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Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Glaucoma and marijuana

Glaucoma_pic


I’ve told you recently that I have been getting loads of genetic information from 23andme.com. Among other things, I have learned that I have a significantly enhanced chance of developing something called “exfoliative glaucoma.”

 

 

I have read several descriptions of this interesting condition. As I understand it, little particles of dead tissues (often described as “dandruff-like”) begin to accumulate within the eyeball. (Actually they accumulate within the “trabecular network,” but let’s not get too technical.) At any rate, your eyeballs turn into miniature snowflake paperweights, full of inert whitish material. This increases the fluid pressure within your eyeballs, and – presto! – glaucoma.

 

 

The average chance for developing this charming disease is 0.7 percent. Mine is 2.2 percent. Not huge, but more than triple the average.

 

 

This is interesting. There’s no glaucoma in my family that I know of, but we seem to be capable of generating nasty little mutations of our own, so I’m sure the folks at 23andMe.com are not making this stuff up.

 

 

So what’s to be done?

 

 

Glaucoma is treatable. There are eyedrops, and laser surgery, and other things.

 

 

Also there is always medical marijuana.

 

 

One of the first uses of medical marijuana was to reduce the fluid pressure in the eyeballs of glaucoma patients. It’s not the most highly-recommended treatment – damn medical research! – but it’s still used in many cases.

 

 

And medical marijuana gives you the nicest giggly feeling, and the most tremendous appetite.

 

 

Ah well. There are much worse things than glaucoma.


 

 

Monday, April 29, 2013

Treasures

 

Treasures


Everyone has treasures put away. I still have some of my early-childhood books, and a big box of (mostly Canadian) pennies. Total worth: not much, really.

 

 

But I have a little box in which I keep my real treasures.

 

 

One is a stone I found when I was maybe six years old. It’s a perfect spiral made of quartz, and I knew even then that it was extraordinary. I know now that it’s a real fossil: some casting from a long-dead creature that burrowed in the mud. All of my uncles collected rocks, and I accused them (at the age of six!) of planting it so that I could find it, and they all denied it. I think, after all these years, I believe them, because in the rain and mud of Washington state, how could they have planted it and been sure that I’d find it?

 

 

Another is a cheap plastic coin I got in a bag of Fritos sometime in the early 1960s. They were doing a space-exploration series; I think I had John Glenn and Alan Shepard too. But I really only liked Laika the Russian space dog. Poor little thing: shot into space, and never seen again. I still have her coin, and I still remember her.

 

 

Also a little plastic Bible, about the size of a raisin. If you look into the little lens on the bottom, you can read the Lord’s Prayer. Miraculous!

 

 

Also a plastic cigarette, actual size. The filter comes off, and it’s a pen.

 

 

All these stupid little things were precious to me in my childhood. I’ve managed to hang onto them for fifty years!

 

 

And, at least once a year, I get out the box and check to make sure they’re all still there.

 

 

Because they are still precious to me.


 

 

 

Sunday, April 28, 2013

For Sunday: the Three Stooges swing the alphabet

Stooges_alphabet


I have been a Stoogeophile since childhood. I like nothing better than watching Moe poke Curly in the eye and yank Larry’s hair.

 

 

Here’s their only real musical number: the very wonderful alphabet song from “Violent is the Word for Curly.”

 

 

All together now:

 

 

B – A – bay –

B – E – bee –

B – I – bicky-bye, B – O – bo,

Bicky-bye bo bicky-by boo, bicky bye bo boo!

 

 


 

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Floating kidney

Floating_kidney

Gather round, children! Mama has another self-diagnosed illness!

 

 

So you know all about my kidney stones, blah blah blah. I was told a month or two ago that little can be done for them; they’re small, and they dissolve quickly, and there’s no medication to prevent them. The pain and discomfort I suffer is mild, and usually ibuprofen is enough to make me feel better.

 

 

But hm.

 

 

I took some very interesting Human Biology courses in college. My instructor was a remarkable woman who was a church organist, and city councilperson, and chief anesthesiologist at a local hospital, as well as teaching courses at Gonzaga. She was funny and energetic, and an excellent instructor. I remember a lot of what she taught me.

 

 

And suddenly, from back the mid-1970s, I remembered her saying something like this: “The kidneys are cushioned on layers of tissue. In some people – often when there’s weight loss – the kidney can move around. This can cause discomfort. It’s called floating kidney.”

 

 

No kidding.

 

 

I checked. Kidney stones normally don’t feel worse when you move around, but a floating kidney certainly does. Kidney stones aren’t normally relieved by lying down; my pain goes away when I lie down.

 

 

A lot of the other symptoms are the same: colic, upset stomach, etc.

 

 

So wait’ll I see my timid little doctor.

 

 

Do I have a few things to tell him.


 

Friday, April 26, 2013

Neustria

Neustria


When we were in Caen in October, I saw a little place across from our hotel window: Pizzeria la Neustrie.

 

 

Neustria? It rang a faint bell.

 

 

I looked it up. Neustria was an area in northern France, back in the late Dark Ages. It was, in fact, most of the northwest  of France.

