In 1986, I was working at the Denver Center Cinema (a repertory film theater in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts), when we were chosen as one of a handful of small theaters in the country to participate in an exciting year-long program by the Directors Guild of America (DGA). In celebration of DGA'S 50th Anniversary, the DCC would host a different American film director each month. Throughout a weekend, a famous director would make appearances, speak, answer questions, and present a selection of his favorite films. It was a film nut's dream come true!
However, the precarious situation of such movie houses in the late 80s, when ready availability of home video kept people away from art and repertory cinemas in droves, affected even such an auspicious program as the DGA's. After just four months the DGA could no longer sustain the countrywide directors-in-person offerings. Like animated dots on the map showing one, then another and another Kane newspaper dying, the program went dark in revival movie theaters across the country. As if to teach us landlocked masses where true culture resided, the DGA continued the series event at only 2 locations: one cinema each in New York City and Los Angeles.
It was a fantastically exciting program while it lasted, though. Legendary American directors came. They talked at length about their films and their careers. They answered questions. Alan J. Pakula showed Klute and All the President's Men. Peter Bogdanovich arranged last-minute shipping of his own personal print of The Last Picture Show when the good-but-not-perfect one we had obtained just wouldn't do. The great renegade director, Samuel Fuller, strode back and forth restlessly, telling stories, answering questions, and alternatively gesturing with and chomping on his trademark cigar. I don't remember if it was lit or not.
The program was kicked off in January with a visit by the affable, gracious once-President of the Director's Guild, Robert Wise. I'm hesitating to call him a genius, but only because it is a misunderstood term. Look at just a handful of the films he helmed: The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Haunting, The Sound of Music, The Andromeda Strain. Lesser-known gems of his include the great boxing film noir with Robert Ryan, The Set-Up, and the Oscar-winning performance by Susan Hayward in the riveting death-penalty melodrama, I Want to Live! (one of the films that Wise chose to present when he came to the Cinema.)
OK, "genius" will do.
Wise arrived at the Denver Center Cinema carrying under his arm a special treasure in a film can. He had brought a brand-new short film with him, a film produced by the Director's Guild "in honor of the 100th Anniversary of Film," as an opening title says. Wise was visibly excited and very eager to share this film with us. Except for some screenings for DGA members, no one had seen it.
As we few employees of the Denver Center Cinema joined Robert Wise in the dark of our 255-seat theater, we wondered what we were in for. What could have this great director so fired up?
By the end of the 8-minute short we knew.
That extraordinary short film was called Precious Images.
Precious Images is a moving tribute to the hundred-year history of film, made entirely of short film clips set to various pieces of classic film music. The approximately 470 clips are recognizable and often iconic gems from a kaleidoscopic variety of mostly American films: sound and silent, black-and-white and color, comedies, dramas, westerns, thrillers, musicals, even a few animated features.
From these beautifully-chosen raw materials, director Chuck Workman has fashioned a marvel and a wonder. Brilliantly arranging these fleeting images by first grouping them into broad thematic categories and then very cleverly juxtaposing individual clips in subtle, witty, and emotionally powerful ways, Workman's film carries the viewer along on a ride that's alternatively heartwarming, funny, thrilling, stirring, and intellectually satisfying.
Precious Images is aimed squarely at film lovers. Watching it is a fascinating kind of meta-film experience. Its power relies on how many of these films you have seen. As its scores of images cascade by, an image here and an image there sparks recognition: I know that film, seen this one, or, look, that's Bette Davis/Gary Cooper/Sissy Spacek/Edward G. Robinson/Marlene Dietrich/Paul Newman/Lauren Bacall! The clips flit so fast (at an average of a second per clip but in some sections much faster) that there's often no time to attach a film title or a actor's name to a particular image before ten more catch the eye. These multiple sparks of recognition transcend the verbal, and quickly become visceral. They hit the eyes and the neural pathways like a clattering shower of gems. They evoke memories, and flashes of strong emotion accumulate like a lightning storm. And very soon, even if you've only seen one in ten of these films, you find yourself awash in emotion woven from these connected flashes of recognition.
This crude, basic description of technique barely touches the miraculous emotional power of this film. Workman's editing choices are subtle, clever, often brilliant. They show his understanding of the history of American film, of the meaning of particular images, and of deep correspondences across the decades. It's a huge understatement to say that Precious Images stands up to multiple viewings. I have seen it dozens of times and always am able to pick out some clever juxtaposition of images or music that I'd never noticed before.
Look at the first two images in the film. It starts off with the snow globe resting in the hand of the dying Charles Foster Kane from the first scene of Citizen Kane. Cut to Casablanca: Ingrid Bergman in closeup, saying "Sing it, Sam," and Sam (Dooley Wilson) does: "You must remember this. . ." On the word "this," and as the song continues on the soundtrack, we switch to a clip-after-clip section of couples embracing or kissing, bang-bang-bang-bang, including Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen and the eating-spaghetti kiss from Lady and the Tramp. Now we know that Sam is singing not just to Ilsa in Rick's Cafe, but to us and to our memories of films: "You must remember this..." That word "this" kicks off the whole 8-minute memory cascade.
But go back to that first image: Kane is still holding the snow globe when we see it at the beginning of Precious Images. We have to wait to the very end of the film to see Kane's lips pronounce "Rosebud," and for the globe to fall and break. It is as if all the other truly precious images, all our memories from films down through 100 years, are contained within that glass globe. They are the illusions that break when Charles Foster Kane dies.
These are just a couple of examples of the really well-considered editing choices that Workman makes throughout the film. The deeper you look, the more you discover. His use of music is perfect as well, with individual lyrics or musical cues underlining the images, sometimes brilliantly.
After that first screening of Precious Images at the Denver Center Cinema, we could not get enough of it, and neither could our audiences. We programmed it before films as often as we could, and soon it spread to other theaters in Denver. It was common in the summer of 1986 to see Precious Images before your feature at several theaters in Denver.
The film won a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Live Action Short for 1986. In 2009, it was named to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as a film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" to be preserved for all time.
I started wondering about the film again a few years ago. I found that it was not available on DVD, and more recently saw that it had been pulled from YouTube. Some sources stated that it cannot be shown anymore, due to a massive tangle of copyright issues.
Chuck Workman, however, dispelled these ideas in a recent email. He assured me that not only is the film available to any theater in the world from the Director's Guild (dga.org), but that it can also be obtained by museums, schools, and other media arts centers. Non-profit organizations can get the film from the Film-Makers Cooperative in New York (film-makerscoop.com).
So I urge you to urge your local film organization to investigate getting a copy of this really extraordinary film.
For my readers in Denver, you have an upcoming chance to see Precious Images on the big screen. Word at the moment is that it will show at the Starz Film Center on the first Saturday of August, at 7pm, before that month's Tattered Cover Free Classic. Call the theater to make sure, however!
At this writing, you can view Precious Images here.
