Lance Mannion

Molotov Milkshake

On the way home from work, stopped in at the convenience mart to buy a couple of milkshakes.  Chocolate for me.  Vanilla for Young Ken Mannion who I knew would still be up and in need of a fortifying snack after another long day of being 17.  Wears a body out.

Girl working the counter said, “You’re my last milkshakes of the night so I’m going to really hook you up.”  Behave yourselves.  She meant she was going to pack the cups full of ice cream.  Which she did.  But then she got worried she’d overdone it.  So she was extra careful about placing the shakes  on the machine and watched them closely as they spun.

“Last week,” she said as she watched, “I had one explode on me.”

“Oh no,” I said.

“It went everywhere.  On the walls, on the customers, on me.  It was all over me.  I was covered in chocolate from my eyes down to here.”  She made a chopping motion across her thighs.  “I was drenched with chocolate milk shake.”

“Did the customers laugh?”

“Yes.  They were real good about it.”

“How many of them whipped out their cell phones and took your picture?” I asked.

She started to say something then she froze.  He smile changed to a look mixing amazement with annoyance.

“You know what?  None of them!  Nobody did!”  She put her fists on her hips.  “Nobody took my picture like that.  What was wrong with those people?”

Bookslut | Sex at Dawn (and at Noon, Dusk, and Midnight)

If ever you’re asked to provide a two-word Latin summary of Sex at Dawn, try this: Homo hypersexualensis. Though not deployed by authors Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, this phrase points acutely to their central theses...Read the rest of Barbara J. King's review at Bookslut.

M.A.Peel: Italian Hours: Updated

Henry James made fourteen visits to Italy, his first in 1869, his last in 1907. His travel essays were first printed in magazines, and some collected for Transatlantic Sketches (1875) or Portraits of Places (1883). In 1909 William Heinemann published all the Italy essays as Italian Hours, complete with an index. Yes, it was a marketing ploy to make the volume something travelers would bring along to consult during their own travels. It's a Lonely Planet guide for crazy English majors!...Read the rest of Mrs Peel's post.

Shakesville: Number of the Day

72: The percentage of British government budget cuts estimated to be born by women, prompting the women's advocacy group The Fawcett Society, to file "an unprecedented complaint with the nation's high court this month arguing that the government failed to consider the effect on women of its leaner 'emergency budget'.""The government is under a duty to look at its policies and check whether they are likely to widen inequality," said Anna Bird, head of policy for the Fawcett Society. "We do not think they undertook that task when putting forth the hardest, most austere budget in generations. Women are going to be adversely affected as a result. That should not happen."...Read the rest of the McEwan's post at Shakesville.

Pakistan

UNICEF

CARE

Catholic Relief Services

Doctors Without Borders

The Red Cross

Tame as other household Kates

An evening at the Thee-uh-tuh for the Mannions last night.  Shakespeare.  Sort of.

Well, sort of sort of.  The Bomb-itty of Errors, the hip-hop adaptation of The Comedy of Errors we saw at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, was more truer to the spirit of Shakespeare’s play than some of the museum-piece, word-for-word faithful, perfectly in period productions and high-concept, let’s make Shakespeare relevant to modern audiences exercises in directors’ and designers’ vanities I’ve seen.  The hip-hop was good, the rapping was clever, the performances were excellent, and…

It was funny.

But this post isn’t about that.  It’s about this.

Before the lights went down and the show began, I was reading through the program which does triple-duty as the program for the three plays in rep at HVSF this summer, Bomb-itty, Troilus and Cressida, and Taming of the Shrew, and includes, besides the cast lists and production credits, notes to the audience from each play’s director.

And the director’s note for Taming of the Shrew started off like this:

The Taming of the Shrew has been pleasing audiences for 400 years.  And, why not?  Tame a spirited woman, break her spirit, starve her, deprive her of sleep, train her to obey---what could be funnier?

Excuse me?

Spirited?

Kate the Curst, spirited?

Rosalind is spirited.

Beatrice is spirited.

Kate is…a shrew.

I almost wrote the b word.

But she’s that too.

At the start of the play, Kate is a mean-spirited, temper-tantrum-throwing, vindictive, selfish, jealous, spoiled little rich girl.

She is smart and witty but she uses her intelligence to devise ways of terrorizing her family and her wit to insult and brow-beat and bully everybody she comes in contact with.

And she hurts people.

As in she slaps them, pinches them, kicks them, throws things at them, and breaks things over their heads.

I can’t tell you how many directors, actors, college professors, and just plain Shakespeare fans, I’ve listened to tying themselves into intellectual knots trying to explain away Katherine’s shrewishness as an independent and intelligent woman’s understandable rebellion against the political, cultural, and economic constraints on a woman’s autonomy in Elizabethan England.

I know, you could write a book.  Books have been written.

But there’s this.  How does her rebellion justify her torturing her sister?

In one of her earliest scenes Kate drags Bianca on stage by the ear, after having tied her hands, and then proceeds to humiliate her in a dialog that comes titillatingly close to a lesbian S & M game.

When her father tells Bianca’s suitors he won’t let her get married until he’s found a husband for her big sister, he’s actually begging them to help him get this crazy lady out of his house.

But there’s more to it.  Baptista can’t let Bianca get married first because Kate won’t allow it.  She’s too jealous and selfish to stand to see her sister happy and successful.  She makes it clear that if Bianca marries and moves out first, she’s going to make things even worse for Baptista.

She is not nice.

Which is oddly part of her attraction.

But she can’t go through life like this because she’s a danger to herself and others.  Plus, she’s miserable.

Oh, and did I mention that The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy?

A particular kind of comedy.  A farce.  Which makes it practically a live-action cartoon.  Worrying about Katherine’s emotional and physical well-being after she’s “tamed” as if she’s a real person is kind of like worrying about Woody when he falls off the roof in Toy Story 3.

Besides, if you’re going to worry about Kate as if she’s a real person, or at least a character in a realistic drama, then you should worry about the other characters that way too.

There’s a scene that takes place offstage in which Kate smashes a lute over the head of one of her sister’s would-be suitors.

