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It’s amazing how a phone call from your wife telling you she lost control of the car on the way to work in a snowstorm and spun into a guardrail makes it really hard to think about blogging.
The blonde is ok. She’s at work. The car is banged up but apparently drivable. Can’t wait till she gets home now. Probably won’t say all the things I’m thinking and want to say but maybe I’ll surprise myself and her.
Update: Thanks to everyone for their concern and well wishes. The car looks ugly but it runs fine and brought the blonde home safe and sound. She’s fine and sends along her thanks and love too. We were all set to pamper her last night, but the only pampering she wanted was what she expected when she left the house in the morning. Pizza, wings, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
I didn’t get a single book this Christmas. Not counting Garry Trudeau’s book of satirical Twitter posts, My Shorts R Bunching. Thoughts?: The Tweets of Roland Hedley. Which is fun but I have to be careful and read it in short snatches because it’s already had way too much influence on my own tweeting, as you can tell.
I’m not complaining, exactly. It was just an unusual Christmas that way. Every other Christmas I can remember Santa managed to leave at least one book under the tree for me.
This year he probably figured I’ve got a big enough stack of unread books on my desk, I don’t need to add to it. It’s probably unsafe to add to it. It’s three feet high, halfway to the ceiling from the top of the desk and not built for stability. Still, I wouldn’t have minded adding Pops, Terry Teachout’s new biography of Louis Armstrong.
But maybe a bookless Christmas was Santa’s way of leaving coal in my stocking. Finish the ones you have, was his message, then we’ll discuss next year.
The blonde has always been good about her books. She reads every new one she gets her hands on right away. So Santa brought her Lorrie Moore’s new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, and the boys gave her the latest Wallander paperback, The Pyramid, which contains the first Wallander stories, first in the sense of being set earlier in Wallander’s career, before the novel sequence begins, before Wallander became as utterly miserable as his fans have gotten to know him, not in the sense of having been written first.
Ken and Oliver made out like bandits, book-wise, themselves. Plus they each received a Barnes and Noble gift certificate from their respective Secret Santas among their cousins. Books are all Ken asked for for Christmas this year. His haul includes too many to list here, but he’s halfway through the copy of Stephen King’s Under the Dome his grandparents gave him.
This bookless Christmas had given me an idea. It’s an idea that proceeds from the fact that Christmas is not over.
Ever since I was a kid it’s bothered me that Christmas shuts down right on December 25. Go into a drug store on the 26th, The Feast of Stephen, when good King Wenceslas looked down, and you’ll find the clerks hurriedly putting out the Valentine’s cards and heart-shaped boxes of chocolate. In other stores the Christmas decorations are coming down and the carols have stopped playing and the clerks, if they can muster any left over holiday cheer, are half-heartedly wishing customers a happy New Year.
And this is with eleven more days of Christmas to go!
Plus the Feast of the Three Kings, Little Christmas!
And in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Christmas itself is celebrated on January 7.
Christmas isn’t over when it’s over.
It shouldn’t be, at any rate.
Perhaps I took the song too much to heart. More than likely I was overly influenced by Dickens. In A Christmas Carol the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge through all twelve days of Christmas and finally leaves him outside a Twelfth Night party for the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to find.
For as long as I can remember it’s been my mission in life to persuade my friends and family to keep their Christmas spirits up all twelve days and to celebrate Twelfth Night and Little Christmas. This never completely caught on at Mom and Pop Mannions’ house. For some reason Mom Mannion thought we kids didn’t need any more presents. I always argued that more didn’t have to be the point. We could just save some of the boring gifts---clothes---and maybe one toy to open on January 5 or 6. I never won this argument. But some years, if the Epiphany fell on a Saturday or Sunday, Mom would indulge me by making a big dinner and inviting my grandparents over.
This has more or less been the case here at our house, although the blonde, like Mom Mannion, never seems quite as enthusiastic about more cooking and more visitors so soon after New Year’s.
This year, however, I think my new idea will get her a little more excited.
I propose that the celebration of Twelfth Night and Little Christmas be marked by the giving of a few simple gifts.
That is, books.
I suggest that everybody give to a select small group of nearest and dearest one book each. Hardcover or paperback. New or used.
Who’s with me?
