What Gives

After a rare four-day hiatus, I imagine my reader asking, “What gives?” This would be a swell intro to a heartachingly warm essay on Thanksgiving, but I’m in a charitable enough mood that I’ll spare my reader that pleasure.

Anyway, the four-day vacation was occasioned by a writing project — no, check that: a research project, mostly — on various figures in Irish-American history. The work, which I’d describe as incredibly rewarding except for the money, is for a pictorial history of Irish Americans that I believe is coming out next year. I’m one of a small group of writers doing mini-essays on a variety of subjects and people: Irish women in the (American) Civil War; the Irish-American lawyer who helped bring down (Scottish-American) Boss Tweed and his Tammany Hall cronies; the tensions between poor immigrant (“shanty”) Irish and striving, upwardly mobile (“lace-curtain”) Irish; Chicago newspaperman Finley Peter Dunne and his famous creation, Mr. Dooley; and Nellie Bly, whom you might call the first of the muckrakers.

The challenge of all this is to say a lot about remarkable people in very few words. To do that confidently, I feel like I need to have a good basic understanding of who they were and what they did. Which is where the research comes in; and of course that’s a joy, except for the money involved. I guess I already said that.

Still, beyond the money, there’s the chance encounter with some compelling person or story or piece of historical research (someone else’s) that is a reward in itself. Today’s best example: I noted that there’s a disagreement on the birth date of Nellie Bly (nee Elizabeth Jane Cochran): some sources give it as May 5, 1867, others as May 5, 1864. In trying to resolve this in poring over the sometimes poorly written and produced websites that mention Bly, I noticed that the Wikipedia entry goes with the 1864 date, a fact that was footnoted. The note, in turn, referred to “Kroeger;” that’s Brooke Kroeger, author of a 1994 Bly biography. I had come across her book, “Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist,” both on Google Books and at Amazon. But since the text wasn’t searchable, and my task allows scant time to do something radical like go to a library, I skipped over it for more accessible resources. After seeing the Wikipedia entry, I searched Kroeger as well as Bly and landed on the biographer’s website. And bingo: Kroeger includes the text of a beautifully written 1996 article she wrote for the Quarterly of the National Archives that lays out the state of Bly scholarship (virtually nonexistent) when she set out to write the biography as well as a wealth of absorbing detail on Bly’s life and career that she discovered by way of the Archives.

An editor I worked with once referred to the “pure pleasure” of reading a well-crafted story. That’s what I felt reading Kroeger’s story of discovering hidden dimensions of her subject’s life: a deep satisfaction and admiration at seeing someone conscientious and artful at work. Now I need to take the time to read her book.

World of Wonders

Today’s haphazard, desultory and absorbing bit of ephemera arrives by way of Thursday’s New York Times: “Hokum That Stands the Test of Time.” It’s a review of an exhibition of handbills in Los Angeles. No, not just handbills; handbills of a particular sort — those advertising circuses, magic acts, extreme acrobatics, and freak shows of all sorts:

“… single sheets, usually printed on a letter press with lots of hyperbolic language, not much color and only sometimes a crude illustration, rarely fine ones. They trumpet horses that jump through hoops, armless dulcimer players, German strongwomen who lift anvils with their hair, contortionists, fire eaters, magicians and pig-faced ladies.”

You can just picture those German strongwomen.

The show, “Extraordinary Exhibitions,” features items from a collection assembled by Ricky Jay, the actor, magician, student of magic, and Renaissance man. Jay’s collection includes much that is extraordinary. But the focus is on the more mundane, the throwaway announcements urging the rubes to hie themselves to the theatre or the tent at the edge of town to see something they would scarcely believe and never forget. Vast piles of such handbills were trampled into the mud, carted off to the dump in the household garbage, or used to light fires. Times critic Michael Kimmelman says:

“But the handbills must have been appreciated, or else they landed by mistake in a pile on someone’s desk or inside someone’s library, as bookmarks, avoiding leaky roofs, small children with soiled hands and generations of tidy owners, to transmute into prized artifacts that passed to the antiquarian market, from which Mr. Jay, a century or two or three after they were printed, acquired them.

“And now they’ve landed in an art museum.

“Art works that way. It can turn up, unexpectedly, and once you see it, you can’t imagine how you missed it in the first place.”

Of course, there’s more to the handbills than age and rarity. Yes, they promise amazing feats with colorful language and imagery, and they were meant to inspire curiosity if not wonder. But the amazing feat they accomplish now — without anvils or German strongwomen — is they way they capture ordinary voices speaking unselfconsciously to their own time.