In production, the actor playing the suitor will stagger out on stage with a prop lute down around his ears or his head sticking up through a hole in a broken-necked, unstrung guitar, at which point, if you’re thinking of this is a realistic play, you ought to be thinking, “Somebody get this poor guy to a hospital!” and “How come Kate isn’t being arrested for felonious assault?”

But nobody worries about Hortensio needing an X-ray and stitches.  Most of the audience is thinking the dolt deserved it.

Kate deserves a good spanking.  She doesn’t get it.  What she gets is actually far more and worse than she deserves.  She spends several scenes in the middle of the play facing the prospect of a life married to a madman.

The humor isn’t in watching Kate get “tamed” or having her spirit broken.  Her spirit isn’t broken.  If anything, her spirit strengthens.  It just takes on a different, larger, more sympathetic character---sympathetic, as in she begins to sympathize with people she used to treat horribly.  The humor is in Petruchio’s madman act, in his antics as he goes about “taming” her by showing her what life with her was like for everybody else.

Kate is “tamed” when she realizes that from other people’s point of view she’s been behaving like a madwoman.

The rest of the director’s note is a long apology---a long, long apology---for Kate’s final speech, the one in which she ostensibly makes the case that a wife’s proper place is on her knees in submission and gratitude to her husband, and an explanation of how he went about making the speech politically palatable to a 21st Century audience.

Look, if you’re worried about how you’re going to make the speech politically acceptable, don’t do the play.

If you feel you have to apologize for your female lead, don’t do the play.

Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays.

Do Much Ado instead.  Do As You Like It.

Nobody will expect you to apologize for Beatrice or Rosalind.

But you know what?

You don’t have to apologize for Kate or the final speech.

The question is how serious is Kate herself in that speech?  Has she truly been “tamed” or is she being ironic?  Is she trying to pull a fast one on Petruchio and the other representatives of the patriarchy onstage or is she sincerely promising to be a good little domestic angel of the house?

Does she mean it or is she kidding?

Of course she’s kidding!

Like I said, it’s a comedy!

Her final speech is the closing gag.  Husband and wives in Shakespeare’s day were rolling in the aisles of the Globe.  Or would’ve rolled, if the Globe had aisles.  The idea that wives are and ought to be subservient and totally submissive to their husbands is a joke that goes back to the Greeks at least.  “Yeah, right,” would have been the standard response in 17th Century London.

If you want to know how Shakespeare and his audience viewed how a typical middle-class marriage worked, see The Merry Wives of Windsor.  Mistresses Page and Ford run their domestic worlds, and their husbands are along for the ride.  The measure of a happy marriage was how cheerfully and contentedly a husband could say, “Yes, dear.”

The cliches of TV sit-coms are not new.  Shakespeare’s audience would have got Everybody Loves Raymond.

And of course all the men onstage, except Petruchio, take the speech seriously.  They’re idiots.

Petruchio, however, should see exactly what Kate’s up to.

So should the audience.

She’s not just joking.  She’s flirting.

With her husband.

Kate isn’t promising to be obedient.  She’s telling Petruchio that she’s truly changed.  She’s developed a sense of humor to match her wit and to match his.  From here on out she’s going to play along.  And that doesn’t mean she’s going to pretend to be a good little wife, meek, obedient, and totally undemanding.  It means she’s going to be play-ful generally.  She is going to enjoy life, control her temper, treat people the way she wants to be treated herself, and, by the way, with that in mind, the last speech is a call on Petruchio to do the same.  And he agrees.

Kate ends her speech down on her knees but she needs to be there so that Petruchio has to bend to lift her up to her feet, and up to his level, for the final kiss.

And that kiss isn’t her reward for being a good girl.  It’s the real kiss that seals their wedding vows.  They’re both finally responding to “You may now kiss the bride.”  This scene is the wedding that traditionally ends a comedy.

It’s a happy ending, not the conclusion of a tract on Elizabethan marriage.

If you don’t see it as a happy ending, you don’t see Taming of the Shrew as a comedy, which means you don’t think Shakespeare knew what he was doing, so don’t do the play.

If, however, you make the play funny enough, and cast the right actress as Kate, nobody’s going to care about the political import of the final speech.

Then you can use your director’s note to explain why you set your production of an Italianate farce in the cantina on Mos Eisely or in Paris during the Occupation.

A high school production of Taming of the Shrew, a hundred years ago.  There’s a blogger you know in there somewhere in one of the comic servant roles he was famous for.  One summer, a growth spurt, and a halfway decent haircut later he was playing John Proctor in The Crucible.

Divided we stand…stock still

There are Serious People in Washington seriously looking forward to the Republicans taking control of Congress in the fall because they fully expect that the Republicans will not be able to do anything except make sure that President Obama can’t do anything.

These people, some of whom I suspect are Democratic Senators themselves (Did I say Max Baucus?)---think divided governments make the best governments, one side cancelling the other out, with nothing significant being accomplished by either side, as long as the real power remains in the hands of those who serve the interests of the corporate elite.

The prospect of Senators Angle, Paul, and Buck doesn’t frighten them.  If anything, it amuses them.  Nutcases make great news copy and titillating gossip.  The Serious People are counting on the cynics and corporate stooges who manage the elite’s business in the Senate to keep the nuts in line.  Look at the House.  How much trouble does Michelle Bachmann really cause?

Their only disappointment with Angle, Paul, and Buck---and you can throw in Senators Rubio and Toomey---is that none of them look as good as Bachmann in a skirt.

The Serious People know that a Republican Congress even if well stocked with Right Wing nutcases will accomplish next to nothing over the next two years but neither will President Obama.  Which is fine.  The corporate elites who run the country will get done what they want to get done.

The Bush Tax Cuts will be made permanent.

Social Security will be “saved” in some way that makes sure that no rich people’s taxes are raised and, with a little luck, actually cuts the amount of money businesses have to kick in and even makes some rich people richer.

But it won’t be called “privatization.”

Restraints on corporations will be loosened again.

Obama will have to appoint more corporate friendly judges.

Our giant imperial military will continue to keep the world safe for international corporate business interests.

In short, nothing is going to change.  It will be business as usual and things will go on the way they’ve gone on for the last 30 odd years.

The danger a Democratic Congress and a Democratic Senate posed to the corporate elite has always been potential not imminent.