I’m convinced that if the printing press had been invented the Wise Men wouldn’t have bothered with their gold, frankisncense, and myrrh but would have given the Baby Jesus Pat the Camel, Goodnight Wandering Star, and If You Give a Mouse a Matzoh.
And, no, this isn’t a sneaky plot to make up for Santa’s omission.
So…what about you?
What books would you give? What books would you like to be given? What books did you get.
I AM NOT JEALOUS!
____________________
Looking for suggestions? People pay Maud Newton to read books. Which is smart of them because Maud is a fine writer of reviews of books she’s been paid to read. Maud’s posted a list of her favorites among the books she was paid to read (not that she really needed to be paid to want to read them) and ones she read on her own for the sheer love of it over the past year.
Maud was also one of the authors Salon asked to recommend one special book. Maud’s recommendation is very interesting.
What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.
Even as the dot-com bubble deflated, credulous bankers and investors began inflating a new bubble in housing. Even after famous, admired companies like Enron and WorldCom were revealed to have been Potemkin corporations with facades built out of creative accounting, analysts and investors believed banks’ claims about their own financial strength and bought into the hype about investments they didn’t understand. Even after triggering a global economic collapse, and having to be rescued at taxpayers’ expense, bankers wasted no time going right back to the culture of giant bonuses and excessive leverage.
Then there are the politicians. Even now, it’s hard to get Democrats, President Obama included, to deliver a full-throated critique of the practices that got us into the mess we’re in. And as for the Republicans: now that their policies of tax cuts and deregulation have led us into an economic quagmire, their prescription for recovery is — tax cuts and deregulation.
From an interview Simon did with Vice Magazine. Not all of it’s about economics, but given what The Wire was about and that his new show, Treme, is set in post-Katrina New Orleans, the way money works or rather doesn’t work for many people was naturally on his mind:
…of course it’s socialism. These ignorant motherfuckers. What do they think group insurance is, other than socialism? Just the idea of buying group insurance! If socialism is a taint that you cannot abide by, then, goddamn it, you shouldn’t be in any group insurance policy. You should just go out and pay the fucking doctors because when you get 100,000 people together as part of anything, from a union to the AARP, and you say, “Because we have this group actuarially, more of us are going to be healthier than not and therefore we’ll be able to carry forward the idea of group insurance and everybody will have an affordable plan...” That’s fuckin’ socialism. That’s nothing but socialism.
…So the whole idea of group insurance, which of course everyone believes in, like that fellow on YouTube, “Don’t let the government take away my Medicare…” You look at that and you think there’s only one thing that can make people this stupid, and that’s money.
LanceMannion Visit to the old folks over. Long, hard drive thru the mtns at nite. Tired. Vision blurring. Pulling in at truck stop for a cup of joe. about 23 hours ago from txt
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LanceMannion Pretty waitress behind counter young, too young for the seen it all look in her eye. Look that sizes a guy up, sez I know your type, bub. about 23 hours ago from txt
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LanceMannion Only get a look like that from having your heart broken one too many times. Reminds me of a girl I knew in Belgrade a long time ago. about 23 hours ago from txt
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LanceMannion Remembering that girl, nites we spent together---fighting urge to frisk waitress for concealed weapons. about 23 hours ago from txt
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LanceMannion If I knew then what I know now... about 23 hours ago from txt
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LanceMannion Time to hit road. Waitress giving me a look says I knew a guy like you wouldn't stick around. Or maybe shld've left more'n a quarter tip about 22 hours ago from txt
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LanceMannion Miles and miles to go. Waiting for the pills I bought from those truckers to kick in. about 21 hours ago from txt
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LanceMannion Nice guys, those truckers. Great senses of humor. Wish I knew what had them so cracked up as I was walking away. about 21 hours ago from txt
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LanceMannion Fighting to keep eyes open. Still not even a tingle from the pills. Slow acting, I guess. about 19 hours ago from txt
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LanceMannion Hmm. Funny. Can’t remember ever having reds tasted like this. What is it? 0 about 19 hours ago from txt
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LanceMannion Nah. Can’t be. about 19 hours ago from txt
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LanceMannion Cinnamon? 25 about 19 hours ago from txt
I don’t mind that Guy Ritchie seems to have turned Sherlock Holmes into an action figure since Arthur Conan Doyle regularly implied that Holmes was in fact an action figure.