18 July 2010
13 June 2010
Time Machine
We often can benefit from other people's obsessions.
Nowhere is this more truly or more often dramatically demonstrated than on the internet. How many times have you just discovered or been told about what to you was a new, bizarre, but fascinating topic, only to find that there is an extensive Wikipedia article about it, as well as a healthy selection of websites where variously driven people have explored the obscurantist subject thoroughly?
One of these came to me today by way of my brother, Roger, in Germany.
Roger is a big baseball fan. He also has a burrowing mind that delights in origins, in history, in the roots of things. Through an investigation of the source of the song "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," Roger chanced upon a marvelous page of old recordings.
Here's where the obsession comes in. Glenn Sage, who apparently is behind the site www.tinfoil.com, is gloriously obsessed with and very knowledgeable about old recordings.
And when I say old, I'm not talking lps or 45s or even 78s. This is a site entirely dedicated to wax cylinder recordings, an early improvement on the very first recording medium, invented by Thomas Edison.
In case you have never heard of or seen these amazing, original recordings, there is an excellent, concise, illustrated history of them at the tinfoil site. But briefly, Edison invented the pioneer recording machine in 1877. With the first device, a needle scratched grooves in tinfoil strips wrapped around a 4-inch-diameter cylinder. This primitive and ephemeral tinfoil recording medium was replaced ten years later by a more durable standard: 4-inch-long and 2-inch-diameter waxlike cylinders.
[A brief detour back to my New Jersey childhood. Following a family outing to Edison's laboratories in West Orange, that same brother, Roger, maybe 11 years old?, built a replica of the original recording machine. It recorded on aluminum foil wrapped around a tin can. And it actually worked! I'm pretty much in awe of my brother!]
Edison used the machine to record hundreds of bands, performers, and speakers. And Edison's was only one of dozens of companies that recorded on wax cylinders during the last years of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century.
The delicious, wondrous bounty of the tinfoil site, however, can be found at its Cylinders of the Month Archive. Since 1997, Sage has been posting detailed information about one interesting or special wax cylinder recording each month. So now we have this mammoth page, a compendium of all the past Cylinders of the Month. Just click on the highlighted date to the left of each entry's title and you are transported to a detailed page about that particular recording.
Best of all, though: from the detailed page it is only one more click to the recording itself. Yes, you can LISTEN TO any of these more-than-hundred-year-old audio documents!
And taken together, they compose an enchanted aural time machine! These are songs, speeches, comedy bits and musical numbers such as you have never heard, and that you'll never hear anywhere else. Just listening to the scratchy, ancient recordings takes you back to another time, and the content of the pieces places you firmly there. We're not in Kansas anymore.
Or, technically, we ARE in Kansas in one comic song that spoofs the violent temperance reformer, Carrie Nation. It's called "Carrie Nation in Kansas." There are "ethnic specialities" here that have long ago fallen to the axes of political correctness. Listen, for instance, to an Irish comedy bit, "Casey as Umpire at a Ball Game." (I found this piece--from 1898!--hilariously pertinent, considering the recent Detroit Tigers "near perfect" game debacle!) Where else would you be able to listen to several hundred-year-old "minstrel" numbers?!
The "category" column of the Archive page indicates the variety you'll find here. In just a random listing, there are selections tagged as "Band," "Clarinet Solo," "Hebrew monologue," "Talking & banjo," "Baritone," "Tenor solo," "Serio-comic song". . ."Minstrels." Here you'll find orations by William Jennings Bryan and William H. Taft, numbers by Sophie Tucker and "Sousa's Band" (Stars and Stripes Forever March recorded in 1901!). But mostly you'll see no-longer-familiar groups such as Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette, Issler's Popular Orchestra, Herr Dr. Professor & George Donahue, and many individual performers.
Though there is tremendous variety here, I found that all the pieces I listened to worked mysterious magic on my nervous system, transporting me, for two or three scratchy, pop-punctuated minutes at a time, to a strange world of very different assumptions, ideas, and styles than our quotidian own.
It is a trip well worth the taking.
Nowhere is this more truly or more often dramatically demonstrated than on the internet. How many times have you just discovered or been told about what to you was a new, bizarre, but fascinating topic, only to find that there is an extensive Wikipedia article about it, as well as a healthy selection of websites where variously driven people have explored the obscurantist subject thoroughly?
One of these came to me today by way of my brother, Roger, in Germany.
Roger is a big baseball fan. He also has a burrowing mind that delights in origins, in history, in the roots of things. Through an investigation of the source of the song "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," Roger chanced upon a marvelous page of old recordings.
Here's where the obsession comes in. Glenn Sage, who apparently is behind the site www.tinfoil.com, is gloriously obsessed with and very knowledgeable about old recordings.
And when I say old, I'm not talking lps or 45s or even 78s. This is a site entirely dedicated to wax cylinder recordings, an early improvement on the very first recording medium, invented by Thomas Edison.
In case you have never heard of or seen these amazing, original recordings, there is an excellent, concise, illustrated history of them at the tinfoil site. But briefly, Edison invented the pioneer recording machine in 1877. With the first device, a needle scratched grooves in tinfoil strips wrapped around a 4-inch-diameter cylinder. This primitive and ephemeral tinfoil recording medium was replaced ten years later by a more durable standard: 4-inch-long and 2-inch-diameter waxlike cylinders.
[A brief detour back to my New Jersey childhood. Following a family outing to Edison's laboratories in West Orange, that same brother, Roger, maybe 11 years old?, built a replica of the original recording machine. It recorded on aluminum foil wrapped around a tin can. And it actually worked! I'm pretty much in awe of my brother!]
Edison used the machine to record hundreds of bands, performers, and speakers. And Edison's was only one of dozens of companies that recorded on wax cylinders during the last years of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century.
The delicious, wondrous bounty of the tinfoil site, however, can be found at its Cylinders of the Month Archive. Since 1997, Sage has been posting detailed information about one interesting or special wax cylinder recording each month. So now we have this mammoth page, a compendium of all the past Cylinders of the Month. Just click on the highlighted date to the left of each entry's title and you are transported to a detailed page about that particular recording.
Best of all, though: from the detailed page it is only one more click to the recording itself. Yes, you can LISTEN TO any of these more-than-hundred-year-old audio documents!
And taken together, they compose an enchanted aural time machine! These are songs, speeches, comedy bits and musical numbers such as you have never heard, and that you'll never hear anywhere else. Just listening to the scratchy, ancient recordings takes you back to another time, and the content of the pieces places you firmly there. We're not in Kansas anymore.
Or, technically, we ARE in Kansas in one comic song that spoofs the violent temperance reformer, Carrie Nation. It's called "Carrie Nation in Kansas." There are "ethnic specialities" here that have long ago fallen to the axes of political correctness. Listen, for instance, to an Irish comedy bit, "Casey as Umpire at a Ball Game." (I found this piece--from 1898!--hilariously pertinent, considering the recent Detroit Tigers "near perfect" game debacle!) Where else would you be able to listen to several hundred-year-old "minstrel" numbers?!