There was always the chance that Nancy Pelosi might get real control of her caucus and Harry Reid might grow a spine.

There was always the chance that the liberals in the Senate might rebel and change the rules so that the majority actually ran the show and Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, and Blanche Lincoln were reduced to the irrelevancies they deserve to be.

It’s amazing, isn’t it, that the Democratic Party, which mainly represents the urban centers on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts has been at the mercy of Senators from Montana and Nebraska.

You could take the entire population of Montana and combine it with the population of Nebraska and bus them all to Manhattan and they’d get lost in the crowd.

There was always a chance that the people of New York might notice this unfairness and start demanding that their Senators do something about it, like having one of them challenge Harry Reid for Majority Leader.

Fortunately, it’s looking as though the people of Pennsylvania have decided that instead of having their interests in the hands of Senators from Montana and Nebraska they want them placed in the hands of Senators from Kentucky, Alabama, and South Carolina.  It’s possible that the people of Washington State and even California are deciding they want to be represented by Senators from the South too.

Which is to say in the hands of other corporate flunkeys who won’t have to worry about having their committee chairmanships taken away by obstreperous liberal colleagues.

So come January all will be as it should be as far as the Serious People are concerned.

The corporate elite will continue to run things but with less worry.

The rich will continue to grow richer.

The middle class will continue to shrink.

American business will have a larger pool of anxious, desperate workers who will be glad for any job they can get at any pay with the barest minimum of benefits.

And if it all goes to pot again, well, then President Obama or some other naively “responsible” Democrat can be allowed to take office and clean up the mess in a way he or she will get no credit for because no credit will be deserved because it will be done by punishing the middle class, again, and then it will be back to business to usual, with the Right Wing propaganda machine making sure that Americans blame each other for the mess.

Why I won’t own a kindle or a nook even though I think they’re both really cool. Part 5.

I don’t really need one.

I don’t travel a lot.  I don’t have a long commute on a train or subway.  I don’t live somewhere out of easy reach of a bookstore or a library.  I’m not a student or an academic so it wouldn’t save me from having to lug around a lot text books and journals (although I’m not sure there are enough of those available in the right formats to even make that a consideration).  I don’t spend a lot of time anymore poolside, at the playground, at soccer practice, or any place where my main reason for being there is to keep my ears open to the sounds of kids getting into trouble.

And because I don’t need one I can’t justify buying one.

But, trust me, as soon as I can convince myself I need one, I’ll own one.

Cause they’re really cool.

Why I won’t own a kindle or a nook even though I think both are really cool. Part 4.

No refunds.  No exchanges.

I’d “own” even more books that I’m never going to finish or even start than I do now.

Buy an ebook from Barnes and Noble and you own it until the silicon chips decay.

Buy the paper and glue artifact at Barnes and Noble or from Barnes & Noble online and you got two weeks to return it or exchange it and I can’t tell you how often I take advantage of that policy.

Not nearly as often as I should have taken advantage of it, but still.

A quick search through our bookshelves and the dozen boxes in storage would turn up dozens of books I’d be surprised I own and couldn’t understand why I owned them and couldn’t remember how and when I came to own them.

“Why in God’s name did I ever think I’d want to read this?”

And librarians across New York State and down on Cape Cod, the ones who don’t hate me outright, at any rate, think I’m a nuisance, an amusing and somewhat pathetic nuisance, but a nuisance nonetheless.  I can’t help myself.  If I read a book review and think, “This sounds interesting,” or if someone recommends a book to me, I put it on reserve at the library as soon as I can and, since I never go anywhere without my netbook nor stray far out of range of a WiFi router, that often means immediately.

The hold shelves behind the circulation desk at the library here in town groan daily under the weight of stacks of books I’ve requested.  I routinely check out ten or so books at a time and wind up reading none of them.

Usually, by the time they’ve arrived I’ve forgotten why I thought I’d want to read them and have already found ten or so other books I’m more interested in.

I’d be in a lot of trouble if every time I read a review or received a recommendation that made me think, “This sounds interesting,” I was able with the click of a mouse make it appear instantly on my kindle or nook.

So I guess the real Reason Number 4 I won’t own a kindle or nook even though I think both are really cool is:

I don’t have the strength of character a kindle or nook owner needs in order to avoid bankruptcy.

Why I won’t own a kindle or a nook even though I think they’re both really cool. Part 3.

The economy is in enough trouble.

And by the economy I mean us not the money making system the technocrats in Washington and the business schools and the thieves on Wall Street and the predators in the corporate boardrooms serve and service.

I’m not looking forward to the day when libraries and book stores disappear and another whole swath of the working force is made obsolete.

So, if I had a kindle or a nook, which are both really cool, every time I downloaded a book I would be reminded of It’s A Wonderful Life.

You know.  “Every time a bell rings it means an angel gets its wings.”

“Every time a book gets downloaded a clerk in a bookstore loses her job.”

Why I won’t own a kindle or a nook even though I think they’re both really cool. Part 2a.

The thunk of a hundred and fifty dollar piece of plastic and glass hitting the floor after it slides off the bed as I’m drifting off to sleep won’t be quite as satisfying and reassuring as the thunk of a book doing the same.

Why I won’t own a kindle or a nook even though I think they’re both really cool. Part 2.

I’m not about to prop open a door or prop up a wobbly table or swat a fly with a hundred and fifty dollar piece of plastic and glass.

Why I won’t own a kindle or a nook, even though I think they’re both really cool

Can’t see myself spending ten dollars or so a pop to “own” arrangements of pixels on a screen.

