Known By His Legacy, Not His Name

Pharaohs sought immortality through mummy-wrap, entombing themselves with a few of their favorite wives, servants and pets. For those of us without the shekels to build a pyramid we may be best remembered by the deeds we bequeath. At least the gift endures if not the name of the giver.

Consider the image we have of Santa Claus, the Republican elephant, Uncle Sam and the Democrat’s donkey. One man created the first two and popularized the others. He is credited with being instrumental in the elections of three presidents, Grant, Hayes and Cleveland. Lincoln called him, our best recruiting sergeant.  He was hailed as the father of the American cartoon. His fifteen minutes of fame lasted forty years. During the Gilded Age he was as famous as his friend, Mark Twain. A household name 150 years ago, now only history buffs know Thomas Nast.

He is said to have added the whiskers to Uncle Sam and depicted him often enough for it to become a national icon. Nast was an ardent abolitionist and supporter of Native Americans and Chinese-American rights. He carried Harper’s Weekly for several decades. When he left in 1886 the magazine lost its political significance.  One of his passions was exposing the corruption of Tammany Hall, Boss Tweed in particular. Nast was offered a bribe by Tweed of $500,000 to leave the country. He declined.  In fact it was Tweed who fled after his arrest and was identified in Spain by Nast’s caricature drawings.

Nast’s depiction of cherubic Santa came to him partly from the folk lore of his native Germany and partly from Clement Moore’s poem, The Night Before Christmas. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Nast is that he never learned to read or write. His wife is said to have read the poem to him as he made his engravings. It was also his inspiration to locate Santa in the North Pole along with elves and a workshop, making him a universal figure for all children.

Later in life he started his own publishing house and newspaper (he was not related to Conde Nast) and still relied on friends to read the sentences out of which came his drawings. He saw words as pictures. One of them is worth a thousand of these squiggly things. History and the passage of time do strange things, lifting some names up and devouring others. Even though Thomas Nast got misplaced in the national chronicle his contribution is beyond authorship.

For the rest of us who do not live out loud and may not even exist according to Google there are enough daily acts of kindness, beyond all measure, to assure our claim for remembrance among those we have touched.  

Crows

This morning’s minion I woke to was a controversy of crows, a family squabble, perhaps, over whose early-bird worms these were, or maybe just a diva’s rendition of a mating aria from their repertoire of crow-caw. It had the decibels sufficient to pull me from REM-sleep and was probably screechy enough to scare the bejesus out of hummingbirds and chicks in unguarded nests.

Crows seem to be following me lately, on the page, not in the Hitchcockian sense. They are darkening the stanzas of poems and paragraphs of novels. Ever since Poe’s raven (and likely before that) members of the crow family have been identified with morbidity and worse. Nevermore, the raven famously proclaimed driving the rejected lover into madness. Crows have become the number one metaphor for menace. Van Gogh dotted his canvas with them in his familiar, Wheatfield With Crows.

Enough! Crows have been maligned far too long. Look at their extended family. Jackdaws, magpies, jays and rooks are cousins; some fine feathers there. Nutcrackers also belong in that aviary and look what Tchaikovsky did for them. Crows are among the smartest of creatures scoring high on the non-human SAT exams. It could be crow-propaganda but they even show a degree of self-awareness in a mirror-test; some of us have never gotten beyond this stage. If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows; so said Henry Ward Beecher. Crows are also credited with fashioning their own tools; that’s more than I could boast.

They are classified as oscine passerine, which is another way of saying songbirds that perch. Can they help it if their song makes me long for elevator music?

There is some question whether Vincent saw them as foretelling his demise. He was a reader of Jules Michelot who regarded crows with a kind of reverence, calling attention to their curiosity, sagacity and prudence. In letters to his brother Theo, Van Gogh also noted the birds as a symbol of resurrection. Among the Northwest Coast Indians ravens are attributed with bringing light to the world in their creation myth. In Native American culture, crows have been endowed with human attributes. In traditional tribal societies crows and shamans are revered as tricksters, their spirits interwoven with masks and their power passed along. 

We humans aren’t very nice; we even assign the name, crow’s feet, to our facial wrinkles. Crows would never do that to us. Many a plastic surgeon has taken a cruise on the money made from smoothing those pleats around our eyes, Americans particularly. In Italy they are called hen’s feet and in France they are goose’s feet. But the Danes say it best; they call them, smiling wrinkles, signifying a long life of living and laughing.

