler put everything he had learned as a writer into that novel. As a result he changed the genre once again. He gave us the socially conscious Private Investigator.
The book was a quintessential American novel that happened to have a crime in it.He delved into social, racial,political, sexual and environmental issues as he weaved a spellbinding narrative. His use of language was subtly superb and breathtaking. Los Angeles was a living, breathing, oasis of decadence and desperate corruption. It may be his best work. It is an enduring snapshot of L.A.
After the death of his wife his work was sporadic and of uneven quality. He was drinking heavily. A full blown alcoholic. And still in that later work was flashes of genius. The man who shaped SoCal for the rest of us even today.
All PI's are the children of Marlowe. Rockford. Spenser. Any good person that will walk mean streets to put themselves in harm's way for a cause. A reason.
A brilliant, flawed man gave us an endearingly flawed character. One who endures the life he has to help others keep theirs. His voice was uniquely American. Uniquely precise. A Doctoral course on the power and beauty of the written word..
Less than twenty attended his funeral. Any of us that fancy ourselves a writer owe him a tremendous debt.
Sorry. I've been reading Chandler and seem to have gone full Noir.
Why am I reading a crime novelist who died over a half century ago? One whose last major work dates from the early Fifties? Well, because I love how the English language works in the hands of a master. Raymond Chandler was a master if nothing else.
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler took the crime novel out of Christie's English Country Estates where the corpse was served up with tea and crumpets and put it back in the gritty, dark corrupt urban environs where it belonged. No gimmick like a detective who works from bed or never leaves the house. Spade and Marlowe were men. Human. Damaged guys with a sense that law and justice were at times not even nodding acquaintances. Men with situational ethics long before the phrase.
Chandler is a long standing favorite of mine. An early influence. Hell I read "The Little Sister" when I was eleven or twelve, poolside during rest periods. There was something there that engaged my developing love of a well written novel. The use of language the way an artist wields a brush. Literary landscapes. Prose portraits .A world as far removed from Sixties Columbus as modern Britain is from The Shire unfolded in my imagination.
Chandler, more than anyone, perfected a uniquely American genre. The hard boiled Private Eye with the tough exterior and thoughtful, compassionate center. A man alone but undaunted. A man that walks in the shadows and still sees the stars.
Chandler's Mother, after her divorce, took Raymond home to Ireland where they lived with her Mother.Chandler's Father had married "Lace Curtain Irish".After the family relocated to England, He attended upscale British public schools.There he excelled in the classics and learned a code of honor he never lost. After graduation he wrote essay's, poetry and critiques.
Wanting to write, Chandler took a job in the civil service thinking it would provide stability and time.. Unable to deal with the rigid environment he went back to the States.
Ray settled in L.A. He was an educated man for the time and held various white collar jobs. When WW1 started he Joined The Canadian Expeditionary Force. Serving with distinction in fierce engagements he was wounded and was the sole survivor of his unit. He was decorated and discharged.
Raymond returned to Los Angeles. Prior to the war he had fallen in love with a woman eighteen years his senior. Following the war she divorced. Chandler put her up in an apartment in Hermosa Beach near where he lived. His mother was living with him at the time. Following her death he married the love of his life, Cissy Pascal.
He took a position with an Oil Syndicate in L.A. The oil business there was rather wild west. Chandler met all sort of characters. The rich and obscenely rich. Pickpockets, crooked politicians, corrupt cops and others that would surface later in his work.
Chandler was drinking heavily as he would off and on for the rest of hos life. He was fired. He wandered up and down the Pacific coast. As he did so he started reading pulps. This was the peak of the pulp industry. Reading "Black mask" he decided he could do the crime genre, learn to really write as he did it and make a little money while he was at it.With his Classical education Chandler thought he could bring something new and unique to these stories.
He set his fiction in Los Angeles. The City Of Angels had exploded in population with the rise of the Film industry. With the explosive growth came money, power, vices of every description, crime and corruption. A perfect back drop straight out of a studio lot.
He sold his first story to "Black Mask". At one cent a word. He soon got a raise to a nickle a word. He wrote slowly and meticulously crafting these tales of L.A.'s seamy underside. Thus his output was never high. Especially when compared to prolific writers like Cain, MacDonald and Stout. Chandler was correct though. He was learning to really write.
Chandler had developed an uniquely Southern Californian voice. The hot dry Santa Ana winds drove the narrative at times. That wind pushed the characters over their moral boundaries. The unthinkable became logical. Desirable. Needed, His characters wandered up and down the coast. Venice Beach. Santa Monica. Into the desert. The harsh unrelenting sunshine exposed things best left in shadow. Los Angeles was the major recurring character in his work. The Dame. The Seductress. The nemesis pulling all the strings.
Knowing if he were to make any money he needed to write a novel he cannibalized and reworked three short stories into "The Big Sleep". Here we meet Phillip Marlowe and the mature writer Raymond Chandler.
Chandler had perfected his use of dialogue to drive the narrative, Subtle wordplay. Wry humor. Smartass interactions. This was layered over a cynicism that veiled a hopeful Marlowe. One who had seen the worst of humanity and did not despair. He still believed. In justice and people. He was a knight errant saving the village from the dragon and losing innocence along the way. The heroic sacrifice.
Chandler's and Marlowe's vision of right and wrong wasn't weighted by black and white. He embraced shades of grey as Marlowe embraced a femme fatale. Ray's use description created the Noir world of the Los Angeles not promoted by Studio flacks.
Chandler's use of devices like simile and metaphor was poetry in prose form. You feel the dry hot air moving through the Los Angeles basin. You recognize the venality of the wealthy. Unlike film and novels of the time Chandler didn't aggrandize the rich. He showed them as they are. Powerful, entitled, spoiled and demanding feudal Lords. He showed us the rich are different. He did it with a word, A well turned scathing phrase and an egalitarian point of view.
Chandler showed the corruption of our ideals. The American Dream as nightmare.
Raymond Chandler wrote more novels and had a love hate relationship with the Hollywood Studios. They adapted his novels to varying degrees of success. He received two Oscar nominations for screenplays. Billy Wilder allowed him to write drunk.He realized a loaded Chandler wrote better than most sober screenwriters.
In 1953 "The Long Goodbye" was published. Chandler put everything he had learned as a writer into that novel. As a result he changed the genre once again. He gave us the socially conscious Private Investigator.
The book was a quintessential American novel that happened to have a crime in it.He delved into social, racial,political, sexual and environmental issues as he weaved a spellbinding narrative. His use of language was subtly superb and breathtaking. Los Angeles was a living, breathing, oasis of decadence and desperate corruption. It may be his best work. It is an enduring snapshot of L.A.
After the death of his wife his work was sporadic and of uneven quality. He was drinking heavily. A full blown alcoholic. And still in that later work was flashes of genius. The man who shaped SoCal for the rest of us even today.
All PI's are the children of Marlowe. Rockford. Spenser. Any good person that will walk mean streets to put themselves in harm's way for a cause. A reason.
A brilliant, flawed man gave us an endearingly flawed character. One who endures the life he has to help others keep theirs. His voice was uniquely American. Uniquely precise. A Doctoral course on the power and beauty of the written word..
Less than twenty attended his funeral. Any of us that fancy ourselves a writer owe him a tremendous debt.
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Growing up on Ohio. A long road to how the hell'd I get here?
I was born, raised and lived the majority of my misspent life in Columbus Ohio.
I grew up in the late 50s and came of age in the turmoil of the late 60s. Like many of my Generation I embraced the values of all are equal, war is wrong and music is freeing to the soul. Unlike many I seem to have maintained my, what seems to be now, naive and archaic worldview.
