Oscars Everywhere

These are the months when hyperbolic adjectives are dragged out to adorn movie titles. It seems as if every new film is the greatest, best, most compelling, not-to-be-missed, if-you-see-no-other of the year, the decade, of all-time. All are Oscar-worthy which got me thinking about that name, Oscar, and all the Oscars I have known. The name derives from classic Irish, "friend of deer."

Sixty years ago my first job as a pharmacist was with Thrifty Drugs in Beverly Hills. I was newly licensed and thrust suddenly into a galaxy of Hollywood stars. Cary Grant called up one day to make sure his wife, Betsy Drake’s uppers and downers, were put on a separate bill from his. Robert Cummings stayed young buying vitamins I couldn’t talk him out of. My favorite customer was Oscar Levant. In his lugubrious voice he would phone for early refills on his favorite sedative, Paraldehyde, which fell out of favor decades ago. I’d hate to think I contributed to his delinquency.

He really didn’t need my help plunging from wunderkind piano virtuoso, composer, radio star of Information Please, actor, author, and wit to mental patient stung by his own acerbic tongue as if he quipped himself to death. He was one of the most quotable entertainers in town, e.g. In some situations I was difficult, in odd moments impossible, in rare occasions loathsome but at my best unapproachably great.

Oscar Levant never won an Oscar but Oscar Homolka, the Viennese-born character actor, got a nomination for his supporting role in I Remember Mama…a movie I’d sooner forget. Oscar Peterson was another Oscar I saw several times when he performed at Birdland back in the early 50s. His fingers moved on the keyboard effortlessly yet so dazzlingly I was carried away with the cigarette smoke.

Oscar Hammerstein II was possibly the most famous Oscar of them all in my lifetime. His grandfather, Oscar the first, born 1850, made a fortune in cigars but also built eleven theaters mostly in what came to be known as Times Square. Oscar, the younger, won two Oscars for best song. He wrote hundreds too numerous to mention collaborating first with Jerome Kern in Showboat and later with Richard Rodgers. Hammerstein also mentored Stephen Sondheim who has taken musical theater far beyond Oscar’s reach.

Oscar, he of Academy Award fame, owes its origins to the stuff legends are made of. There are at least four claims to the naming from Bette Davis to Walt Disney to Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, to Margaret Herrick, librarian of the Motion Picture Arts and Science. She is said to have looked at it back in 1931 and thought it bore a resemblance to her uncle, Oscar.

With apologies to Oscar Wilde, Oscar de la Renta, Oskar Werner and  Oscar Robertson, I have almost depleted my store of Oscars. Not a bad gallery of dignitaries. The name has never ranked high among boy’s names; it is now 175^th in popularity with about 1500 new Oscars in maternity wards each year. One version of its genesis derives from the French word for Golden City which would be apt for the 8.5 lb. trophy.

Finally a nod to Oscar Mayer Weiners whose jingle was once suggested to replace the Star Spangled Banner as our national anthem.  It works for me.

Dreadful Times

Bombs dropping. Carnage in the streets. People fleeing. Dictators violating international law. A country is divided. A sense of dread across the world. Then as now.

This could be the present or the future but I am describing the past. It is late summer, 1940. Hitler has unleashed the blitzkrieg over England. Poland has fallen in the east and Belgium and France are occupied by the Nazis.

The U.S. is receiving refugees and the first peacetime draft is underway. Roosevelt has started to aid England with the Lend Lease program but the tenor of our country is half isolationist.

In a three-story brownstone in Brooklyn Heights by the East River there lived W.C. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Paul and Jane Bowles, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee. This Bohemian-like enclave was the brain-child of George Davis, the flamboyant raconteur editor of Harper’s Bazaar magazine. In a single issue of that magazine Davis published Collette, Elizabeth Bishop, Katharine Anne Porter and Stephen Spender.

Over the next 18 months this address was, arguably, the hub of American literati living a communal style fueled by the urgency of war. This moment in history is so well-captured by Sherill Tippins in her 2005 book The February House.

All-night parties included Aaron Copland, George Balanchine, William Saroyan, Kurt Weil and Lotte Lenya, the three children of Thomas Mann, Salvadore Dali and Richard Wright who later moved in.

Carson McCullers was the toast of the town having just published The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter at age 23. Britten was working on his operetta, Paul Bunyan and Gypsy Rose Lee started her first novel, G-String Murders. It was a hive of creative minds.

Rent was $75/month shared equally by the residents. The Depression was still being felt for some while Gypsy Rose Lee earned $4,000/week from Mike Todd’s extravaganza at the World’s Fair.

At the same time, the British emigres, Auden, Britten and Isherwood were being denounced as cowards by their homeland. Britten made his way back to England in 1942 but Auden remained and became an American citizen. He was struggling with his loss of faith, which I take to mean faith in the human race. The book includes conversations between Auden and the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr.

I was alive through all this but my experience as a child was the sense of a struggle between the forces of good and evil and we were the good guys. By age ten (1943) I never doubted our victory over fascism. After all, I was buying war bonds, collecting tin foil and even knitting squares for blankets. Two of my closest friends were German refugees. With those clandestine meetings on the other side of my bedroom wall, I went to sleep driving Nazis from Stalingrad.

