With the loss of Aster just over a year ago family holidays have lost some of their luster. They are impossible to face without mixed feelings. On the one hand the ability to get together, even on the limited basis that we are doing it this year, has to be appreciated and honored. It is a very good thing. On the other hand, the gap at the table is even more noticeable.
All that being said, while a year does not lessen the pain, it does increase the perspective. You realize that suffering loss is part of the human condition, and that you are not alone in your grief. You realize that life must go on. That there are obligations that must be met. That there are challenges to deal with. That there is laughter yet to be had.
This is especially true at Thanksgiving, which has always been a favorite holiday. It is the least baggage laden of days we celebrate. It doesn’t have the gift buying pressures of Christmas, the sense of New Years that there is somewhere a better party that I should be at, the need for a clever costume at Halloween. It is just a chance to get together with family, eat too much, drink a bit and laugh over old times and new. What could be better than that?
Also, with other holidays it’s easy to forget why we even celebrate them. With “Thanks Giving” that is not possible. You have to reflect on everything you have, how it’s more than you could ever have hoped for, and how it’s more than you really deserve. Like most people, I could list out the many things that I am thankful for, but that would be both boring and unnecessary. What’s important is that I recognize and appreciate the items on the list, and Thanksgiving demands that I do that.
This Thanksgiving will have more than a tinge of sadness in it, to put it mildly, but it will also have a very real sense that there is so much that life has given me and that there is so much more to look forward to. So, I say without a hint of irony or sarcasm, Have A Very Happy Thanksgiving!!!!
There are certain movies that I always stop and watch if I stumble across them while channel surfing, even though I’ve seen them a thousand times. (I know, I just badly dated myself, but I still channel surf). Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of those movies (As is Star Trek II (“KHAAAAANN!!“), Alien or Aliens (“Game over man!!”), Young Frankenstein (“It’s pronounced ‘Fronkensteen.’”)). I am especially pulled in by the ending where Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon are compelled to struggle up the side of Devil’s Tower, only to confront the base built there for the extraterrestrial encounter.
A year or so ago I was watching the part of this sequence when the scientists begin to communicate with the aliens. The camera pans over the assembled scientists and technicians there to set up the base and assist in the communications with E.T. All of a sudden it struck me. Everyone there is a white male. I thought that can’t be right. I rewound to watch it again. I spotted two black men and two, maybe three, women out of a crowd of about 100. However, the only people actually doing anything in the scene were white men.(operating equipment, greeting returnees, playing the organ, etc.).
The more I thought about this the more I was floored. Not because the depiction was odd for Hollywood, but because I even noticed. I realized that when this movie came out in 1977, and for many years thereafter, I was oblivious to the demographics of this scene. It would never have even dawned on my Cro-Magnon brain that there was anything wrong with the depiction of a world where only white males mattered and everyone else should be happy for whatever token presence they are given. If someone had pointed it out to me, I would have agreed that it was not right, but I would not have come up with it on my own.
This awareness of the importance of representation, which is obviously still weak, is another example of something I learned over the years that seriously threatens my ability to enjoy things that I once really liked, as discussed in my last (non-election/non tribute) blog post. How far I have to go was recently brought home to me through a discussion with my son Calvin. He watched The Battleship Potemkin in his Russian Revolution class (all hail Marx and Lennon) and we were discussing the famous Odessa steps scene. If any of you ever took a film class you probably saw this scene where the Tsar’s soldiers chase a fleeing crowd down steps, trampling and shooting people as they descend. If not, you might have seen Brian DePalma’s pale homage to this scene in the movie The Untouchables.
Calvin said that one of the reasons he liked this movie, and this scene, was that Sergei Eisenstein, the Director, had included people with disabilities in the crowd – people who are generally missing in Hollywood movies. It had never occurred to me to even consider that. Once I did, I realized he was right. Hollywood has plenty depictions of people with disabilities in lead roles where the disability is central to the story (Born on the Fourth of July, My Left Foot, The Elephant Man), but you almost never otherwise see people with disabilities. It is as if they don’t exist unless they are useful.
It actually matters that everyone sees potential versions of themselves that hold out a promise of accomplishment, a promise of achievement, a promise of a seat at the table. And it has to be more than just an occasional starring role that shows someone overcoming obstacles (e.g., Hidden Figures, Brave), because most of us are not geniuses, and will never have to save our tribe. It’s just as important that everyone needs to see themselves as a potential part of the team that creates, succeeds, prevails, to feed the drive to muddle through the BS. It’s in a team that most of us reside, and most of us see success, whether our ego wants to hear that or not. Feeling part of that team is where we find our satisfaction. (I will now step down from my soapbox). I will never see Close Encounters, or any other depiction of an assembled group, in quite the same way.