With the events of the last few weeks, writing this pressure relief valve, I have found myself becoming introspective.. How the hell did a white, blue collar suburban boy became whatever the hell I am now?
Think of it as a background briefing. What a long strange trip it's been.
I have talked with people I grew up with and can not believe we are contemporaries. The differences in beliefs and attitudes are staggering to me.
In the first half of the Twentieth Century there was a huge migration to the North by African Americans and poor agrarian Southern Whites. Both groups sought a better future in the Industrialized Northern States. Henry Ford was paying an unheard of eight dollars a day. Both groups wound up segregated.
The prejudice in the North was subtle and insidious.
Blacks had their neighborhood. The hillbillies had theirs. Both were expected to know their place.
The largest part of this migration, here in Columbus, came from Kentucky, West Virginia.and southeastern Ohio. Appalachia.
They were the butt of jokes. Stereotyped as ignorant, inbred hillbillies. It wasn't confined to Central Ohio. Look at the original Mountain Dew label and marketing. Li'l Abner. Hee Haw The Beverly Hillbillies. (Here we knew they were from Arkansas)
African Americans? Our racism here was insidious and covert. That enabled us to preserve our moral superiority to the Old Confederacy. This was the mix and attitudes I grew up surrounded by.
I grew up in Whitehall, a blue collar, mostly white suburb of Columbus. A Cop I knew told me in Whitehall we don't even put blacktop down. In a class of 350+ there were three blacks. This is years after Little Rock.
I remember my Dad talking about an argument with a big Buck N****r. My Mom casually talking about that N****r Bitch. My Father in the mid-sixties told me, with a straight face, believing it, that the reason Martin Luther King Jr. was so smart was he was about half white. Looking back I find the casual racism in my environment appalling.
As to the Kentucky expats we joked about the three r's taught in school there. Readin, ritin, Route 23. Route 23 is a major highway connecting most of Ohio with Kentucky. The road to Columbus.
Somehow I rejected much of the ideas and attitudes I grew up with. Its my Parents and lilley white school system's fault.
I was instilled at a young age with a love of reading and learning by my parents. They always bought the encyclopedia volume of the week at the A & P. I fondly remember The Golden Book Encyclopedia. A slim twenty six volume set aimed at young readers. I read them like a collection of short stories. Then there was Funk And Wagnalls. Made famous by Rowen and Martin on Laugh-In. Both were sold a volume a week as a promotion at A& P. My parents made sure there was a complete set of both in our house. They purchased a collection of great books from a door to door salesmen. Before I was twelve I had read "Great Expectations", "Huckleberry Finn,","Tom Sawyer", and other seminal masterpieces of great literature.
Both my parents read. We subscribed to both Daily Papers here. I read Chandler, Rex Stout, Erle Stanley Gardner and John MacDonald. Dashiell Hammett and Ross MacDonald also. I was exposed to the world. New ideas and points of view. My parents helped me escape my past never dreaming of where my mind would wander.
Whitehall City Schools aided me also. I learned critical thinking. Amazing Social Studies teachers instilled a love of History. I learned who we are and why. A grasp of historical context that seems so rare in social conversation today.
Then there was the insanity that was the sixties.
Jack Kennedy was shot on my birthday. I was in sixth grade. On the news Walter Cronkite showed me Birmingham. Selma. Watts. George Wallace standing on the steps saying segregation now. Segregation forever. James Meredith and Ole' Miss. Viet Nam . The Berlin wall. I saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald, live. Martin, Bobby and Malcolm were murdered.
An uppity prize fighter changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali.
The College campus' across the country exploded in protest, anger and violence. Students were gunned down at Kent State. I was beaten and tear gassed at Ohio State more than once.
I talked and listened to the College students as I hung out as a High School student. I needed to understand. I embraced some positions. I rejected others. Hell, I met and talked with Bernadine Dohrn of the Weather Underground in an off campus apartment in Columbus in 1970.
I embraced the madness and change like a lover. My worldview was being radically altered. Eldridge Cleaver was asked what was the position of women in the Movement. His response was prone. I disagreed. I had developed a radical notion that people were equal. Equal meant equal.Color, religion and plumbing made no difference to me.
I asked my first wife how she could vote for Saint Ronnie in '80 with his views on women's issues. She looked at me like I was insane. We were divorced not long after.
I moved away from being politically active in the eighties. I just didn't have the passion anymore. After Reagan and Bush the Elder my annoyance was powering. I was waking back up/ Attacking womens rights was becoming the norm .The demonization of the poor. The rise of the Religious right and their rejection of the Twentieth Century
I saw evangelicals trying to push into education their bible stories. I looked on in amazed despair as this virus spread never dreaming we would be where we are now. I reengaged. Volunteer work for Clinton. Gore. And 2000 reawakened the radical bomb throwing hippie of my youth.
Then came Twitter.
I found like minded people. I remembered how to think and express myself. I remembered how to make reasoned, cognitive arguments. I rediscovered I had a vocabulary as rusty and unused as it was.The friends I made there may have saved the shards of my sanity.For that I am lucky and grateful.
I seem to be color blind. I think women are people and equal. I really don't care who someone loves.
So I was talking to a friend of mine about the happenings of the last few weeks. He's gay. As we discussed things he saw my opinions and point of view. He told me I was a true progressive. I was flabbergasted. I really don't see myself that way. I feel I'm a reasonably smart guy. I feel I'm an understanding, basically nice guy. One who understands how and why the world works the way it does. I know I understand historical context and perspective. I understand politics. I am a liberal. That's my idea of who I am. But a true progressive, Said like I was a fucking unicorn? I embrace that compliment. I will wear it as a badge of honor as if he were right.A goal to attain.
A long strange trip. Mistakes and regrets abound. On the whole though I like how I wound up. My evolution from a boy to a man. A liberal? Guilty.
A true progressive? I don't know. Jury is still out. I hope so. At least on the road. But I'll settle for being a nice guy and a good father. What more does one need anyway?
I grew up in the late 50s and came of age in the turmoil of the late 60s. Like many of my Generation I embraced the values of all are equal, war is wrong and music is freeing to the soul. Unlike many I seem to have maintained my, what seems to be now, naive and archaic worldview.
With the events of the last few weeks, writing this pressure relief valve, I have found myself becoming introspective.. How the hell did a white, blue collar suburban boy became whatever the hell I am now?
Think of it as a background briefing. What a long strange trip it's been.
I have talked with people I grew up with and can not believe we are contemporaries. The differences in beliefs and attitudes are staggering to me.
In the first half of the Twentieth Century there was a huge migration to the North by African Americans and poor agrarian Southern Whites. Both groups sought a better future in the Industrialized Northern States. Henry Ford was paying an unheard of eight dollars a day. Both groups wound up segregated.
The prejudice in the North was subtle and insidious.
Blacks had their neighborhood. The hillbillies had theirs. Both were expected to know their place.
The largest part of this migration, here in Columbus, came from Kentucky, West Virginia.and southeastern Ohio. Appalachia.
They were the butt of jokes. Stereotyped as ignorant, inbred hillbillies. It wasn't confined to Central Ohio. Look at the original Mountain Dew label and marketing. Li'l Abner. Hee Haw The Beverly Hillbillies. (Here we knew they were from Arkansas)
African Americans? Our racism here was insidious and covert. That enabled us to preserve our moral superiority to the Old Confederacy. This was the mix and attitudes I grew up surrounded by.
I grew up in Whitehall, a blue collar, mostly white suburb of Columbus. A Cop I knew told me in Whitehall we don't even put blacktop down. In a class of 350+ there were three blacks. This is years after Little Rock.