Saving Avatar for New Year’s Day and taking Pop Mannion to Sherlock Holmes this afternoon---Mom Mannion will be using the opportunity to rest up from all her Mother Christmasing over the last few days.
Is any fan’s ideal Sherlock Holmes the character as Conan Doyle wrote him or as Sidney Paget drew him? Pop Mannion’s Sherlock Holmes was Basil Rathbone. Mine is Jeremy Brett. But Brett taught both of us that there is no one way to play Holmes, although having seen and enjoyed The Seven Per-Cent Solution I’m not sure it’s a lesson I hadn’t already learned from Nicol Williamson, who come to think about it played Holmes as a bit of an action figure himself.
For the most part his Holmes was a strung-out, drug-addled, hyper-neurotic Freudian case study, but then there was that sword fight on the top of the cars of a speeding train. And I don’t remember thinking that was out of character for Holmes.
That’s because Doyle’s Holmes probably could fence. Why not? He was a crack shot. He could box. He was strong, as strong as Downey appears to be playing him in the movie. Take this scene from The Speckled Band in which the villain shows up at 221B Baker Street to try to scare Holmes off the case:
"I will go when I have said my say. Don't you dare to meddle with my affairs. I know that Miss Stoner has been here. I traced her! I am a dangerous man to fall foul of! See here." He stepped swiftly forward, seized the poker, and bent it into a curve with his huge brown hands.
"See that you keep yourself out of my grip," he snarled, and hurling the twisted poker into the fireplace he strode out of the room.
"He seems a very amiable person," said Holmes, laughing. "I am not quite so bulky, but if he had remained I might have shown him that my grip was not much more feeble than his own." As he spoke he picked up the steel poker and, with a sudden effort, straightened it out again.
It’s true Doyle rarely showed Holmes in situations that required him to duke or shoot it out with a bad guy. Rarely. And, remember, Doyle only showed Holmes as Watson saw him, and Watson was not the constant companion that popular imagination has him. Watson and Holmes shared rooms on Baker Street, but not a room. Watson spent his days at his surgery. Then he got married and moved out. He moved back in after Doyle widowed him but the Watsons were married for a while and during that while Holmes and Watson saw each other only on occasion. When they got together, Holmes usually hinted at three or four cases he had solved in the meantime without Watson’s aid and advice. And those cases often sounded more romantic and dangerous than any of the ones that became the basis for Watson’s stories.
In fact, Holmes seemed to encourage Watson to write up those cases because they were less romantic and violent and then objected to the little bits of romance Watson worked into those. Holmes wanted Watson to record and tout his methodsof detectionnot his adventures while detecting.
"To the man who loves art for its own sake," remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, "it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped this truth that in these little records of our cases which you have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish, you have given prominence not so much to the many causes celebres and sensational trials in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province."
"And yet," said I, smiling, "I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records."
"You have erred, perhaps," he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood--"you have erred perhaps in attempting to put color and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing."
We also know that Holmes had extensive connections among the denizens of London’s underworld and spent lots of time there, and not always because he was investigating a case. Holmes led a double life and he enjoyed keeping the details from Watson. He also seemed to think Watson wouldn’t be able to handle it if he did let him in on what he’d been up.
Then there were the years after Reichenbach Falls during which, Holmes wasn’t, as he says he’ll be doing at the end of The Seven Per-Cent Solution, spending his time on the stage passing as a concert violinist named Sigerson.
I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office.
I think I’d like to know what made that short visit to the Khalifa interesting.
As for the scenes in the trailer that show Holmes as a robust, randy, and somewhat kinky heterosexual, well, there isn’t anything in Doyle’s stories that insists definitively that he wasn’t. Holmes is usually brusque to the point of rudeness with women who cross his path---upper class women, at any rate---and he leaves it to Watson to act the gentleman with them. And he routinely drops remarks that are more than typically Victorian in their sexism. They border on misogyny and shock Watson, who has a high regard for women in general and is regularly quite admiring of individuals---he makes a point of noting female clients’ intelligence, courage, and level-headedness. Holmes talks as if he thinks all women are borderline hysterics. Watson is always ready to assure his readers that no actual hysterics have ever showed up at Baker Street.
Of course, we know that Holmes knows that there is at least one woman who is not an hysteric.
