Snow ages us. One day after the 2016 blizzard, which broke all local records, we Baltimoreans are still confined to four walls, multiplied by how many rooms earned, rented or inherited. Snow falls, fells us into the future: tomorrow I will be sitting on the porch doing nothing save watching a squirrel nibble at a collapsing pumpkin, softened after a three-month-long stay on an uneven step; today a wizening septuagenarian is doing nothing but reading, talking--and, of course, writing--while sipping cocoa from a rocking chair before a crackling hearth. A crick in the knee feels like a harbinger of a figurative crack in the wall through which I, like us all, must eventually pass, into a landscape where snow is endless and never melts-- I hear the voice of an angel just beyond my front door. It is my wife's. Will you please stop writing and help me clear a path? Inevitability opens my cage. Blow, snow blow, shouts an intermittently youthful, unbent Lear, as he shovels snow into the wind.
Prose Translation: O you beautiful flake-time!/Wherever I look I see snow/ Snow's so cool even though white/Beautiful, leisurely flake-time!
An eminent theologian of the past century, the German-American Paul Tillich, defined God as one's ultimate concern. In other words, whatever is most important to you is your god. Since mind and body form a unity, your gods are reflected in what you do as well. A variation of this truth pertains to what your body "worships" in order to survive: you are what you eat. Sweet. Or should I say, sweets. When you walk into the supermarket in my neighborhood, this is what greets you:
This is but one of our many secular altars to what may be called The Sweet God of Premature Death. You will find in any large supermarket an entire aisle dedicated to soft drinks, where communion with this god can be bought at bargain prices. Walk into any convenience store in America and you will find a little idol house, a secular church offering its congregants a perennial rite where the wine is cola and the host is chips.
Most of us know that junk food is harming us. Most of us know that the queen of dietary demons is sugar. I am writing this article as a public service, since I recently discovered that hardly anyone knows the degree to which we are sacrificing our bodies and minds to (eventually Bitter-) Sweet Kali. Why do we need to cut down on our intake of sugar and how does one accomplish this? The answers to these questions are the subject of this article. Its specific objectives are two: first, how much sugar should we be consuming each day, and second, how does one convert grams of sugar into teaspoons of sugar? This knowledge is essential, as we shall see. The Problem The sugar problem is far worse than most people imagine. I will now provide a brief summary of these dismal statistics. Almost ten percent of the population of the United States is diabetic. Among seniors, it is a whopping twenty-five percent. Many cases remain undiagnosed, which means that considerable damage to the body proceeds apace without the mind even knowing that there is a problem. Even worse: 30% of the population suffer from pre-diabetes--often without knowing it. (Pre-diabetes is the state characterized by impaired glucose (that is, sugar) metabolism; if it is not countered by proper eating habits and exercise, diabetes will most likely develop, often in a matter of a few years.) Worst of all: 70% of Americans are classified as being either overweight or obese (17% are obese, roughly the same percentage of those who are overweight). The rate of diabetes rises in tandem with the rate of obesity. In other words, just about everybody needs to control their sugar intake. Why? The sweet tooth in your head is rushing you along on your inevitable dead-end journey from head to skull! Diabetes is now the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S. Heart disease, the leading cause of death, is associated to a high degree with both diabetes and obesity. Other leading causes share this unfortunate association as well, including stroke, Alzheimer's disease and cancer. "Killing me sweetly with his song" is a ballad every American needs to sing to every piece of cake.
As you can see, America is one of the very few countries that gets more than 600 calories of sugar per day. Towards A Solution: What you Need to Know Space does not permit this to be an in-depth essay, but it contains a very pithy message in the form of two objectives, as stated previously: how much sugar should we be consuming and how do we monitor our consumption of empty calories? The answer to the first question is simple: we should be consuming no more than six to eight teaspoon of added sugar per day. The average American consumes four to five times as much as that. Remember, we are talking about added sugar, not about fructose, the sugar found in fruits, which is metabolized more slowly. The answer to this first question, however, isn't really all that simple. Many people think that reducing sugar intake involves cutting down on table sugar alone. In fact, most of the added sugar we consume comes from processed foods in the form of high fructose corn syrup and not from the sugar we add to tea or coffee. High fructose corn syrup is in just about everything: cakes, cookies, ketchup, sauces, etc. etc. The biggest culprits are, by far, soft drinks.
