Pitching the Movie of Our Days...In A Time Warp

(For cinephiles and septuagenarians or beyond)

Louis B. Mayer: I'll give you ten minutes. What have you got?

Me: I have this script about a delusional megalomaniac who takes over the country.

Mayer: What is it, a horror movie? Bela Lugosi?
Me: Think of it as The Rotten Tomato That Ate Chicago.

Mayer: So tell me more.
Me: He is elected President...twice and puts a wrecking ball to half the White House.

Mayer: I haven’t got time for this. You say a crazy guy wins two elections?
Me: Right, it's sort of a comic book, apocalyptic, political thriller.

Me: I can see Citizen Kane dumbed down to a blabbering Rosebud.
Mayer: You mean Orson Welles in the Cuckoo's Nest?

Me: More like P.T. Barnum meets Al Capone. Or Huey Long

merged with Elmer Gantry.

Mayer: Capone? We can use George Raft.
Me: No, he’s more than a gangster, he barks like Edward G. Robinson.

Mayer: Sounds like a musical comedy. it’s over-budget already.
Me: Listen to me, L.B., you only need one actor and a mob.

Mayer: A mob? Get me Frank Capra on line one.
Me: You’ll never regret it. You can use a lot of out-of-work extras.

Mayer: Sounds like a cast of thousands. Bring in DeMille.

Me; More like a zany madcap romp with body bags.
Mayer: Get me Preston Sturgis and Stanley Kramer.

Mayer: It may play in the Brown Derby but we need the Heartland.
Me: It will be a blockbuster. Everyman gone berserk. Think of the foreign market; dictators will love it.

Me: You'll need lots of red ties and MAGA red caps.

Mayer: Hold on here. That's too close to MGM. Scrap that.

Mayer: What about females, that's a must. Stanwyck is under contract and we've got dozens of starlets.

Me: We can use them all. The guy is salacious. 

Mayer: How about the ending?  It's got to be happy.

Me: Trust me, L.B. we’ll see him in a long shot. A guy in an orange jumpsuit picking up trash from a homeless encampment.

Communal Air

Fog is suppressed. Hair frizzled. Air stopped from cooling down by El Nino. Monsoonal flow is thick and sticky.

But think of it this way: monsoonal is communal. Whatever happens, happens to all of us. And, to some extent, we contributed to this sweltering phenomenum through neglect and avarice. There is big money in fossil fuels. Energy is the cash cow we've been milking for the past 150 years with calloused indifference to the consequences. The damage may be halted but is irreversible. 

To this ten-year old the summer heat tapped into my vault of childhood; weather, war and whooping cough, We had our heroes and our shared menace; infantile paralysis, traitors and the dreaded third rail.

Weather, particularly in triple digits, brings us together, setting off memories as when we lived in NYC or Philly or Jersey City. The illegal moisture from Mexico finds asylum in my head and with it a remembrance of distant summers. 

Low pressure trough, they say. It comes up like overripe fruit, pregnant with its bag of water. Thunderous maybe, tripping the sky electric. It’s not enough to quench a thirsty plant with its tongue hanging out. But enough to monsoonal me back to those afternoons in "Air-Cooled" movies (who cares what's playing?) and August nights on the fire escape. When the livin' was easy, languid but energy enough to chase a Good Humor truck when we heard that bell toll.

Games were postponed when they rolled out the tarp. Could just be a sun-shower. Some were rained-out, with a double-header scheduled the next day. Heat and humidity tied in extra innings.

There I was, empty mayonnaise jar with perforated holes in the lid, chasing after fireflies, leaping higher than a pop fly, delerious in the heat of my years.

On the subway with the overhead fan circulating vapors from under arms hanging on to straps. Maybe I grabbed a straw seat and got stuck to it even as we all whoosed under the East River to the canyons of tall rectangles.

That word monsoonal makes me swoon with the sound of it. Imagine an alto sax in cahoots with a lunatic moon; a recording of Sleepy Lagoon. The air is syrup, in a soupy spoon, thick enough to climb that cratered balloon. Every year we get a dose of this undocumented air from Baja or maybe Khartoum. 

Overhead fans didn’t do much but scatter the flies so people came out to un-stifle themselves. So did the gnats. They swarmed by gazillions all over the front window of my father’s drug store. 

It must have been the flag colors of the Ex-Lax sign that attracted the gnats. They covered that part of the window and gradually the rest of it in sufficient numbers to excite the neighborhood. I don’t think the store ever had such traffic, at least at the outside entrance. My father possessed a natural calm which could break a fever. He needed every bit of it to persuade the crowd we were not being invaded by an alien species. 100 degrees does strange things to all creatures in a shared inferno.