She is the only woman---the only person---who ever outwits Holmes and he likes that about her. He likes her. He may love her. It may be that every thing he says about women and the way he treats them, when on a case or considering taking a case, is defensive. He is pushing back against any feelings that could cloud his thinking. On a case, he needs to be cool-headed to the point of being a machine. (It makes perfect sense that Spock is one of his descendents, a possibility that requires us to believe that Holmes married and reproduced.) But it may also be that what we are hearing is the result of his comparing every woman who comes after to the woman.
Or to the women he knows from the opium dens and dive bars and---why not?---whorehouses he visits without Watson around to complain or fret or judge.
So it may be that Guy Ritchie has simply taken what’s implied is going on in the background of Conan Doyle’s stories and moved it to the foreground where Watson can see what his friend’s really been up to for once.
What I’m dreading is not what Ritchie might have done with or to the character. I’m dreading what he might have done with the movie, which is to have made it into a big noisy mess.
But I’m also dreading one more thing.
Rachel McAdams in a corset, garter belt, and thigh highs.
I’ll tell you why when we get back. Movie’s starting soon. We’re off. Catch you later.
___________________
Take a virtual tour of Holmes’ study at 221B Baker Street.
Having a holly jolly Christmas here at the old homestead with Mom and Pop Mannion. Always a comfort and a joy to be home, except as the evenings wane and Pop reaches for the TV remote to turn on…the news.
Back home I don’t watch the news on television. I read newspapers and catch up with what the networks are passing along as news online. I recommend this practice for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is that it’s quieter.
Everybody on TV seems to shout.
It’s clear that John McLaughlin not Walter Cronkite, and certainly not Edward R. Murrow, has bee the greatest influence on broadcasting over the last generation.
But Pop tuned into the local Fox affiliate first to get the weather report and I was pleasantly surprised.
Their meteorologist was a twentysomething guy who…spoke softly. And calmly. Amazing, since he’d grown up listening to weathercasters who couldn’t report a heat wave in Texas in August or rain in Seattle without resorting to tones and volumes they must have learned in college watching a film clip of the burning and crashing of the Hindenburg.
His voice was measured, his emphases and stresses well-placed and never overdone. He used his hands a bit much, but his gestures were subdued and simply demonstrative or illustrative---he wasn’t the type to make hurricanes out of zephyrs. He was reporting the approach of snow but seemed well-aware that he was in upstate New York and it was late December and under those circumstances ran overnight dusting isn’t exactly breaking news. You might as well get breathless reporting a morning frost.
It was a nice change from the sort of weather reporting that helped convince me to stop watching the news, the sort that another local station demonstrated a half hour later after Pop had switched over to get the sports scores.
Their meteorologist was not quiet.
Or calm.
Or seemingly aware that anybody watching had ever seen snow before in their lives.
I wouldn’t say that when he warned us about the oncoming “wintery mix” (in the “higher elevations,” meaning up in the foothills the Adirondacks---it’s also a feature of weather reports that if there are “higher elevations” in the broadcast area, the whole area shares in the worst of what’s battering the windward side of the peaks) in tones that made me think “Oh the humanity!”
But if you didn’t speak English and didn’t have your eyes on the screen you wouldn’t have been able to tell the weather report from a sports update in which the top story was an upset of the Cowboys beating the Saints order.
And another thing!
Have you noticed how the meteorologists grow more cheerful whenever they have real bad weather to report, like they have a rooting interest in seeing us get flattened, buried, or drowned? It’s as if Mother Nature is the underdog and they had their life savings riding on her.
Sorry. I’m done. Another reason not to watch TV news---cuts down on cranky posts like this one.
The Globe Theatre, Christmas morning. Today’s performance…No, not Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night will be performed on Twelfth Night. This afternoon, at the Queen’s request for Christmas, Falstaff in love---The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Merry Christmas from all of us here in Mannionville to all of you in whatever ville, burg, town, or swold you call home or feel at home in.
At mass Christmas day last year the Communion hymn was The First Noel, one of my top three favorite carols, even when it's sung by a churchful of tone-deaf Catholics, many of them still half-asleep from having been dragged from their beds at an ungodly early hour to watch the kids tear into their presents from Santa, or maybe I'm just projecting.