(I must politically digress here, sorry. Most conservatives vehemently oppose food stamps. For instance, Jeb Bush wants to eliminate the food stamp program, now known as SNAP, The Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, entirely. This is unconscionable. First of all, the program provides effective nutritional help to those who need it--about fifty percent of whom work, yet still can't afford to feed themselves and their families adequately. The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan organization, states that for every dollar spent on food stamps the economy receives $1.50 in return. It is very much a win-win situation. Part of the Act which provides food relief to the poor provided subsidies to agribusiness as well. --At present, farm subsidies are mostly in the form of crop insurance, an indirect way of paying the wealthiest farmers directly-- This is not just a waste of money; Agribusinesses are responsible for the production of high-fructose corn syrup, which is enormously profitable, since it is found in just about all processed foods--in many, it's the main ingredient. In other words, taxpayers are paying to be poisoned.) How do we manage our sugar consumption. Another simple answer: we have to read labels. In America, calories from sugar are listed by weight in grams, not by teaspoons. The first thing people need to learn is how many grams of sugar constitute one teaspoon of the powdery drug. (Sugar is quite addictive.) What triggered my writing this essay is my discovery that very few people know the answer. My wife and I recently attended a party; while people were chomping down, I proceeded to ask twenty-five of them two questions: How many teaspoons of added sugar is the daily limit, and, how many grams of sugar are in one teaspoon of sugar? NOBODY KNEW ! Not one! Not even the diabetics! This is a terrible situation that is easily remedied. If you don't know already, and if you're like most other people you don't, there are four grams of sugar in every teaspoon of sugar. This is a very important piece of information that the makers of high-fructose corn syrup and, especially, the beverage industry don't want you to know. (I've heard that the beverage industry has blocked legislation to require that the amount of sugar be listed in teaspoons, which everyone understands. I wonder why.) If we should consume no more than eight teaspoons of sugar daily at the most, this means no more than 32 grams of sugar. One can of cola contains 39 grams of sugar! Now that you can convert grams to teaspoons of sugar, proceed to be horrified by the sugar content in, say, a Starbucks latte. There are many online sources that provide such useful information. An example: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/262978.php Try to determine the added sugar intake in your diet as precisely as you can for one day. You will be surprised! Two things you should do, whether you monitor the sugar in your diet or not. 1. Stop drinking soft drinks! Fruit juices contain almost as much sugar--Get your fruit from, well, fruit. Drink water instead, with moderate amounts of tea, coffee, and if you are an adult, wine--all of which have definite health benefits and are all, at least to this writer, enjoyable beverages. 2. Limit as much as possible the consumption of processed foods. If something has more than four or five listed ingredients, especially if they are chemical additives, put the item back on the shelf and proceed to produce. It's not hard to cook simple meals with lots of vegetables! And, of course, eat lots of salads. (Along with limiting sugar, one needs to exercise and limit one's calories in order to maintain a BMI (Body Mass Index) in the normal-weight range. Calorie restriction and exercise, both crucially important, are beyond the scope of this essay.) Summary This is not all you need to know, but it's a very important start: REMEMBER; ONE TEASPOON OF SUGAR IS EQUIVALENT TO FOUR GRAMS OF SUGAR REMEMBER; LIMIT THE CONSUMPTION OF ADDED SUGAR TO SIX TO EIGHT TEASPOONS A DAY, THAT IS, 24 TO 32 GRAMS PER DAY. You don't have to be Spartan about this: good food tastes best. If you follow easily obtainable recommendations regarding sugar consumption, you will undoubtedly feel better and very likely live longer. Not bad. Even better: See to it that your sweetness is mostly metaphorical! That is, if it is chiefly derived from an attitude dissolved in your mind and less from a high-fructose lolly that dissolves on your tongue, you will be wise as well.
This is the seventh edition of the Baltimore Book Club. Approximately every six weeks, we meet--we are a group of six--at the home of a member and discuss a book over a meal of good food and wine. As I informed readers in my review of "The Blue Angel," by Francine Prose, posted on 12/23/2015, our choice for the 1/4/2016 meeting was F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night." A few days after each meeting, I post a review of the work most recently discussed. Our next selection, (we will meet on 3/10/2016), is "The Notebook of Maya" ("El Cuaderno de Maya"--some of us will be reading it in the original Spanish) by Isabel Allende. We invite cyberspace members to read the book along with us, and to provide comments once the online review is posted.