Walk around most of our cities today, and you’ll see lots of flyers stapled to utility poles. Some poles in Berkeley have had so many handbills hung on them that they have layers of staples at eye level. The handbill of our day might be more pedestrian — by informal survey, the chief topic is lost pets — and they might lack the artistic flair of handbills of old. But I read them anyway. On some level, there are voices there, and maybe even art.

Handbillkittredge

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No Tele, Plenty of Vision

I’ve mentioned several times that we’ve become TV-less here at the HQ. That’s true, and a truly wrenching experience that I’m backing into; but it’s also not like the old days — pre-DVD, pre-VCR –when turning off your TV was the media survival equivalent of pouring a drum of ice water on the fire you were counting on to keep you alive through the winter. In other words, our little electronic fireplace can still keep us warm. The “tele-” part of the TV might be switched off for now, but there’s plenty of “vision” left in the box if you have the requisite hardware hooked up.

We have some DVDs of old TV shows: “SCTV” and “Saturday Night Live,” “NewsRadio” and “Mad About You” and “Taxi,” too. “NewsRadio” is the only one we’ve been watching; Phil Hartmann’s show all the way, and I’m simultaneously surprised by how good he could be and shocked, still, that he’s dead.

But you could say TV on DVD — even inspired TV, which I admit exists — is nothing but the vast wasteland without the commercials. True, but that’s a great improvement. The last week or so, we’ve gone on to the part of the vast wasteland that comes out first-run in theaters and then comes home on DVD: movies.

We’ve been watching a mixture of old favorites and some stuff we’ve been curious about. To wit, the past five days have featured “Young Frankenstein,” “A Night at the Opera,” “Mr. Brooks,” “The Flying Scotsman,” and “Zodiac.” The capsule reactions and reviews:

“Young Frankenstein”: First viewed decades ago. Not as sharp or funny as I remembered it. Teri Garr and Marty Feldman — not as funny. Neither was Madeline Kahn. Cloris Leachman: inspired. Gene Wilder — nah. Peter Boyle and Kenneth Mars: very good. But the main thing: The first time through this and other Mel Brooks films, you don’t really mind his penchant for trying to pound you into submission, for the constant reminders that what you’re watching is funny. Coming back to it, some of the bits are inspired, but more are painful. I’ll come back to this in 2020 or so.

“A Night at the Opera”: Wanted to see this after watching the last third, close-captioned, on a TV at the bar where we occasionally go for pizza and beer on Friday nights. It’s as good as I’ve always though it was — which is very, very good.

“Mr. Brooks”: You sit down and willingly watch Kevin Costner and Demi Moore, you’ve got no right to complain about it. And for the first half of the movie, in which Costner plays a company CEO who’s also a kinky serial killer and Moore is the multimillionaire homicide detective fumbling to find him, I wasn’t inclined to gripe. Much. But after Costner’s daughter turned out to be a killer, too; and after daddy had to go down to Stanford and commit a copycat murder to get his girl off the hook; and after daddy set up a dazzling plot to get rid of the annoying Moore and some idiot who accidentally figured out daddy was a killer; and after daddy has a nightmare lifted right out of “Carrie” — after all that, the movie went from interestingly implausible to absurd. William Hurt was given the scary job of being Costner’s alter ego and did more than OK, as usual.

“The Flying Scotsman”: True story of a Scots cyclist who sets out to break one of the legendary marks in cycling — the one-hour record — and does it on a home-built bike. Find it and rent it if you’re remotely interested in the world of bicycle racing or in the world of depressed Scotsmen. So: kudos for the story. But the movie shares the usual modern flaw of minimizing characterization in favor of plot. Yes, movies have always had to find dramatic shortcuts to inform you why George “It’s a Wonderful Life” Bailey is the way he is and why he was a big enough sap to stay in Hooterville and try to run his family’s stupid bank. But compare the time and detail Frank Capra devotes to explaining George to the stick figures thrown at you in “Mr. Brooks.” Capra, in the midst of a light entertainment, practically gives us “War and Peace”; in the midst of what someone must fancy to be a psychological thriller, “Mr. Brooks” barely matches “Ren and Stimpy” in terms of character development.