The "category" column of the Archive page indicates the variety you'll find here. In just a random listing, there are selections tagged as "Band," "Clarinet Solo," "Hebrew monologue," "Talking & banjo," "Baritone," "Tenor solo," "Serio-comic song". . ."Minstrels." Here you'll find orations by William Jennings Bryan and William H. Taft, numbers by Sophie Tucker and "Sousa's Band" (Stars and Stripes Forever March recorded in 1901!). But mostly you'll see no-longer-familiar groups such as Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette, Issler's Popular Orchestra, Herr Dr. Professor & George Donahue, and many individual performers.
Though there is tremendous variety here, I found that all the pieces I listened to worked mysterious magic on my nervous system, transporting me, for two or three scratchy, pop-punctuated minutes at a time, to a strange world of very different assumptions, ideas, and styles than our quotidian own.
It is a trip well worth the taking.
21 May 2010
Canterbury Tales Rap
Since there can never be too many viewings of this absolutely marvelous and ingenious setting of the Prologue from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I throw it out here on my blog, on the off-off chance that it catches a new pair of eyes. If you have not seen this before, please leave me a comment!
This gem was the brainchild of Jon Wilkerson. The slick video editing, direction, and organization were done by Kirk Anderson. The piece is performed by Jon, Kirk, and DeShawn Jones, to music created by Darren Lawless.
I feel like I've become an evangelist for this piece over the past couple of days. I can't explain why. The music, the beat, the images, and the middle English words have routed my defenses and now have taken possession of a small but significant plot in my brain.
It has gotten tens of thousands of viewings on YouTube, and there are lots of testimonial comments from high school students who used it to help them memorize the beginning of Chaucer's Prologue. Teachers have also weighed in, saying that this is now required viewing for their English Literature classes.
And it should be.
So, surely you know a teacher, a student, or a word nerd friend who would get a kick out of this.
If you like it, pass it on. Tell somebody about it!
16 May 2010
Fear Friday
For a variety of reasons, mostly involving neglect, disinterest, and sheer laziness, I do not have TV service at home.
What I do have is a 20-year-old 19-inch TV that I use to watch my DVDs on.
Recently I am thinking that this has got to change.
One of the reasons I can state in two words. Fear Friday.
On many Fridays, I go down to Littleton to spend the afternoon and evening with my stepmother, Amy. We'll do errands and go out to eat, then come home and inevitably watch some TV.
So, these Fridays are my only real TV viewing time for the week. I'm devoted to the rantings on The McLaughlin report. We'll usually watch the local news at 10 pm.
Amy will nod and drift off and fall asleep on one end of the couch as I sit flipping channels on the other. She'll stay dozing there for quite a while before she wakes up just enough to decide to go to bed. She always tells me to stay as long as I like.
I used to leave just shortly after Amy went to bed.
But a few times I stayed and channel-surfed through the dreck of her Utterly Basic Cable, which she got really just so she could continue to receive the local channels. And sometime about a year ago I chanced upon it: Fear Friday.
Of course, as of yet I didn't know what Fear Friday was. Nor did I have any devotion to it. All I knew was that they were showing the original classic Night of the Living Dead, and I couldn't resist watching the last 45 minutes or so of the ur-zombie movie. Then, I noticed, the station followed it with another, highly inferior, zombie flick. I watched just a little bit of that one and hit the road.
But there was something fun about being up in the middle of the night here in the family room at one end of the darkened house while Amy slept at the other end, watching the beloved low-budget film that launched the whole zombie cult. In between the ads I saw AMC's promos for upcoming film series, tied together always with their new slogan "Story Matters Here." And always just before the movie itself was firing up again, the words FEAR FRIDAY jerkily staggering around the screen and finally aligning themselves in lurid black on red. (Or maybe white on red?)
I didn't think anything of it, never crossed my mind, until maybe a couple or three weeks later, when the end of a Friday of errands and dinner with Amy found me once more settling down on the couch to see what a little channel surfing might turn up.
And this time it was both the old and the new versions of The Fly, back-to-back! I got sucked in again, this time just in time to watch the disgusting, unlikely, horrifying and somehow hilarious climax of David Cronenberg's The Fly, with the creature that used to be Jeff Goldblum sliming up his laboratory and Geena Davis, who finally blasts him to pieces with a shotgun. Really a tour-de-force of disturbing imagery, that film! Wow. I either missed or purposely left without seeing the Vincent Price version, which has a few joys of its own.
But Fear Friday had bit me again.
After two or three chance run-ins with the show like this, I began to realize that it was a show. The facts started to coalesce in my brain like so many zombies converging on the big white house where the still-living are holed up.
Fear Friday is a Friday night horror movie festival on AMC. They show two or maybe three horror films in a row, often connected thematically.
Part of the fun of the presentation, for me at least, comes with AMC's plugs for the week's upcoming (non-horror) film series. They throw films together under an umbrella theme, and the little ads feature well-edited film clips of a bunch of disparate movies. The fun lies partly in trying to ldentify all these films from just a shot here and a shot there. And the promos reveal progressively a little more each time. It is a clever promotion. Fun to watch and it keeps you guessing.
So now I knew just what Fear Friday was, and approximately when it comes on. But I wasn't obsessed with it.
Yet.
I didn't yet look forward to the next Friday night's selection, wonder what they might be showing. I didn't yet talk at length to people at work about it. I hadn't yet even really spoken the words "Fear Friday."
But I would. I would.
In recent weeks, some of the joys offered up by AMC on Fear Friday have been:
Poltergeist - Utterly ridiculous fun which could be described in TV Guide as: "Suburban family is menaced by over-the-top self-indulgent state-of-the-art special effects!" But the film's core and its germ, I'm sure, and its worthy, lasting place in American culture, is that it enshrines the now-lost-but-not-forgotten eerie moment when the TV stations go off in the middle of the night, abandoning you to the existential challenge of snow and white noise. The first thing you hear in Poltergeist is the Star-Spangled Banner, signalling, you soon find out, the horrifying end of another broadcast day.
The Amityville Horror - Creepy film from an older era, before special effects took over. I kept seeing parallels between this evil-house-that-caused-previous-owner-to-kill-his-entire-family film and Stanley Kubrick's masterful The Shining. Was Kubrick. . .or possibly Stephen King. . .influenced by this film? The creepiness here revolves mostly around everyday things, like flies and toilets backing up and unsettled dogs. But these items are put together in odd ways, exaggerated, played up. As in The Shining, one child has an evil imaginary friend. And then there's the great performance by Rod Steiger, as a priest who is brought in to bless the house, and whom the house progressively takes apart, blinds, and ruins. Fun film. Terrible ending.