Tender Is the Night F. Scott Fitzgerald Scribner, New York, 1934, 1982 315 pages "Tender Is the Night" is one of the greatest American novels ever written. It has been widely reviewed and commented upon; we decided that it would be a bit presumptuous to post another one. We will therefore provide a very brief summary and discuss the novel from a novel angle, which we call that of The Clever Contemporary--we will explain. The novel has a dual purpose. One is to portray the life of the fantastically wealthy during the gilded age, the Jazz Age of the 1920s. The other is to tell a good story, full of well-depicted characters and their interactions. Fitzgerald triumphs on both accounts. The central plot of the book is the moral and social disintegration of Dick Diver, a brilliant psychoanalyst. At the outset, the dapper, widely admired, high-living doctor is the center of attention, idolized by almost everyone. His basic problem is an inordinate need to be loved and a limited ability to love. When the women in his life, his wife Nicole, and the young actress Rosemary Hoyt, no longer need him, he rapidly descends into alcoholism. Nicole divorces him and remarries. Far from the high-life of wealthy American expatriates in France, he winds up in obscurity as an unstable country doctor in upstate New York. So much for summary; we will now proceed with our analysis under the rubric of "The Clever Contemporary." In 1947, Rudolf K. Goldschimdt-Jenner published a wonderful little book entitled, "Der Kluge Zeitgenosse, Fehl-Urteile der Kritik," ("The Clever Contemporary, Faulty Judgments of Critics.") We don't have to give examples of unwarrented put-downs from German literature, English literature has many examples as well: Emily Dickinson's poetry was not appreciated during her lifetime; a contemporary critic of Keats, one of the foremost poets of the English language, found his poetry to be nothing more than "imperturbable drivelling idiocy." We are certainly not going to be so harsh in our judgement of outdated notions that enjoyed wide currency in Fitzgerald's time, which albeit tempered by the alembics of genius, still found their way into the novel. Our criticism will be more in accord with an essay I wrote long ago, "The Folly of Our Times," in which I asserted--and still assert--that important truths are missed by previous generations only to become obvious truths in the future, much as one is blind to a large portion of ambient light while wearing polarized glasses. (An example: the--relatively--enlightened Thomas Jefferson "owned" slaves.) Let us now turn our discussion to such follies in the novel, which were widely accepted when "Tender Is the Night" was being written in the 1920s, (it was first published in 1934). 1. The Clever Contemporary: No more Wars The first section of the novel takes place in France, where Nicole and Dick are living in style with a wealthy set of friends and acquaintances, consisting mostly of American expatriates. They visit an area that was roiled by intense carnage during World War I, which had ended only five years earlier. Dick Diver says the following to Rosemary Hoyt, with whom he is falling in love: "See that little stream--we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it--a whole empire walking very slowly dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rags. No European will ever do that again in this generation." --page 57 Fifteen years later the bloodiest and most horrible war in history began. Dick goes on to explain why a European war is no longer possible. We sadly shake our heads in disbelief while reading this pathetically unprescient view of a clever, albeit fictional, contemporary of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald was not being ironic; he wrote this at a time when the trauma of the First World War was quite fresh. How could civilized people be so stupid as to choose war again? A good question. Unfortunately, they were soon to behave in an abominably uncivilized fashion, as we now know only too well. 2. The Clever Contemporary: Homosexuality is Evil Dick, a psychiatrist at a prestigious Swiss clinic, receives a visit from a wealthy merchant from South America who is greatly upset due to the "moral corruption" of his twenty-year old son: "I am at the end of my invention. My son is corrupt. He was corrupt at Harrow; he was corrupt at King's College, Cambridge. He's incorrigibly corrupt. Now that there is this drinking it is more and more obvious how he is, and there is continual scandal. I have tried everything--I worked out a plan with a doctor friend of mine, sent them together for a tour of Spain. Every evening Francisco had an injection of cantharides and then the two went