Cartoons from the Issue of August 30, 2010 : The New Yorker

via www.newyorker.com

Will Bunch: It's Not About the Mosque! It's America's War on 'the Other'

A few months ago, I spent a Sunday morning in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart on Thomas Road in East Phoenix, just on the cusp of the immigration flare-up over racial profiling and Arizona's repressive law called SB 1070. It was quieter then -- a weathered 39-year-old Mexican in a wool cap with a New York Mets logo named Roberto Valdez told me of his trek across the desert to seek work in Phoenix as a day laborer. Weeks earlier, Mexican day laborers like Valdez had been harassed on the weekends by angry white nativists, but in March of 2010 the nativists had moved on. Many had joined the Tea Party, and some were campaigning for GOP anti-immigration zealot J.D. Hayworth for U.S. Senate. Why waste time on "the Other" Roberto Valdez, when America now had "the Other" daring to occupy the Oval Office in the person of Barack Obama.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Mike Bloomberg’s Remarks at the Annual Ramadan Iftar Dinner at Gracie Mansion

There is nowhere in the five boroughs of New York City that is off limits to any religion.

via www.mikebloomberg.com

Self-Styled Siren: Wee Willie Winkie (1937)

The first thing to know about Wee Willie Winkie is that it isn’t a Shirley Temple movie that happened to be directed by John Ford; it’s a John Ford movie that happened to star Shirley Temple. What makes it such a good film is that Ford doesn’t condescend to the material or the star. He shot it with the same loving attention to detail and deep, beautiful precision that would characterize Stagecoach two years later. And the themes that Ford, via Kipling, brings to bear-–the civilizing influence of women and children, sacrifice, courage, respect between enemies—-are also familiar from countless other Ford films.

via selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com

The gnews from gnome

Is he thirteen feet tall from heel to the top of his head or thirteen feet tall from the tips of his pointed shoes to the tip of his pointy cap?

KERHONKSON — The gnews is gnot good for Chomsky, the giant garden gnome.

For four years, the 13.5-foot icon that stands astride at Homegrown Mini Golf and Kelder's Farm on Route 209 has reigned supreme as the world's tallest garden gnome.

Now, according to Guinness World Records, Chomsky has been out-talled by not one but two newcomers: a 15-footer from Iowa State University and an even taller 17-foot, 8-inch fiberglass model from Poland.

Chomsky, as is his wont, had no comment on his comeuppance. But the woman who made what he is — artist-in-residence Maria Reidelbach — had plenty to say.

You can read the plenty she has to say in Jeremiah Horrigan’s story, Rivals out-tall Ulster gnome, in the Times Herald-Record.

There’s controversy too: Fiberglass vs. concrete.

My favorite quote is from a local musician who sings the praises Chomsky’s unbreakable spirit.

"He still gazes west with that confidence and joy that he has always exuded. I would wager that Chomsky would kick the ass of any of these other gnomes.”

Oliver’s Request

Hi I’m Oliver Mannion and I need help. Two of my favorite games of all time are the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic games. However I can’t install them on any of our computers because I get this message:Component: Default component File: D:/data2.cab Error:The device is not ready

I have not found a way to deal with this. If anyone gives me the way to solve this I will do a review of the games. Thank you for your help.

On a side note Heroes has been canceled so I can no longer to live blogs of it. If they make made for TV movies I’ll live blog those.

Polyester nightmares

Woke up at three AM.  Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf.  Fitzgerald’s Dark Night of the Soul. The time, says the poet Philip Larkin, when the mind blanks at the glare of death, “a whole day nearer now”:

Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

Unlike Larkin though, my mind does blank in remorse at the good not done, the love not given, the time torn off unused.  To distract myself from dwelling on those thoughts and of that sure extinction that we all travel to, I tried to read myself back to sleep with Jonathan Mahler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning.

Bad move.

Good book, lousy decade.

New York City in the mid-1970s?

To start with there’s the horror of facing the fact that thirty-odd have passed since then.  Talk about time being torn off unused!

But never mind the evil actors creeping around.  David Berkowitz hasn’t appeared yet but the story is moving steadily towards the Summer of Sam.

At three AM, it’s just as appalling to be dragged back into the company of obnoxious and pathetic personalities who have faded from the public memory, thank goodness, but who dominated the news back then---Abe Beame, Billy Martin, Bella Abzug, anybody and everybody who thought it was cool to frequent Plato’s Retreat or cruise the abandoned docks along the West Side Piers---and re-watch the rise of other, even more obnoxious personalities who would dominate the news in decades to come---Ed Koch, Rupert Murdoch.

You can make the case that some good things came out of the 70s.  There was a lot of great music, although most of it was crowded into the early and late years of the decade, with disco, Heavy Metal, and John Denver and the Electric Light Orchestra clogging it all up in between.  A whole slew of classic movies got made, one of them being Star Wars, which supposedly ruined everything for everybody as Hollywood gave up making quality films for adults to devote itself collectively to producing nothing but blockbusters targeted at adolescent boys.  Then there were all those pioneering TV shows, M*A*S*H and Mary Tyler Moore and Saturday Night Live and Laverne & Shirley and Charlie’s Angels and Three’s Company and Love Boat and Fantasy Island and…and…um…What was my point again?

But a decade that began with Richard Nixon in the White House and the Vietnam War still raging and ended with Jimmy Carter trapped in the Rose Garden, 51 Americans held hostage in the Embassy in Tehran, and the first cases of AIDS being diagnosed, with Watergate, the Oil Crisis, and double-digit inflation defining the years in the middle, has got to rank as one of the very worst of all the decades in American history that did not include the Civil War, the Great Depression, or World War II.

To top it all off, it was a decade of deliberate ugliness passing itself off as cool.  Ugly clothes, ugly hair, ugly furniture, ugly cars.

On a personal level, though, for someone like me, a middle of the night re-immersion in the 1970s is like deliberately giving yourself a nightmare about being back in high school except that all the surreal dream images are actual memories and instead of finding yourself standing in front of the room in your underwear you’re standing there in suede crepe-soled shoes, corduroy bellbottoms, a mustard-colored polyester shirt with collar wings that reach to the shoulders on either side, and a Shaun Cassidy haircut.

For the record, as soon as I started buying my own clothes so that my wardrobe was no longer exclusively birthday and Christmas presents from well-meaning parents and grandparents who assumed I wanted to wear what the other kids were wearing---my poor sisters had it even worse---I ditched the bell bottoms and polyesters for straight-leg jeans and cotton Oxfords with button-down collars so there was no more danger of a lift-off in a high wind.

I stuck with the Wallabees until the mid-80s though.

And I had a pretty good time in high school.  College?  Not so much.  Not to begin with.  Which might go a long way towards explaining why I don’t like to stroll down that particular stretch of memory lane.