On the other hand we call hand-writing like mine, chicken scratch, while Denmark uses the term, kragetaeer, or crow’s toes. We just can’t resist bad-mouthing those black birds. I’m feeling you, crow, evermore.

Staying In The Moment

I’m trying, I’m trying. Peggy says that’s all we have. Kobe Bryant agrees. It’s hard enough living one day at a time. I’m hearing it from Zen masters and ballplayers.

I woke up this morning thinking of my brother who died fifty years ago. There he was in the pillow. From what I could retrieve of my dream I was flying in something of my own invention I called a Kazoom. It looked like an air-borne scooter lifting off the ground about twenty feet, easing the long trek up the mountain. I was with my grandson at first and landed with my brother.

They’re all crowded in the moment along with the November election and an up-coming dental appointment. Then there’s our anniversary get-a-way plans for next week. I’m still not quite off the wheel of desire even though memories have it over plans by vast numbers. How do I go with the flow while staying in the moment?

Maybe the moment has biblical proportions; each mini-moment is a lifetime the way God stretched his seven days into billions of years to make the world. Maybe He could have done a better job if he’d given himself a few more weeks. So yesterday and tomorrow are all part of the moment. I can’t help dragging my baggage into the present, even those moments that didn't quite happened. It’s never too late to imagine. The, what ifs, almost balance the bulk of our stories that went down the drain into oblivion.

When the athlete says to stay in the moment he/she is shrugging off last night’s failure. It could also be a cautionary note to not get too much swagger in their step for today. It all comes down to pay attention right now, stay focused.

If grief or regret is calling, my inclination is to neither wallow in it nor stifle it but to give it its due and then move on. That then becomes the new moment, part old pages, part new chapters, living to the hilt in that moment and the next.

As A.A. Mlne put it:

What day is it?
It's today," squeaked Piglet.
My favorite day, said Pooh.

To Be Or Be Had

Most polls now show a divided electorate with about 94% of voters committed to the good guy or the bad guy which leaves the election in the hands of these undecided 6 percent. Woe is we.

Who are these equivocal folks? Are they semi-comatose, incorrigibly cynical or truly wrestling with their better angels? My guess is all of the above. I’ve tried to imagine the three types I will call Chuck, Charley and Charles.
Chuck minds his own business which is mostly just getting by. He paints houses or repairs bicycles out of his garage. His mind is occupied with the blue-plate special at Smity’s Diner. The tune of last Sunday’s hymn is humming in his head. He read something about one of the candidates in the barber shop last week but can’t remember what. Any ideas about political parties get shredded in his head like severe tire damage. He says he’ll probably vote and make up his mind behind the curtain. He always says that. The last time he actually bothered was back in the 90s when he heard that Clinton liked Garth Brooks and Dole listened to Dolly Parton…or was it the other way around? He’s getting fed up with all these political ads on TV. He’s going to rent a horror movie tonight and knock off a six-pack which keeps inching up in price. Whose fault is that, he wonders.

Charley has no use for any of them, not since our founding fathers. There are no statesmen anymore above the fray, just whores from special-interests groups. Charley chokes on anything less than rarefied air. He’s never met a bumper sticker he didn’t want to rear-end. He lets his dog pee on lawn signs. They’re all crooks, he says. A litany of hollow promises betrayed as soon as they’re elected. He denounces them with the fury of a lover scorned. He’s been hurt too often and now there is no forgiveness left in him. Maybe he sees from a distant perch where no hands get dirty. Perhaps his favorite subject was math; nothing measures up to the elegance of numbers. Maybe he is a fallen-Catholic still looking for saints.
Charles might be a Westside attorney. He’s a registered Democrat but can list half dozen reasons why he can’t trust them any longer starting with Israel and ending with immigration. Of the former, he bristles at every perceived slight. He would agree with Gilbert & Sullivan’s piece from Iolanthe. The Law is the true embodiment / of everything that’s excellent. / It has no kind of fault or flaw / and I, my Lords, embody the law. Charles vacillates which is not the way of an advocate. His colleagues on the elevator have already moved their allegiance. He squirms with both candidates. He knows that the Conservatives have been overrun by imbeciles, Neo-Cons, evangelists, and the privileged one percent for whom greed is their creed. Too many bleeding-heart liberals, he says. Can he feel his own heart clotted and closing? Who will get his vote? Will he sit out the most important election in several generations, the one that will either shame our nation or reinvigorate it?