together to a reputable bordello--for a week or so it seemed to work, but the result was nothing. Finally last week...I made Francisco strip to the waist and lashed him with a whip." --page 244 Dick finds the boy to be "handsome and alert," that is, quite intelligent and perky. Dick asks him which came first, the drinking or the "abnormality." The boy responds as follows: "I think the drinking is caused by the other." He was serious for a while--suddenly an irrepressible facetiousness broke through and he laughed, saying, "It's hopeless. At King's I was known as the Queen of Chilli (Chile). The trip to Spain--all it did was to make me nauseated at the sight of a woman." --page 244 Dick talks "pleasantly" with the intelligent young man for about an hour. "It was as close as Dick had ever come to understanding such a character from any but the pathological angle--he gathered that this very charm made it possible for Francisco to perpetuate his outrages..." Dick advises the unhappy young man as follows: "It's a hole-and-corner business at best," Dick told him...If you want to face the world you'll have to begin by controlling your sensuality--and, first of all, the drinking that provokes it." --page 245 Times have changed, and, in this regard, definitely for the better. The greatly increased acceptance of homosexuality is, however, fairly recent. When I was in medical school, in the late 1960s, I remember a psychiatry lecture I attended. It took place in a conference room that accommodated about 20 students. The psychiatrist who gave the talk was, I thought then, ancient--but was probably no older then than I am now. He suffered from a progressive neurological disease, however, and reached his seat with great difficulty. He also had a rather marked tremor in both hands. He was quite stern as was his wife who accompanied him. (She knitted throughout the session with a grim expression on her face, without saying a word; she reminded me of Madame Defarge.) The doctor asserted that homosexuality was a grave mental and moral illness. He commented that W.H. Auden was indeed a great poet, but was quite mentally ill due to his alleged deviant orientation. What bullshit, I thought, but kept silent, as did everyone else--most of whom probably were in agreement with the decrepit expert, whom I nicknamed "The Not-So-Grand Inquisitor." His view of homosexuality, however, had wide currency at the time. But not for long: The American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. Progress was slow at first, but steadier ever since. Who in my graduating class of 1972 could have imagined that gay marriage would be legal in the United States four decades later? I certainly didn't. The encounter between Francisco and Dick is, I think, quite subtle. Dick is a "clever contemporary," but not exclusively so. He realizes that the young' man's sexual orientation would not be altered by therapy or by willpower, which was a progressive view at the time. Dick views homosexuality as a disorder much like drinking--it is not a "sin" but must be controlled--a view that is no longer appropriate today, although it is, sadly, still the official position of the Catholic Church. Dick, obviously, is promoting a double standard: if Francisco had been "sleeping around" with women while at college, he probably would have gotten a pat on the back. Activity that is viewed in one case as "sowing one's oats" is in the other case considered to be scandalous, even though the oats, albeit sowed in different fields, are exactly the same. The idea that Francisco might eventually fall in love and have a stable, loving relationship with a man was not a thought that ever crossed Dick's mind--oh, the folly of the times! Dick, a charmer himself, is, however, undeniably captivated by Francisco's winsome personality. Fitzgerald portrays Dick, a character based on himself, as biased here, but much less biased than the homophobic zeitgeist of the times. Fitzgerald as the omniscient narrator presents, however, a much subtler picture. Francisco's father considers his son to be a horrible pervert. The narrator presents him as a intelligent vivacious individual of considerable charm. The implication is that the problem is with the father, and, to a less degree, with Dick. If Fitzgerald's position had been more in accord with the father, Francisco's personality would have most likely been colored with a much darker brush. The very understated implication is that Francisco is normal. Such a view was scandalous in the 20s. It is a tribute to Fitzgerald that he implied, albeit subtlety, that the scandal was homophobia, not homosexuality. He was able to laugh, albeit almost inaudibly, at one of the follies of his time.