 

 

I like thinking of this, even though it’s the memory of a pretty barbaric time. I’ve read Gregory of Tours, and I know that modern France and Germany were a patchwork of principalities and kingdoms in those days, full of petty tyrants and evil queens and benevolent squires. If you didn’t like the area, or the local king or queen, you just put your things in a cart, and rode down the lane a few miles, and you were in someone else’s kingdom.

 

 

Of course, this assumes that you were able to leave your home. Most people weren’t. Most people were desperately poor, and unable to leave their homes, even if the local queen was drinking out of a human skull (as I seem to recall Gregory of Tours recounting).

 

 

But what’s all this? It’s fifteen hundred years later, and everything seemed quiet and charming when we were there, in Caen and Bayeux and Honfleur and Paris.

 

 

And, too, 23andme.com has identified that part of my ancestry comes from Doggerland, which is the land around the English Channel. Which is to say: Neustria.

 

 

I am a Neustrian (partly). And proud of it.

 

 

Bring me a drink in a human skull.


 

 

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Is everything all right?



Is_everything_all_right


So much has gone wrong over the past few weeks: the Boston Marathon bombings, the ensuing manhunt, the Texas factory explosion, the terrible floods in the American Midwest.


It makes you think.


Natural disasters – floods, tsunamis, storms, earthquakes – are awful, and take a terrible toll. But they’re not intentional. They just happen. The universe doesn’t care very much about human beings (sadly enough), and sometimes we get in the way.


Human disasters, like the Boston bombings, are another thing. They make us think about human folly, and insanity, and how easily our lives can be overturned by a backpack full of black powder and shrapnel.


They make us realize that, though we might feel comfortable in our lives, there’s always an unknown element. An asteroid might hit. A fire might break out. A madman might open fire.


Back in my freshman year of college, I was assigned to read a book by Michael Novak. In it was the following passage (I paraphrase):


“Your child wakes up in the middle of the night, crying from a bad dream. You come into his bedroom and cradle him, and say: Everything is all right.


“Are you lying?”


Yes, of course. We’re all lying to ourselves. We’re in peril every moment, and death is just around the corner.


But maybe that’s the silver lining in tragic events like the Boston bombing: they remind us not to be too secure in our daily lives, and to live fully.


Here’s the last line of a classic Latin poem, “Copa,” written maybe by Propertius, maybe by Virgil, maybe by someone else:


Mors aurum vellens, “vivite,” ait, “venio.”


Death tugs you by the ear. “Live it up,” he says. “Here I come.”




Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Motivations


 


Last week was pretty horrible here in southern New England, but things have calmed at last: one of the marathon bombers is dead, the other is in custody and charged with using a weapon of mass destruction.

 

 

I’m thankful that one of them is alive; maybe he can explain to us, in some way, what this was all about.

 

 

When horrible things happen, we try to make them conform to a narrative: good guys and bad guys, mysterious conspiracies. We want to understand why people do the horrible things they do.

 

 

Here’s some of what we know: the brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were ethnic Chechens. They came to the USA when they were young, and went to good schools. They are described as being mostly happy and well-adjusted by those who knew them.

 

 

So what happened to them?

 

 

It appears that Tamerlan became radicalized over the past few years. He was under scrutiny by both American and Russian intelligence, but neither discovered anything of interest.

 

 

All of the clues were subtle:

 

 

-         He visited his family in Russia last year, who noted that he seemed to be much more devout in his religious practice than before.

-         He posted a radical Islamist video on YouTube, and then removed it.

-         He told a friend that the Bible was a poor imitation of the Koran (showing an interesting misconception of the history of both books), and said that the United States used the Bible as an excuse to be a world aggressor.

 

 

We won’t know much more. He’s dead.

 

 

But his brother is alive.

 

 

His brother is a deeper mystery. He seems to have been universally liked, and is still described warmly by those who know him.

 

 

Here’s a narrative. Tell me what you think of this:

 

 

Once upon a time, in Chicago in 1924, there were two young men named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. They both came from well-to-do families, and were both very intelligent. They decided, for whatever reason, that they were Supermen a la Nietzsche, and were far smarter than anyone else. They decided to demonstrate this by kidnapping, abusing, and killing a little boy named Bobby Franks.

 

 

They didn’t get away with it. A pair of Leopold’s glasses were found at the crime scene, and the whole scheme fell apart.

 

 

Loeb is portrayed as a persuasive seducer, who conned the more suggestible Leopold into coming along with him. (Leopold was a little older, but much shyer by all accounts.) And how about those glasses that Leopold dropped? Do you wonder if he dropped them on purpose?

 

 

It makes for a nice neat narrative.

 

 

But what do we really know?


 

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

The F-bomb

F_bomb_jpeg


Boston was in celebration mode over the weekend, after the capture of marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. There’s been an outpouring of relief. At Saturday’s Red Sox game, there was this memorable moment:

 

 

 

 

In short: David Ortiz, “Big Papi,” spoke before the game, saying: “This is our f***ing city, and nobody gonna dictate us!”