“Zodiac”: Continues a trend that began several weeks ago when watching, “The Hoax,” an adaptation of Clifford Irving’s account of inventing Howard Hughes’s autobiography. The trend is that people I’ve worked with — Frank McCulloch in “The Hoax,” Paul Avery in “Zodiac” — are showing up as characters in movies (if you’ve seen these and your curious about where I am, I’m the guy berating some poor obit writer in the background). But on to the movie: I though it was good, almost great; I think that’s because the movie actually spends time with the characters — though here again, would it be too much to ask the writer and director to give us a little on why Avery was such a wildman and why Robert Graysmith, the editorial cartoonist who is the movie’s main character, became so obsessed with the case? Maybe not, though; maybe both characters, the overwhelming dimension of their dysfunction and obsession, is enough. That perhaps involuntary spurt of bile aside, “Zodiac” was worth the now-extraordinary two hours and thirty-eight minutes running time.

No Words Needed

By way of Marie: an arresting image, “birds and bike,” from Toronto photographer Sam Javanrouh. Gross. Beautiful, too.

And that reminds me of a favorite wordless bicycle narrative, the classic (well, it’s at least two and a half years old, anyway), “Det Var Gång en Cykel” (“There Once Was a Bicycle”). It’s the poignant story of a bike left out in the elements on the mean streets of … Stockholm?

The Show Must Drag On

I’m not much of a fan of the San Francisco 49ers. Sure, I followed them avidly during their long, long run of great and good teams. Hey, two of the best quarterbacks and the best receiver in league history were doing their thing just across the bay, and the organization had solved a mystery most franchises never do by fielding very good squads around the superstars. There was the fun, too, in seeing a team that was one of the worst in the league in the late 1970s turn around and win the Super Bowl at the dawn of the ’80s; I drove a cab in Oakland during that 1981-82 season and the playoff run that followed, and those games made the Sunday afternoons, spent mostly doing grocery store trips and neighborhood trips to and from the local BART station, go a lot faster.

That’s all ancient history. The management that made the team great is either dead or long gone, and the 49ers have been bad for years. In our TV-less house this evening, I turned on the radio to listen to tonight’s game against the Seattle Seahawks. It was a doubly masochistic exercise in that Joe Starkey, the vapid man behind the mike for the University of California games, also does play by play for the Niners. But listening turned out to be fascinating in a dark way because the game was such a debacle. The Seahawks trampled the 49ers so badly, and the 49ers’ offense proved so feeble the few times that the defense was able to set it up with an opportunity — that Starkey and analyst Gary Plummer spent the entire fourth quarter talking about how horrible the team looked. The final score: 24-0; it was San Francisco’s seventh loss in a row.

After the game, Starkey and Plummer talked to Mike Nolan, the head coach. Nolan’s father, Dick, who coached the 49ers in the late ’60s and early ’70s, died yesterday. So that was probably part of the reason the announcers sounded apologetic asking about the game. But you had the feeling there was more to it than that. They were interviewing a guy whose ship is going down, and neither he nor they have a clue about what might be done to right the situation. Nolan sounded hoarse and spent. Plummer at one point said he saw some positives for the 49ers: their rushing game had been OK before they had to give up on the run, and the offensive line had allowed “only” three sacks of the increasingly bewildered young millionaire quarterback, Alex Smith. Nolan actually thanked Plummer for finding something to be positive about, but he didn’t sound convinced.

In the end, Nolan is just part of an entertainment enterprise that’s failing to entertain. The Niners are like a Broadway show that has bombed, finally and definitively. I suppose that the brutal and merciful thing about a Broadway show failing is that it simply dies. Unless it’s in the hands of a particularly insistent investor or producer, it just goes away. The sad thing listening to Nolan is that that’s not how it works in professional sports. It might be better for everyone to just hang up a banner at the ballpark saying future performances have been canceled because the production stinks. But in pro football, there’s always an audience. And for Nolan — you could hear it in his voice as he talked about how badly tonight’s game went — there’s no easy way out for anyone lashed to his wreck of a team. The show must drag on.

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Comets

The San Francisco Chronicle landed on our doorstep this morning for the first time in a couple of months; we actually canceled it, which is a subject worth a site unto itself, and I think the Hearst Corporation is trying to sneak back in (“You didn’t really want us to go away, did you?”); yesterday, we got a subscription offer: six months for fifteen bucks.

Anyway, the Chron materialized out of the predawn mist today. On the front page is a story about Comet Holmes, blogged here several days ago, and I wasn’t nearly at the leading edge of the Holmes enthusiasts. So yes, they’re a little late to the comet-gazing party. On the other hand, we’ve been pretty well socked in the last several evenings in the Bay Area, so no sightings from here. A couple nights ago, though, I took a quick trip up to the Sierra with my neighbor Piero, and the night sky was brilliant and clear: the comet was very bright, though you still had to know what you were looking for to find it (one apparent reason: the comet’s tail is extended directly away from Earth; so what you actually see is an immense cloud of illuminated ice and dust apparently being blown off the comet’s body).