Auden and others were also conflicted with the role of an artist / writer in dreaded times as is the case today. In his original poem “1939” the last line rings true for me. We must love one another or die. He later changed it to read, love one another and die. In the final version he omitted the line altogether. It still has resonance 87 years later. Without love we die inside. 

Two Moroccan Films

Casablanca. Say that word and the Bogart / Bergman movie comes to mind even though it was shot in the Warner Bros studio in Burbank.

My two favorite films seen recently were shot in Casablanca and directed by the Moroccan born Maryam Touzani. Adam (2019) and The Blue Caftan (2022) are everything American filmmakers seem unable to achieve. Without deafening noise, explosions or sci-fi confections, each touches the souls of their characters. Nor is there any psychological probing on display.

It is through unspoken gestures that the camera, alone, reveals moments of a life-changing dimension. In Adam we see a widow’s face carrying the weight of the world, slowly melt as she rediscovers joy in her eyes while her body moves to the rhythms of Moroccan music.

In another scene we witness her reawakening while kneading dough. Her hands take on a sensuality. In its sweep, the camera transports us as we align with Touzani’s close-ups and a spirited humanity emerges.

The power of these films is in its simplicity. In the Blue Caftan, the complex heroic character of the husband is revealed wordlessly, only through the language of cinema. 

At the same time, each of these films is quietly subversive as one challenges the conventions of the male domination which consign women into a circumscribed life. In the surprising final scene of the other, the potency of love overwhelms a societal taboo.

American story-telling is most-often accompanied with bombast appropriate for a pre-adolescent brain. The operative word is power. Violence is obligatory as befits a nation out to police the planet, accompanied by high decibels as if to wake our numbed senses whose attention must be wrested from their smartphones.  

I found the two Moroccan movies on Kanopy, a free streaming site offered by local libraries. Touzani's latest film, Calle Malaga, will soon be available on streaming.

 

 

 

 

 

Like A Virus, Mutating

People and viruses mutate. Our President has devolved since his first term from the man-child with a penchant for nastiness to an egomaniacal miscreant unfettered to our foundational precepts. In a sense, humans are just oversized microorganisms, capable of even greater virulence. Fortunately our species has developed a brain and an ethos, albeit not evenly distributed.

Viruses need to keep mutating to survive the onslaught of modern medicine. This year's influenza virus seems impervious to the vaccine which was based on last year's version. One such colony has found a homeland in my throat, nose and sinuses.

Not all viruses are bad viruses. In fact, some protect us. But in this case I rely on my immune system which is, unfortunately, already compromised. However, I'm awaiting the cavalry of antibodies to drive out the pathogens.

Turning toward our delusional Commander-in-Chief, his muscular view of the world, however compensatory it may be, threatens to ignite a regional if not a global war. He and his circle exhibit a callous indifference to human suffering. All the signs were there in his first administration but he was restrained by wiser and more experienced advisors. They have now been replaced by sycophants. 

It may well be that authoritarianism is not simply imposed on a people but it taps into a latent impulse of a constituency to be herded like sheep, told what to do, where not to stray and when to say Bah.

I expect my flu virus will soon find me inhospitable and move on. Yet in a larger sense we are all infected by this new order that has uncaged the beast within; which legitimizes violence, mocks intellect, villifies dissenters, and defiles the office of the presidency. 

The immune system of our social contract is now under assault  from within. Like an autoimmune disorder, our core values are being overthrown. In terms of virology, an immunosuppressant is called for. I have no prescription to remedy this, except resistance, whatever form that may take.

 

    

Time To Give It Up

After agonizing hours of deliberation, vacillation and a distinct shrug from my vast constituency, I have decided not to run for Governor. We’ve had a family conference including the pet rock and the dog I don’t have plus a random sampling of customers waiting in line at Costco. 

The sense is that the field is already too crowded with an ex-congreswomen, two ex-mayors, an ex-cabinet secretary, ex-controller, a sitting congressman, a billionaire and assorted others totaling nine candidates.

Perhaps the propitious time has passed me by. I peaked too early having served as wardrobe monitor in kindergarten. (I excelled at sorting galoshes). I was elected milk monitor in 1^st grade and designated pencil monitor in 2^nd grade. Let it be noted that I did not embezzle any of those pennies, nor is it true that I got high on wood shavings. In 7^th grade I was chosen to receive the gift left by the 8^th grade upon graduation and in 8^th grade I was the one presenting the token gift thus demonstrating my ability to give and take. One might say I flamed out in early adolescence.

Now that I have dropped out we need seven other Democrats to take one for the team. Give it up. Flip a coin or have a food fight but the field of worthy names must be whittled down to two. 

The Primary is a mere three months away; this is serious stuff. Apparently none of them are polling more than 20%. By splitting the pie into so many slices, the two Republican candidates are quite possibly going to be the only names on the final ballot. That's the way our California primary system works. It is not one from each party but the two highest vote-getters. This could be a tragedy caused by oversized egos. I'm waiting to hear them drop.