 

 

Naturally the usual silliness broke out:

 

 

a)     Think of the children!

b)    Think of the television audience!

c)     Think of the FCC!

 

 

The head of the FCC almost immediately tweeted that he was fine with this. (He had nothing to lose; the FCC doesn’t regulate cable broadcasts.)

 

 

As for the children: if they haven’t already heard the word, they will hear it (and much worse) in due course.

 

 

Seriously: it’s so silly that people respond so violently to profanity, especially bathroom / anatomical / sexual profanity. I know it’s largely cultural, but the whole idea that the common name of a body part or a sexual function isn’t a “nice” word is just – amazing. I mean, look at me! I can’t even write “f***ing”!

 

 

Because I’m afraid I might shock or offend my readers.

 

 

I know enough about languages, however, to know that this is the way language works. Some languages (such as Tibetan) have a whole different range of vocabulary items which are used in higher-class situations.

 

 

Religious profanity is altogether a different thing. Casual swearing in Jesus’ name is common in most Catholic countries, but is often considered blasphemous in Protestant countries.

 

 

Arabic, of all the languages with which I’m familiar, is the best for swearing. Arabic-speakers combine bathroom words, sexuality, family insults, and religion in the most refreshingly creative ways.  Here’s one of the most creative (please note that I will try to translate in the least offensive way):

 

 

“May God condemn the religion of thy mother’s private parts.”

 

 

Compared to that, Big Papi seems tame, doesn’t he?


Monday, April 22, 2013

Wake

Wake


A childhood friend of Partner’s passed away recently. We went to the wake.

 

 

I’d met a lot of the people before, as a brother of the deceased had passed away some years ago, and we’d gone to that wake too. But I was amazed that everyone seemed to remember me. “Are you kidding?” Partner said later. “Of course they remembered you. We were the talk of the place the first time. We were the only gay couple there.”

 

 

The deceased was in his coffin, looking as if he’d just drowsed off. His daughter told us: “We made sure he was wearing his casual clothes. We wanted him to be comfortable.” Partner touched his arm as we knelt by the coffin, to say goodbye. A few weeks before, when we’d visited him, the deceased told Partner: “You were my first friend.” I thought that was an extraordinarily wonderful thing to say to someone.

 

 

The family (there were five living siblings, and some spouses, and children, and cousins) were all very warm, and glad to see Partner, and very nice to me. The funeral home was full of laughter: people reminiscing, people telling stories (about the deceased and about all kinds of other things), people reconnecting with one another.

 

 

“We never see each other except at funerals!” people say.

 

 

Ain’t it the truth.

 

 

Wakes and funerals always make me realize how important my friends are.

 

 

Have you said hello to your friends lately? Email, snail mail, Facebook, telephone?

 

 

Get on it.

 

 

Life is shorter than you think.


 

Sunday, April 21, 2013

For Sunday: Cab Calloway sings "St. James Infirmary"

Cab_calloway

Cab Calloway was a great performer in the 1920s and 1930s. This is an animation of his performance of the great song “St. James Infirmary,” sung by Koko the Clown in a Betty Boop version of Snow White.

 

 

It’s terrific.

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 


 

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Goldendale, Washington

Goldendale


 Goldendale is a town in Washington state, in Klickitat County not far north of the Columbia River. The sign at the city limits used to read like this (maybe it still does):

 

 

 

WELCOME TO GOLDENDALE

THE GOLDEN GATE

TO THE EVERGREEN STATE

 

 

When we made our yearly visits to my my paternal grandmother, back in the 1960s and 1970s, Goldendale was the last real town we passed through before we arrived at her house. We usually stopped for a burger. I wish I could remember the name of the burger place, because it was excellent.

 

 

Partner and I have passed through Goldendale a few times over the past fifteen years. It’s bigger than I remember, but I see from Wikipedia that it has less than four thousand residents, so it’s still pretty small.

 

 

In June 1918, astronomers William Campbell and Heber Curtis came to Goldendale to view a solar eclipse. This was an especially important eclipse, because Einstein’s theories predicted that the light of stars close to the sun would be deflected slightly, and everyone wanted to see whether or not it was true.

 

 

The Goldendale data (which wasn’t terrific) did not confirm Einstein’s theories. Luckily, other viewings over the next few years confirmed that Einstein was correct.

 

 

But Goldendale turns out to be a great place to have an observatory. The air is clear, and the weather is mostly cloudless. There’s a permanent observatory there now, in its own state park.

 

 

And here’s the thing: my father (who was six years old at the time) was only a few miles away from Campbell and Curtis, on his parents’ ranch, as Campbell and Curtis performed their observations.

 

 

The world is a very small place after all.


 

Friday, April 19, 2013

Bears of the USA

Bears


Bears are back in New England!

 

 

A bear was sighted in North Kingstown, Rhode Island only a few days ago. And there have been bears sighted on Cape Cod too. (Which is interesting, because they’d either have to clamber over one of the two bridges to the Cape, or ride on top of a vehicle to get there. Or swim. Or ride a floating log across the Cape Cod Canal. Or commandeer someone’s Humvee. Nothing’s impossible.)