Probably augmented by relatives from out of town and CAPE Catholics like me, the lines to the wine and the wafers were moving at a leisurely pace, so we had time to sing all the verses.
If I did, I'd forgotten it, and I was taken aback by the the third verse.
The reason I love The First Noel, besides the fact that it's such a pretty tune, is that the first noel that the angel did say was to certain poor shepherds in fields where they lay.
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
Yeah, I know, Catholics don’t use the King James version. That’s another one of our mistakes.
Ever since I was a kid Luke 2: 8-14 has been the beginning and the end of the Christmas story for me. I didn't need Linus to teach it to me, but he drove the point home. Jesus, the son of God, our Savior, was born a poor kid, in a stable, and the first people to hear the news were other poor people, shepherds, who, the nuns taught us, were the lowliest of the low on the economic ladder of first century Israel.
Nowdays this of symbolic importance to me, but when I was a kid I believed it was literally the case, that God actually choose the shepherds over everybody else to hear that first Noel---I wasn't an altar boy just for the status and the money. I was a believer with all my heart and in my heart I still feel this as if it is true.
How did the kings get in there? They have their own song. This is the shepherds' carol.
When the congregation warbled in eight different keys into the third verse, I was stunned…and outraged.
It was as if in a song about migrant workers making the best of their Christmas around a campfire at the edge of a vegetable field we suddenly switched to singing about how nice it was that some executives from Citigroup were spending part of their government-financed bonuses buying toys for Toys for Tots.
But, you know, there are many ways to be a Scrooge even if you love Christmas and one of them is to insist that everybody else love Christmas and keep it the way you do. The carol is what it is and has been what’s it been for centuries. The tidings of great joy were to all people. The shepherds heard the first Christmas carol but the wise men saw the same star at the same time. He came for kings and shepherds alike and had the same message for both and for all of us.
Love one another.
If we sing all the verses at mass tomorrow I’m joining right in as loud as I can on all five.
Middletown mail carrier is dead ringer for Saint Nick
MIDDLETOWN — The first time Steve Decker put on a Santa suit, he knew: He IS Santa Claus.
His transformation bears all the marks of Christmas magic.
As a U.S. Post Office mail carrier in Middletown for 37 years, he grows out his beard each winter.
Over the years, his beard got whiter and whiter, and — as it so often happens with such magic — children noticed first. The kids on his route started calling him Santa.
In 2006, a mail customer asked him to play Santa at their home, and there was an invitation to a neighbor's Christmas party. He bought a Santa suit, put on the red-and-white costume, and had his epiphany.
‘It is so easy to condemn,' said [Mr Arabin], continuing the thread of his thoughts. 'I know no life that must be so delicious as that of a writer for newspapers, or a leading member of the opposition--to thunder forth accusations against men in power; show up the worst side of every thing that is produced; to pick holes in every coat; to be indignant, sarcastic, jocose, moral, or supercilious; to damn with faint praise, or crush with open calumny! What can be so easy as this when the critic has to be responsible for nothing?..---From Barchester Towers (Oxford World's Classics) by Anthony Trollope.
Told off the 25th Most Influential Progressive tonight, via Twitter.
Shut him right up.
Now I’m full of myself.
Next I’m going to go looking for the 24th, 23rd, and 22nd Most Influential Progressives and tell them off.
I figure by the time I get to Numbers 17 and 16, Number 15’s going to be so scared he’ll go running home to mommy and hide under a bed, whimpering at the prospect that I’m on my way over.
Think I’ll stop well before I get to Number 1 though.
The Number 1 Most Influential Progressive is Bill Moyers.
Don’t feel like I’ve got the nerve to tell off Bill Moyers.
It’d be like telling off Abraham Lincoln or God or Tom Seaver.
Honestly, can we go back to picking on conservatives? This is the primaries all over again, except that various people have switched sides. Actually, it’s the primaries continued, and it’s still mostly about hurt feelings and who’s holier or more of a grown-up than thou.
I plan to see Crazy Heart, if it plays around here. And SFMike, ace photoblogger and longtime commenter here, won’t forgive me if I don’t get to Avatar like yesterday. Fortunately, the young men Mannion intend to drag me to it this weekend.
Unfortunately, I haven’t seen enough of the movies in the last six or seven years to know if Bob’s right.