I remember my Dad talking about an argument with a big Buck N****r. My Mom casually talking about that N****r Bitch. My Father in the mid-sixties told me, with a straight face, believing it, that the reason Martin Luther King Jr. was so smart was he was about half white. Looking back I find the casual racism in my environment appalling.
As to the Kentucky expats we joked about the three r's taught in school there. Readin, ritin, Route 23. Route 23 is a major highway connecting most of Ohio with Kentucky. The road to Columbus.
Somehow I rejected much of the ideas and attitudes I grew up with. Its my Parents and lilley white school system's fault.
I was instilled at a young age with a love of reading and learning by my parents. They always bought the encyclopedia volume of the week at the A & P. I fondly remember The Golden Book Encyclopedia. A slim twenty six volume set aimed at young readers. I read them like a collection of short stories. Then there was Funk And Wagnalls. Made famous by Rowen and Martin on Laugh-In. Both were sold a volume a week as a promotion at A& P. My parents made sure there was a complete set of both in our house. They purchased a collection of great books from a door to door salesmen. Before I was twelve I had read "Great Expectations", "Huckleberry Finn,","Tom Sawyer", and other seminal masterpieces of great literature.
Both my parents read. We subscribed to both Daily Papers here. I read Chandler, Rex Stout, Erle Stanley Gardner and John MacDonald. Dashiell Hammett and Ross MacDonald also. I was exposed to the world. New ideas and points of view. My parents helped me escape my past never dreaming of where my mind would wander.
Whitehall City Schools aided me also. I learned critical thinking. Amazing Social Studies teachers instilled a love of History. I learned who we are and why. A grasp of historical context that seems so rare in social conversation today.
Then there was the insanity that was the sixties.
Jack Kennedy was shot on my birthday. I was in sixth grade. On the news Walter Cronkite showed me Birmingham. Selma. Watts. George Wallace standing on the steps saying segregation now. Segregation forever. James Meredith and Ole' Miss. Viet Nam . The Berlin wall. I saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald, live. Martin, Bobby and Malcolm were murdered.
An uppity prize fighter changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali.
The College campus' across the country exploded in protest, anger and violence. Students were gunned down at Kent State. I was beaten and tear gassed at Ohio State more than once.
I talked and listened to the College students as I hung out as a High School student. I needed to understand. I embraced some positions. I rejected others. Hell, I met and talked with Bernadine Dohrn of the Weather Underground in an off campus apartment in Columbus in 1970.
I embraced the madness and change like a lover. My worldview was being radically altered. Eldridge Cleaver was asked what was the position of women in the Movement. His response was prone. I disagreed. I had developed a radical notion that people were equal. Equal meant equal.Color, religion and plumbing made no difference to me.
I asked my first wife how she could vote for Saint Ronnie in '80 with his views on women's issues. She looked at me like I was insane. We were divorced not long after.
I moved away from being politically active in the eighties. I just didn't have the passion anymore. After Reagan and Bush the Elder my annoyance was powering. I was waking back up/ Attacking womens rights was becoming the norm .The demonization of the poor. The rise of the Religious right and their rejection of the Twentieth Century
I saw evangelicals trying to push into education their bible stories. I looked on in amazed despair as this virus spread never dreaming we would be where we are now. I reengaged. Volunteer work for Clinton. Gore. And 2000 reawakened the radical bomb throwing hippie of my youth.
Then came Twitter.
I found like minded people. I remembered how to think and express myself. I remembered how to make reasoned, cognitive arguments. I rediscovered I had a vocabulary as rusty and unused as it was.The friends I made there may have saved the shards of my sanity.For that I am lucky and grateful.
I seem to be color blind. I think women are people and equal. I really don't care who someone loves.
So I was talking to a friend of mine about the happenings of the last few weeks. He's gay. As we discussed things he saw my opinions and point of view. He told me I was a true progressive. I was flabbergasted. I really don't see myself that way. I feel I'm a reasonably smart guy. I feel I'm an understanding, basically nice guy. One who understands how and why the world works the way it does. I know I understand historical context and perspective. I understand politics. I am a liberal. That's my idea of who I am. But a true progressive, Said like I was a fucking unicorn? I embrace that compliment. I will wear it as a badge of honor as if he were right.A goal to attain.
A long strange trip. Mistakes and regrets abound. On the whole though I like how I wound up. My evolution from a boy to a man. A liberal? Guilty.
A true progressive? I don't know. Jury is still out. I hope so. At least on the road. But I'll settle for being a nice guy and a good father. What more does one need anyway?
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Rogues. Scoundrels.Scalawags. And me.
I was born and raised in Columbus Ohio. I am an unabashed Big 10 fan. I'd like nothing better than to watch Ohio State clock an SEC school. Just to shut them the fuck up about slow Northern Teams. We play Football in football weather. The SEC plays football in beach volleyball weather. Sundresses and heels are not proper football attire.
That said, I have a major affection for the South. I am a card carrying Liberal. I don't care.The sublime, sweet,serene, sensual, Southern siren song has me as rapt as Odysseus. How?
How indeed?
It's complicated. Famous last words.
I first saw the South as a twelve year old boy on a family driving vacation. We visited family in Memphis. Drove south to New Orleans.I saw spanish moss on trees lining the two lane.In N'Awlins we wandered the Quarter.
Even then there was a gothic sensibility in the French Quarter that tugged at my soul. The ancient buildings. Courtyards.Balconies. The sunlight. The shadows The dark, Delta jewel beckoning, smiling softly..As a suburban boy from Ohio I was amazed and awed by the history.Walking in the footsteps of Lafitte,, Williams. Faulkner.Jackson. I had never experienced anything like this.The smells, sounds and music moved my heart and nestled somewhere in my soul waiting to reemerge in my adulthood. To catch me by surprise.
We moved along the Gulf coast. My younger brother and I launched bottle rockets into the Gulf of Mexico from a beach in Gulfport Mississippi.
We travelled along the Redneck Riviera.Got salt and sand in my swim trunks in Ft. Walton Beach Florida.
Up the East Coast through Savannah, Charleston. We ate well. It was on this trip I developed a lifelong disdain for grits. I have since been informed I may have to reevaluate that attitude.
I walked the decks and marveled at the big guns on the Battleship USS North Carolina.
On to Washington DC. Mount Vernon. Williamsburg. In the summer. In the South. The seeds were sown.
As an adult I spent time in Nashville and discovered I pick up accents easily and quickly. I found a different way of life. An appealing attitude.An intrigueing world.
I also developed a soft spot for Southern women. Similar to my genetic, Irish fascination with red heads.Both turn my head and steal my reason, only for me to discover I'm far out of my depth. I turn befuddled into the arms of strong Yankee women and am comforted there. I understand them. As well as I understand any woman. .
I later spent time in Maryland.
Then came my return to New Orleans.
She stole my heart. Captured my soul. The ambience. The music. The food. The people. The deep South called to me with it's genteel charm. The flower scented breezes. The sensual dance of life. It's hard not to love the South.
I am at best eccentric. At worst functionally crazy. A bit of a rogue. A scoundrel with an astounding lack of propriety. Eccentrics, scoundrels and rogues have a storied tradition in Southern life. We aren't avoided and condemned as in the staid puritanical North. And many of us are Irish. Imagine that.
I realize the South is conservative. Well so is most of Ohio. I simply feel lost and out of place in the North. I have a Southern sensibility pulling at me. Calling me. Confusing the hell out of me. Though a dear Southern friend told me I understand the charm and foibles of Dixie better than most Yanks. I would fit in.