Unconventional Notes

The Republican convention was a circus complete with clowns, legerdemain, acrobatic flip-flops, high wire lies, disappearing acts and elephant excrement requiring a nuclear-powered shovel to clean it up. All the puppeteers in Tampa couldn’t breathe life into wooden Mitt even as he talked out of both sides of his mouth.

Paul Ryan spoke on behalf of Ayn Rand whose simplistic catechism of Greed is Good, now translates into painting non-believers with a brush as wide as mother Russia. And if your opponent doesn’t fit your doctrinaire portrait, just fabricate his birth, his narrative, his position to make it fit. The Republicans are not running against President Obama; they are running against an imagined creation of their fevered minds. It is as if they have photo-shopped his programs and mastered the technique of assigning their own blunders onto him.

A new ad accuses Obama of changing Medicare. They must believe the American people are morons and they may be right about that. Welcome to Wonderland written by Mad Hatters at a tea party. Was that Mitt overheard saying, I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir, because I'm not myself you see... Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Carl Rove seems to have scripted Mitt as the Mock Turtle believing in education as he knows it with Reeling and Writhing, to begin with, and then the different branches of arithmetic -- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.

Don’t wait for certain words to be aired at political conventions; not in Tampa, not in Charlotte. Geo-politics is mostly off the table. Even if China and India will be the new super powers in the world by 2050, their names are not likely to be heard. I doubt if the European debt crisis will be mentioned. Nor will anyone mention Africa, which boasts 6 of the top 10 fastest growing economies in the world in 2012 according to the I.M.F. Nor will there be any discussion of our irrational drug war which has drained a trillion dollars from the budget over the last forty years at the same time that our prison population has swelled from 300,000 to 7.2 million under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail or prison).

Tuesday:

Tonight the Democrats have their turn. I expect some of the orations to also be full of tired phrases I’ve already heard on the stump. Speechifying is my least favorite way of receiving information. Too many words falling limp, too much rhetoric designed to incite the herd. Yet I’ve now heard two speeches this afternoon before writing this and they have both been substantive. My only wish is that they may get a bounce in the polls by waking up some of the undecided. At least they will get real and I won’t be carried away by a Jaberwocky.

It is now Thursday morning. Last night Bill Clinton showed how it’s done. With Arkansas folksiness and Rhodes scholar smarts he made the case. Clinton is equal parts preacher, professor and purveyor. If he knocked on my door I’d probably buy his set of Fuller brushes or encyclopedias, maybe even the Brooklyn Bridge. He has a way of seeming to speak to each person in a packed hall and making complex issues within the grasp of a simple phrase. Obama has a tough act to follow.

And now it is Thursday night and Obama met the challenge, seized the narrative and reminded America who is responsible for change in a democracy………us. His words were directed at the cynics and the constituency he may have lost from 20008. He delivered a brilliant speech, referencing Lincoln’s humility and asserting his role as commander-in-chief with all the burdens and leadership that office entails.

Casablanca

Our favorite restaurant this year has been Café Chez Marie. It seems to have fallen to earth from the south of France along with a few other provincial houses nuzzled next to an office building just west of Century City. From the courtyard alone we can imagine being in Aix en Provence, without the jet lag. The French-Moroccan cuisine is presided over by Marie Saltzman, born in Casablanca.

Great chefs work intuitively in Casablanca though Bogey and Bergman cooked up their romance and intrigue on the screen making due with the back lot of Warner Brothers. The Epstein twins, Julius and Phillip, wrote the script by the seat of their pants handing the ensemble players their lines each morning. Round up the usual suspects, is said to have come to both brothers, simultaneously, at a traffic light on Wilshire and La Cienega on their way to the Burbank studio.