 

 

Well, it’s like the Middle Ages around here.  The bear here in Rhode Island knocked over a chicken coop and made off with one of the chickens!

 

 

Our stuffed polar bear, Carbuncle, has his own thoughts on the subject. (Carbuncle, you might recall, won the Financial Times crossword puzzle contest about a year ago. This is a picture of him wandering the neighborhood last winter):

 

 

Carbuncle_winter

 

 

First of all: Carbuncle is glad that the bears are back. He’s less lonely now.

 

 

Second: Carbuncle wonders what kind of bears are back. Polar bears? Probably not. Ah well. Less competition for those tasty seals:

 

 

Bear_and_seal

 

 

Also: will this mean less pick-a-nick baskets for Carbuncle to steal from friends and neighbors?

 

 

I direct you to the following cartoon for more information:

 

 


 

 

Thursday, April 18, 2013

For National Poetry Month: "Some Trees," by John Ashbery

Poem_in_your_pocket


April is National Poetry Month. And today – April 18 – is “Poem In Your Pocket” day. Today’s the day to carry your favorite poem with you, and give it to people, and let people know.

 

 

I don’t have a single favorite poem. It depends on my mood, which is sometimes a little somber. But it’s April, so let’s have a brighter one today – a very early one by John Ashbery:

 

 

 

Some Trees

 

These are amazing: each 
Joining a neighbor, as though speech 
Were a still performance. 
Arranging by chance

 

To meet as far this morning 
From the world as agreeing 
With it, you and I 
Are suddenly what the trees try

 

To tell us we are: 
That their merely being there 
Means something; that soon 
We may touch, love, explain.

 

And glad not to have invented 
Such comeliness, we are surrounded: 
A silence already filled with noises, 
A canvas on which emerges

 

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning. 
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, 
Our days put on such reticence 
These accents seem their own defense.


 

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Gerard Butler

Gerard_butler

Partner and I saw “Olympus Has Fallen” last weekend when we were down on Cape Cod.

 

 

Oh dear. It’s dreadful. If you really want to see it, here’s what you do: queue up “Independence Day” and “Die Hard” and “Red Dawn” one after another, and hit yourself on the head very hard with a ball peen hammer while you’re watching them.

 

 

Here’s a quick plot summary, with spoilers: North Koreans make a (very unlikely) commando attack on the White House. The North Koreans have incredible space-age weapons, and evidently all we Americans have is handguns. The American President (Aaron Eckhart) is a charming weenie who gives the North Koreans two-thirds of the computer codes they want, because “they’ll never get the third part.” Naturally, they figure out the third part on their own.

 

 

But that’s okay: a superhuman Secret Service operative, played by Gerard Butler, kills all the North Koreans and saves the President (and, incidentally, the United States of America).

 

 

Which brings us to Gerard Butler.

 

 

You might remember Gerard as King Leonidas in “300,” gigantic and bearded and powerful and angry. Well, god bless him, that’s pretty much his schtick. He’s big and dark and nicely built, and has blue eyes which range from Warm to Stern to Threatening. He’s one of those men on whom stubble looks not only good, but natural.

 

 

He’s a co-producer of this movie, so you’d expect his character to be The Hero, and you’d be right. He’s a friend of the Weenie President, and a second (and much better) father to the Weenie President’s son.

 

 

Also, he’s an unstoppable killer.

 

 

A while back, I wrote about Victor Mature, and the uses of big handsome muscular men in the movies.

 

 

“Olympus Has Fallen” establishes that nothing has changed.

 

 

We love you, Gerard, the way audiences loved Victor in the 1950s.

 

 

Now: please make better movies.

 

 

Over and out!


 

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Famous last words

Famous_last_words


Funny how someone’s always hanging around to jot down the last words of well-known people. 

 

 

These last words fall into (many) categories:

 

 

Incomprehensible: “Moose Indian” (Thoreau).

 

 

Moral / religious: “See in what peace a Christian can die!” (Addison).

 

 

Visionary: “Mozart . . .” (Gustav Mahler).

 

 

Egotistical: “What an artist dies with me!” (Nero).

 

 

Mysterious: “More light!” (Goethe).

 

 

Sardonic: “Are they lighting the fires already?” (Voltaire).

 

 

Stoic: “Livia, remember the days of our married life” (Augustus Caesar).

 

 

But let’s face it: the moment of death is probably very scary.

 

 

So let’s think of the boxer Buddy Baer, who sat up in bed a moment before he died, and said, simply:

 

 

“Oh my god, here I go!”


 

 

 

Monday, April 15, 2013

Horsemeat

Horsemeat


There’s been a recent scare in Europe over the use of horsemeat in prepared foods. It showed up in one country after another (evidently a processing plant in Romania was providing the horseflesh).

 


Then, most shockingly, it was in some of the stuff sold in Ikea.

 


Ikea! Nice sweet friendly Ikea!