I know moving is not a panacea. However I feel if I'm going to be alone and miserable I can do it just as well, if not better someplace I'd actually like. After all these years I can say with certainty that Ohio sucks. Not in a good way.
So it seems to be time for an exodus. Time to become an expat Buckeye. Time to live not exist. I'm overdue to embrace the the sultry seductress that is the South. It could be a mistake. I could get burned. But as Buffett once said,"the pleasure is worth all the pain". It'll be one hell of a ride.
That said, I have a major affection for the South. I am a card carrying Liberal. I don't care.The sublime, sweet,serene, sensual, Southern siren song has me as rapt as Odysseus. How?
How indeed?
It's complicated. Famous last words.
I first saw the South as a twelve year old boy on a family driving vacation. We visited family in Memphis. Drove south to New Orleans.I saw spanish moss on trees lining the two lane.In N'Awlins we wandered the Quarter.
Even then there was a gothic sensibility in the French Quarter that tugged at my soul. The ancient buildings. Courtyards.Balconies. The sunlight. The shadows The dark, Delta jewel beckoning, smiling softly..As a suburban boy from Ohio I was amazed and awed by the history.Walking in the footsteps of Lafitte,, Williams. Faulkner.Jackson. I had never experienced anything like this.The smells, sounds and music moved my heart and nestled somewhere in my soul waiting to reemerge in my adulthood. To catch me by surprise.
We moved along the Gulf coast. My younger brother and I launched bottle rockets into the Gulf of Mexico from a beach in Gulfport Mississippi.
We travelled along the Redneck Riviera.Got salt and sand in my swim trunks in Ft. Walton Beach Florida.
Up the East Coast through Savannah, Charleston. We ate well. It was on this trip I developed a lifelong disdain for grits. I have since been informed I may have to reevaluate that attitude.
I walked the decks and marveled at the big guns on the Battleship USS North Carolina.
On to Washington DC. Mount Vernon. Williamsburg. In the summer. In the South. The seeds were sown.
As an adult I spent time in Nashville and discovered I pick up accents easily and quickly. I found a different way of life. An appealing attitude.An intrigueing world.
I also developed a soft spot for Southern women. Similar to my genetic, Irish fascination with red heads.Both turn my head and steal my reason, only for me to discover I'm far out of my depth. I turn befuddled into the arms of strong Yankee women and am comforted there. I understand them. As well as I understand any woman. .
I later spent time in Maryland.
Then came my return to New Orleans.
She stole my heart. Captured my soul. The ambience. The music. The food. The people. The deep South called to me with it's genteel charm. The flower scented breezes. The sensual dance of life. It's hard not to love the South.
I am at best eccentric. At worst functionally crazy. A bit of a rogue. A scoundrel with an astounding lack of propriety. Eccentrics, scoundrels and rogues have a storied tradition in Southern life. We aren't avoided and condemned as in the staid puritanical North. And many of us are Irish. Imagine that.
I realize the South is conservative. Well so is most of Ohio. I simply feel lost and out of place in the North. I have a Southern sensibility pulling at me. Calling me. Confusing the hell out of me. Though a dear Southern friend told me I understand the charm and foibles of Dixie better than most Yanks. I would fit in.
I know moving is not a panacea. However I feel if I'm going to be alone and miserable I can do it just as well, if not better someplace I'd actually like. After all these years I can say with certainty that Ohio sucks. Not in a good way.
So it seems to be time for an exodus. Time to become an expat Buckeye. Time to live not exist. I'm overdue to embrace the the sultry seductress that is the South. It could be a mistake. I could get burned. But as Buffett once said,"the pleasure is worth all the pain". It'll be one hell of a ride.
Monday, June 24, 2013
Looking South (REVISED)
When I mention I want to move South, people look at me aghast. "Why?", they ask. "You're a Liberal. They'll kill you and eat you. If you want to move go to the Northeast. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware." I explain because, snow. Cold. Also New England tends to be a bit staid for me.
The South on the other hand is warm. Mild winters. A more laid back lifestyle. Besides there are Progressive Southerners who despise the stereotypes that their Representatives tend to reinforce on the National stage. I am also quite adept at finding the Liberal resistance cells. Having read and spoken with some of these Progressive Southern voices I have great hopes for the South. The South has progressed, albeit slowly. There are still attitudes entrenched in the culture that will take time to evolve past. There are good Southerners of vision leading that evolution. They need our encouragement and support, not
our ridicule and disdain.
But they're redneck racists, I am told. Trust me, Liberal Columbus Ohio has their share of those. And then some.
I will say during Segregation and Jim Crow at least the South was up front about how they felt. Unlike the insidious covert racism of the North. An African American could eat at the Woolworth's lunch counter but they'd best be back in Bronzeville when they're off work. We had our Ghetto and Red Lined neighborhoods. Here in Columbus the Federal Court ordered busing to desegregate the Columbus School System two decades AFTER Little Rock. I remember when the Ghetto here in Columbus burned. In the upscale suburbs there is the issue of driving while Black.
I've been in the South and Deep South. What I've found are warm, caring people. A culture of hospitality and a genteel sensibility. OK, there's ignorant rednecks there. So, we have them here. It's conservative. Have you looked at an Electoral Map of Ohio lately? Or Indiana?
When I was working in New Orleans I found there, what I felt was a sensual, open outlook on life. The food was a celebration. The music was communion. The sultry atmosphere had a certain erotic charge to it. I felt Tennessee Williams was writing documentaries.
Whereas Ohio is a cold hidebound repressed society. A certain sexual and social repression that may be remnants of the large German population that shaped Columbus in the 19th century. It's only in the last twenty years that there has even been culinary adventurism. When I grew up there was only Cantonese served in Chinese restaurants. No Mexican or Thai. Boring Mid Western food in an over sized College town.
Columbus has changed. More vibrant, more diverse and sophisticated but still repressed and emotionally cold.
I fell in love with the South when I was there. And I'll admit the women had a lot to do with it.There seems to be cultural differences between the North and South. Southern women have this open charm lacking in the Mid West. Strength with compassion. The velvet covered steel. The gentle ability to slice you to the bone with a smile. You don't even feel it. Ninjas in heels and sundresses. They claim to have superpowers. I believe them. I have been bewitched, bothered and bewildered by them a few times. Southern Women are right up there with redheads when iy comes to making me stupid. Smitten. Surrendered. And that dark jewel of the Delta, New Orleans has stolen my heart. Soothed my soul.
There seems to be a tradition of appreciation of eccentrics, rogues, scoundrels and scalawags. My kind of people. People like me. A person I respect once told me I have a certain Southern sensibility to me. I took that as a compliment. If true my readjustment will be easier. I will need a southern culture tutor though. Need to assimilate correctly. Active camouflage.
I'm not naive. I know moving isn't a panacea. A magic cure all for my myriad problems. But if I'm alone and miserable here in Ohio, I can be alone and miserable just as well somewhere else. Someplace warm, weather and culture-wise.With good food. A different outlook on life. A smile and dinner. A drink with other eccentrics. They don't hide us crazy people in the attic. They invite us to lunch.
The South on the other hand is warm. Mild winters. A more laid back lifestyle. Besides there are Progressive Southerners who despise the stereotypes that their Representatives tend to reinforce on the National stage. I am also quite adept at finding the Liberal resistance cells. Having read and spoken with some of these Progressive Southern voices I have great hopes for the South. The South has progressed, albeit slowly. There are still attitudes entrenched in the culture that will take time to evolve past. There are good Southerners of vision leading that evolution. They need our encouragement and support, not
our ridicule and disdain.
But they're redneck racists, I am told. Trust me, Liberal Columbus Ohio has their share of those. And then some.