You have to love the way Hollywood studios each had their stable of actors at the ready to fit in almost anywhere, many of whom were refugees from Europe, Who could beat the team of Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet along with S.Z. Sakall? Only three of the speaking parts belonged to American born actors. One of the minor roles was played by Leon Belasco, his 13th movie done that year. The scene at Rick’s place where everyone, except the German soldiers, breaks out singing La Marseillaise, is all the more poignant given that most of the voices came from a cast in exile including those playing Gestapo agents, many of whom were Jewish performers who fled Europe.

The film is a miraculous coming together of clichés, the sum of which exceeds the separate phrases. The result is a serendipitous work of art, the way chef Marie knows instinctively what herbs and spices to add to her couscous or coq au vin. It is a collaborative triumph of producer Hal Wallis, director Michael Curtiz, screenwriters and cast. Some of the best lines were either never said or not in the script. Play it again, Sam, is an improvement over, Play it Sam or Play it once Sam, for old times sake. Dooley Wilson, Sam, was actually a drummer who couldn’t play the piano. Here’s looking at you, kid, was a throw-in by Bogart from a poker game he was playing with Ingrid Bergman between takes. The final line, Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, was written by Wallis a month after and added in post-production.

The grandson of Phillip Epstein is Theo Epstein who revitalized the Boston Red Sox. Whether it was that old Epstein intuition or some unique vision that managed to break the Curse of the Bambino (the trading of Babe Ruth), we may never know. Today Epstein is saddled with the task of exhuming the Chicago Cubs from the crypt. They last won the World Series in 1908. Stayed tuned.

Could it be that the choice of Casablanca as the name of the 1942 film had a subtext? The arc of the story was of a self-absorbed, cynical man who is grudgingly transformed to sacrifice his personal desire for the greater good. The final foggy scene, shot at Van Nuys airport, with midgets and a cardboard plane, has Bogart walking off with Claude Rains having saved each other and found their moral compass. It might also have been directed at the American people and the man in the White House Casa Blanca) leading up to our involvement, to move us from our private cafés into the Good War with our own letters of transit...as time goes by.

Life As A Movie

They’re making a movie about my life. Spielberg refused to direct because it is too dull. Ingmar Bergman turned it down saying it is too exciting. It’s not enough of a madcap-zany romp for Preston Sturgis and it is too real for Fellini. Woody Allen said he needs someone more nebbish. Stallone wanted me less nebbish.

Casting should be no problem. Peggy says I look just like Sam Waterston. And I always thought of myself as Cary Grant. I’ll settle for anyone except Danny De Vito.

It’s one of those movies in which the audience knows what’s going on before I do. In fact I’m the last one to see what is obvious. It must be hard to watch all my wrong turns and missed signals. I wouldn’t bother if I had just a cameo part or even second banana but in this one I’m the star.

What was he thinking when he did that?
No, no don’t fall for that!
If not now, when?
It’s about time.

There are no car chases though I did get ticketed once for almost coming to a full stop. Now I get out and look for trains at every intersection. No near-death experiences unless you count the time I hung on the line waiting for customer service at Verizon while the person I wanted was away from her desk. There are some exciting moments such as the time a woman at Costco let me in line in front of her with my one item or less. For those who insist upon a little violence their Adrenaline may get moving when I use excessive force separating two shopping carts in a parking lot. This was managed in one take without a stuntman.

Cineastes have learned the language of movie maladies; how a headache is never less than a brain tumor and a cough means certain death from T.B. within twenty minutes unless a Viennese doctor is sent for with an experimental treatment. The other scene that never happens in my film is the plan to leave (for anywhere) first thing in the morning, shorthand for an untimely demise. My getaway gets me away.

After I scale the wall, dodging searchlights and the hounds, I make my way out of the Valley past the last row of repeatable homes. Just in time, I was almost too over the hill to go over the hill. At this point I'm hearing background music, a cross between Hi Ho Silver and Swing Low Sweet Chariot.

There are also scenes of the No Problemo Bordello in Pocatello in which I lost my shirt but not my pants. And two hold-ups at gun point for Dilaudid between globes of colored water, followed by the ignominy of picking the wrong man from a police line-up.

The rest is arguably the Second Greatest Story Ever Told, which answers the question: Can a mild-mannered pharmacist from suburbia find happiness with a bohemian poet, living in a rent-controlled garret, who hung with Orson Welles, Krishnamurti, the Modernaires and Carl Jung? The answer is, Yes, ever after and the camera is still rolling.