It also pains me to watch the field of Democrats attack each other; all fodder for the Repugnants. There is only one issue for this election and for the ones around the country coming up in November, and again in 2028. That is electability. Who can reach the critical mass of voters with electile dysfunction; too busy taking photos of their french toast to realize where their bread is buttered.

Who would vote for anyone from a party who supports a man whose early record reveals that he ran with scissors, didn't play well with others and threw spitballs? The malignancy of Trump which has metastasized into every aspect of his reign cries out for full triage, an urgency to reverse the wreckage of our democracy. A vote for a Republican is a vote for another sycophant. 

An internecine squabble among Democrats ensures a Republican victory.Those who give it up will be celebrated as martyrs. They can join me playing with galoshes and sharpening pencils.

 

Boxes

My first job, age twelve, was delivering hats on the subway from Queens to Manhattan.  The man in the change booth knew the weight of twenty nickels for a buck. I needed only two for a round trip on the F train. Maneuvering three or four big boxes became part of my skill-set.                           

I never saw the feathered flowers Mrs. Danziger had fashioned or the artistry she sculpted from velvet and scraps of ribbon. She lived below us in apt. 2-F. A quarter a box was my pay. Soon I would be rich.

New Yorkers in straw seats wore their subway faces, assured of anonymity, staring into defeat or dreaming of the next stop off the map. I was the kid behind those boxes in that August heat of 1945. One hand gripped the straps while I disappeared, ground up by the overhead fan. In the whoosh and whir we went from Jackson Heights under the East River to a city that buzzed in a long afternoon.

I emerged on Lexington Avenue, proud of how I mastered the Manhattan grid, scooting from one swanky address to another, unseen, as I darted from Bloomingdale's to Bergdorf Goodman or Saks Fifth Avenue.

No longer twelve, I was now going on thirteen that summer when something died in me and something was born. Yahweh, was gone when FDR died. Death everywhere: depraved, bestial acts revealed, mass graves, Hiroshima, burned flesh. Going on thirteen was a secular bar mitzvah. I was initiated in the crush of it all.

I started thinking outside my boxes of divisions I hadn't noticed before. The well-dressed walked through the front door and soared with the uniformed elevator operator announcing women's apparel and notions. Sometimes a great notion. Others, like me, were relegated to the rear entrance and got yanked up with the freight. No spiffy regalia, no notions, no ceiling to protect me.

To think I could disappear in a sweaty subway. To know I had crossed that river. To believe I would not be crushed in the lift was an act of faith. To imagine I could live my life with the perils of indifferent streets. I would make my way with Mrs. Danziger’s creations, her felt and lace, her flight from the shtetl, refugee to these safe shores in her plumed birds, her deliverance.

Hats and words weigh next to nothing. I still carry an invisible box weightlessly. Millinery birds and words on the wing and always that elevator up and the risk of climbing.

Olympics

Blame the Greeks…….or credit them. The coming together of nations is both a giant step for humankind and also one which soon devolves into a divisive competition. Seen from the space station, an astronaut recently commented on how our planet looks. There are no borders; just, arguably, six distinct land masses. What we call a map of the world is just a construct of jagged lines left over from tribal times or by regal decree.

The Olympics foster nationalistic rivalries at the same time as it joins athletes in camaraderie. Who will receive the most gold, silver and bronze? Which country will have their flag raised and anthem sung? Do I care?

There is also something unnatural about the events. It’s the precision, the exactitude, slavishness to the clock, the scale and the rigidity of the straight line. There are no straight lines in Nature. Think trees and rocks. Hopi Indians knew to punch a tiny hole of imperfection in their pots so as not to compete with the gods.

Why punish the body to fit the ideal? I raise my glass to messy humanity. Bring on the Deviationist, the Revisionist! Why does a young person train eight hours a day for years and return home in disgrace having been nosed out by four-one-hundredths of a second? Why must mastery of the body be quantified? Does a wobble or a bobble signify the measure of a person? 

How is it that a nation of gifted and devoted athletes can bring their resources and passion to excel but cannot find the will or concern to serve their homeless and disadvantaged citizens?

I watch and they all look wonderful. I still can’t tell a toe-loop from an axel from a Salchow. They spin, they split, they soar and sometimes they spill. So what? Let it be an exhibition instead. Ice dancing is an art and artists shouldn’t be in competition and be scored. Do we pit Matisse against Picasso or Van Gogh? I hope not. Virginia Wolff declined an O.B.E. reminding the committee that her mother taught her never to accept candy from strangers.

Of all the measurements of speed, endurance and accuracy the least defensible has to be the Biathlon which combines cross-country skiing with rifle shooting. After the spate of massacres we have endured one wonders how the hell this paramilitary exercise is to be prized and honored.

Celebrate them all and skip to the closing ceremony. Melt the medals. The winners are those who made new friendships, who found kindred spirits from distant lands, embraced their rivals; for everything beyond the judge’s hypercritical scrutiny.

After watching for a couple of hours, I can feel the judge from Kazakhstan over my shoulder, taking off points for the way I tie my shoes or whether the toast is burnt. Next event: Tooth Brushing.

This is my slalom down the white page. Sisyphus just passed me on the way up.