I will say during Segregation and Jim Crow at least the South was up front about how they felt. Unlike the insidious covert racism of the North. An African American could eat at the Woolworth's lunch counter but they'd best be back in Bronzeville when they're off work. We had our Ghetto and Red Lined neighborhoods. Here in Columbus the Federal Court ordered busing to desegregate the Columbus School System two decades AFTER Little Rock. I remember when the Ghetto here in Columbus burned. In the upscale suburbs there is the issue of driving while Black.
I've been in the South and Deep South. What I've found are warm, caring people. A culture of hospitality and a genteel sensibility. OK, there's ignorant rednecks there. So, we have them here. It's conservative. Have you looked at an Electoral Map of Ohio lately? Or Indiana?
When I was working in New Orleans I found there, what I felt was a sensual, open outlook on life. The food was a celebration. The music was communion. The sultry atmosphere had a certain erotic charge to it. I felt Tennessee Williams was writing documentaries.
Whereas Ohio is a cold hidebound repressed society. A certain sexual and social repression that may be remnants of the large German population that shaped Columbus in the 19th century. It's only in the last twenty years that there has even been culinary adventurism. When I grew up there was only Cantonese served in Chinese restaurants. No Mexican or Thai. Boring Mid Western food in an over sized College town.
Columbus has changed. More vibrant, more diverse and sophisticated but still repressed and emotionally cold.
I fell in love with the South when I was there. And I'll admit the women had a lot to do with it.There seems to be cultural differences between the North and South. Southern women have this open charm lacking in the Mid West. Strength with compassion. The velvet covered steel. The gentle ability to slice you to the bone with a smile. You don't even feel it. Ninjas in heels and sundresses. They claim to have superpowers. I believe them. I have been bewitched, bothered and bewildered by them a few times. Southern Women are right up there with redheads when iy comes to making me stupid. Smitten. Surrendered. And that dark jewel of the Delta, New Orleans has stolen my heart. Soothed my soul.
There seems to be a tradition of appreciation of eccentrics, rogues, scoundrels and scalawags. My kind of people. People like me. A person I respect once told me I have a certain Southern sensibility to me. I took that as a compliment. If true my readjustment will be easier. I will need a southern culture tutor though. Need to assimilate correctly. Active camouflage.
I'm not naive. I know moving isn't a panacea. A magic cure all for my myriad problems. But if I'm alone and miserable here in Ohio, I can be alone and miserable just as well somewhere else. Someplace warm, weather and culture-wise.With good food. A different outlook on life. A smile and dinner. A drink with other eccentrics. They don't hide us crazy people in the attic. They invite us to lunch.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Living and dying in 3/4 time
I've mentioned I used to write song lyrics. That was a long strange trip filled with awful decisions, missed connections, bad timing and amazing mistakes. It was also exhilarating. There may be no feeling like hearing your words in a well crafted song applauded by a crowd. It was good. I felt I had potential. I also thought I was Raymond Chandler so suspension of disbelief may be called for.
I started in High School. It was the Sixties a heady time of foment and revolution in life. I was not popular. Surprise. Usually the smartest kid in the room I tried to perfect the image of the angst ridden teen. I sorta pulled it off. I may have felt the need to be liked a little too much to succeed fully at that. Teenagers are so dramatic.
I wrote dark, foreboding, despair filled poetry. A true joy to read. Had a shrink read my work, with today's diagnostic tools, I would have been immediately medicated and slapped into therapy.
It was the Sixties and I was angry. Immersed the issues of the time. The War. Civil Rights. The Draft. Hell, I had the radical notion that women were people and deserved full equality. Wacko. I was appalled and devastated in '68 with the murders of Martin and Bobby. I was beat and tear gassed at demonstrations at Ohio State. More than once.
Then there was the music,Dear God, the music. I am an unabashed Boomer. In my humble opinion, the 1960's was the most explosive time of creativity in popular music ever. The Beatles. The Stones. The Who,. Bob fucking Dylan. I listened to the lyrics. Everyone had a message. At time's you had to dig in and decipher. That had risks of misinterpretation. (See Charlie Manson) Other times the message was overt. I found I was writing lyrics. I learned structure and evolved. I wasn't very good but I evolved.Also my eclectic tastes were developing. It spanned from Dylan to Boyce and Hart.
This kid was hanging out with Garage Bands. A roadie. Helped put together set lists. Tried to learn how to flirt. Crashed and burned at that. So the band and I tried to put music to my words. It simply didn't fit . Not late 60s,early 70s sorta lyrics.
We moved into the Seventies. I was still writing but Rock was changing. There was the rise of the Singer/Songwriter. We also saw the rise of pretentious, overproduced Rock. Yes, ELO and Queen were not my idea of Rock 'n Roll.The Beatles and CSN&Y broke up. The Eagles were taking wing though.
I had discovered Outlaw Country. I moved there, away from Rock, though I still listened. In the Outlaw movement brilliant writers were working. Kristofferson. Willie Nelson. John Prine. David Allen Coe. Billy Joe Shaver. Tom T. Hall. And there was the Rock side of this coin. James Taylor. Mac Davis. And of course, Jimmy Buffett. I listened. I wrote. I learned. Me, as a singer/songwriter was not an option. At best my guitar playing was mediocre. My voice made Kristofferson and Prine sound operatic.
Eventually I found myself writing with one of the guys from the Garage Band Days in his basement. His wife bitched about the noise and wine consumption. (Wine was cool) I'd bought a used big Sony reel to reel (Google it)and we wound up doing a demo tape of his music and my lyrics. I went to Nashville. For a week. Arrogant or what?
I found myself in the Holiday Inn Centennial. Across from Centennial Park and the reconstructed Parthenon. (Nashville is called the Athens of the South) I found myself walking 15th and 16th avenues. Dusty one way streets since renamed Music Square for the tourists. I saw the publishing houses shoved into old frame working class homes surrounded by mature trees. Pools of cool shade and shadows dappled the sidewalks.. I saw the big names on the signs. Loretta. George. Johnny. I drank beer in the little tavern on 16th Kris tended bar in . Talked to Writers. Learned.
I pitched the tape. No takers. What a shock. I came home. Undeterred.
The following year I met a guy in a band. We became friends and shared a townhouse. I learned a lot from him about structure and composition. He had a trio. At the gigs women seemed to hang out with the band in quartets. I learned to flirt. Well. I learned about music and life. My roomie looked over my scribbled lyrics. He liked my style but nothing clicked. It happens. I turned on my reel to reel and did a demo. Me and my guitar. Singing. As to my skill as a composer the keyboard player in my roommates trio once described it thus. "C, F, G and an occasional A minor." Off to Nashville I went. For a week. Again. I seem to have a history of arrogance or overconfidence. Or both.
Back at the Holiday Inn Centennial, I hit Music City Row again, tape and dreams in hand.
I talked to the owner of a small pblishing house. She had some writers in the stable who'd written chart hits. She said , not to disparage my picking and singing I was writing commercial top forty lyrics,.My playing and singing sucked. That was not exactly news to me.
That was whrn I made one of the biggest mistakes in my life. (Excluding my first wife) "Would I like to sign as a staff lyricist?"" No, I said. Right now I'd like to work with people I know." Moron. Never let a twenty year old kid make decisions like that without someone to advise him.
I partied in Nashville and after having money wired from Columbus to clear my bar tab at the Holiday Inn, I came home.