But here’s the thing.

Another reason I don’t like to remember those times is that I have a very hard time remembering those times clearly.

I don’t mean in the sense of veterans of the 1960s who say, “If you remember the 60s, you weren’t there.”

I mean that two obstacles get in the way of my seeing that time in my life objectively and through my own eyes.

The first is my temperamental proclivity for remembering bad times more than the good.  Even in the warm light of midday, my mind blanks in remorse at the good not done, the love not given, the time torn off unused, and given that the 70s were the years of my all too typical protracted adolescence, there’s a great deal of good not done, love not given, and time torn off unused for my mind to blank in remorse at.

But the other one is that I can’t “see” those years in the way I see just about every other time in my life.

There’s too much media blocking my view.

Notice I said “media” not “the Media.”

When I “picture” those times to myself I literally see pictures, the faded ones in the family album---another thing to hate about the 70s, the ruin of color film---and the ones I saw on television.

Instead of being able to call to mind my own memories I seem only able to conjure up documentary evidence that events I ought to have memories of actually happened.

I can look through my mind’s eye and see up and down the street I lived on when I was in kindergarten.  I look through my mind’s eye for the street I lived on when I was in high school and see the photographs in the family album.  I can look through my mind’s eye and see the blonde coming up the aisle on our wedding day.  I look through my mind’s eye for the girl I took to the senior ball and I see her in the snapshot I used to keep in my wallet, posed in her parents’ living room before I arrived to pick her up, so I’m not even in my own memory of my own senior ball.

When I try to remember what I thought and felt about Watergate, I see Sam Ervin and John Erlichman verbally jousting on the TV set in the school library annex.

When I try to remember what Mom and Pop Mannion looked like back then I see Bob Newhart and Suzanne Pleshette, which as anyone who knew them when can tell you isn’t all that farfetched.  Newhart has always been my first choice to play Pop Mannion in the movie.

My inability to actually remember the 70s has always troubled me because there are a lot of nice things that happened I would like to be able to look back upon and take pleasure in remembering.  There are good people who have since passed out of my life whose kindnesses and friendship I should never forget.

And it would be helpful, not to mention more enjoyable, if I could read books like Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning with both more objectivity and a more personal engagement.

I think I have a plan for dealing with this.

Fight media with media, fiction with fiction.

My idea is that instead of simply resisting the archival sort of images that keep getting in the way of the “real” images of actual memories, I might be able to jog more of those actual memories by reminding myself what the 70s actually looked like as they happened by watching a lot of movies from the period.

But only a certain sort of movie.

Obviously not movies like Chinatown or McCabe and Mrs Miller.

But not ones set in the then present that were overly stylized because of their genre---like The French Connection, The Exorcist, Jaws, even The Goodbye Girl and Rocky.

And not movies that tried too emphatically to capture the spirit of the moment or say something about the issues of the day.  Nashville, Coming Home, The Candidate, Network, Shampoo, Deer Hunter, Saturday Night Fever, and Taxi Driver fall into this category.  Good as those movies are as movies, trying to get through them a sense of what it was like to be living in the 70s is like trying to get a sense of what it was like through a museum exhibit or an entry in an encyclopedia.  There’s a didactic note in all of them and the filmmakers use the 70s as a prop to help explain…the 70s.

Which is why I wouldn’t put All The President’s Men in the group.

All The President’s Men is about current events, of course, but its focus is actually on Woodward and Bernstein as reporters as working stiffs not agents of history.  It’s a movie about doing a job.  In a way, Watergate is the movie’s McGuffin, its excuse to tell the story and the story is how these two guys go from door to door and office to office chasing down clues to a mystery their job requires them to solve.

The 70s as an historical event or a series of unfortunate historical events are almost irrelevant.  They’re just there because they’re there.  The camera can’t help taking them in but nothing much is made of them.  They’re the given, which is how people living through a particular time period tend to see it, which is to say they take it for granted.

And that’s what I’m looking for.  Movies in which the 70s are taken for granted.  Movies that present the clothes, the cars, the furniture, the affects and mores, the way people saw them at the time most of time, as just there.

Topicality and topical references and in-jokes don’t automatically exclude a movie from the list.  It’s a matter of degree and approach.  And all genre pictures aren’t exercises in style.

So a film like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore which was topical at the time because of the effect of Feminism on many women’s lives would still make the list because an early 70s version Feminism itself isn’t the reason for telling Alice’s story, not the way an anti-70s Feminism is pretty much the excuse for Kramer vs Kramer, which is only one reason that piece of sentimental claptrap is off the list.

By the way, follow the link up there, then let me know if you were surprised to be reminded who directed Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Meanwhile, What’s Up, Doc? has to be scratched because it is so self-consciously a throwback to the screwball comedies of the 1930s that nothing on the screen actually looks contemporary, it all looks made-up for laughs, even the jet planes.  But The Hot Rock, which is genre two-fer, a farce and a heist movie, locates itself comfortably and naturally in 1970s era New York City, without any of the self-consciousness or self-congratulation of either Annie Hall or Manhattan, two movies that have to go on the list.

Here’s my list so far:

Breaking Away.

An Unmarried Woman.

The Hot Rock.

Annie Hall.

Manhattan.

The Last Detail.

Scarecrow.

Oh, God!

Smile.

The Bad News Bears.

Between the Lines.

So, your turn.  What movies would you put on the list?  Which ones would you take off? 

Nightmare of a farm share widower

Last night I had a terrible dream.

I dreamed the blonde was having an affair with the Secretary of Agriculture.

The New York State Secretary of Agriculture.

New York State doesn’t have a Secretary of Agriculture.

I even told myself so in the dream.

Didn’t stop me from dreaming she was having an affair with him though.

It was one of those hyper-realistic dreams, the kind that cause the dreamer to feel real emotions.

I woke up in a panic, feeling hurt, angry, and humiliated, just in time to catch the blonde sneaking out the door.

It was just before dawn.

“Where are you going?” I demanded.

“To the farm,” she said in a quiet and reassuring voice.

“What farm?  Whose farm?”  I almost said, “His farm?”