________________
Updated in relief: I feel a little better about my movie going experience after reading Shawn Drury’s The Nextflix Decade – The Best Movies of the 2000s. I’ve seen at least half the movies on this list!
Watched the last episode of Bored to Death tonight, thanks again to Mike. I wish there were more than eight episodes. Like the show a lot, but it turns out that the reason I wanted to watch it to begin with is the reason to watch it.
Ted Danson.
Jason Schwartzman’s Jonathan is the main character. But Bored to Death is a show with three leading men. Schwartzman gives it its heart and soul. Zach Galifianakis gives it its edge, simply by defining where it is by constantly being on the verge of going over it. Zach is grumpily dissatisfied with everything good in his life and at any moment seems about ready to check out on whatever---his relationship with his girlfriend, his friendship with Jonathan, his art, life. Not that he’s suicidal, but if he could will himself out of existence…
Check that. If he could will himself into another existence, he’d do it. Often he seems to be trying to do it right in the middle of a conversation. His forehead furrows, his eyes focus inwards, angrily, his mouth contracts, and he looks as though he’s attempting to force himself ass first through a small porthole that’s opened up between this world and someplace, anyplace, else.
Danson, as the constantly stoned and seemingly monstrously self-absorbed magazine editor George, gives the show weight and heft, which is hard to see in the first several episodes because George appears to be a flibbertigibbet.
But what George is is what the title of the show tells us all three men are, bored to death.
Jonathan and Ray are young, they haven’t found their way in life yet, and they feel lost. They don’t like the looks of what’s in front of them, and they can’t go back. They don’t know which of any other choice of directions would be the right choice. So they’ve decided, independently, that the wisest thing to do is to stop moving, at least for the time being. They don’t do nothing while standing still. They just do the same things over and over. Emotionally and intellectually, they’re jogging in place, which bores them, well, to death.
Jonathan, however, has found a way to feel as though he’s moving by stepping out of his real life into a fantasy life as a private detective. Even though he has actual cases and solves them, mostly, and is routinely in real danger, his second career doesn’t provide him with a new life because to live it he has to pretend to be someone he’s not and when he’s not on a case he falls back into his old life, where he’s still standing still. The more success and fun he has as a PI the worse he feels when he has to stop and go back to being a journalist and writer, his career heading, as far as he can see or cares, nowhere.
But George found his way in life a long time ago and he liked where it took him. He likes what he sees ahead of him, except for that part up ahead where he’s no longer in the picture. George sees Death up ahead. But he’s not afraid of that, at least no more than is normal. What’s bothering him is that he can feel his strength and energy draining from him and he’s afraid he won’t be able to meet his end head on and at full speed. He doesn’t want to coast to a stop, short of his final destination too, and wind up lying there doing nothing while waiting for Death to come to him and sweep him up and away.
So like Jonathan and Ray he’s decided to stop moving, but like Jonathan he needs pretend to be in motion, just that unlike Jonathan he can’t settle on any one pretense.
In the sixth episode, when George insists on coming along on one of Jonathan’s cases, it looks as though Jonathan is dragging George out of his doldrums.
It turns out that it’s George who’s been keeping Jonathan going all along by keeping him challenged.
Jonathat’s book editor---played in explosive short bursts of affectionate bullying by Bebe Neuwirth believes in Jonathan’s talent and admires him as one of her best writers, but her idea of what makes a writer a writer is that he writes. She isn’t really interested in what Jonathan writes about. She’s confident that whatever he writes will be interesting because Jonathan wrote it.
In her mind, it’s the writer who makes the writing. But to George, it’s the writing that makes the writer, therefore it’s vitally important that the writing be stimulating, challenging, and worth the writer’s time and attention.
Since he’s the editor of a magazine that publishes Jonathan’s non-fiction, George doesn’t think of writing as something separate from living. A journalist, which is the kind of writer he can’t help classifying Jonathan as, since that’s the kind of writer he knows him best as, can’t write without getting out and about and experiencing new things and meeting new people. A writer, as far as George knows or cares, is very much like a private detective. George often seems to be giving Jonathan assignments that are no more than busy work, but what he is actually giving Jonathan opportunities to get out and about and have experiences and meet people---he is sending him out to investigate life.