My roommates band was cutting a demo at a cutting edge studio just built south of Columbus. They had for Pure Prairie League to finish before the could start.H
e said they needed another song and did I have anything laying around He had not seen. I rummaged around and handed him a set of lyrics. It clicked. We worked the lyrics and music hammering out the song in under an hour. I'm still proud of it. The demo made the rounds. We entered the song we wrote in the 1974 American Song Festival. Out of the 60,000+ entries we won an Honorable Mention in the Professional category. Along with Sheb Wooley and Darryl Hall among others whose names escape me this far out. RCA wanted to hold the song for Elvis. Mistake number two. We said no. To be honest Elvis was at the end of his career, but still....
I moved on and got married. I also wrote less and less. I finally stopped. There was something about my life then that blocked me. i just dried up. Wasn't her fault. It just happened. We divorced. I continued to hang out with musicians. I simply love music. I moved to writing prose though. My songwriting days behind me.
My old roomie called me out of the blue one day. Johnny Paycheck was interested in a couple of our songs. The Song festival one and another about the closing of the American frontier. Here's where my impeccable timing comes in. Paycheck cut a couple of my .partner's songs with one in a straight to video movie. Then Johnny Paycheck shot a guy in a bar in Greenville Ohio. They put Johnny in the can prior to his putting my songs in the can. Life can be an evil bitch with a twisted sense of humor. My love of finely crafted lyrics remains. But sometimes, sometimes I feel I let something fine and wonderful slide out of my life.
I started in High School. It was the Sixties a heady time of foment and revolution in life. I was not popular. Surprise. Usually the smartest kid in the room I tried to perfect the image of the angst ridden teen. I sorta pulled it off. I may have felt the need to be liked a little too much to succeed fully at that. Teenagers are so dramatic.
I wrote dark, foreboding, despair filled poetry. A true joy to read. Had a shrink read my work, with today's diagnostic tools, I would have been immediately medicated and slapped into therapy.
It was the Sixties and I was angry. Immersed the issues of the time. The War. Civil Rights. The Draft. Hell, I had the radical notion that women were people and deserved full equality. Wacko. I was appalled and devastated in '68 with the murders of Martin and Bobby. I was beat and tear gassed at demonstrations at Ohio State. More than once.
Then there was the music,Dear God, the music. I am an unabashed Boomer. In my humble opinion, the 1960's was the most explosive time of creativity in popular music ever. The Beatles. The Stones. The Who,. Bob fucking Dylan. I listened to the lyrics. Everyone had a message. At time's you had to dig in and decipher. That had risks of misinterpretation. (See Charlie Manson) Other times the message was overt. I found I was writing lyrics. I learned structure and evolved. I wasn't very good but I evolved.Also my eclectic tastes were developing. It spanned from Dylan to Boyce and Hart.
This kid was hanging out with Garage Bands. A roadie. Helped put together set lists. Tried to learn how to flirt. Crashed and burned at that. So the band and I tried to put music to my words. It simply didn't fit . Not late 60s,early 70s sorta lyrics.
We moved into the Seventies. I was still writing but Rock was changing. There was the rise of the Singer/Songwriter. We also saw the rise of pretentious, overproduced Rock. Yes, ELO and Queen were not my idea of Rock 'n Roll.The Beatles and CSN&Y broke up. The Eagles were taking wing though.
I had discovered Outlaw Country. I moved there, away from Rock, though I still listened. In the Outlaw movement brilliant writers were working. Kristofferson. Willie Nelson. John Prine. David Allen Coe. Billy Joe Shaver. Tom T. Hall. And there was the Rock side of this coin. James Taylor. Mac Davis. And of course, Jimmy Buffett. I listened. I wrote. I learned. Me, as a singer/songwriter was not an option. At best my guitar playing was mediocre. My voice made Kristofferson and Prine sound operatic.
Eventually I found myself writing with one of the guys from the Garage Band Days in his basement. His wife bitched about the noise and wine consumption. (Wine was cool) I'd bought a used big Sony reel to reel (Google it)and we wound up doing a demo tape of his music and my lyrics. I went to Nashville. For a week. Arrogant or what?
I found myself in the Holiday Inn Centennial. Across from Centennial Park and the reconstructed Parthenon. (Nashville is called the Athens of the South) I found myself walking 15th and 16th avenues. Dusty one way streets since renamed Music Square for the tourists. I saw the publishing houses shoved into old frame working class homes surrounded by mature trees. Pools of cool shade and shadows dappled the sidewalks.. I saw the big names on the signs. Loretta. George. Johnny. I drank beer in the little tavern on 16th Kris tended bar in . Talked to Writers. Learned.
I pitched the tape. No takers. What a shock. I came home. Undeterred.
The following year I met a guy in a band. We became friends and shared a townhouse. I learned a lot from him about structure and composition. He had a trio. At the gigs women seemed to hang out with the band in quartets. I learned to flirt. Well. I learned about music and life. My roomie looked over my scribbled lyrics. He liked my style but nothing clicked. It happens. I turned on my reel to reel and did a demo. Me and my guitar. Singing. As to my skill as a composer the keyboard player in my roommates trio once described it thus. "C, F, G and an occasional A minor." Off to Nashville I went. For a week. Again. I seem to have a history of arrogance or overconfidence. Or both.
Back at the Holiday Inn Centennial, I hit Music City Row again, tape and dreams in hand.
I talked to the owner of a small pblishing house. She had some writers in the stable who'd written chart hits. She said , not to disparage my picking and singing I was writing commercial top forty lyrics,.My playing and singing sucked. That was not exactly news to me.
That was whrn I made one of the biggest mistakes in my life. (Excluding my first wife) "Would I like to sign as a staff lyricist?"" No, I said. Right now I'd like to work with people I know." Moron. Never let a twenty year old kid make decisions like that without someone to advise him.
I partied in Nashville and after having money wired from Columbus to clear my bar tab at the Holiday Inn, I came home.
My roommates band was cutting a demo at a cutting edge studio just built south of Columbus. They had for Pure Prairie League to finish before the could start.H
e said they needed another song and did I have anything laying around He had not seen. I rummaged around and handed him a set of lyrics. It clicked. We worked the lyrics and music hammering out the song in under an hour. I'm still proud of it. The demo made the rounds. We entered the song we wrote in the 1974 American Song Festival. Out of the 60,000+ entries we won an Honorable Mention in the Professional category. Along with Sheb Wooley and Darryl Hall among others whose names escape me this far out. RCA wanted to hold the song for Elvis. Mistake number two. We said no. To be honest Elvis was at the end of his career, but still....
I moved on and got married. I also wrote less and less. I finally stopped. There was something about my life then that blocked me. i just dried up. Wasn't her fault. It just happened. We divorced. I continued to hang out with musicians. I simply love music. I moved to writing prose though. My songwriting days behind me.
My old roomie called me out of the blue one day. Johnny Paycheck was interested in a couple of our songs. The Song festival one and another about the closing of the American frontier. Here's where my impeccable timing comes in. Paycheck cut a couple of my .partner's songs with one in a straight to video movie. Then Johnny Paycheck shot a guy in a bar in Greenville Ohio. They put Johnny in the can prior to his putting my songs in the can. Life can be an evil bitch with a twisted sense of humor. My love of finely crafted lyrics remains. But sometimes, sometimes I feel I let something fine and wonderful slide out of my life.
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Blame it on Kristofferson (REVISED)
I grew up on some of the best lyricists to use the English language in the last half of the Twentieth Century. Lennon and McCartney. Dylan. Carole King. Neil Diamond. John Hartford. Jimmy Webb. Like many of the lost young people of my time I fancied myself a poet. A songwriter.