“What farm.  Our farm.  It’s my turn to help pick and sort the shares for today.  I reminded you about this last night.  I told you I had to get up at Oh-Dark-Thirty to go to the farm.”

“You did?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” I said.  “That explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“Nothing.  Have fun.  Careful on the roads.  Don’t bring home too much kale.”

“Kale’s all done,” she said.  “There’s coffee.”

“Thanks.”

She left.  I rolled over and went back to sleep, relieved to know that she would be bringing home tomatoes not that she was someone’s tomato.

Mapping the demi-deity genome

According to the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series of young adult fantasy novels by Rick Riordan, the ancient Greek gods are alive and well and adapting somewhat uneasily to life in the 21st Century.

They don’t meddle as much in human affairs as they used to, but they are as randy as ever and busy than ever seducing and falling blindly in love with mere mortals without concerning themselves with such mundane human concerns as birth control.

They’ve been prolific enough that in the northeastern United States alone there’s an army’s worth of their offspring just counting the ones between the ages of fifteen and twenty.  Well, they are gods after all and you’ve got to figure that Zeus alone must be good for a regiment a year, but the goddesses have been pretty frisky too.  Going by the movie adaptation of the first book, The Lightning Thief, Aphrodite has about a dozen daughters, all nineteen years old.  Apparently demigoddesses arrive by the litter.

Even Athena has at least one child, a daughter named Annabeth.  This means that, willingly or unwillingly, Athena gave up her famously well-defended chastity. 

When last seen, waving good bye to Odysseus as he strode up the beach of Ithaca to welcome himself home by cleaning his palace of Penelope’s suitors, Athena was still Pallas Athena---the maiden Athena.

Percy Jackson is a son of Poseidon.  His first name and his origins echo those of his older (way older) and more famous cousin, Perseus.

As demigods are ranked, this makes Percy one of the chosen ones.  Children of the big three, the brother gods who deposed the Titan Kronos and defeated the other Titans, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, have special powers and destinies.  Jealous and suspicious of each other, the brothers have an agreement not to mate with mortals so that they don’t produce any offspring who might help one brother gain ascendency over the others.   None of them has kept his word on this, but apparently they’ve been more careful of late, careful enough that there aren’t many super demi-deities running about.  Percy is apparently a one-off for Poseidon in this generation and his mother has kept his existence hidden in order to protect him from Hades and Zeus who would regard him as a threat and deal with him with customary Greek God ruthlessness.

Percy learns his true identity as a demigod and hero just in time to be sent off on a quest that will prevent an Olympian war and save the gods from wiping each other out and taking the whole human race with them in the process.

That’s par for the course for Chosen Ones.  They’re always managing to get themselves born and have their true identities and destinies revealed to them just in time to save a world in crisis.  That’s pretty much how you know you’re a Chosen One.

Archetypical wise man cribbed from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces:  Congratulations, kid, you’re a chosen one.  Here are the weapons and powers that are the symbols of your chosenness.

Chosen One (if he or she is one kind of archetype, like Harry Potter or King Arthur): No, thanks.  I want to live a normal, quiet life with no special destiny.

Chosen One (if he or she is another kind of archetype, the hubristic kind, like Anakin Skywalker):  Way cool!

Archetypical wise man: That’s the good news.

Chosen One:  What’s the bad news?

Archetypical wise man:  Your special destiny kicks in right away, before you have a chance to develop your powers or skills, and lots of really bad characters with powers greater than your own are going to start trying to kill you.

Chosen One:  Really?  When?

Archetypical wise man:  Oh, right about NOW.  Duck!

In Percy’s case, the attack by the bad characters comes first and the revelations of his identity and special destiny as a chosen one follow, but he survives and accepts his new identity with only a little immodesty.  Its not so much that he’s as hubristic as Anakin.  He’s just incredibly relieved that he’s not the dweeby loser he thought he was.

At any rate, he arrives at a summer camp for demigods in the Catskills where he must learn the ways of the Force…

Um…

I mean, where he must hone his skills as a warrior and hero.

Apparently, a demigod education involves endless hours of practicing how to fight with broadswords and bows and arrows as if the adult career of a demigod will require refighting the Battle of Thermopylae or they’re training to be an especially realistic band of Peloponnesian War re-enactors.

I’m told by young Ken Mannion, a long-time fan of the books, that there’s a war with the Titans coming up and the swords and the arrow tips are made of a “celestial” bronze that is like kryptonite to Titans.  It isn’t clear why it has to be administered in the form of a sword cut or an arrow piercing.  Might have something to do with the magic not working unless the blow is dealt directly by the hand of a demi-god.

Percy starts his training and, in the movie version anyway, his powers kick in immediately.  He turns out to be the camp’s top gun…er…top sword and impresses everyone with his prowess.

Everyone except the archetypical wise man, who knew the truth all along but also warns Percy that sheer talent isn’t going to be enough, and the camp’s previous best swordsman, who is actually a swordswoman and would have whipped Percy’s ass but good except that he, being the son of Poseidon, has special magic powers she can’t match, the use of which she regards as cheating.

Here, though, is where the movie, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, which we watched for Family Movie Night last week, departs from the book.

In the book, Percy’s rival is Clarisse, the daughter of Ares, and Annabeth is a separate character.

The movie combines them.

In Ken’s and my opinion, this ruins the character of Annabeth.

In the books, Annabeth, although pretty handy in a knife fight, is more a thinker than a fighter.  Her ambition is to be an architect.  Clarisse is the camp bully, so all that can be transferred from her character to Annabeth’s is her fighting skills and her initial jealousy of Percy, but the movie makes far too much of that, which does two things to her.

One, it makes her particular subplot the story of how she gets over herself and learns to admire, respect, and defer to Percy, which means she is all about him.

Two, it turns her into that bad action movie and TV and video game staple, the love interest as a boy with tits.

The movie Annabeth’s problem is that she’s the female lead in a 21st Century action-adventure movie which means she trapped by current conventions into being essentially the second male lead.

I’m not saying that a female character’s ability to fight or do anything physical as well or better than male characters makes her a boy in disguise.