3. The Clever Contemporary: Women are this and thats while Men are Thats and Thises Although gender roles were changing rapidly at the time "Tender Is the Night" was written, the untamed lions of patriarchy were still roaring during the roaring twenties. Proud male lions were still very much in control of the pride, even though, in the wilds of Western civilization as in the wilds of Africa, lionesses did much of the work. Fitzgerald did not entirely escape this rebarbative jungle, as the following passage from the book demonstrates: He (Dick) saw that no provision had been made for him, or for Nicole, in Mrs. Speer's plans--and he saw that her amorality sprang from the conditions of her own withdrawal. It was her right, the pension on which her own emotions had retired. Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such "man-made" crimes as "cruelty." So long as their shuffle of love and pain went on within proper walls Mrs. Seers could view it with as much detachment and humor as a eunuch. She had not even allowed for the possibility of Rosemary's being damaged--or was she certain that she couldn't be? --page 163 Before I discuss the gender issue, I would like to bring to the reader's attention two characteristics of Fitzgerald's writing, which are very much present here, as they are on just about every page of the book: remarkable psychological depth and a lyrical, figurative style of expression that is as beautiful as it is apt. "The pension on which her own emotions had retired" and "their shuffle of love and pain..within proper walls" are fine examples of the latter. The above-quoted passage contains a fine example of the former as well. The fictive Mrs. Speers rivals the all-too-real mother of Judy Garland in her ambition for her daughter. She encourages her daughter, Rosemary Hoyt, now a young actress, to have an affair with Dick not with a goal of permanent relationship in mind, but in order to get more experience and become more sophisticated. Fitzgerald, always the good psychologist, convincingly portrays her as a ruthlessly ambitious women, who, thwarted in her own life, transfers her insatiable desires onto her daughter. Most of us have encountered persons like Mrs. Speers during the course of our lives; only about half of them, however, can flaunt a beard. Fitzgerald's error, a folly of his time now apparent to us all, is that he partially excuses Mrs. Speers's behavior because, well, that's the way women are. I call this the Oedipal Fallacy, that is, attributing to nature what is attributable to nurture. Freud believed that the oedipal complex was an inevitable part of human nature. In his day, the women raised the children with love and acceptance; the distant fathers provided the discipline. In our day, many fathers are close to their kids; when fathers "mommy" the oedipal complex thrives as well as an oak tree thrives in the desert--that is, not at all. That women, thwarted in their ambitions, sometime behave like Mrs. Speers, is not due to the intrinsic nature of women, but due to extrinsic pressures of a society which demanded that female wings, as it were, must always be worn in a lady-like fashion, that is, clipped. Fitzgerald, however, was not a male lion asleep in the jungle while his females prowled. We have seen that his views on homosexuality were hardly those of a fundamentalist; similarly, Fitzgerald's women are far more formidable than the cardboard cuties whom the zeitgeist of the times espoused. One shouldn't forget that Mrs. Speers's ambitions were centered on a daughter, who, despite the former's potentially damaging interventions, became a successful, self-assured woman, whose inner pockets were as full of empathy as her outer pockets--not in pants, but in a pocketbook--were full of cash. Am I exaggerating when I consider Fitzgerald to be a proto-feminist? Perhaps, but just as in Lake Wobegone, all the women in the novel tend to be strong; the men, in contrast, tend to be weaker. For instance, Dick, who had everything handed to him, succumbs to his own narcissism. Nicole, who had everything taken away from her when her monstrous father sexually abused her, understandably descends into mental illness. Yet her inner strength eventually triumphs. By the end of the book, her assertiveness is the foil for her husband's passivity. Weak men and strong women appear throughout the book. For instance, Abe North, who, as a musician, has apparently been permanently diverted from the Yellow-Brick Road of Early Promise to the Dun-Stone Path of Ongoing Lack of Success, becomes an alcoholic and suffers a shameful death in a speakeasy. Another instance: the fantastically wealthy Baby Warren, Nicole's sister, is indeed a monster, but a very powerful one. The fiction of male superiority is more apparent than real in Fitzgerald's transcendent fiction. Although not immune from follies of his time, the omniscient narrator of this novel, that is, Fitzgerald himself, possessed great insight into the human condition. Not only that, Fitzgerald has given us perhaps the greatest portrait of the Jazz Age in fiction; not only that, he accomplishes this with the creation of a story replete with human, perhaps all-too-human, vivid characters, that hasn't lost its ability to amaze and delight almost a century later, and, presumably, for centuries to come. * We invite you to become a cyberspace member of our club. In addition, we welcome any comments you may have. We also invite you to read Allende's "The Notebook of Maya" in preparation for the eighth edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club. In the meantime, we wish you quiet hours of contended reading.