I started in the late Sixties. Words full of angst and despair. Thankfully I matured and evolved quickly. I was trying to write short stories in three verses and a chorus. I was friends with musicians and was hanging out on the fringes of the business.A couple tried to put music to my words. They said I was writing tone poems with a nice internal rhythm. However we couldn't shoehorn them into late Sixties, early Seventies Rock 'n Roll. I had no idea where my words fit in. What kind of voice did I have? Was I simply playing the sensitive young man and trying to get laid? Well, it was the Sixties though I felt there was more to me. A bit more anyway.
Then I heard the songs. "Sunday Morning Coming Down". "Me and Bobby McGee."
When I heard Cash sing about those Sunday Mornin' sidewalks I was floored. Then I paused and thought,"WHAT!?!? I'm writing fucking Country?" I looked back at "Nashville Skyline". I loved it but whatever Muse I was being used by was left cold.Even by "Lat Lady Lay." I listened to the Columbus,Ohio Country station. I was appalled. Pro Vietnam war, anti youth , twangy redneck bullshit.
I found out who wrote those two songs and started to listen for that poetic voice. Remember, there was no internet. No Google. I relied on Billboard magazine for news of this guy. There was an occasional blurb as this was the dawn of songwriter as auteur, i.e. James Taylor.
Then on 1230 WCOL AM I heard the song snag by the man who wrote it. It told me what I was writing. How to write and it broke my heart. I knew I would never write anything that beautiful and powerful.The lyrics flowed with imagery, loss and hope."Loving Her Was easier(Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again). Kris Kristofferson. Christ, the first two lines are stunning. "I have seen the morning, burning golden on the mountain in the sky. Aching with the feeling of the freedom of an eagle when she flies." I was done. Hooked.
I bought the "Silver Tongued Devil" album. I was awed and amazed. I found his first album "Kristofferson" Hell the songs on that. "Sunday Mornin' Coming Down". "For The Good Times". "Help Me Make It Through The Night."Me And Bobby McGee". OMG.
I discovered he was a Rhodes scholar.Majored in English Literature at Oxford. Wrote a paper on William Blake. The Nashville old guard weren't happy about this hippie invading their old boys club. Kris brought the nuances of the power of the English language well and truly used into popular music. He changed the face of Country music.
Kris found his way into movies and proved to be an excellent actor and a bit of a heart throb See "The Sailor That Fell From Grace With The Sea' sometime. Dark. Powerful. Boldly erotic. And lets forget about "Heavens Gate" I blame that disaster on the Director.
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To me Kris reinforced the knowledge of just how beautiful English is in the hands of a writer with mastery. I learned lessons in lyric writing. I learned how to use language to paint with my prose. A lesson I have mostly forgotten. I learned how to hurt at an ending but remain hopeful. HE shaped how I see and feel the world around me. I learned that joy, passion,angst and sorrow were all connected on one level or another, You may be hurting but you need to hope. To care. To love again.
Kris is still writing and performing powerful music in his seventies. On his own terms. Following his vision, not some executive's.
If you want to know why I write as I do. Blame it on Kristofferson. Why am I an unabashed romantic? Blame it on Kristofferson.
Why do I hope to find a love someday? Blame it on Kristofferson. Why do I still dream even when I'm in despair? Blame it on Kristofferson. Why do I try singing? Blame it on Kristofferson.
So Kris, thank you for writing such a major portion of the soundtrack of my life. Thanks for schooling me. Thanks for telling me about that lonely guy wandering those bleak Sunday sidewalks. Thanks for the good times.
I started in the late Sixties. Words full of angst and despair. Thankfully I matured and evolved quickly. I was trying to write short stories in three verses and a chorus. I was friends with musicians and was hanging out on the fringes of the business.A couple tried to put music to my words. They said I was writing tone poems with a nice internal rhythm. However we couldn't shoehorn them into late Sixties, early Seventies Rock 'n Roll. I had no idea where my words fit in. What kind of voice did I have? Was I simply playing the sensitive young man and trying to get laid? Well, it was the Sixties though I felt there was more to me. A bit more anyway.
Then I heard the songs. "Sunday Morning Coming Down". "Me and Bobby McGee."
When I heard Cash sing about those Sunday Mornin' sidewalks I was floored. Then I paused and thought,"WHAT!?!? I'm writing fucking Country?" I looked back at "Nashville Skyline". I loved it but whatever Muse I was being used by was left cold.Even by "Lat Lady Lay." I listened to the Columbus,Ohio Country station. I was appalled. Pro Vietnam war, anti youth , twangy redneck bullshit.
I found out who wrote those two songs and started to listen for that poetic voice. Remember, there was no internet. No Google. I relied on Billboard magazine for news of this guy. There was an occasional blurb as this was the dawn of songwriter as auteur, i.e. James Taylor.
Then on 1230 WCOL AM I heard the song snag by the man who wrote it. It told me what I was writing. How to write and it broke my heart. I knew I would never write anything that beautiful and powerful.The lyrics flowed with imagery, loss and hope."Loving Her Was easier(Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again). Kris Kristofferson. Christ, the first two lines are stunning. "I have seen the morning, burning golden on the mountain in the sky. Aching with the feeling of the freedom of an eagle when she flies." I was done. Hooked.
I bought the "Silver Tongued Devil" album. I was awed and amazed. I found his first album "Kristofferson" Hell the songs on that. "Sunday Mornin' Coming Down". "For The Good Times". "Help Me Make It Through The Night."Me And Bobby McGee". OMG.
I discovered he was a Rhodes scholar.Majored in English Literature at Oxford. Wrote a paper on William Blake. The Nashville old guard weren't happy about this hippie invading their old boys club. Kris brought the nuances of the power of the English language well and truly used into popular music. He changed the face of Country music.
Kris found his way into movies and proved to be an excellent actor and a bit of a heart throb See "The Sailor That Fell From Grace With The Sea' sometime. Dark. Powerful. Boldly erotic. And lets forget about "Heavens Gate" I blame that disaster on the Director.
To me Kris reinforced the knowledge of just how beautiful English is in the hands of a writer with mastery. I learned lessons in lyric writing. I learned how to use language to paint with my prose. A lesson I have mostly forgotten. I learned how to hurt at an ending but remain hopeful. HE shaped how I see and feel the world around me. I learned that joy, passion,angst and sorrow were all connected on one level or another, You may be hurting but you need to hope. To care. To love again.
Kris is still writing and performing powerful music in his seventies. On his own terms. Following his vision, not some executive's.
If you want to know why I write as I do. Blame it on Kristofferson. Why am I an unabashed romantic? Blame it on Kristofferson.
Why do I hope to find a love someday? Blame it on Kristofferson. Why do I still dream even when I'm in despair? Blame it on Kristofferson. Why do I try singing? Blame it on Kristofferson.