 


It’s nothing to me. I’ve eaten horsemeat knowingly. There was a cunning little butchershop in Morocco with a nice painting of a racehorse over the door; it took me a while to figure out what that meant, but I got it after a while. Then I realized that the Belgian lady who owned the snack shop downtown was using horsemeat in her hamburgers. (It turns out that horsemeat has a pleasant flavor, sweeter than beef, and doesn’t change color very much when it’s cooked, so it still looks a little raw when you eat it.) I used to take American friends there, just to see how they’d react. Most didn’t notice a thing. One friend sent his burger back, because he thought it was underdone, and couldn’t understand why the meat was still pinkish. I never had the heart to tell him.

 

 

It’s all cultural. I had rabbit and frog in France last October, because how often do you see them on the menu in the United States? The rabbit was delicious; the frog was a little muddy and fishy. I love squid (which is much more palatable as “calamari”), but still struggle a little with octopus, which has a very strong smell and taste. I had paella a long time ago in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and found a tiny starfish in the rice, and wasn’t sure if it was for decoration or meant to be eaten. (I didn’t eat it. Even I have my limits.) I love sushi, and one of my favorites is unagi, which is eel with plum sauce. Eel! Horrible slimy snaky eel!

 

 

Herewith one of my favorite I’ll-never-make-this recipes:

 

 

Stewed Dog (to be served over rice)

3 kg dog meat*
1 1/2 cups vinegar
60 peppercorns, crushed
6 tablespoons salt
12 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 cup oil
6 cups onion, sliced
3 cups tomato sauce
10 cups water
6 cups red pepper, cut into strips
6 pieces bay leaf
1 teaspoon tabasco sauce
1 1/2 cups liver spread**
1 whole fresh pineapple, cut ½” thick

1. First, kill a medium sized dog, then burn off the fur over a hot fire.

2. Carefully remove the skin while still warm and set aside for later (may be used in other recpies)

3. Cut meat into 1″ cubes. Marinate meat in mixture of vinegar, peppercorn, salt and garlic for 2 hours.

4. Fry meat in oil using a large wok over an open fire, then add onions and chopped pineapple and saute until tender.

5. Pour in tomato sauce and boiling water, add green pepper, bay leaf and tabasco.

6. Cover and simmer over warm coals until meat is tender. Blend in liver spread and cook for additional 5-7 minutes.

* You can substitute lamb for dog. The taste is similar, but not as pungent.
** Smooth liver pate will do as well.

 



 

 

Sunday, April 14, 2013

For Sunday: Paul Evans sings "Seven Litttle Girls"

Seven_little_girls

Here’s a song I remember very clearly from my childhood, performed by its writer, Paul Evans. It was often on the radio in the early 1960s; it’s what you call a “novelty hit.”

 

 

Listen to it until it gets stuck in your mind, as it’s still stuck in mine, after fifty years.

 

 

Keep your mind on your driving,

Keep your hands on the wheel;

Keep your snoopy eyes on the road ahead;

We’re having fun

Sitting in the back seat,

Kissing and a-hugging with Fred!

 

 

 


 

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Tulipa tarda

Tulipa_tarda_1


All of the early bulbs are blooming at once this year: squill, and snowdrops, and hyacinths, and daffodils, and crocus. The tulips are holding off, as always.

 

 

Except Tulipa tarda.

 

 

Funny: the name, Tulipa tarda, means “late tulip.” But hereabouts, it blooms before all of the other tulips. It’s a botanical tulip, which means that it was never hybridized; it still grows wild on the plateaus of central Asia.

 

 

It is a small tulip, with bright yellow-and-white starlike flowers on short stems. Most hybridized tulips bloom for a year or two and then die away; Tulipa tarda goes on and on for years and years.

 

 

I love hybridized tulips, don’t get me wrong. They can be extraordinary: the parrots, and the lilies, and the Rembrandts. The colors and shapes are beautiful.

 

 

But one of the charms of spring bulbs is their simplicity. We don’t look for lots of variation in our crocus, or our squill, or our snowdrops: we just love looking out the window and seeing hundreds of them thronging the garden.

 

 

That’s what I love about Tulipa tarda. They are simple and unextraordinary and still very beautiful. They pop up from the grass and shine up at you like little stars.

 

 

If you want something different and easy and charming in your garden in early spring, go buy a few T. tarda bulbs.

 

 

You won’t regret it.


 

Friday, April 12, 2013

Annette Funicello

Annette

Annette Funicello passed away on Monday. It wasn’t a surprise; she’s been sick for a long time – she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1987, and has been battling it ever since.

 

 

But it is a very sad occasion for me.

 

 

Annette was my very first television crush, back in the late 1950s / early 1960s, when she was one of the original Mousketeers. She was so pretty! And she was always smiling!

 

 

Annette had a singing career, and she even had her own TV show for a while. Then, in the mid-1960s, there were the Beach Party movies with Frankie Avalon. I never tire of seeing those beach movies; they are eternal 1960s summer, with no shadow of Vietnam or the counterculture. Annette is always the Good Girl; Frankie is always tempted by the Bad Girl (Connie Stevens, or Luciana Paluzzi, or whomever), but he always comes back to Annette.