The Chron’s story, while waxing expansively on Comet Holmes’s stunning emergence from nearly invisible object to celestial wonder, treats the phenomenon as something of an imponderable — just one of those things that astronomers scratch their heads about. The truth is, even the better-informed articles on the subject, like one last week in the Boston Globe, make it clear that no one really has a clear answer to why the comet is behaving the way it is. But there’s a range of speculation out there, and as long as you’re having your veteran science reporter write up the comet, and as long as readers are likely to be curious about the why of what they’re seeing, you might as well relay the best-educated guesswork in the field. The Chron’s story gives a couple lines to that near the end, but only after dutifully including notes from a local observer who calls the comet “amazing!” despite having his view obscured by trees and clouds.

Even if the story isn’t particularly well done, it does convey the wonder of seeing this thing that’s been invisibly sailing through space forever and suddenly reveals itself. I suppose that’s the best sort of encounter in journalism or literature: a story that uncovers an absorbing person or place or phenomenon that has been proceeding on his/her/its way for years and suddenly commands attention.

One case in point from today’s New York Times: a front-page story about the high school football team in Smith Center, Kansas — hey, I rode my bike into Smith County last year! In a high school with about 150 kids, in a town of just under 2,000, the team has won 51 in a row. In winning all 10 of its games so far this year, the team has outscored opponents 704-0. In one game, they scored 72 points in the first quarter. It’s a great tale.

Of course, in a sense, the Times can’t leave well enough alone. Landing in a symbol-freighted landscape — it’s small-town America, it’s the Great Plains — the Times investigates just how this juggernaut came to be and what it means. They find a coach who’s been on the scene for generations. And naturally, I suppose, they find that the lessons the coach teaches and that the kids and townsfolk learn isn’t really about football, it’s about life:

“None of this is really about football,” [Smith Center coach Roger Barta] added. “We’re going to get scored on eventually, and lose a game, and that doesn’t mean anything. What I hope we’re doing is sending kids into life who know that every day means something.”

Yes, of course. But presumably, the coach for the team that suffered that 72-point first-quarter stomping is trying to send kids into the world with some constructive ideas about living life, too (“Boys, sometimes you’re the windshield, and sometimes you’re the bug”). Presumably, too, Coach Barta has some athletes on his squad who are especially adept at administering lessons in blocking, tackling and execution to opponents. But the Times doesn’t mention any ot that. Instead, it insists on seeing not a gridiron story — not important enough to its elite audience, I imagine — but a wondrous and somewhat mysterious comet — why, after all, doesn’t the same story unfold everywhere? — glowing out there under the evening lights on the prairie.

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Your Daily Fogey Flashback

As far as musical taste goes, I’m a confirmed fogey. I hear lots of stuff of undetermined recent vintage I like. But unless I hear a new song 98 times or can ask my family expert on such matters (Thom), I don’t know who’s playing, whether they’re a big name or not, or what the heck the lyrics are. Sometimes I catch on to someone, like Kurt Cobain or Elliott Smith (or in a different vein, Susannah McCorkle), well after they’re dead of self-inflicted injuries.

All of which is preamble to a burst of enthusiasm for a daily oldie experience on San Francisco’s KFOG-FM. The station often grates with its insistence on going back to the standards (I just hear “Touch Me” by The Doors for the second time today; KFOG would do itself, its listeners and the memory of Jim Morrison a big favor by losing that track for about 15 years or forever, whichever comes later). But day to day, one of the station’s old standbys continues to surprise and please: 10@10.

The format has been pretty much the same for decades: Each day at 10 a.m. (Pacific time), the station plays a pre-produced selection of 10 songs from a single year chosen probably not at random from the prior 40 years or so (the emphasis is on mid-60s through mid-80s, the prime boomer cum fogey era). The selection of songs isn’t earth-shatteringly original, but it’s usually a couple cuts above what the station’s standard playlist inflicts on the audience.

But the money part of 10@10 comes with the period clips — snatches of news stories, speeches and advertisements — that the producers mix in to the music (I’ve come to assume that the DJ who intros the show, Dave Morey, also has a major part in producing it). It helps a lot to have the framework for the snippets in mind, but at their best, “10@10” is sort of a history mini-lesson. The occasion for holding forth on this show, which I’ve listened to for years without feeling the need to comment, was today’s edition. At a listener’s request, it toured 1968 (among the songs played, The Band’s “Chest Fever,” which ain’t on anyone’s playlist anywhere). The middle of the set was the Chambers Brothers “Time Has Come Today,” which the show used as a vehicle for a news tour of the year from beginning to end. It was extraordinarily well done; if you’re inclined to take my word for that and want to listen, it will be replayed Saturday morning (not sure what time, but I’m guessing sometime around 9 a.m. PT/11 a.m. CT).