I said that George was seemingly self-absorbed to the point of monstrosity. What George actually is is very good at keeping his mind on several things at once. It happens that we meet him and first get to know him at a time when what he has foremost on his mind is his own boredom. At the moment he is the chief focus of his own attention and he has himself worried. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t noticing what is going on around him and thinking about it and worrying about it.
His magazine is in trouble and he’s working on figuring out why and fixing it. And his favorite up and coming young writer is lost and adrift and, possibly, off his rocker, and George is aware of it and concerned for Jonathan and he’s continually coming up with ideas for ways to shake Jonathan up and get him moving---writing---although quite often those ideas serve the dual-purpose of shaking George himself up and getting him moving too.
And Ted Danson, who I suspect of being one of the smartest actors working in television, knows how to show us George thinking on several tracks at once. He keeps George’s self-absorption in front, on his face, in his bursts of goofiness and outbursts of childish temper, but whenever he’s apparently looking outward, his eyes are fixed, unfocused, glassy, and his smile is a tight, a little too broad, and in fact more of a grimace. Then, instantly the smile will change, sadden, flicker, flash again, flicker again, and shrink some more. And his eyes will turn inward, and we can see him looking at his own thoughts, but in a way a hunter who is simultaneously contemplating the approach of a bear from one side and a an angry bull moose from the other and trying to decide what are the odds that both will notice each other before either notices him and which one he should shoot first if they notice him at the same time.
Jonathan is dealing with his boredom by playing. Ray deals with his by sulking. George, however, is still working while apparently doing both, playing and sulking, and Danson lets us know that through his hands, which are never at rest.
Acting, Spencer Tracy said, is done with the eyes. He was simplifying for beginner’s. The best actors act with their whole bodies but they do it carefully and selectively. Danson is the most graceful comic actor since Cary Grant. There isn’t a part of himself he can’t make dance and dance in character. His favorite partners are his hands. Much of any part he plays is conveyed by a gesture.
He did this with Sam Malone, his hands were always at work, literally, often, when he was slicing up lemons or polishing glasses or pouring a drink, the small but necessary jobs of running a bar, which he performed with reflexive precision and confident ease, and more figuratively. His hands would be at work orchestrating, conducting, directing, smoothing things over, plugging leaks in the air, as he went about his real job in life, which was taking care of his friends at Cheers.
As George, Danson keeps his hands at work thinking. Whatever is occupying the thoughts at the front of his mind, the movement of his hands and fingers show us that in some other corner of his mind editing is being done. His hands and fingers are moving across empty desktops or on tabletops or bartops or in the air the way they’d move if he was leaning over a page layout or rewriting an article or sorting through photographs.
All of this is going on in the background of Danson’s performance, almost as if there are two of him on screen, and it’s why in the last two episodes, after the first shock at the change, it quickly seems right that the flibbertigibbet vanishes in an instant and the hard-headed, decisive, street smart editor and newsman and adult takes over. He’s been there all along, pushing Jonathan, guiding him, teaching him, challenging him.
Which makes it perfect that the last scene of the last episode has the two of them alone in a boxing ring, playfully sparring. That’s not a spoiler, by the way. How they wind up in that ring is the secret of the plot.
Frank Rich makes good points in his column declaring Tiger Woods his choice for Person of the Year, but as often happens when a writer tries to use a single human-sized example to symbolize an entire country’s collective experiences, the metaphor gets stretched and stretched to the point that it is as overblown and unwieldy and bears about as much resemblance to the original as a balloon in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and it threatens to drift away on the writer or carry him away on his own windstorm of words.
Happens all the time.
In fact, I think it just happened to me.
Nevermind.
As Rich himself acknowledges, neither Tiger Woods nor any of the other sharpers, con-artists, and thieves he mentions are new types original to the last ten years. What strikes Rich as our time’s unique twist to things is how many people who should have known better and perhaps did know better joined in the general bamboozlement and what a nation of self-conned suckers we made of ourselves.
Maybe.
The column is worth reading as a reminder of how collectively stupid and dishonest we managed to be even when the frauds being perpetrated were as obvious and easily seen through as a six year old’s lie about how the last of the cookies gotten eaten up.