 

 

Annette did occasional gigs in the 70s and 80s, but not much. Then, after her MS was diagnosed in 1987, she and Frankie Avalon made the dreadful-but-loveable “Back to the Beach,” with Connie Stevens and Pee-Wee Herman. It’s a twenty-years-later beach movie, which tries to recapture the feeling of those madcap stupid 1960s beach movies. It fails, naturally.

 

 

But who cares? It was fun. I watched it three or four times, because I loved Annette.

 

 

And I still do.

 

 

Rest in peace, sweetheart.


 

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Victor Mature

Victor_mature


Turner Classic Movies has been showing an awful lot of Victor Mature pictures lately: “The Robe” and “Demetrius and the Gladiators” on Easter, and “My Gal Sal” not long after.

 

 

Oh, you don’t know him? See the above photo. Victor Mature (which was, believe it or not, his real name) was a big handsome Italian-American who appeared in a whole bunch of movies in the 1940s and 1950s. He was every cliché you could think of: broad-shouldered, barrel-chested. He was tall, dark, and handsome. His shirt seemed to come off in every single movie he was in. (Even as the songwriter Paul Dresser in “My Gal Sal,” he gets tarred and feathered, and we get to see Carole Landis gently clean the tar and feathers from his immense torso.)

 

 

Hollywood is all about pretty girls and handsome men. Back in the 1990s, the house movie reviewer for “Premiere” magazine, Libby Gelman-Waxner (who was really Paul Rudnick), answered a letter from a reader thusly (I paraphrase):

 

 

Dear Libby: You seem to like or dislike movies based on whether or not you’re attracted to the lead actors. Libby: that’s not what movies are all about. (signed: Reader.)

Dear Reader: Oh yes it is.

 

 

The above photo is from “Samson and Delilah,” in which the lovely but very petite Hedy Lamarr played Delilah. This inspired Groucho Marx’s great comment (which I’ve bowdlerized slightly): “I don’t like seeing movies in which the men’s breasts are bigger than the women’s.”

 

 

But you can’t deny that Victor had That Certain Something.

 

 

There were lots of other big lugs in movies in those days – Aldo Ray, Gilbert Roland, Jack Carson, Stewart Granger, even Keenan Wynn. They were all big and beefy.

 

 

But none of them had big dark vulnerable eyes like Victor Mature.

 

 

We miss you, Victor.


 

 

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Rhode Island food; or, What the hell is a Wimpy Skippy?

Ri_food


I was meditating in the third-floor kitchen at the office the other day, staring out the window, when a refrigerator magnet caught my eye: CASERTA PIZZERIA. ORIGINATOR OF THE WIMPY SKIPPY.

 

 

Oh my God. I’d forgotten all about the Wimpy Skippy.

 

 

Now, tell me again: what the hell is a Wimpy Skippy?

 

 

Simple: it’s a spinach calzone with mozzarella, pepperoni, and black olives. Here’s the story of the W. S., told in Rhode Islandese by one of Da Guyz up at Caserta’s:

 

 

 

 

Listen: my local bakery makes spinach pies with mozzarella and pepperoni. So I don’t have to go traipsing up to Federal Hill to get one of theirs.

 

 

How about an Awful Awful? That was a Newport Creamery item: a giant milkshake, “awful big, awful good.” Their advertising slogan for it was the simplest possible phrase: “It’s a drink!” And best of all: if you drink three, you get one free.

 

 

And finally: the Jimmie Gimme. It’s an egg-and-ham sandwich (basically an Egg McMuffin) served at the Modern Diner in Pawtucket. It’s a little on the greasy side.

 

 

And don’t even get me started about New York System hot wieners. You can read all about them at this link.

 

 

(Why are we so obsessed with food? I’ve asked this question before, but I still don’t understand. Food’s necessary to our survival, but then again, so are air and water. We don’t talk about air all day long, or water. Why do we talk about food, and write books about it, and argue about it incessantly?)

 

 

(Heaven only knows.)

 

 

(Now let’s go downcity and get a Haven Brothers hot dog.)


 

 

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

The gold bug

Gold


Partner, who knows a lot about finance, was advising a friend recently on the purchase of gold. “I want it,” she said, “but what happens if the government collapses? Can I trade the gold for a quart of milk?”

 

 

He tried to explain the system to her. He even helped her to buy some small gold coins on the Internet, from a reliable dealer who offers decent prices. (She bought half an ounce of gold, so the coins will be very small. I think she expects to receive a chunk of gold about the size of a manhole cover.)

 

 

Why gold? It occurs naturally worldwide. It’s malleable and can be made into almost anything. It’s beautiful. It’s rare, and difficult to obtain.

 

 

It is, in Karl Marx’s terminology, a “fetish.” You can’t eat it, or benefit from its ownership in any natural way. But you know that you (and many others) are fascinated by it, and will give you outlandish amounts of useful goods (currency, food, clothing) in exchange for a small amount of it.