I have one more of these in me (I told you it was a rabbit hole), and then I will move on. I promise.
He had all the answers, but you had to know the questions (and no, it is not my Uncle Irving).
For 400 Mauritanian Ouguiya:
He made us Jump with his great guitar solos, but might now be Dancing with the Devil.
For 600 Malaysian Ringgit:
He came from Philadelphia, but that didn’t stop this Black Mamba from striking at us again, and again, and again.
For 800 Lao Kip:
She was briefly James Bond’s wife, but Avenged that death many times before succumbing to the Queen’s Justice.
For 1000 Kazakhstani Tenge:
Truly a Justice for all.
Double Jeopardy
For 400 Haitian Gourde:
Baseball actually lowered the freaking mound because he was so dominant!!!!!
For 800 Gambian Dalasi:
As leader of his Group, he proclaimed I’m a Man, but acknowledged he needed someone to Gimme Some Lovin.
For 1200 Georgian Lari:
He chronicled A Drinking Life and everything else that happened in New York City for over 50 years.
For 1600 Nicaraguan Cordoba:
He walked Paths of Glory and went 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and always came back up with that chin intact, still yelling “I am Spartacus!!!!”
For 2000 Venezuelan Bolivar Soberano:
He marched across the bridge leading out of Selma and never stopped marching.
A Video Final Jeopardy:
After too many vodka martinis, shaken, not stirred, this iconic actor considered his role as Zed in Zardoz his crowning achievement (or at least I assume he did). (Click on the link).
Since I saw fit to comment on the 2020 Presidential election with a 5:00 a.m. semi-depressed rant I thought that I should probably follow it up with something more measured now that the counting is all but done. Obviously, I am ecstatic about the outcome, but what happened isn’t really weighing on my mind. The more interesting questions are what this election foretells for the future, not that I have a lot of answers.
It is hard to see this election as anything other than a referendum on Donald Trump. What is not clear is the extent to which it was a referendum on him personally or on his policies, though both naturally come into play. Ultimately, did the coalitions that formed reflect a belief that we have to implement/repudiate action on issues such as climate change, student debt, tax structure, pandemic relief? Or did the coalitions form to either embrace or reject Donald Trump and his style of leadership?
The upcoming Georgia runoff elections for Senator should tell us something about these coalitions. Will the 2.455M Georgia voters who supported Trump in the general election come out in similar numbers in an election where he is not on the ballot and is unlikely to significantly engage? Conversely, will the 2.465M Georgia voters who supported Biden come out in similar numbers in an election where Trump is not on the ballot to vote against? Plus, how many of those voters who could not stomach four more years of a Trump Presidency will be equally wary of a congress fully controlled by the Democrats? How many of those voters really wanted to see a significant change in policies, or were they just interested in getting rid of Trump?
And what now for Donald Trump himself? I watched a post-election webinar sponsored by Authors against Trump because it included two novelists I greatly respect, Paul Auster and Salman Rushdie. They, along with the other panelists, said they thought that Donald Trump would now go quietly in the night. I wonder whether they had been paying attention to the last four years and had digested the election results.
Donald Trump garnished over 70,000,000 votes in this election, more than any other candidate in the US history (except for Joe Biden of course). If this was a referendum on Donald Trump half of the country answered with a resounding YES!!! Whether we like it or not, Donald Trump remains the most popular person in the country. Is there anyone else other than rock stars that can pack arena after arena the way he does? I certainly doubt if Joe Biden could.
Knowing Trump’s love of the spotlight, and how much he feeds off of these crowds, do you really think that he will give that up? (Honestly, do you think any of us could?) We know that he will never admit that he lost this election, that much is already clear. We also know that many of his followers believe that as well, regardless of whether there is any proof of fraud. Donald Trump will eventually have to abandon the White House, but it will be kicking and screaming.
I think that what we are likely to see from Trump is a never-ending, unrelenting Twitter stream castigating Joe Biden, being received by millions of receptive fans. Barring debilitating medical or legal issues (both of which are very possible considering his lifestyle and the way he conducts his business dealings) I can very easily see him coming back for round two in four years. He knows the support will be there. There are clearly no Republicans that could challenge him. If he does run again, will the voters come out again in droves once more to reject him? Because you know his supporters will be there for him.
Actually, I think that Joe Biden is coming in at a good time to withstand any challenge four years from now. We are at an ebb, much as we were in 2008 when Barak Obama became President. Four years from now the pandemic should be behind us. The long-term economic outlook is actually pretty good, especially if Biden provides short term stimulus for those hit hardest by the virus and invests in infrastructure projects that put people back to work. That being said, all Presidents are subject to attack because of where they sit, and many of his supporters, especially young progressive voters, will be looking for more than a return to stability to enthusiastically support him again in four years (assuming that he is in shape to run again – a whole different topic).
