R.I.P. 2019

My fix on the contemporary world is slowly slipping.  Merely keeping up with headline stories is not enough--it is insufficient and distorting.  So I confess, for example, that apart from the obviously enormous and growing wealth of the few, I have little purchase on economics.

But I do more or less keep up on the fate of the planet from global heating, species extinction and other tragic destruction of the natural world that sustains all life, including ours.  And there the news in 2019 could hardly be worse.  The insane policies of the current US regime are beginning to take a severe toll on the nation's laws and policies, and perhaps most obviously on the world's will to address the climate emergency, as evidenced by the virtual collapse of the recent UN climate summit.

 Lack of US leadership, or even encouragement in the wrong direction, has emboldened the government of Brazil to allow the cynical burning and cutting down of vast areas of the Amazon rainforest, which is not only causing severe degrading of air quality and other problems in the vicinity, but which adds to the load favoring global doom.  Add this to relentless and expanding effects of melting at both poles, and any chance of saving the future seems more and more remote.

All of this is fueled by global social conflict leading to a growing imbalance in the human response to almost everything. The dark side of human nature is in the ascendancy: greed, hate, systematic and reflexive mendacity, willful ignorance and an almost inexplicable cruelty.

So 2019 was not a good year for the world and many people in it, and a potentially catastrophic year for the future.  Except for important reductions in severe poverty, and what now seems like the distant memory of the Obama years, there's little better to say about the entire decade.

As for those prominent people I knew of but did not necessarily know who died in 2019, when looking at the long list of them, I see my own world slipping away as well.  These were people who populated my life in some way, and as I have waning interest in (or access to) a lot of current culture, they are not being replaced.  This is part of getting old, and realizing it is part of dealing with the change.  But it's also true that the world is changing in ways it hasn't changed in generations--the ways we typically get the news, for example.

When I read some of the names, I recall first my experiences with these individuals, however brief.  James Atlas was a writer, editor and publisher I encountered a few times when we were both young men in Cambridge and Boston in the early 1970s, and had friends in common.  Even then he was working on his biography of the American poet Delmore Schwartz that was nominated for the National Book Award, and complained that Schwartz was invading his dreams.  My most extended memory is of an evening when the two of us detached from a larger group to go bar-hopping, and got gloriously drunk together.

I interviewed architect Cesar Pelli in the 1970s, when he was chiefly a designer of shopping malls (including Greengate Mall in Greensburg.)  He was a key voice in my "Malling of America" article for New Times and subsequent book.  His pronouncement on the mall's effect ("Towns disappear!") was an influential eye-opener at that early stage in my research.  He later became a prominent architect indeed of major urban projects in New York City and around the world. I remember him as gracious and thoughtful. (And in these photos, he looks a lot like James Atlas.)

Wofford accepts the Presidential Citizens Medal from
President Obama in 2013

Harris Wofford was Pennsylvania Secretary of Labor and Industry when I worked on a project highlighting PA Job Centers in the early 1990s.  Our most extended conversation was during a private dinner, when he talked about brokering candidate John Kennedy's call to the jail where Martin Luther King was incarcerated, which may have won him the election, as well as other tales of serving in the JFK administration. He recommended his book on the subject, Of Kennedy and Kings, as now do I.

I also recall that at one of our Job Center inaugural events, Wofford asked everyone not to use the increasingly common jargon of "servicing" people.  We service machines, but we serve people, he said. This respect for language impressed me, as did his urbane and--yes--Kennedyesque manner. Later he was elected to the US Senate as a prohibitive underdog, the first candidate to demonstrate the political potential of running on expanding health care coverage.

Among the musicians of my time who died in 2019 (including Ginger Baker of Cream and Peter Tork of the Monkees) I remember a more obscure one: Leon Redbone.  I saw him perform at a small club in Cambridge, from the front table reserved for music writers. He wore dark glasses and a broad-brimmed hat, and kept his head down so we hardly saw his face, as he played acoustic guitar and sang one old standard after another in his rich baritone. It was the strangest  performance I'd seen to that point.  Still, I got several of his records, and  I always hear "My Blue Heaven" in his voice.