In part one, we briefly discussed how TV changed things forever. Once the big brass band of tiny black and white images marched into eyes and ears, we put all our books down and stared. Oh, no we didn't. That took time.
Ernie Kovacs In 1949, when we got our first TV, I was four years old. We working-class children didn't have much diversions in those days. Toys didn't talk back; and the few that did sounded as if they were dying from an awful, metallic disease. And who could have imagined then the menagerie that followed? Computers, cell phones, Ipads--lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my! Don't get me wrong--these are among the great technological advances that have improved our lives. We were living in the stone age then; we thought phone booths and dial phones would last forever. The potential for learning; the ability to communicate almost instantly with anyone in the world; the reception of entertainment of the highest quality--without them many of us would feel as lost as Charlie Sheen locked in a monk's cell. (There is, of course a downside to everything: an example of the misuse of technology--there are many--is described in a short essay, "My Walt Whitman Moment," accessible --via the internet!-- on this blog.) I don't want to descant, I don't want to rant; I would just like to briefly relate how TV changed my life and provide a little glimpse of how things were before it's too late. Although its words will remain in the cloud, this body that thinks them approaches a shroud. It's time to write a few memories down with the reader, young or old--that means you--foremost in my mind 2. In the early fifties, television was a family affair. That soon changed, as the networks added programs, some for kids, some for adults. Saturday morning was reserved for children. Howdy Doody, Buffalo Bob and the peanut gallery became staples. One show, The Buster Brown Show, featured a goofy Andy Divine, who attempted to tell a story. He would say something like, "Yesterday I met my new neighbor while I was on the way to the movies. He was walking his poodle, and I said, 'Howdy, neighbor--,' whereupon he was interrupted by a talking puppet of a frog who completed his sentence with something like, "--which one of you is the dog?" The camera then flashed to the audience of children screaming with delight. The frog didn't look anything like Kermit. He looked malicious and swayed to and fro with schadenfreude as he tripped up poor Andy. I forgot the name of the show, but an appropriate title would have been, "Little Brats in Training." Kids, with Froggy Gremlin as their model, were getting their first lessons on how to be sarcastic. We didn't talk back to adults in those days, but, with Froggy's help, we soon did. Our incipient rudeness was as accomplished as a five year old hesitantly playing jingle bells on the piano with one hand; it took a generation before kids dared play the scales of talking back to Mom and Dad up and down the keyboard like cross and spoiled Franz Liszts.
Another children's show, I forget its name as well, gives a good indication of 1950s TV technology. We had to get mom or dad to send away for a kit so we could interact with the TV. I was so happy when it came in the mail! It contained a little transparent plastic cover , which we taped onto the TV screen. Then we took a magic marker and, following the instructions of the program's host, would trace lines and circles that began to appear on the screen. After we had been instructed, say, to trace out two circles and fill them in with a yellow marker, we were told that the fun was about to begin. Suddenly the circles became the noses of two clowns; then they'd become the wheels of a car; then they'd turn into balloons on a string, each of which was held by a cartoon child. If the tech-savvy gremlins of today could have seen my amazement, what would their comments have been? "LOL! OMG!" I remember one Saturday when I couldn't find the little plastic protective covering. Refusing to miss all the fun, I traced the morning's worth of squiggles directly onto the TV screen. My mother, with good reason, was irate. I washed off the marks as best I could. Froggy Gremlin didn't make a sound; if he grumbled at all, he ketpt his grumbles inside. Our family began to be hooked. We watched more and more shows, and now not always together. Nightly activities began to center on TV shows. For instance, our English setter, Spooky,(1948-1962), the dog of my life, gave birth to seven pups in our living room in about 1954 while we watched The Sid Caesar Show. "How many now?" my brother asked. "We'll check during the next commercial," I replied. The programs proliferated--My Little Margie, Our Miss Brooks,Gunsmoke,The Today Show hosted by David Galloway and his chimp. Mugs, As The World Turns and, my grandparent's favorite, The Lawrence Welk Show, etc. I was especially fond of The ErnieKovacs Show. Although his career was short-lived--he died in a car crash--he was important in the development of the medium, and often broadcasted innovative, albeit weird, clips such as this one:
3. I Continued to Love Lucy In those days, before DVDs, NetFlix, etc. you only got to watch things once. (My nephew, Roger, who is making a film, recently told me that he had seen Casablanca about fifty times!) Much as primitive photosensitive cells, such as those on each limb of a starfish, eventually evolved into eyes, the starfish phase of what currently enables my son's roommate to binge watch old episodes of Frazier, began in 1954, with the advent of Million Dollar Movie, which premiered on a New York TV station, WOR-TV channel 9, in 1955. It showcased one movie every day for an entire week, sometimes broadcasting it twice daily. It began with the theme song from Gone With The Wind; the Million Dollar over-the-top version which I heard so many times will remain in my betz cell library for as long as it exists. Here is how the program began:
In 1955, Lucy was my idol still; when I found out from our copy of TV Guide that the feature film for the following week on MiIlionDollar Movie would be an old movie staring Lucille Ball, I could hardly wait to see it. The movie in question was a 1942 version of a Damon Runyon story entitled, "The Big Street" starring Lucille Ball, the young Henry Fonda, and, among others, Agnes Morehead. The first time we watched it together as a family; I subsequently watched it every day after school for a total of about five times. I didn't quite understand the film, but certain snippets from it were permanently deposited in my memory bank. After renting a copy of the film from Netflix and watching it with my wife a few days ago, and watching it for the first time in over sixty years, I will close with a summary and review of the film from a perspective very different from the one I had decades and decades ago. (Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan? Where are the snows of yesteryear? Melted. Thank God.) 4. The Big Street
The Big Street was adapted for the screen from a short story by Damon Runyon, who was a well-known journalist and writer at the time.. The name of the story is "Little Pinks;" It appeared in the January 1942 edition of Collier's Magazine, a once popular magazine. The movie was made the same year; the screenplay by one Leonard Spigelgass, must have been written very quickly. Runyon wrote sentimental stories, mostly about the demi-monde of Broadway and of those involved in the entertainment industry. His stories were centered in New York; the distinctive style of his writing, called "Runyonesque," attempted to capture the no-nonsense argot of tough NewYorkers. "Runyonesque" at its best is quaint and out-dated; at its worst it is unintentionally ridiculous. An example: As the arrogant Gloria Lyons (Lucille Ball), now an impoverished invalid, is carried by Pinks (Henry Fonda) into her new and humble digs, she must pass by the loving but unglamorous Violette (Agnes Morehead) who has been helping her; Gloria dismisses her with the following words: "How's your tapeworm, Sister?" That's all you need to know, I think, about the once famous and now entirely forgotten folderol called Runyonesque. The film itself might be classified by a well-traveled critic--who has had a few drinks--as an example of Alabaster Bolllywood--that is, glamorous inanities with music and an all-white cast. A brief summary of the plot: Gloria Lyons, (played by Lucille Ball, who was known at that time as "Queen B"--The Queen of B movies), a singer who is even more haughty than she is beautiful, performs in a nightclub owned by a hood, Case Ables. (She is obviously his mistress; censorship in Hollywood films in those days, however, was as strict as censorship in Bollywood films of today. No direct references to mistress-making was allowed. Anyone over twelve, however, had at least subliminal knowledge about the source of Gloria's diamonds. --I was completely unaware of their relationship when I saw the film for the first time(s). I have a good excuse: I was only nine.) Lucy/Gloria falls for a young dandy named--another example of Runyonesque--Decatur Reed. When she tells Case she has found a better date, he slaps her hard. She falls down the stairs and is, alas! paralyzed for life. Pinks (Henry Fonda) who works in the club as a waiter, not only loves Lucy, he worships her. He and his kindly working-class neighbor, Violette (Agnes Morehead), that good soul with the imaginary tapeworm in her belly, take care of her. Lucy is deathly ill--Metasisizing Paralysis? They sell all her jewels to pay the hospital bills. She is better now, but destitute. (There is a ridiculous scene in the hospital during which Lucy learns she has become an invalid. There she is, all dolled up, sitting up in bed trying to move her hips to a rumba blaring from the radio. After several boot(y)less attempts to wiggle her rump, she realizes that her rumba days are gone forever. She pouts, she cries. In the meantime, Violette has married and moved to Florida. Poor Lucy is cold and wants to join them. Henry has no more