 

 

Gold will keep its “value” if even a vestige of the current civilization continues. People will still want it, and will barter valuable items for it. (Don’t barter it for milk, however. You can probably find something else around the house to barter for milk. Extra bedsheets? Candles? A family member?)

 

 

I’ve seen gold coins in museums, and I can vouch for the fact that they’re beautiful. They are also usually (as I said above) very small.  (I saw a great advert in Reader’s Digest recently offering gold coins for $150. The picture accompanying the advertisement made the coins look as if they were the size of Oreo cookies. Given the price, however, they can’t be larger than the nail of your little finger, and perhaps smaller than that.)

 

 

But gold enchants people.

 

 

Partner’s friend has been bitten by the gold bug.

 

 

She will never be the same.

 

 

(I’ve looked at the websites too. My goodness, those coins are pretty. And they’re not all that expensive . . . )


 

 

 

Monday, April 8, 2013

Movie review: "Oz the Great and Powerful"

Oz-the-great-and-powerful-poster-1

Partner and I saw “Oz the Great and Powerful,” with James Franco and Michelle Williams and Rachel Weisz and Mila Kunis, this past weekend. We knew the reviews hadn’t been great, but we knew also that it had done terrific box office the past few weeks, and that a number of my friends had seen it.

 

 

Um. Well . . .

 

 

I am, as you’d expect, a huge Ozphile. I love the 1939 movie (what gay man doesn’t?), and “Wicked” (both book and musical), and I own all fourteen of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, and I have seen “The Wiz” and a couple of the other knockoff versions. It’s a rich mythology, and lots of people have had fun playing in the wonderland that Baum created.

 

 

But this new movie is a mess, frankly. It has some great bits: the opening credits are wonderful – an animated sequence of magic tricks – and there are some beautiful scenes along the way: gorgeous super-realistic color, flowers that are gems and musical instruments. But it tries to recapture the amiable magic of the 1939 movie, and it fails. There are all kinds of winking reminiscences of the old movie: a lion, and some scarecrows, and a reference to “having no heart,” and singing/dancing Munchkins.

 

As in the 1939 movie, we open in Kansas, in a sepia-toned black-and-white. The Wizard (Mr. Franco) is a sideshow conjuror and a womanizer. He gets in a hot-air balloon to escape from the circus strongman, who’s just found out that his girlfriend has been seeing the Wizard on the side.

 

 

Cue the tornado!

 

 

The Land of Oz, naturally, is super-Technicolor. We meet witches, and flying monkeys, and talking birds. The movie was filmed in 2D/3D, so there are lots of soaring / flying / coasting scenes; when the Wizard first gets to Oz, he rides down a waterfall in a way that reminded me exactly of the Splash Mountain ride at Disney World. (If there’s not an “Oz” ride in Disney World within ten years – provided this movie is a hit – I’ll eat my magical hat.)

 

 

You’d think, with all that background material, that the screenwriters would have had enough to work with.

 

 

But they ended up with a thin movie full of thin characters.

 

 

You know what? Save yourself the heartache. Go to Netflix and see “Wild at Heart” instead. It’s a very sly retelling of the Oz story, and it’s much better than “Oz the Great and Powerful”:

 

 

 


 

Sunday, April 7, 2013

For Sunday: Art Garfunkel sings "I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)"

Garfunkel_i_believe


 

Art Garfunkel released his “Breakaway” album when I was in college. My friends and I listened to it incessantly. It’s sort of a theme album; it begins with heartfelt declarations of love (this is the first song on Side I), progresses through all kinds of ups and downs, and ends in heartbreak (the last song is “The Same Old Tears on a New Background”).

 

 

This song was written by Stevie Wonder. It has a strange ecstatic power, especially as performed here. I see that Josh Groban has covered it; I can’t imagine he improved on Garfunkel’s performance.

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 

 


 

 

 

Saturday, April 6, 2013

The Tolstoy museum

Tolstoy


Back in 1978 I spent a few days with a tour group in Moscow. The guides got tired of us after a while, and let us go off on our own. I noticed that some of the classic authors – Gorky, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy – had small museums dedicated to them around the city, and I decided to visit the Tolstoy museum.

 

 

It took me forever to find it; it was an inconspicuous door on a side street. I rang, and two old ladies ushered me in, babbling in Russian (I knew only a few words in Polish, which is close to Russian, but not close enough for me to fake it most of the time.) They showed me the house, which was small but magnificent; it was Tolstoy’s pied-a-terre in Moscow, full of beautiful furniture, and manuscripts displayed everywhere.

 

 

Finally the old ladies brought me into the library. There were at least fifteen or twenty folding chairs set up, and I was the only visitor; they sat me down in the front row, and got out an old Edison cylinder machine, and got it set up, and –  well, I didn’t know what to expect.

 

 

Finally, from the Edison cylinder, I heard something: a man’s voice, scratchy, evidently reading from something. The two old ladies were staring at me, waiting for my response.

 

 

 

Aha. This was a recording of Tolstoy himself, reading (presumably) from one of his own books. And the museum ladies were waiting for my response.