Well, again, I really hadn’t planned to delve into politics in this Blog, but there are some things I can’t resist. I feel like all of the networks that have had 24/7 election coverage for the last week. “Now back to our regularly scheduled program”.
It is 5:00 a.m. on November 4 and I am wide awake. I spent most of the night after my stint as a poll worker trying to avoid watching the election results, but failed miserably. Just as I have failed in my attempts to go to sleep. At this juncture the final tally has not been recorded, or a winner declared, but it is clear that the results will closely mirror 2016. Regardless of how the few remaining states play out, there is no doubt that Donald Trump remains immensely popular, and any thought of a blue wave is gone.
I know that I said that this blog would not be political, but, as Bill Murray said in Ghostbusters, that is more of a guideline than a rule. Anyone who knows me knows that I am bitterly disappointed in these results, and will be even if Joe Biden manages to eke out a victory, which, frankly, I doubt will happen. However, if you are looking for a screed against Donald Trump or those that voted for him, you will be disappointed. I believe that it would be misplaced.
After the 2016 election I was among many who dismissed the results as stemming from a hatred of Hillary Clinton, or people not appreciating who Donald Trump really was. I was wrong to do so. We have now had four years of Donald Trump, so people know who is and what he stands for, and Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton. And yet his support has not waned in the least. If anything, it has strengthened. It is time to admit that Donald Trump won in 2016, and has made the showing he has in 2020, because many people in this country like him and his positions.
I totally fail to see the allure of Donald Trump, and could not disagree more with what he stands for, but that is immaterial. Clearly millions of people in this country do think that he should be our President. There is no Russian interference, or voter fraud behind that. It is not a matter of Democrats being complacent. It is the reality of our electorate.
At this juncture, as painful as it is for me to say it, we have to accept this reality. We are where we are because we live in a democracy and the people have spoken. I have joined the chorus deriding Donald Trump for undermining democracy, but I cannot have it both ways. I cannot attack those who seek to dismantle our system and at the same time refuse to accept the results of the democratic process.
Nor can I continue to bemoan to electoral college. It is a waste of energy. Yes, it is antiquated and anti-democratic (with a small ”d”), but it is not going anywhere. There is no chance of achieving the consensus needed to alter this process in the foreseeable future, so we better learn to live with it, for better or worse.
Does this mean that we roll over and play dead? Of course not. We still need to agitate, and then agitate some more, for what we believe in until we are blue in the face (pun intended). If Donald Trump is the ultimate winner, we need to call him out on every policy and every pronouncement we disagree with. We also need to strengthen and hone our positions to convince more people that we have the better vision for this country and not get sidetracked by minutiae.
Turning this around is not as farfetched as it seems. We have to remember that half the voters in this country voted against Trump in both elections, and want to see change. Further, many of the same states and counties that supported Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 supported Barak Obama in 2008 and 2012. (Don’t ask me how that’s possible, but it’s true). Politics in this country goes in waves, and the tide will shift again.
Well, it’s 5:45. Little has changed on CNN. There is no way that I am going back to sleep, so I am going to make myself some coffee and start reading a book that has nothing to do with politics (The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, if you must know). Please forgive these early morning ravings. I promise that going forward I will rarely go down this path again (emphasis on rarely).
One of the definite joys of retirement is having the time to pursue whatever quirky topic comes across my path. To that end, as soon as I retired, I eagerly signed up with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, run through Temple University, to take some classes. The offerings were many, with subjects ranging from Chinese Literature, through Modern Britain: Empire, War, Rock and Roll to Medieval Art from Timbuktu through Paris. I was, to put it mildly, like the preverbal kid in a candy shop.
I ended up signing up for three courses, including Prehistory Today: Cave Art and Beyond. I had an interest in this course mainly because of a remarkable film I had seen a few years back, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, directed by Werner Herzog, about the exploration of the cave paintings in the Chauvet cave of Southern France. As I will explain further below, it was one of the most stunning movies that I have ever seen, and remained firmly implanted in my mind. It also, as I found out, altered forever my ability to watch other movies on the same topic.
Our first assignment in the Cave Art class (yes, there can be assignments in lifelong learning classes) was to watch a film called Finding Altamira. It is a dramatization of the discovery of the first cave paintings in Europe. It is an interesting story, which was, from what I can tell, fairly depicted in the film.
The Altamira cave paintings were discovered and publicized by an amateur paleontologist, Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola (gotta love those Spanish names). The trouble was that if these cave paintings were what they seemed to be it meant a lot of people had been very wrong in what they had been saying about the origins of humans and their development. The Church, still reeling from the recent publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, could not accept proof of human activity that long predated its calculations of the age of earth based on biblical interpretation. For the professional paleontologists to accept the find was to admit that their theories of pre-historic humans had all been wrong.