money, but if proto-Disneyland is what she wants, proto-Disneyland is what she'll get. He has no choice but to attempt to push her in a wheelchair all the way to balmy Dade County. After hitching rides, they arrive. Pinks plunks the still ever-so-glamorous yet immobile Lucy on the beach. Guess who passes by? Decatur Reed. When he finds out that she can't move her rump anymore, he can't get away quickly enough. Lucy, in a fit of Grade B movie emotional turmoil, lashes out at poor Pinks, since he's the only one left who listens to her. He can't take it any more and leaves her. Apparently Lucy's emotional state has exacerbated her Intermittent Metastatic Paralysis; she is near death once again. The doctor is not optimistic. Humbled now, Lucy wishes she could play the role of a bejewelled crooner at a big club just one more time. Pinks, of course, doesn't lose any time making her wish come true. Guess who has a night club, not only in New York, but in Miami as well? Guess who, along with Decatur Reed, has miraculously been transported by bad writing to Miami? Case Ables, mean as ever, agrees to give Lucy her big night. Why? Pinks has uncovered some of his criminal activities and threatens to report him to the police if he doesn't do what Little Pinks tells him. That night, during a lavish Hollywood-style gala attended by the haute monde. Lucy sings her signature song. (The real Lucy couldn't sing; it was someone else's voice.) She sits in a chair, dressed in a beautiful evening gown, big-lipped, big-eyed and pouty as ever. She realizes she loves Pinks now. She's learned her lesson. The hussy inside her is dead; the housewife inside her has triumphed. She tells Pinks that she will be satisfied with a life of knitting as long as they're together. Oh, but only if she could dance one more time! Oh, but only if she could see the ocean one more time as well! I'll help you, says Henry, with fierce determination. After a few halting steps, Lucy dies in Henry Fonda's arms. He carries her, limp as a rag doll, up the swanky, long staircase, while the soundtrack supplies a sorrowful version of Lucy's song; she gets her last wish, and sees, metaphorically at least, the sea. The movie is even worse than my summary indicates. When Lucy lies in the hospital, gravely ill after she and Henry break up, Henry and friends gather in front of her room. They ask her extremely serious doctor whether she will survive. The doctor gives them the devastating news. "Have you ever heard of--Paranoia?" No one dares speak. They apparently hadn't ever heard of it, but they surmise, from the doctor's expression, that it must be something terrible. The doctor explains: Paranoia is when you pretend you're someone you're not. Oh, it works for a while, but one day you discover the truth and..." You die! When Lucy finds out she is a housewife and not a hussy, it's all over. Were audiences in 1942 ignorant enough to listen to such rubbish with a straight face? Apparently; the movie received fairly good reviews. Apparently not: The Big Street was released in the same year as the sophisticated Casablanca. The target audience of a Grade B 1940s film was undoubtedly very different from the target audience of a Grade A one. The nine year old I was once didn't understand the film very well. Lucy, because of her arrogance, was sarcastically referred to as "Your Highness." The little kid really thought she was a princess. He never, however, forgot the words and melody of Lucy's (very mediocre) torch song, "Who Knows?" After watching the film for the first time in over sixty years, I went to the piano and played it. I didn't cry. I laughed. After the age of ten, my love for Lucy rapidly faded, At the height of my TV craze, I averaged about one or two hours a night. Now I average three or four hours a week. A dose of entertainment here and there is like a daily glass of red wine; it is very pleasant and good for body and soul. In larger does, however--well, you know what can happen then. Lucys continue to amuse us, but abuse us perhaps even more The American Academy of Pediatrics informs us that kids today spend an average of seven hours every day playing video games or watching TV. That's way way too much. Along with entertainment overuse came a whole host of ills plaguing society today: processed foods, obesity, unspoken conversation and unread books, to name only a few. The curmudgeon in me thinks that it is the drug of entertainment that keeps the working class pacified. For many the TV screen (or computer monitor) has taken over their entire field of vision. And yet there is hope: you have chosen to read this essay instead of watching another episode of The Big Bang. I wish I had entertained you better; I hope, however, that I provided some pleasure along with something to think about in a time-proven, wondrous and old fashioned way: with words. May your tribe increase! Yes, Inner Angel is still optimistic. Inner Curmudgeon looks up for a moment from a book of poems, shakes his head in contempt, and then returns to Keats.