The Shining - We were sitting there on the couch, Amy and I, when I chanced to tune in to the baseball bat scene in this terrific film. What an amazing scene, in how it develops and how long it goes on, and the escalating dialogue as Jack Nicholson threatens the pleading Shelley Duvall across the lobby, eventually backing her up the stairs as she swipes at the air pathetically, ineffectually with the bat! The scene is sustained for unbelievably long! The actors are so well-matched here, Nicholson sarcastic and terrifying and insane, and Duvall's Wendy beaten down and whimpering but fiercely protecting her son. Jack keeps cajoling her, "Give me the bat, Wendy!" and eventually, she does. She gives it to him. Right in the side of the head.
I appreciated that film more than ever viewing it that night. It is so wildly over-the-top, so fiercely hilarious! I cackle with laughter as Nicholson sails off the deep end!
Then there was the great double-billing of Bram Stoker's Dracula and the original Bela Lugosi classic. This was inspired. The Frances Ford Coppola film, so deliciously lush and visually inventive, contains so many self-conscious hat-tips to its 1931 inspiration. Gary Oldman intones lines that we all know from Bela's delivery of them: "I am Dracula. I bid you wel-come!" Playing the two films back-to-back like this really showed how excellent they both are, and what a worthy successor the Coppola film is to the original.
So now Fear Friday's got me.
I might just have to buy a TV.
What I do have is a 20-year-old 19-inch TV that I use to watch my DVDs on.
Recently I am thinking that this has got to change.
One of the reasons I can state in two words. Fear Friday.
On many Fridays, I go down to Littleton to spend the afternoon and evening with my stepmother, Amy. We'll do errands and go out to eat, then come home and inevitably watch some TV.
So, these Fridays are my only real TV viewing time for the week. I'm devoted to the rantings on The McLaughlin report. We'll usually watch the local news at 10 pm.
Amy will nod and drift off and fall asleep on one end of the couch as I sit flipping channels on the other. She'll stay dozing there for quite a while before she wakes up just enough to decide to go to bed. She always tells me to stay as long as I like.
I used to leave just shortly after Amy went to bed.
But a few times I stayed and channel-surfed through the dreck of her Utterly Basic Cable, which she got really just so she could continue to receive the local channels. And sometime about a year ago I chanced upon it: Fear Friday.
Of course, as of yet I didn't know what Fear Friday was. Nor did I have any devotion to it. All I knew was that they were showing the original classic Night of the Living Dead, and I couldn't resist watching the last 45 minutes or so of the ur-zombie movie. Then, I noticed, the station followed it with another, highly inferior, zombie flick. I watched just a little bit of that one and hit the road.
But there was something fun about being up in the middle of the night here in the family room at one end of the darkened house while Amy slept at the other end, watching the beloved low-budget film that launched the whole zombie cult. In between the ads I saw AMC's promos for upcoming film series, tied together always with their new slogan "Story Matters Here." And always just before the movie itself was firing up again, the words FEAR FRIDAY jerkily staggering around the screen and finally aligning themselves in lurid black on red. (Or maybe white on red?)
I didn't think anything of it, never crossed my mind, until maybe a couple or three weeks later, when the end of a Friday of errands and dinner with Amy found me once more settling down on the couch to see what a little channel surfing might turn up.
And this time it was both the old and the new versions of The Fly, back-to-back! I got sucked in again, this time just in time to watch the disgusting, unlikely, horrifying and somehow hilarious climax of David Cronenberg's The Fly, with the creature that used to be Jeff Goldblum sliming up his laboratory and Geena Davis, who finally blasts him to pieces with a shotgun. Really a tour-de-force of disturbing imagery, that film! Wow. I either missed or purposely left without seeing the Vincent Price version, which has a few joys of its own.
But Fear Friday had bit me again.
After two or three chance run-ins with the show like this, I began to realize that it was a show. The facts started to coalesce in my brain like so many zombies converging on the big white house where the still-living are holed up.
Fear Friday is a Friday night horror movie festival on AMC. They show two or maybe three horror films in a row, often connected thematically.
Part of the fun of the presentation, for me at least, comes with AMC's plugs for the week's upcoming (non-horror) film series. They throw films together under an umbrella theme, and the little ads feature well-edited film clips of a bunch of disparate movies. The fun lies partly in trying to ldentify all these films from just a shot here and a shot there. And the promos reveal progressively a little more each time. It is a clever promotion. Fun to watch and it keeps you guessing.
So now I knew just what Fear Friday was, and approximately when it comes on. But I wasn't obsessed with it.
Yet.
I didn't yet look forward to the next Friday night's selection, wonder what they might be showing. I didn't yet talk at length to people at work about it. I hadn't yet even really spoken the words "Fear Friday."
But I would. I would.
In recent weeks, some of the joys offered up by AMC on Fear Friday have been:
Poltergeist - Utterly ridiculous fun which could be described in TV Guide as: "Suburban family is menaced by over-the-top self-indulgent state-of-the-art special effects!" But the film's core and its germ, I'm sure, and its worthy, lasting place in American culture, is that it enshrines the now-lost-but-not-forgotten eerie moment when the TV stations go off in the middle of the night, abandoning you to the existential challenge of snow and white noise. The first thing you hear in Poltergeist is the Star-Spangled Banner, signalling, you soon find out, the horrifying end of another broadcast day.
The Amityville Horror - Creepy film from an older era, before special effects took over. I kept seeing parallels between this evil-house-that-caused-previous-owner-to-kill-his-entire-family film and Stanley Kubrick's masterful The Shining. Was Kubrick. . .or possibly Stephen King. . .influenced by this film? The creepiness here revolves mostly around everyday things, like flies and toilets backing up and unsettled dogs. But these items are put together in odd ways, exaggerated, played up. As in The Shining, one child has an evil imaginary friend. And then there's the great performance by Rod Steiger, as a priest who is brought in to bless the house, and whom the house progressively takes apart, blinds, and ruins. Fun film. Terrible ending.
The Shining - We were sitting there on the couch, Amy and I, when I chanced to tune in to the baseball bat scene in this terrific film. What an amazing scene, in how it develops and how long it goes on, and the escalating dialogue as Jack Nicholson threatens the pleading Shelley Duvall across the lobby, eventually backing her up the stairs as she swipes at the air pathetically, ineffectually with the bat! The scene is sustained for unbelievably long! The actors are so well-matched here, Nicholson sarcastic and terrifying and insane, and Duvall's Wendy beaten down and whimpering but fiercely protecting her son. Jack keeps cajoling her, "Give me the bat, Wendy!" and eventually, she does. She gives it to him. Right in the side of the head.
I appreciated that film more than ever viewing it that night. It is so wildly over-the-top, so fiercely hilarious! I cackle with laughter as Nicholson sails off the deep end!
Then there was the great double-billing of Bram Stoker's Dracula and the original Bela Lugosi classic. This was inspired. The Frances Ford Coppola film, so deliciously lush and visually inventive, contains so many self-conscious hat-tips to its 1931 inspiration. Gary Oldman intones lines that we all know from Bela's delivery of them: "I am Dracula. I bid you wel-come!" Playing the two films back-to-back like this really showed how excellent they both are, and what a worthy successor the Coppola film is to the original.