The Warrior Princess is an ancient archetype and contemporary avatars abound.  One of my favorites is Farscape’s Aeryn Sun, although in her case her abilities as a warrior are the result of a perversity in her upbringing and over the course of the series she has to unlearn a lot of the lessons that made her such a tough nut.  Warrior Princesses often have to suffer through a Taming of the Shrew storyline in which the loving and patient hero, in a reversal of stereotypical gender roles, teaches her how to be thoughtful, considerate, and sensitive, or, in other words, how to be a real woman.  This happens in Farscape.  As often as she comes to the rescue of the scientist-hero John Crichton, he comes to hers using his brains, thus demonstrating that there are other and better ways to solve problems than by killing the people causing you the problems.

Then there’s the Tomboy Who Cleans Up Nice.  That would be Samantha Carter of Stargate: SG-1.

Carter’s basically a science nerd and her mastery of weapons and explosives is an expression of her technogeekitude.  She has taught herself how to be very good with a submachine gun because it’s a tool of her trade, just like computers or a naquadah generator. 

I could probably make the case that Burn Notice’s Fiona Glenanne is a combination of Warrior Princess and Tomboy, but really she is a very different archetype, the catwoman.

The name says it all.

Catwomen are cat-like, temperamental, inscrutable, unreliable in their affections, sometimes demanding of attention, often rejecting it, alternately cuddly and standoffish, unpredictably cruel and just as unpredictably loving and caring, mentally, physically, and emotionally supple, and possessed of a set of very sharp claws.  But no matter what they’re doing, they are always completely and perfectly feline, which is to say, ultra-feminine.

Batman’s Catwoman is the catwomen’s catwoman.

But with Warrior Princesses, Tomboys, and Catwomen, the abilities that allow them to keep up with and best the men are expressions of their idiosyncratic, non-archetypal characters. 

Aeryn Sun’s fighting skills are awesome but when you watch her in action you can’t help being reminded that she possesses them because she was brought up in a sick, violent culture that warped her spirit.  There is a tragic element to her heroism.

Carter’s marksmanship is of piece with her ability to read and reconfigure alien technology at a glance.

And whenever Fiona blows something to bits or beats a bad guy to a pulp she’s also working out her feelings for Michael.

The boy with tits, however, has no character except for her ability to kick butt and the supposed source of her attractiveness to both the hero and the audience is mainly, if not only, her ability to kick butt.

The hero, no matter how big, buff, and surly, is basically pre-adolescent and he’s drawn to her because he’s looking for a playmate, and not the Playboy kind, although casting, costuming, and camerawork can make it look as though that’s why he’s smitten with her.

But what he really likes about her is that she’s just like him or, if he’s a nerd, just like the guy he wishes he was.  She’ll be his new best pal and they can spend their time doing guy stuff together.

The movie’s Annabeth catches Percy’s eye when he sees her taking on several other guys in a swordfight and they establish their mutual attraction when they face off in a duel of their own.  That’s their courtship.  They flirt and fall in love through hacking away at each other with broadswords.

And when they aren’t hacking away at each other they don’t have much to say to each other, even when they are on the quest to save the world together.  Percy doesn’t rely on her the way Odysseus relied on her mother or the way his cousin relies on Io in the recent update of Clash of the Titans.

The movie’s Annabeth is no dummy.  But she clearly hasn’t inherited much from her mother unless its her tangled mass of long, dark hair which she may owe to an Irish strain on her father’s side since her round-cheeked, snub-nosed, freckle-faced good looks in no way recapitulate the classical angles of her mother’s Greek beauty. (Athena is played by Melina Kanakaredes.) She demonstrates none of her mother’s wisdom, craft, or politesse, and while Athena is the Goddess of Battle, Annabeth is more of a jock than a born general and strategist.  Her idea of a clever battle plan is to plot an ambush at the spot where she knows our hero, because he’s the hero, is bound to turn up sooner or later.  Annabeth is a leader among her fellow demigods and goddesses because she can stomp the hell out of everybody else in a swordfight, not because she can out-think them.

And weirdly, when she’s out on the quest that is the movie’s main plot she forgets how to fight and even that she can fight.  In moments of dire peril she has a tendency to drift, bug-eyed and open-mouthed, into the background, and since she can offer Percy no wise counsel befitting the daughter of a goddess of wisdom she is pretty much useless in a pinch.  If her mother had been more like her, it would have taken Odysseus twenty years to get home, if he even survived his first Cyclops.

Once upon a time, in the days of Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power, the female lead in an adventure movie was the love interest and a damsel in distress.  She didn’t have to be a wilting flower.  She could show courage and resourcefulness and even some physical derring-do but almost always in defense of her honor.  She was brave in eluding the clutches of the villain but she needed the hero to come to her rescue in order to finally escape.

In many movies this made her appear passive.  In the better movies she was lively and active but she showed this by being intelligent and talkative.  She may have needed the hero to fight for her, but she sure didn’t need him to think for her.

She couldn’t handle a sword or a gun with the dexterity and lethality of the hero, but she could match him, even best him, in a battle of wits.

Post-feminist makers of action movies seem to regard this kind of active heroine as an old-fashioned and sexist construct.  There are exceptions.  The scientist-heroines of I Robot and The Day the Earth Stood Still.  Elizabeth in the first of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  Marion Ravenwood.  Princess Leia.  When the time comes to get physical they can put up a good fight, but their value to the plot and the source of their attraction for the hero---and the audience---is their ability to think and out-think the villains and the hero.

Trouble is that the way most action-adventure movies are put together these days, moving frenetically from explosion to car wreck to gun fight to explosion again, there’s hardly any time for the heroes to think or to talk.

Robin Hood and Zorro are positively gabby next to even the more loquacious of contemporary heroes, Indiana Jones and John McClane.  These days, once the basic exposition is out of the way, most action-adventure heroes quickly grow monosyllabic, not saying much more than “Duck,” “Run,” “No,” and the heroines’ names which they use as synonyms for duck, run, and no.

The same goes in The Lightning Thief.  The best way for heroes or heroines to show their intelligence is to tell us what they’re thinking and there just aren’t that many opportunities between eruptions of CGI threats and menaces for either Percy or Annabeth to do that.

Percy and Annabeth can’t flirt and fall in love through talking because they don’t talk.