 

 

I gave them everything I had. I told them it was good, in Polish (which they may or may not have understood). I smiled.

 

 

And they seemed to be very happy, having shared their museum with me.

 

 

This is one of my best memories from my trip to Russia. It seems like a dream now, of course; I barely remember the details of the house, or of the sound of Tolstoy’s voice, or what the old ladies looked like.

 

 

But I do remember how lovely I felt as I left. 


 

Friday, April 5, 2013

Bacteria

Bacteria


I lose things all the time. In the office, it’s usually my coffee cup. I bought two identical cups, just so that I could lose one and not disrupt my routine.

 

 

One of them disappeared about two months ago, but, just the other day, I found it.

 

 

O children it was horrible. There’d been a little coffee in the cup, which had dried and bred some kind of horrible fungus / bacterial stew. There were odd geometric structures at the bottom of the cup that looked like something out of a science-fiction novel.

 

 

When I tried to rinse out the cup, the bacterial remains not only stayed put, but they stayed dry: they repelled water as if they were made of wax. Not even hot water made a difference. Detergent wetted them a little, but not much.

 

 

Finally I filled the cup with rubbing alcohol and put it aside.

 

 

Who knows what happened in that cup? Maybe whole bacterial / fungal civilizations lived and died and fought and loved. Maybe – eep! – they’re still there, wearing microscopic scuba gear and zipping through their new alcohol sea.

 

 

I don’t know.

 

 

Hmm.  Even if I ever get it clean, do you think I’ll ever have the nerve to drink out of that cup again?

 

 

And does anyone out there own an autoclave?


 

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Allies

Allies


The Supreme Court heard arguments about two gay-marriage issues last week: California’s Proposition 8, which declares (by popular vote) that gay marriage is out of the question, and the Defense of Marriage Act, enacted by the usually-smarter Bill Clinton, which declares that (for federal purposes) marriage can only ever be between a man and a woman.

 

 

The passage of Proposition 8 implies that voters can grant or deny civil rights.

 

 

DOMA creates a situation in which married gay couples can still be denied federal benefits.

 

 

You can guess (if you don’t already know) where I stand on both issues, but here are some thoughts:

 

 

-         Can a referendum really decide a civil rights issue? I’m fine with the voters electing representatives, and deciding on bonds issues, and so forth. But I’m pretty sure that, if civil rights for black people had been put to a vote in the sovereign state of Mississippi in 1964, the vote would have gone badly for black people.

-         Much has been said and written about “marriage.” Isn’t “civil union” enough for gay people (in the states which grant it)? Well, not so much, since “civil union” almost never grants the same rights as “marriage.” If Partner and I were in a civil union, most or all of the local hospitals would be within their rights to deny either of us the right to visit the other. (Most or all of them don’t – Rhode Island is surprisingly gay-friendly – but the law permits them to be far more restrictive than they are. And the Catholic Diocese of Providence is extraordinarily gay-unfriendly.)

-         Someone on Facebook suggested “holy matrimony” as a substitute for the Catholic / Baptist / etc. word “marriage.” After all, pretty much every City Hall grants “marriage licenses,” and City Hall is no place for religious ceremony. So: if the Holy Roman Catholic Church doesn’t like gay marriage, it doesn’t have to perform them; that would be allowing two men to enter “holy matrimony.” But it must acknowledge that two men are civilly and legally “married,” just as they acknowledge Protestant marriages and Jewish marriages and Muslim marriages and purely-City-Hall marriages.

 

 

Over the past few weeks, a lot of my straight Facebook friends have posted pro-gay marriage messages and images. People at work whom I’ve known casually for five, or ten, or twenty years, have suddenly come forward and hugged me. (Partner reports similar behavior in his office.)

 

 

These are “allies”: straight people, people whose rights are not in question, who are coming forward to say that they support our right to marry.

 

 

I thank all our allies: Mary, and Diane, and Paul, and the rest. They are wonderful people.

 

 

And who cares what the Supreme Court decides?

 

 

We know we’re right.

 

 

And we will win in the end.


 

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Unenchanted April

Unenchanted_april


Poets used to love springtime. Remember Chaucer?:

 

 

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,

And smale fowles maken melodye,

That slepen al the night with open ye . . .

 

 

 

Or how about some Shakespeare?

 

 

It was a lover and his lass,

 

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,

 

That o'er the green corn-field did pass,

 

In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,

 

When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;

Sweet lovers love the spring.

 

 

 

Eh.

 

 

 

I myself do not much like the spring. It can be very pretty, granted, and I do think crocuses and daffodils are very nice. But there’s something a little – I don’t know – relentless about it. And I notice that, over the past hundred years, a few poets seem to be agreeing with me.

 

 

 

How about that ol’ T. S. Eliot?:

 

 

 

April is the cruellest month, breeding

 

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

 

Memory and desire, stirring

 

Dull roots with spring rain.

 

 

 

 

But my personal favorite is New England’s own Edna St. Vincent Millay:

 

 

 

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

 

 

 

I love those last few lines.

 

 

 

Happy springtime, everyone!