So now Fear Friday's got me.
I might just have to buy a TV.
11 April 2010
Off the Cuff
Just off the cuff here.
I am working on a blogpiece of some length touching on events of childhood visits to my grandparents' farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Been working on this piece for some time. The date where it is stored in the Blogger Dashboard astonishes me:
9/30/09. I have been slogging away at this piece, albeit in a sometimes desultory fashion, now for six months and 10 days. Or so.
Wow.
In the mean time, after I started that piece, I have published a couple of others.
And I thought it was high time for another.
As the title suggests, this blog is pure spew. Just me tapping away on my tippy-tappy laptoppy, sitting here at my accustomed perch in a corner at a local Village Inn Pancake House. And, its nature being such, it might end up demonstrating why most of my pieces are more planned out! We'll see.
A blog is supposed to have a bit of spontaneity about it, isn't it? A journal-like quality of frequent postings? That sort of thing?
The Red Wheelbarrow has never been a thing of frequent postings, anyway. And I do feel a little guilty about it!
Well, it is what it is and it will be what it will be.
For the moment, though, I'd like to talk just a little about the vagaries of memory. I wrote "vagaries of memory" out of a kind of lazy impulse. It is a hackneyed phrase, isn't it?
But, looking up "vagary" in my online dictionary I find this definition:
"an unexpected and inexplicable change in a situation or in someone's behavior."
Fantastic! Could not be more apt to my discussion here.
After writing a few paragraphs on the legendary Bucks County farm piece, I felt like running them by my two brothers, Bill and Rog, to see how my brief sketches of a few places and things compared with their memories of them. I sent them each an email with my descriptions and a few questions.
They each responded very quickly, and it launched a short but intense discussion among the three of us about some details of the old farm that we took such pleasure in visiting when we were kids.
Our memories, needless to say, differed. For instance, in talking about a marvelous and ancient machine, The Corn Sheller, out in the barn: I remember it clearly as being painted a dullish red-brown with fading yellow trim, while both brothers have no memory of it being painted at all. We even differed over what it was called. To me there is no question that it was The Corn Sheller, but my elder brother, Bill, who is 6 years older than me and thus should remember better calls it The Corn Shucker.
Hmmmmm. . .
Even more interesting is the way those vagaries have rendered our memories of the physical landscape at the farm. Back behind the main house there were a couple of ancient and fascinating outbuildings. Both were square, thick-walled stone buildings. One had been an old smokehouse, with the other being called The Woodshed.
I recall us being slightly forbidden to go in these buildings, and so we went in them when we could get away with it. The Smokehouse had not been in use for years. It was a dirt-floored, empty square. On hot summer days it was a great refuge from the heat, being naturally cool, but there was really nowhere to sit nor much of anything to do in there. The Woodshed I remember as very dark and somewhat scary and definitely forbidden. The main thing in there was a big stump on the floor with a hatchet's blade buried in it. This darkly suggested a place where chickens had been beheaded, and there was a delicious scariness in it for us.
But before I make the mistake of speaking too much for "us," let me show how that could be a big mistake.
Though we visited our grandparents' farm many times in our childhoods, and surely skulked around and daringly crept inside these two small old buildings lots of times, they show up very differently in our three distinct brotherly memories. Or, more accurately, they don't show up there.
In the ensuing 40 years since we were kids, our mental landscapes of the farm have shifted and altered, blurred here and there, sometimes changed completely. Those outbuildings, The Smokehouse, The Woodshed: they have flickered and fluxed, and in some cases winked out entirely.
Roger, 15 months older than me, does not remember The Woodshed at all. And Bill had this to say:
"But strange - I don't remember anything about any smokehouse, even after reading Jim's description of it's location."
As the three of us continued to compare memories by email, it came back to me once again that memory is not any kind of a documentary, recording function. We are constantly revising and rewriting the scripts of our lives. We cobble together this memory with another, far removed in space or time. We visualize things people have told us and then swear we were present where we could not have been. Even with single objects or events, we all color these in our own ways, according to the mysterious dictates of our own personalities. My memory landscape contains a barn with an old wooden red and yellow painted corn shelling machine. My brothers' show a different device.
Memory is a creative function.
I am working on a blogpiece of some length touching on events of childhood visits to my grandparents' farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Been working on this piece for some time. The date where it is stored in the Blogger Dashboard astonishes me:
9/30/09. I have been slogging away at this piece, albeit in a sometimes desultory fashion, now for six months and 10 days. Or so.
Wow.
In the mean time, after I started that piece, I have published a couple of others.
And I thought it was high time for another.
As the title suggests, this blog is pure spew. Just me tapping away on my tippy-tappy laptoppy, sitting here at my accustomed perch in a corner at a local Village Inn Pancake House. And, its nature being such, it might end up demonstrating why most of my pieces are more planned out! We'll see.
A blog is supposed to have a bit of spontaneity about it, isn't it? A journal-like quality of frequent postings? That sort of thing?
The Red Wheelbarrow has never been a thing of frequent postings, anyway. And I do feel a little guilty about it!
Well, it is what it is and it will be what it will be.
For the moment, though, I'd like to talk just a little about the vagaries of memory. I wrote "vagaries of memory" out of a kind of lazy impulse. It is a hackneyed phrase, isn't it?
But, looking up "vagary" in my online dictionary I find this definition:
"an unexpected and inexplicable change in a situation or in someone's behavior."
Fantastic! Could not be more apt to my discussion here.
After writing a few paragraphs on the legendary Bucks County farm piece, I felt like running them by my two brothers, Bill and Rog, to see how my brief sketches of a few places and things compared with their memories of them. I sent them each an email with my descriptions and a few questions.
They each responded very quickly, and it launched a short but intense discussion among the three of us about some details of the old farm that we took such pleasure in visiting when we were kids.
Our memories, needless to say, differed. For instance, in talking about a marvelous and ancient machine, The Corn Sheller, out in the barn: I remember it clearly as being painted a dullish red-brown with fading yellow trim, while both brothers have no memory of it being painted at all. We even differed over what it was called. To me there is no question that it was The Corn Sheller, but my elder brother, Bill, who is 6 years older than me and thus should remember better calls it The Corn Shucker.
Hmmmmm. . .
Even more interesting is the way those vagaries have rendered our memories of the physical landscape at the farm. Back behind the main house there were a couple of ancient and fascinating outbuildings. Both were square, thick-walled stone buildings. One had been an old smokehouse, with the other being called The Woodshed.
I recall us being slightly forbidden to go in these buildings, and so we went in them when we could get away with it. The Smokehouse had not been in use for years. It was a dirt-floored, empty square. On hot summer days it was a great refuge from the heat, being naturally cool, but there was really nowhere to sit nor much of anything to do in there. The Woodshed I remember as very dark and somewhat scary and definitely forbidden. The main thing in there was a big stump on the floor with a hatchet's blade buried in it. This darkly suggested a place where chickens had been beheaded, and there was a delicious scariness in it for us.