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Whiskers

An abbreviated post this morning: Whiskerino. (More formally: the North American Free Beard Agreement Whiskerino 2007). It’s a beard-growing contest or festival (or something), running from now at least through the end of February. Not for me: I last grew a beard during the Carter administration and have never had the impulse to grow it back. I did keep my mustache nearly all the way through the Reagan years. When I shaved it, my younger son looked at me and cried. He’s gotten used to my clean-shaven appearance since then. Whether you intend to compete or not, and I realize some who visit this page are not genetically or hormonally equipped for the contest, I commend the site for its careful attention to detail, if not spelling:

III. BEARD GROWTH

According to Parker Brothers Beyond Balderdash the definition of a whiskerino is “a beard growing contest.” Participation in the North American Free Beard Agreement Whiskerino denotes that the participant will grow a beard. Refusal to grow a beard is not in the spirit of the contest. Note: Testerone levels differ in every male and all levels of growth, regardless of density and coverage, are encouraged. As long as the participant is not shaving the participant is growing a beard.

Bike Cities

A quick take: How bikes are working in two cities.

From The New York Times: In Portland, Cultivating a Culture of Two Wheels.” It’s a good take on everything the city has done to integrate bicycles into daily life and how people have responded. The accompanying video version of the story — here — is also worth checking out.

From Der Spiegel (the English version for German-challenged types):Vive la Vélorution:

Paris Rental Bike Scheme Goes Global
.” A fairly detailed story on how Paris’s celebrated free-bike system works (in a nutshell, a big French advertising firm does all the work in return for the fat profit it enjoys from municipally granted billboard rights). The story mentions that the free-bike idea is spreading through Europe and may even be tried in Chicago. Somehow, it’s hard for me to imagine the scheme working here. My take on the Paris system was that it looked well tended and thought out. Few municipal services, even those undertaken with private partnership, seem to work well in the States. I also think that somehow Americans have a penchant for senseless, wanton vandalism that would make it hard to keep the nice urban bikes on the road.

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Franken and Fawkes

Because we’ve given a series of stray donations over the years — all anyone has to do is show up on our doorstep with a bleeding heart and our checkbook starts to twitch sympathetically and also irresponsibly because it has gone so long without being balanced — we get what I’m guessing is more than the usual household share of fundraising pitches in the mail.

Today we got the best letter ever, from some guy running for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota. Highlights include the salutation — “Dear Person I’m Asking for Money” — and this passage:

“When I get to Washington, someone is going to have to explain to me how the federal government can fail to live up to its promise to fully fund education. Someone (possibly the same person) is going to have to explain to me why political appointees are allowed to edit the language of scientific reports. And you can bet I’m going to ask the members of that august body who still don’t believe in global warming some pointed questions. For instance: What’s wrong with you.”

The pitch is for small contributions. The checkbook is twitching.

(Meantime, how about Ron Paul? When I was up in Idaho with my friend Pete a month ago, we saw plenty of hand-stenciled signs around Coeur d’Alene with legends like “Ron Paul Revolution.” I saw homemade Ron Paul signs in Chicago when I was there a couple weeks ago. And during my trips up to the UC-Berkeley campus in the last week or so, there’s evidence of a well-organized Ron Paul sidewalk chalking campaign (I’d have taken a picture but I’m still sans camera). And just today — Guy Fawkes Day — he raised $3.68 at least $4 million. So is he this generation’s Ross Perot or Teddy Roosevelt, the insurgent who upsets the electoral calculus that has held for three of the last four presidential elections? Much too early to tell, but someone out there likes him.

The Guy Fawkes thing is an interesting ploy, too, since Guy Fawkes (the wonderful “V for Vendetta” notwithstanding) wouldn’t appear to be so much an avenging angel of human liberty as someone bent on seeing the Roman Catholic Church and English Catholics restored to their rightful places. This was the same church that was so in love with liberty and free thought that it would soon be putting the screws to Galileo for thinking too much about what he saw in his telescope. Seems to me that Fawkes is as much a symbol of freedom as say, Edmund Ruffin or Nathan Bedford Forrest, a couple of guys who have been celebrated in some parts as true American patriots and defenders of the people’s rights against an overreaching federal government.

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