So Kris, thank you for writing such a major portion of the soundtrack of my life. Thanks for schooling me. Thanks for telling me about that lonely guy wandering those bleak Sunday sidewalks. Thanks for the good times.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Who's on First? The Doctor (Moderate Spoilers)
When people find I'm a Doctor Who fan they ask why? I reply no, Who. We then try to avoid a SciFi version of "Who's On First" I first saw The Doctor on WOSU, the local PBS station in the Sixties. Even in my early teens, already a scifi nerd, I wasn't impressed. The writing? Good. The acting? Good. It was the cheesy (even by 60's standards) VFX. It was also so......British. I had barely mastered American English. My absurdest,eclectic tastes were still in flux. Unformed. And it wasn't Star Trek. It was cancelled in 1989. I didn't notice. Like Star Trek. Doctor Who was revived by the BBC. Under Russell T. Davies. Filmed in Cardiff,Wales. The new Who starred Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper as the Companion. (The Doctor always travels with a companion, usually an attractive young woman) Had no idea who they were. the Doctor(just the Doctor) is a 900 year old Time Lord. A master of time and space. He travels in a blue police box from the early sixties called a TARDIS. Time And Relative Dimension In Space.It is bigger on the inside. A running joke. A TARDIS is a sentient vehicle that itself exists in all of time and space simultaneously. With the first episode I was intrigued. A quirky little show that had a robust sense of fun. The Doctor's sense of wonder as he showed Rose(the companion) Time and space. The far future. Chasing ghosts with Charles Dickens. game and reality show Earth. They met a charming scoundrel from the future named Captain Jack Harkness during the Blitz. The show works on many levels. Adventure for the kids. A nod and wink for the adults. The season was loaded with dry wit, near slapstick, poignancy, tragedy and heartbreak. Thus in the season finale, The Doctor was fatally injured. Here's where we see the best gimmick ever to replace the lead. Regeneration, From the start in 1963, when the lead decided to leave he morphed into a new version of the character.Same Doctor. New package and new personality. Eccleston was the ninth Doctor. His Doctor had a dark edge but was quirky, humorous and sad. .He regenerated into Tenth Doctor . Perennial fangirl favorite, David Tennent. The First season hooked me. The show was a mad adventure. Led by a mad man in a blue box. The show is character driven. They grew into people we cared for. A world we enjoy. The shows peculiar British sensibility makes it charming and endearing. The Tenth Doctor was the first to appear in a Christmas Special. It has become a Christmas tradition. A bridge between seasons it helps with withdrawal. Tennant's Doctor was a lighter take than Eccleston's. Not as hyper but a little goofy. He was funny, witty charming and capable of darkness. And deep compassion. During his three seasons there were three companions. Rose, then Martha and finally Donna. Rose was trapped in an adjacent universe and the loss devastated the Doctor. Martha moved on so as not to compete with Rose's ghost. Donna was a pal. All she wanted was to see everything. During his tenure Tennant saved the universe more than once. Reset time after it was altered by a renegade Time Lord named the Master. He met the mysterious Professor River Song. A woman from his future who seems to be more than a friend or companion. She knows his name. Her response to The Doctor's queries. "Spoilers, Sweetie."- During these three seasons the story arcs became more grand and powerful. A battle between Cybermen and the Daleks for the Earth. Time was reset after a renegade Time Lord took control. The Daleks were defeated after trying to destroy reality. T The victories and tragedies took a toll and after season four The Doctor regenerated into the eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith. Smith''s Doctor is more eccentric, more joyful and fun loving. As with the others there is a hidden darkness u under the Humor. Season five,six and the Just finished seventh have been a Joy. Amy Pond. The Girl who waited was the next companion. Along with her husband Rory. They adventured across the universe. They rebooted the universe in season five.The Doctor had to repair shattered time after it was torn asunder by River Song in the name of love in six. Seven saw the Ponds move on. And a new companion. The mystery of River song was unraveled. This Doctor was in turns, witty, silly, strong, compassionate and devastated. Season six and seven saw Neil Gaiman pen two episodes. The mystery of Clara, the new companion was solved. The impossible Girl. Now it;s a wait for the fiftieth Anniversary special on 11/23/2013. The Return of the Tenth Doctor and Rose. Since 2005 the show has maintained a high level of quality. It has spawned millions of fans worldwide. This well crafted, character driven vehicle has maintained it's place in the World's heart with a blend of intelligence, wit, charm. an endearing eccentricity and heartbreak. We triumph with them. We suffer with them. Laughing, crying. Thank you Doctor for these travels with a mad man in a blue box.
Sunday, June 16, 2013
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's SUPERMAN!! Reflections on an American Icon
It's Summer movie blockbuster season. Iron Man 3 kicked it off. The Kryptonian Boy Scout flew into theaters this weekend. I've heard it's darker and lacks the lighter Humanistic outlook the previous incarnations had. Well,Christopher Nolan, writer/Director of The Batman Trilogy is on board. So, it should be expected that with him producing and co-writing the story, a darker, edgier Superman would emerge. The question is does darker and edgier work for Kal-El? Superman has always been tough to script.You have an invulnerable,super powerful protagonist.His adversaries tend to be Human, using technology. A confrontation should last moments. Thus over the decades since 1938 weaknesses have been added and discarded. He gets his power from a yellow sun. Radioactive fragments of his home world are deadly (Yeppers, Kryptonite).However, without some sort of FTL those fragments shouldn't be here for centuries. Wait, I'm applying internal logic to a guy who can fly. Never mind. He's vulnerable to magic as we all are. Thus we have Kryptonite powered cyborgs. Lex Luthor likes kryptonite weapons. There are foes who wield dark forces and arcane majiks. High tech aliens are a recurrent pest . Then there's the Phantom Zone Criminals.The Phantom Zone is a Kryptonian prison that occupies an adjacent Universe or Dimension. Once in a while a prisoner escapes. This does present a challenge to Supes as these guys and gals get powers too, They also tend not to be prissy about collateral damage.At times an old Family foe emerges to wreck havoc. General Zod in particular. The Forties radio program, Cartoons and the TV series from the Fifties said he fought for Truth, Justice and the American Way. So from the start of his multi-media exposure Superman has been larger than life. With his power he needed a lighter, more morally and ethically restrictive outlook on life. He couldn't go batshit crazy like his buddy Bruce Wayne. Rather than relying on fear like Batman, Superman relies in his belief of the ultimate goodness of humanity. Batman is rooted in vengeance and darkness. Superman springs from hope and a belief in our inherent desire to do what's right. That was part of the charm of the 1978 Christopher Reeves film, "Superman: The Movie". Instead of the wealthy,bleak, traumatized urban childhood of Bruce Wayne,Clark Kent grew up on a farm in the Nation's heartland. Reeves in his incarnation of the Character embraced the mid-western values Clark developed. To the urbane residents off Metropolis He was unsophisticated and naive.Superman could have been an arrogant, self righteous asshole. Chris played him as a hopeful, caring demigod. Reeves embraced the duality of Clark/Kal-El. The differences in posture, inflection, character and confidence. A humble Superman with a sense of wonder.To my generation Christopher Reeves was the Cinematic Superman. He flew through sequels, each more disappointing than the last until it fizzled out. None recaptured the joyful, hopeful exuberance of the first. TV took over the saga."Superboy" had a thirty year old playing a teen in tights. It was mercifully short lived, "Lois And Clark" was a fun, lighthearted chick lit take on the couple. Then came a decade of "Smallville". A well done look at Clark's journey to becoming the man who would be Superman. Warner turned Brian Singer loose with our favorite Kryptonian. Singer did a wonderful take on the first two X-Men and totally missed the essence of Superman. For some inexplicable reason he did it as a continuation of a thirty year old vision. That vision was sublime. In Singer's hands it seemed over deferential and derivative, lacking in originality. The film was so flawed and failed on so many levels we'll just forget it happened.. Now we have the "Man Of Steel". When Nolan was announced as Co-writer/Producer I had my doubts. A darker, edgy Superman doesn't really jibe with tradition. I'm all for innovation. But, there reasons some things are traditional. Because that take on the character is the right take. Even in the Comic Books and animated series Superman has a brighter, more colorful hopeful look and tone than Batman. Gotham City is a dark, violent, corrupt dying city. Batman reflects that. Metropolis is a bright futuristic city. Superman always reflected that. There has always been a marked difference in tone and outlook. That's why the Superman.Batman team ups have always been so popular. A boy scout and a psychopath Their differences are complimentary. So I look forward to seeing "Man Of Steel". Why not? I'm a fanboy. Plus I so like to have something to bitch about. OK Nolan, show me.
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