But before I make the mistake of speaking too much for "us," let me show how that could be a big mistake.
Though we visited our grandparents' farm many times in our childhoods, and surely skulked around and daringly crept inside these two small old buildings lots of times, they show up very differently in our three distinct brotherly memories. Or, more accurately, they don't show up there.
In the ensuing 40 years since we were kids, our mental landscapes of the farm have shifted and altered, blurred here and there, sometimes changed completely. Those outbuildings, The Smokehouse, The Woodshed: they have flickered and fluxed, and in some cases winked out entirely.
Roger, 15 months older than me, does not remember The Woodshed at all. And Bill had this to say:
"But strange - I don't remember anything about any smokehouse, even after reading Jim's description of it's location."
As the three of us continued to compare memories by email, it came back to me once again that memory is not any kind of a documentary, recording function. We are constantly revising and rewriting the scripts of our lives. We cobble together this memory with another, far removed in space or time. We visualize things people have told us and then swear we were present where we could not have been. Even with single objects or events, we all color these in our own ways, according to the mysterious dictates of our own personalities. My memory landscape contains a barn with an old wooden red and yellow painted corn shelling machine. My brothers' show a different device.
Memory is a creative function.
04 January 2010
Dolce Far Niente
I thought of Ben Sweet today.
Lovely, irascible, erudite, puckish, Ben Sweet.
Ben--no one I knew called him "Professor Sweet"--was a wonderful portly professor who taught for a time out at what was then called Community College of Denver, Red Rocks Campus. I know little else about his life or his death. He was in theater, I know, but where I knew him from was his classes out at Red Rocks.
He taught several classes on British history, and British Literature, I believe.
One of my proudest achievements in all my academic career was a comment that Ben Sweet made on a poem I had turned in to him. I was consciously mimicking the delicious over-the-top euphony of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I still remember this ancient poem of mine word-for-word. . .but would not, I'm sure, save for Sweet's delicious critique.
You have to understand that Sweet was an exacting critic. He was not mean--anything but--but he wore a flinty, no-nonsense exterior when it came to the subjects he loved. Here the subject was the English language. More than that: Poetry. Here he did not kid around. . .though that flinty mask always held a gaily glinting eye beneath a bushy eyebrow.
I had labored on the poem, working hard to get the sounds just right. It was short and not very deep, but stuffed with sound.
I waited for it to come back from the teacher. Ben Sweet was one whose opinion really mattered.
The single note-book paper sheet came back with Ben's comment at the top. "Almost good," it said.
From this man, those two words meant more to me than any number of facile As on papers from other teachers. It still thrills me, and I think of it often: "Almost good." Wow.
In addition to his British History and Literature classes, Ben taught his own invented course, one that was personally important to him. It was called "Jesus and the Challenge of Being Human."
Sweet's idea of Jesus was very particular and often at odds with popular images, and he spent the first class period making that very clear. His Jesus was muscular, bold, radical, and above all, socialist. Ben Sweet told us in that first class that he embraced socialism to begin with because Jesus was so deeply a commited socialist.
This afternoon I sat in a bar. Since I don't drink, I don't often sit in bars. But this place is right across the street from where I live, and it is a pleasant little place. Suddenly something Ben Sweet once said came back to me, and, thinking about it, slowly the whole amazing man appeared in my imagination.
He said it in that first class period of his Jesus class. It was a quote I so loved that I immediately wrote it down, repeated it often, and have never forgotten it.
Ben was in a fine fury about Jesus and who he really was. He was dissing most popular conceptions. With his feet planted wide, arms gesticulating, he said with rascally hellfire, "He's not just some bleedin' heart, hangin' on the cross, telling you not to have a beer or say damn!"
Sleep peacefully, Ben Sweet.
Lovely, irascible, erudite, puckish, Ben Sweet.
Ben--no one I knew called him "Professor Sweet"--was a wonderful portly professor who taught for a time out at what was then called Community College of Denver, Red Rocks Campus. I know little else about his life or his death. He was in theater, I know, but where I knew him from was his classes out at Red Rocks.
He taught several classes on British history, and British Literature, I believe.
One of my proudest achievements in all my academic career was a comment that Ben Sweet made on a poem I had turned in to him. I was consciously mimicking the delicious over-the-top euphony of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I still remember this ancient poem of mine word-for-word. . .but would not, I'm sure, save for Sweet's delicious critique.
You have to understand that Sweet was an exacting critic. He was not mean--anything but--but he wore a flinty, no-nonsense exterior when it came to the subjects he loved. Here the subject was the English language. More than that: Poetry. Here he did not kid around. . .though that flinty mask always held a gaily glinting eye beneath a bushy eyebrow.
I had labored on the poem, working hard to get the sounds just right. It was short and not very deep, but stuffed with sound.
I waited for it to come back from the teacher. Ben Sweet was one whose opinion really mattered.
The single note-book paper sheet came back with Ben's comment at the top. "Almost good," it said.
From this man, those two words meant more to me than any number of facile As on papers from other teachers. It still thrills me, and I think of it often: "Almost good." Wow.
In addition to his British History and Literature classes, Ben taught his own invented course, one that was personally important to him. It was called "Jesus and the Challenge of Being Human."
Sweet's idea of Jesus was very particular and often at odds with popular images, and he spent the first class period making that very clear. His Jesus was muscular, bold, radical, and above all, socialist. Ben Sweet told us in that first class that he embraced socialism to begin with because Jesus was so deeply a commited socialist.
This afternoon I sat in a bar. Since I don't drink, I don't often sit in bars. But this place is right across the street from where I live, and it is a pleasant little place. Suddenly something Ben Sweet once said came back to me, and, thinking about it, slowly the whole amazing man appeared in my imagination.
He said it in that first class period of his Jesus class. It was a quote I so loved that I immediately wrote it down, repeated it often, and have never forgotten it.
Ben was in a fine fury about Jesus and who he really was. He was dissing most popular conceptions. With his feet planted wide, arms gesticulating, he said with rascally hellfire, "He's not just some bleedin' heart, hangin' on the cross, telling you not to have a beer or say damn!"
Sleep peacefully, Ben Sweet.
11 October 2009
Two-Headed Monster
Talking to my brother, Roger, on the phone earlier this evening, I had another weirdly humorous reminder of the deep and sometimes strange connection between us.
I say "sometimes," because the two of us have long since come to laughingly take the whole thing for granted, expect it to happen, even, preternatural as its manifestations may be.
You have heard stories about oddly deep connections between twins even when the twins have been physically separated for most of their lives. Well, though we were born 15 months apart, with Roger and I, it's like that, too. Just like that.
To put it scientifically, the power of genetics is manifest in our lives.