They have one short scene in which they exchange words that are more than just synonyms for Run, Duck, Lookout, and You Go This Way, I’ll Go That Way.  But the point isn’t to reveal or deepen either’s character.  It’s to show that Annabeth has a softer side and she’s getting over herself and coming to realize that she is all about Percy.

Things are more interesting in the books.  In the movie, Percy and Annabeth’s ages aren’t defined, but Percy appears to be in high school when we meet him.  Logan Lerman, the actor who plays him, was sixteen or seventeen when the movie was filmed but he comes across as older and Alexandra Daddario, who plays Annabeth, was twenty-two or twenty-three.  Physically, they are adults and the camera treats their bodies accordingly, emphasizing the physical attraction between them.  But the Percy and Annabeth of the books don’t do much flirting or falling in love, not at first, because when their story opens in The Lightning Thief they’re both only twelve years old.

They start off as friends not potential lovers, which gives Annabeth some room to define herself as a character apart from her relation to Percy. 

One of the ways she is able to do this is that by being a character in a novel she has special powers that movie characters don’t---time and space in which to develop an interesting backstory.

As I mentioned, in the mythology Athena is as virginal as her sister Diana (known to the Greeks as Artemis).  She even has a parallel myth about the perils of seeing her naked.  Annabeth’s father would have had to have been a remarkable mortal to have succeeded where even Odysseus hadn’t the temerity to try. 

But author Rick Riordan respects his mythological sources.  Annabeth’s father is a history buff and a genius inventor.  His attraction for Pallas Athena is purely intellectual.  Annabeth isn’t the product of a sexual relationship.  She is the product of a mind-meld.  She is literally a shared thought and like her mother she wasn’t born so much as cogitated into existence.

She is more than an example of how smart can be attractive.  She is the embodiment of the sentiment.

I don’t know what the creators of the boys with tits as female leads think they’re doing.  They may think they’re doing something at least quasi-feminist, presenting their audiences with female leads who are every bit as tough and dangerous as the men.  But consciously or unconsciously they may be targeting an audience of insecure men who can’t identify with a female character who isn’t a version of themselves or their idealized selves.

Which is to say an audience that is actually afraid of women.

The movie is smarter than that, but still, Percy turns away embarrassed when Aphrodite’s bikini-clad daughters invite him to join them for a swim but he perks right up when he sees the boyish Annabeth swinging her sword and shield.

The choice the movie presents him with is between a generic overtly sexualized expression of femininity and a generic pre-adolescent androgyny.

In other words, he is not asked to deal with any girl as a person in her own right with her own unique brand of femininity.

It should be noted that the movie’s Annabeth is not actually Percy’s equal anyway, because she doesn’t have his special powers.

In the books, Annabeth has powers that Percy doesn’t, the most important of which is her power to be herself and make Percy deal with her as having a selfhood apart from his own.

_______________________

The capsule review: The movie is actually pretty good.  The change in Annabeth will be a disappointment to fans of the Annabeth of the books, but for anyone who hasn’t read the books the movie’s Annabeth probably won’t register one way or the other, which is too bad but not a serious flaw.  The other characters more than make up for her blandness,  Pierce Brosnan as the archetypical wise man, Brandon T. Jackson as Percy’s satyr protector and sidekick, and Steve Coogan as the leather-clad, would-be hipster god of the underworld, Hades, especially.

And Logan Lerman as Percy carries things off with a Tobey Maguire as Spider-man combination of confidence, self-effacement, and gee whiz looky what I can do sense of fun.  You can see why a lot of people thought he’d be the perfect choice to play Peter Parker in the planned Spider-man reboot.  He’s a little too conventionally handsome, though, and only a growth spurt away of being a better choice for Clark Kent.

The good news is that there’s not an over-reliance on the CGI and only two scenes that contained advertisements for the video game.  As I said, there’s a shortage of character-developing dialog, but it’s still a plot-driven rather than a stunt and special effects-driven film. 

Ken Mannion gives it a thumbs up, despite his disappointment at what was left out from the books, which is more than just the more interesting version of Annabeth.  For instance, he would have liked to have seen the lesser gods have more to do than shout at each other and squabble.  He understands, though, why the filmmakers left out foreshadows of the coming war with the Titans.

Of course, he thinks the books are far better than the movie and highly recommends them, but points out that he’s now 17 and he read the last one when he was 15, having started the series when he was 12.

Maybe we should only let war heroes be President…although…

The Republicans nominated one last time out and that wasn’t such a good idea.

At any rate…

George McGovern knew something about shedding blood.  In early1943 he had been a twenty-two-year-old college student with a pilot’s license, a pregnant wife, and an absolute dread of flying a plane.  Nonetheless, he piloted thirty-five bombing raids over Germany, sometimes amid enemy fire that forced him into terrifying emergency landings.  On one mission his right  tire blew out upon takeoff, meaning that his plane would likely crash when it tried to land.  Rather than bailing out, McGovern and his crew completed their nine-hour bombing run, all the while knowing that they might die upon their return to base.  On another flight, McGovern’s plane was struck by more than a hundred pieces of shrapnel during withering German antiaircraft fire.  One of his men was hit in the leg.  The plane lost oxygen, and the heated suits that insulated the crew from subzero weather gave out.  Still, McGovern found a makeshift airstrip and successfully landed the plane.

One of McGovern’s men, a streetwise, hard-drinking engineer from Bridgeport, Connecticut was shattered by these harrowing ordeals.  After the war he entered a mental asylum, and then stepped in front of a truck, in what may have been a suicide.  McGovern’s navigator, a somber Milwaukeean with dreams of entering the ministry, was flying with another pilot when he was forced to bail out over German soil just before his plane blew up.  McGovern spent the rest of the war sleeping next to the man’s empty bunk, gazing at his clothes and photos of his family, praying that he would return.  He never did.  One of the deep ironies of the 1972 campaign, a campaign in which many Americans came to see McGovern as a pacifist, if not a coward, was that he was one of the greatest war heroes ever to run for president.  He had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for Bravery four times.  But in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination, he excised mentions of his war record.  “It seemed hypocritical,” said one of his aides, to boast that “ ‘I killed more people than any of you guys.’”

---from The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris by Peter Beinart.