The Long and Short Of It

Our illustrious president, at 6 ft. 3 in. is pushing 240 lbs. which is unaccountable since he is a hollow man, but I suppose those Big Macs can add up. His official height, at 6 ft. 3 in. might include the bumper crop on top of his crown and an ego to dwarf the Eiffel Tower which makes up for an an absence of conscience and cognitive function.

Ever since David met Goliath in the great mismatch of pre-history, we've been rooting for underdogs. Or so we say. But when it comes to voting we tend to go big. Lincoln, at six ft. 4 in. was a full foot taller than Stephen A. Douglas who got trampled. Of course Lincoln was also stronger having built the log cabin he was born in. Abe was a gentle Goliath whom the Bible claims was nine feet tall. Michelangelo compensated for the disadvantage by sculpting David to seventeen feet.

William Howard Taft is probably the last obese president we’ll ever see. A wide girth doesn't play well on social media. There is a chair built specially for him at the Riverside Mission Inn which looks more like a couch to accommodate his considerable tush. Taft is said to have gotten stuck once in the White House bathtub. All 354 pounds of himself was almost enough to sink the ship of state.

Height counts; more than weight. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson put aside their prospective careers as power forwards in the NBA to found our country. Both were 6 ft. 3 in. give or take an inch. Madison was also 6 ft. 3 in. when on his horse. He is reported to have had a great outside shot but was too busy writing our Constitution.

Beethoven also had a tiny strike zone at 5 ft. 3 in spite of which, thankfully, he did what he did instead of becoming a baseball player. The result is our ode to joy. You didn’t have to be tall to be great in those days. It is doubtful Napoleon had a Napoleonic complex. He was the average height at 5 ft. 6 in. Genghis Khan was more deserving of that term at a mere 5 ft. 1 in. when he finally got off his high horse.

Andrew Carnegie penny-pinched himself to an even 5 ft. while his labor force worked 7 days/week, 12 hours/day. At the same height, Danny DiVito seems to have ended up hawking submarine sandwiches which, somehow, seems apt.

I was surprised to learn that Stalin was a tiny 5 ft. 6 in. to FDR’s 6 ft. 3 in. I suppose they came in at equal numbers with Roosevelt in his wheelchair. Puny Putin twirls Trump around his finger while giving up 8 inches to our inspirational leader. The same sems to be true of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jun Un. Our potentate seems to be drawn to diminutive despots.

Mickey Rooney, at 5 ft. 2 in, was once asked how he managed to accumulate so many tall show girls. He said that he lied about his height. His first wife was Ava Gardner; between them there were 16 marriages. Judy Garland wasn’t one of them. At 4 ft. 11 in., she almost made Mickey look tall except that her booming voice seem to fill the room.

I pray that the Dems come up with a candidate about 6 ft. tall (no need to slam-dunk) trim, well-spoken but not too eloquent; we don't want to alienate six-grade dropouts, also fluent in Spanish, tech-speak and trash talk should the occasion arise. I want a Progressive with a closet free of skeletons, 2.5 children, who refuses money from AIPAC but welcomes contributions with no strings. Someone for whom no constituency will stay home; a tall order.

Zero

It’s all about zeros. Turn your back and millionaires become billionaires and don’t even talk about trillionaires. Life has increased exponentially and left me still worrying about overdue library books.

A million seconds ago was August 8^th. A billion seconds ago, Bill Clinton said he was feeling our pain. A trillion years back, Neanderthals passed the baton to us Homo sapiens….which eventually led to Elon Musk and Donald Trump thus disproving the progression of our species.

A thousand million gives me a brain ache. It makes my hair hurt. Back in the 1950s my union negotiated a contract which would pay pharmacists $4.00/hour at the end of five years. I thought I’d be rich. At that time, the average pay was $2.00/hour. Now, that’s what I tip the man at the car wash.

Yes, I know, looking back is what old folks famously do, while Gen X, Y and Z look ahead. Who’s got the rosy lens and who sees through a glass darkly? It is too easy to embellish the past; it wasn’t so rosy then but, at least, it offers the illusion of clarity.

I am blind to the future, and the present is nearly opaque. My astigmatism helps me see the world at a slant, which is to say, absurd and askew. Few things compute. Zero which used to signify nothing, now multiplies to the beyond.

I have long had the habit of finding refuge in sports. It seemed fixed in time, impervious to the turmoil of the real world. Aside from a few changes in rules to align with fan’s sensibility it carried the aura of permanence. The sports section was a universe apart from the world of finance and politics. Not so now and probably never was the case. Teams, once family-owned, are now corporate toys.

The recent shenanigans with the ownership of the Dodgers are a case in point. Mark Walter, the team owner, has been cited by the Securities & Exchange Commission and the Federal District Court for infractions. His nefarious acts are under investigation. It calls to mind the close ties between corporate misdeeds and the government which has always been the untold story in sports franchises. The baseball term caught stealing takes on a broader meaning as billionaire malfeasance is uncovered. 