First, there are the similarities you expect from brothers. We are both big, fat guys with roundish, chunky, cheerful heads. Our distinctive, buzzing voices sound the same. (This is a quality shared by our third, seemingly mutant, thin and wiry brother, Bill. It has something to do with our northern New Jersey upbringing.) In fact, when Roger and I still lived in the same house, we would occasionally try to fool callers by subtly pitching our very similar voices.
It goes beyond just the sound of our voices, though. It's the way we use those voices, too. We both have a digressive and discursive, detailed way of speaking that can be frustrating to more direct-speaking friends and acquaintances. On any subject that matters, we might start with what we consider important deep background. That is, we take it back to when we were little kids in New Jersey. Or further. Then we illustrate, we progress, we take side trips, backtrack, remember important details we should have put in earlier. We take, in short, the long way around.
That's what I gather, anyway.
So, Roger and I look and sound alike, or very similar. If you swapped my often longish, thick, unruly grey hair and goatee for his self-cut, wispy, one-time blond and pencil-thin Gable mustache, we could take a respectable crack at fooling people.
These kinds of things you might expect from brothers. Even Bill, whom at first glance a stranger might think is from a different family, exhibits some similarities. Some of these grow more and more obvious as the three of us grow older. When I uncovered my now-adult face for the first time in my life by shaving off my beard some years ago, I came to realize that, yes, Bill and I do look alike in some ways.
But then there are the odder manifestations I mentioned earlier.
Roger lives in Germany. He has been there since 1983. We are in almost constant contact by phone and on the internet. We love our instant messenger sessions together.
On the instant messenger it is a common occurrence that we'll both type the same thing at the same time and send it nearly simultaneously. Our wording might be slightly different, but we've both come up with the same comment or question. Often this seems like a new or unique statement to each of us, a new subject or drastic veer away from what we were just talking about. . .until we read that that other brother came up with it, too. Our brains followed very similar paths from whatever we last talked about to arrive at this same place. It has happened like that so many times that we hardly note it anymore.
Then there are the thoughts and even activities that we seem to be doing "independently together."
So, you got your car inspected on the same day I did?
You are also reading about the Civil War?
I had no idea that you, too, were a fan of the Pretenders.
When the weight of these "coincidences" becomes sometimes hilariously annoying, we might seek to assert our own individuality. And of course, Roger and I are different in many ways. Roger is a genius with his hands, with planning projects and following through with them. He is a brilliant maker. I am a ham-fisted dunderhead in this department. Roger is very much more talented musically than I am. He is adept at picking up instruments and noodling around with them, at figuring out songs. I have never been very musical. I try, but it is a struggle for me. Roger might say that I am better with words, but I'm convinced it is just a matter of where we put our attention.
But inevitably, the similarities return:
We are both birders, though Roger, as in most things, is far more diligent and serious about it than I am. We both have favorite birdwatching spots outside of the cities we live in. Both places are lakes. And one of the typical activities for each of us involves making our way to a wooden observation structure to get a better view of waterfowl on the lake. We didn't plan it this way.
To add another layer, in the "tape days"--the years when we frequently exchanged cassette tape letters--we'd sometimes find ourselves listening to a tape of the other brother's birding expedition while we ourselves were driving out to our own lake.
These types of correspondences, though amusing, are understandable considering our shared interests and basic outlooks on life.
The phenomenon is at its most amazing when it has nothing to do with opinions or values, but comes, rather, as a strange echoing of trivial events in our quotidian lives. Some silly thing that happened to me, or that I do in a certain way, I find that Roger experienced also or does the same way. The very unimportance of these events is what makes their correspondence startling, and, to us, usually hilarious.
Why would it turn out that we shave using not only the same type of razor, but the same shaving pattern? On our tapes some years ago, we kicked around the subject of odd things we do that we have never told anyone. That is how we found out that we are both sometime "step-counters": we habitually count our steps when walking from place to place. We both bought cars with sunroofs. We had never talked about sunroofs.
There is a paradox here, though: the more unimportant the action or event we share, not only the more amazing the coincidence, but the more difficult it is to remember! Who remembers these littlest of activities, sometimes as small as gestures or odd, inconsequential thoughts? So, even when Roger and I do weirdly share one, it tends to slip away quietly and disappear. They are the lint of the mind. They blow away in the merest puff.
I've been struggling with this, in fact, in working on this piece, and I have to apologize. I have been trying for quite some time, with Roger's help, to remember some of the more amazing examples of this correspondence between us. And what I have come up with arrives like lukewarm drizzle or small beer. Not that impressive, somehow.
But that doesn't mean the phenomenon is not real. It is very real. Roger and I feel it deeply and experience these funny echoes often. It feels, sometimes, like we are two parts of the same being, living different aspects of one life. It feels like we are a chunky, pleasant-headed colossus, one foot planted firmly in Berlin, one in Denver, spanning the Atlantic!
So, earlier this evening we were once again on the instant messenger, typing away about this and that and nothing in particular. Near the end of our conversation I was talking about my recent efforts to pick out the guitar introduction to "Stairway to Heaven" on my ukulele. I had only gotten as far as the first line or two (the first line repeats as the second), but was delighted how the iconic, oh-so-familiar opening notes of the song came out so easily on the uke. And I wanted to share it with Roger.
In a typical exchange of this two-headed, intercontinental monster:
Jim: Grab your uke and I'll talk you through it.
Roger: Grabbed already!
So we picked through the first 5 notes of the song, Roger getting it much quicker than I did, of course. Then came time for us to sign off the computer, as Roger needed to go to bed.
But he wanted to phone me first to explain something, which involved a little story of when he first left the country to go vagabonding in Europe. He wanted to actually hear my progress on the "Stairway to Heaven" intro, as well.
Well, this involved balancing my cell phone on a pile of books, papers, and so forth, so that it was close to the sound hole of the uke. I plucked a few strings to see if Roger could hear it.
And here came the occurrence that amazed me.
Roger had his uke in hand as well. He was plucking a few strings. And our instruments were in tune. Perfectly.
This would easily be explained if we both had tuned our ukuleles properly, to a pitch pipe or some other source. But we hadn't.
Or, at least I hadn't. Last time I tuned the instrument, I just tuned the strings to each other, and to a pitch I found pleasing. After failing to find my 40-year-old pitch pipe, I said to myself that the key doesn't matter. I'll just make sure the strings are tuned to each other, and forget about the actual key overall. After all, I was not playing it with anybody.
And it turned out that Roger's uke was tuned haphazardly, as well, a tone or two flat of the proper tuning.
I do not have perfect pitch or absolute pitch, or whatever. I don't even know the difference between the two.
But, like so many small occurrences in our mysteriously shared lives, like our lives themselves, our instruments were in tune.
Perfectly.
I say "sometimes," because the two of us have long since come to laughingly take the whole thing for granted, expect it to happen, even, preternatural as its manifestations may be.