But I have a question about something. Rich writes:
Yet we wanted to suspend disbelief. Much of the country, regardless of party, didn’t want to question its leaders, no matter how obviously they were hyping any misleading shred of intelligence that could fit their predetermined march to war. It’s the same impulse that kept many from questioning how Mark McGwire’s and Barry Bonds’s outlandishly cartoonish physiques could possibly be steroid-free.
Bonds is his own story, and that’s just it. I remember McGwire being open from the start about the fact he was self-medicating. I don’t recall if he ever used the word “steroids,” but I’m pretty sure he told anyone who asked he was taking whatever it was he did call it for the specific purpose of making himself stronger and more durable because he was tired of breaking down all all the time. McGwire was a good ballplayer who couldn’t be a great one because he was so fragile. The question about McGwire, which can never be answered, is did he hit those 70 home runs directly because of the stuff he took or did he hit them because the stuff he took allowed him to play in enough games to hit them in.
Babe Ruth hit 10 fewer home runs playing in a season that included 8 fewer games.
Plus, it wasn’t clear he was breaking any rules because it wasn’t clear there were any specific rules.
(I’ll let Rich slide on the fact that 1998 wasn’t part of this decade.)
What I’m saying is that people weren’t looking at McGwire, or Sammy Sosa, the way the were at Bonds, so I think we can be excused for not seeing through a con in the works.
Am I remembering this right? Or am I continuing the phenomenon Rich is describing in his column?
There was a time when I’d have walked on my knees in the snow for one night with Karen Allen.
If I knew she was going to wear the white dress Beloc gave her in Raiders I’d have made the same trip over broken glass.
It wasn’t just the freckles.
Though the freckles were an important feature.
It was the mix of merriment and intelligence and the mischief in the eyes.
Plus, she could act.
So why didn’t she do more of it?
After Scrooged---last night’s Mannion Family Movie Night---she pretty much disappeared from the movies.
Even from the ones she was in.
Animal House,The Warriors,The Wanderers,[Thanks for the correction, Thers.]Shoot the Moon, Raiders, Starman, Scrooged. Not much of anything she did in between those and after Scrooged counts, except for an adaptation of The Glass Menagerie directed by Paul Newman, who wouldn’t have cast her just for the freckles.
Newman either saw or found the vulnerability that, once you know to look for it and go back to watch it again, you can see is at the heart of Marion Ravenwood and that is the defining quality of her character in Scrooged.
Claire is Marion turned inside out.
Marion is as tough as she is to protect the little girl lost that Indy loved and left. Claire is a little girl lost who is tough enough to have loved and left Bill Murray’s Frank Cross.
She is sweet, flighty, open hearted, nice---too nice---fragile. But her fragility is her strength. Nobody, not even Frank, wants to hurt her. Despite her seeming so easily hurt, as if it wouldn’t take more than a harsh word to break her heart or her spirit, she marches bravely forward, doing what she needs to do to shelter and feed and console the homeless, and comes through it without a scratch or a chip in her optimism and good nature. That’s because she is one of those good and cheerful people everybody who comes near her is reflexively protective of. They become careful with her as if they’ve been handed a priceless piece of spun glass.
The latest edition is published by the latest addition to the Christmas village---The Mannionville Daily Gazette. Oliver bought this for his collection this year. I think that’s supposed to be me in the booth there. I thought I was the editor. Guess not. Photo by Oliver Mannion.
What Do I Know? For a lot of reasons, but a really good one of recent vintage is that KathyF and her family lost their beloved dog a couple weeks back and you’ll want to read Kathy’s eulogy for Bailey.
And the Chutry Experiment, because the experiment is controlled, there’s very little chance of an explosion or serious chemical spill, and Chuck Tryon is one smart film blogging film and media professor.
. Which is fun but I have to be careful and read it in short snatches because it’s already had way too much influence on my own tweeting, 
, Terry Teachout’s new biography of Louis Armstrong.
, and the boys gave her the latest Wallander paperback, 
, which contains the first Wallander stories, first in the sense of being set earlier in Wallander’s career, before the novel sequence begins, before Wallander became as utterly miserable as his fans have gotten to know him, not in the sense of having been written first.
by scientist and blogger 
his grandparents gave him.
and 
. But he’s been reading a book he plucked without causing a collapse from my tottering tower on the desk, 
, by another of his new intellectual heroes, 
by Anthony Trollope.
, a perfect holiday gift for the film buffs on your list.
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