Sautuola was, to put it mildly, vilified. The Church labeled him a heretic, who was not fit to raise a child. The professional paleontologists went even further. They called Sautuola a fraud, who had concocted the paintings to take recognition from the real scientists. He was summarily dismissed and disregarded, and the cave sealed up (and they say the cancel culture is something new).
Of course, the story doesn’t end there. Over the next 20 years other cave paintings were found, mainly in southern France, that could not be disputed (i.e., found by professionals). Sautuola’s find was reconsidered and accepted by the scientific community. Émile Cartailhac, who had been one of Sautuola’s leading critics, admitted his mistake in doubting the find by publishing an article, “Mea culpa d’un sceptique” (I know, more French, but it sounds so much better than the translation), in a leading Anthropology journal. By then Sautuola was dead, but at least his reputation was restored, which made his family happy (or so the movie suggests).
Cave of Forgotten Dreams is something else entirely. It’s a documentary chronicling the investigation the Chauvet cave, which had only been discovered in 1994. The paintings in this cave are some of the oldest discovered, estimated at approximately 35,000 years old. They are also some of the most beautiful and intricate.
The film’s depiction of the cave paintings is stunning. I was lucky enough to see it at the Ambler Theater (oh, how I miss movie theaters). It was shot in 3D which made these ancient paintings jump off the screen. Through much of the movie I held my breath as these incredible depictions of horses, mammoths, cave lions and other animals leapt out at me, as moving and as magnificent as anything I have ever seen. To me, these paintings are as relevant as any hung in the Louvre, or elsewhere.
But there is another aspect of Cave of Forgotten Dreams that really stuck with me. We are so used to hearing of filmmakers being given full access to whatever they want to depict, whether it’s on the battlefield (embedded in Iraq) of in dissecting someone’s life (check out Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck). Herzog had anything but. Those studying the Chauvet cave designated a 2-foot-wide pathway through the cave that Herzog had to maintain while filming. He as only allowed three people with him in the cave. The cameras had to be custom-built for the shoot, and he could only use lights that gave off no excess heat. And, of course, the crew could NOT touch the cave wall or floor. Frankly, these limitations make the final movie that much more amazing.
Scientists had learned the need for these precautions the hard way. Cave art had been a 20th Century tourist attraction and the results were not good. Lascaux is perhaps the most famous cave ever found and it became one of the most visited, with up to 1,200 people going through the cave each day when it was open. The result was the formation of lichens, fungus and mold that threatened the very paintings people wanted to see.
That was not going to happen at Chauvet. There was no public access to this cave!!!! In fact, even the number of scientists would be severely limited, and the cave was eventually shut off to all comers. The film is just as meticulous in documenting the efforts to preserve the Chauvet cave paintings, as it is in depicting them.
So, how did Cave of Forgotten Dreams impact my watching of Finding Altamira? Let’s just say that the cave at Altamira was not treated as gingerly as the cave at Chauvet. I guess you really couldn’t blame Sautuola. No one had seen anything like this before. Still, I did not handle it well.
There is a scene shortly after the paintings were found where Sautuola’s daughter and a local painter that Sautuola had engaged to assess the paintings go into the cave and begin to replicate the paintings on the cave walls. I was screaming, “With are you doing? Are you out of your f%*#ing minds??????”. Not surprisingly these freshly painted copies strengthened the claim that all the paintings were fraudulent.
Even worse was the climactic scene where Sautuola’s wife finally agrees to go into the cave after avoiding it because of the objections of the Church. This is meant to be a moving scene of reconciliation between husband and wife, but it lost all impact for me when the first thing she does is put her hand on the wall to measure her hand size against the hand prints there, while Sautuola looked placidly on. I started yelling “Are you out of your mind? Get your grubby, filthy mitts off the paintings, you idiot”. I am sure that my family thought I was watching a football game (“You’re a bum de Sautuola!!! You want to play with the big boys??? They shouldn’t even let you do Junior High Science Projects!!!”)
Once my blood pressure got back to normal, I had to ask myself, what was that all about? I realized that my infatuation with Cave of Forgotten Dreams had made it impossible for me to tolerate the character’s behavior in Finding Altamira, even though I knew: 1. it was only a dramatization, not actual events; and 2. even if it was how it happened Sautuola, et al. had no way of really knowing what they had or how delicate the cave paintings were.
The more I thought about my over-reaction the further I went down the rabbit-hole of examining my response. It dawned on me how many things that I had previously glossed over now really bothered me because of what I had subsequently encountered. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that cave paintings were just the tip of the iceberg.
I want to explore this further, and better understand how the person I am today differs from who I used to be, and why. However, I have gone on too long here and so will pursue that in my next post (I can feel the waves of anticipation flowing through the internet). Till next time.