You have heard stories about oddly deep connections between twins even when the twins have been physically separated for most of their lives. Well, though we were born 15 months apart, with Roger and I, it's like that, too. Just like that.
To put it scientifically, the power of genetics is manifest in our lives.
First, there are the similarities you expect from brothers. We are both big, fat guys with roundish, chunky, cheerful heads. Our distinctive, buzzing voices sound the same. (This is a quality shared by our third, seemingly mutant, thin and wiry brother, Bill. It has something to do with our northern New Jersey upbringing.) In fact, when Roger and I still lived in the same house, we would occasionally try to fool callers by subtly pitching our very similar voices.
It goes beyond just the sound of our voices, though. It's the way we use those voices, too. We both have a digressive and discursive, detailed way of speaking that can be frustrating to more direct-speaking friends and acquaintances. On any subject that matters, we might start with what we consider important deep background. That is, we take it back to when we were little kids in New Jersey. Or further. Then we illustrate, we progress, we take side trips, backtrack, remember important details we should have put in earlier. We take, in short, the long way around.
That's what I gather, anyway.
So, Roger and I look and sound alike, or very similar. If you swapped my often longish, thick, unruly grey hair and goatee for his self-cut, wispy, one-time blond and pencil-thin Gable mustache, we could take a respectable crack at fooling people.
These kinds of things you might expect from brothers. Even Bill, whom at first glance a stranger might think is from a different family, exhibits some similarities. Some of these grow more and more obvious as the three of us grow older. When I uncovered my now-adult face for the first time in my life by shaving off my beard some years ago, I came to realize that, yes, Bill and I do look alike in some ways.
But then there are the odder manifestations I mentioned earlier.
Roger lives in Germany. He has been there since 1983. We are in almost constant contact by phone and on the internet. We love our instant messenger sessions together.
On the instant messenger it is a common occurrence that we'll both type the same thing at the same time and send it nearly simultaneously. Our wording might be slightly different, but we've both come up with the same comment or question. Often this seems like a new or unique statement to each of us, a new subject or drastic veer away from what we were just talking about. . .until we read that that other brother came up with it, too. Our brains followed very similar paths from whatever we last talked about to arrive at this same place. It has happened like that so many times that we hardly note it anymore.
Then there are the thoughts and even activities that we seem to be doing "independently together."
So, you got your car inspected on the same day I did?
You are also reading about the Civil War?
I had no idea that you, too, were a fan of the Pretenders.
When the weight of these "coincidences" becomes sometimes hilariously annoying, we might seek to assert our own individuality. And of course, Roger and I are different in many ways. Roger is a genius with his hands, with planning projects and following through with them. He is a brilliant maker. I am a ham-fisted dunderhead in this department. Roger is very much more talented musically than I am. He is adept at picking up instruments and noodling around with them, at figuring out songs. I have never been very musical. I try, but it is a struggle for me. Roger might say that I am better with words, but I'm convinced it is just a matter of where we put our attention.
But inevitably, the similarities return:
We are both birders, though Roger, as in most things, is far more diligent and serious about it than I am. We both have favorite birdwatching spots outside of the cities we live in. Both places are lakes. And one of the typical activities for each of us involves making our way to a wooden observation structure to get a better view of waterfowl on the lake. We didn't plan it this way.
To add another layer, in the "tape days"--the years when we frequently exchanged cassette tape letters--we'd sometimes find ourselves listening to a tape of the other brother's birding expedition while we ourselves were driving out to our own lake.
These types of correspondences, though amusing, are understandable considering our shared interests and basic outlooks on life.
The phenomenon is at its most amazing when it has nothing to do with opinions or values, but comes, rather, as a strange echoing of trivial events in our quotidian lives. Some silly thing that happened to me, or that I do in a certain way, I find that Roger experienced also or does the same way. The very unimportance of these events is what makes their correspondence startling, and, to us, usually hilarious.
Why would it turn out that we shave using not only the same type of razor, but the same shaving pattern? On our tapes some years ago, we kicked around the subject of odd things we do that we have never told anyone. That is how we found out that we are both sometime "step-counters": we habitually count our steps when walking from place to place. We both bought cars with sunroofs. We had never talked about sunroofs.
There is a paradox here, though: the more unimportant the action or event we share, not only the more amazing the coincidence, but the more difficult it is to remember! Who remembers these littlest of activities, sometimes as small as gestures or odd, inconsequential thoughts? So, even when Roger and I do weirdly share one, it tends to slip away quietly and disappear. They are the lint of the mind. They blow away in the merest puff.
I've been struggling with this, in fact, in working on this piece, and I have to apologize. I have been trying for quite some time, with Roger's help, to remember some of the more amazing examples of this correspondence between us. And what I have come up with arrives like lukewarm drizzle or small beer. Not that impressive, somehow.
But that doesn't mean the phenomenon is not real. It is very real. Roger and I feel it deeply and experience these funny echoes often. It feels, sometimes, like we are two parts of the same being, living different aspects of one life. It feels like we are a chunky, pleasant-headed colossus, one foot planted firmly in Berlin, one in Denver, spanning the Atlantic!
So, earlier this evening we were once again on the instant messenger, typing away about this and that and nothing in particular. Near the end of our conversation I was talking about my recent efforts to pick out the guitar introduction to "Stairway to Heaven" on my ukulele. I had only gotten as far as the first line or two (the first line repeats as the second), but was delighted how the iconic, oh-so-familiar opening notes of the song came out so easily on the uke. And I wanted to share it with Roger.
In a typical exchange of this two-headed, intercontinental monster:
Jim: Grab your uke and I'll talk you through it.
Roger: Grabbed already!
So we picked through the first 5 notes of the song, Roger getting it much quicker than I did, of course. Then came time for us to sign off the computer, as Roger needed to go to bed.
But he wanted to phone me first to explain something, which involved a little story of when he first left the country to go vagabonding in Europe. He wanted to actually hear my progress on the "Stairway to Heaven" intro, as well.
Well, this involved balancing my cell phone on a pile of books, papers, and so forth, so that it was close to the sound hole of the uke. I plucked a few strings to see if Roger could hear it.
And here came the occurrence that amazed me.
Roger had his uke in hand as well. He was plucking a few strings. And our instruments were in tune. Perfectly.
This would easily be explained if we both had tuned our ukuleles properly, to a pitch pipe or some other source. But we hadn't.
Or, at least I hadn't. Last time I tuned the instrument, I just tuned the strings to each other, and to a pitch I found pleasing. After failing to find my 40-year-old pitch pipe, I said to myself that the key doesn't matter. I'll just make sure the strings are tuned to each other, and forget about the actual key overall. After all, I was not playing it with anybody.
And it turned out that Roger's uke was tuned haphazardly, as well, a tone or two flat of the proper tuning.
I do not have perfect pitch or absolute pitch, or whatever. I don't even know the difference between the two.
But, like so many small occurrences in our mysteriously shared lives, like our lives themselves, our instruments were in tune.
Perfectly.
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