The hollow man on the throne has a nose for money. He smells those zeros. It has now become obligatory for the captains of industry to fork up a few hundred million bucks to gain his favor when his DOJ is probing one's corporate empire. The money flows at the speed of a click in this zero-sum game. The king is in the counting house counting all his money and the mogul may or may not get his honey.

All this is almost enough to shed my infantile obsession with sports, but not quite.

A few weeks ago, the story concerned Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA (world soccer organization), cozying up to Trump and nearly ousted by European members. At the heart of organized sports is money (I almost said crime).

Winning and losing on the field is just a micro version of the winners and losers in the scheme of billionaires. It’s all about buying and selling and adding zeros.

 

 

Remembrance

Five years ago today, Peggy died. I'd rather celebrate her on her birthday, not her death-day. Yet here it is and I cannot let this day go without a small remembrance. She said Yes to life in all its offerings. Even in her dying she made of a dirge, a rhapsody. 

 Andalusian Epistemology

Don’t go away. This is not about

anything Andalusian or epistemology.

It is just the punchline of a joke

Peggy and I used to share.

And now I can’t remember the joke.

We used to say those words for the sound of it,

for the polysyllabic stumbling of it all,

for the numbing pretentiousness.

It became a private expression which loses

everything in translation.

I want to ask her to remind me

where it came from

and where the choreography

of our dailiness has gone.

Two, she said, is a sacred number.

Her radiance still lights my way

through this long-night city.

 

Beckett and Brooks

Here I am, Beckett’s character saying, I can’t go on…………I’ll go on. That line from his novel, The Unnamable, was written soon after the end of WWII with all its inhumanity on display. Caught between despair and persistence, was the existential belief that we must make our life meaningful even in a world of the absurd.

Today, we bear witness to nothing less than the systematic overthrow of our founding precepts. Every day, another outrage aimed to subvert our Constitution. I would like to ask one question to the man in the Oval: Why did we enter the war against fascism?

I try to convince myself that writing itself strikes a note of affirmation for the choir of which I am a member. It is an act of resistance and a shout against my own impulse towards futility.

It also makes me think of the line, I got it. I got it. I don’t got it, from Mel Brooks' High Anxiety. I live in that space between what I can carry and what I can't, between what is actual and what I profess. 

I live a privileged life with a closet of clothes, eating when hungry and unafraid of being blown to smithereens. Survival is not an issue.

Yet I pontificate on my keyboard. I get it but I don’t get it. The accident of geography which has deposited me safely flanked by two oceans from a far different reality, has altered my consciousness. It has kept me well-fed and well-clothed but ill-prepared to meet the enormity of daily struggles endured by billions of others.

When I take on the very real perils of climate change and it becomes my weather, my next breath, I fall into inaction and despair... but I go on. 

Pass the Prosecco as the talk goes to the disfigurement of our country literally and ethically. Beckett, with all his melancholia, leaned toward going forward in spite of the pull otherwise. Mel Brooks' character declares he's got it, he's got it, then doesn't. It's too heavy and he lets go. 

As William Bendix proclaimed in Life of Riley, It's a revolting development. Of course, that wasn't a call for revolution, but an incipient revolt may be just what is now taking place. I call it a true populism as opposed to the pseudo populist movement of MAGA.

An aggrieved class is always present under capitalism. Trump told them they were heard and he herded them like sheep, with enough wool to pull over their eyes.

Democrats have a tent full of felines who cannot be herded. Some scratch and their curiosity can be a killer, while others purr. Some cats are hep; others are the donor class who have been declawed. They make good pets. Most people aren't allergic to them as they are to alley cats.

The shepherd tells his flock whom to hate and they say bah on cue. Dems. are a cacophony with an urgency to become a choir.

Going For Broke

By the dawn’s early light, breaking news can break your heart but the heart grows by breaking into chamber music to mend this fractured world.

Breakfast is buttered by a solar spread. Humpty-Dumpty broke into a yellow scramble, then reassembled as omelet, an amulet for the deviled eggs in the Oval.

Today has never happened before with this morning’s minion of ten blueberries multiplied in the bowl while half a toasted bagel breaks into an urgent song to bless the mourning dove on the patio nested in my shoe. A hummingbird flaps a psalm, unheard, sawing  the contaminated air with random grace as light through yonder shadows breaks.

Strange how bro and ken spell split, not as pea soup or bananas  but split as in fracked. Today we break anew going for broke, driven by sun and wind. 

If the bough breaks in the big tent of my party, the cradle of Democracy will fall; let it bend instead, brokered, hemispheres joined, brothers as kindred spirits in a peaceable kingdom against the agreed-upon foe.