When I met Tom Ellis in the WBZ television newsroom in Boston in the early 70s, a lot of people didn't know what to make of him.  With matinee idol looks and a sometimes uncertain grasp of words, it seems to some he was a model for Mary Tyler Moore's Ted Baxter.  But his newscasts led the ratings by a lot, and he hung in there, learned his craft, and stayed on the air for the next 30 years or so.  For awhile he kept jumping stations for more lucrative contracts, and everywhere he went became the top news station.  He was the only person in Boston ever to anchor number one news broadcasts at all three network affiliates.  After a stint in the Big Town of New York, he returned to Boston to anchor for another 14 years.  I can't say I got much of an impression of him, except that he was not arrogant or manipulative.  He was genial and hugely enjoyed what he was doing.

Speaking of the future, my research for magazine articles in the 70s on the subject brought me in contact with futurists Wendell Bell and Barbara Marx Hubbard.  Hubbard, as heir to the Marx toy fortune, was a kind of godmother to young futurists, kind and careful and probably rightly suspicious, though in a gentle, tentative way.

Others I never met, I remember in their historical moment.  Writer Dan Jenkins and screenwriter Christopher Knopf were making a big noise (as Anthony Hopkins might put it) in the 1970s.  Actors Anna Karina, Peter Fonda, Sue Lyon, Danny Aiello, Valerie Harper, Rip Torn, Peggy Lipton, Carol Channing, Phyllis Newman, Carol Lynley, Michael J. Pollard, Rene Auberjonois, Rutger Hauer, Bruno Ganz and especially--over some 50 years-- actor Albert Finney populated the collective dreams of my era known as movies and television.

 One of my favorite Finney films was Two for the Road with Audrey Hepburn (1967), directed by Stanley Donen, who also died in 2019. Donen had also directed the 1950s classic musicals On the Town and Singin in the Rain (which I've only learned to appreciate years later), the 1957 comedy Kiss Them For Me with Cary Grant (which I discovered on TV); the 1960s caper films Arabesque and Charade, the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore comedy Bedazzled (all of which I saw first run at theatres).  All of them fondly remembered.

The lovely Julie Adams lit up odd movies like Creature From the Black Lagoon and Francis Joins the WACs, but her long career confirms her acting talent and intelligence.  Franco Zeffirelli caught the 1960s youth spirit with his Romeo and Juliet.  Dusan Makavejev made one of the strangest yet most compelling movies of the 1970s with WR: Mysteries of the Organism. 

I had perhaps as many arguments as agreements with Harold Bloom's work, but I honor his reverence for literature.  Ward Just and Larry Heinemann were among the writers first ruminating on the Vietnam War after it was over. Paul Krassner was a provocative and often funny presence in the 1960s.  Ram Dass was his more spiritual counterpart.

Sander Vanocur with RFK

I read Russell Baker's column in the New York Times, and learned the news of the days from television reporters Jack Perkins, Robert Zelnick, Sylvia Chase and Cokie Roberts.  The on-camera reporting of NBC correspondent Sander Vanocur is forever bound with my memories of momentous events in the 60s, especially Robert Kennedy's assassination.  I'll never forget the look on his face during the all night vigil outside the hospital as he reported that the mysterious first name of the accused assassin Sirhan was...Sirhan.  It was a surreal moment that Kurt Vonnegut might have scripted.

And that's the paradox of mourning these deaths: they are so bound to moments of my past, with no likelihood that there would be such presence in my future.  In a sense I lost them long ago.  Their moment is fixed in time forever, yet their definitive passing still seems to depopulate my world.

So I mourn Joe Bellino, possibly the first football star (for Navy) that I recall by name from my youth, and Bob Friend, the oddly colorless ace pitcher for my beloved 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, whose record for the most innings pitched in a Pirate uniform is unlikely to ever be broken.  (Rex Johnston also died this year--I don't recognize his name, but he has the distinction of having played for both the baseball Pirates and the football Steelers.)

Other once-important names float through my journalism days memories--Harold Prince, Eliot Roberts, Robert Evans, Andre Previn... Their accomplishments are recorded, but some fame is fleeting.  Ross Perot was once one of the most important people in the US--he was the first billionaire who ran for President in 1992 as an independent and might have won if he hadn't dropped out and then reentered the race.  He ran again in 1996, and both times got more votes than nearly any other non-R or D candidate. Though he was a Texan,  my hometown of Greensburg, PA bragged that he'd married a local girl, with the wedding in Greensburg itself.  But his death in 2019 was barely noticed, and his name didn't generally make the "notable deaths" lists.

Lee Radziwill

Time stutters on, following its own strange logic. Princess Lee Radziwill died at the age of 85, twenty-five years after the death of her older sister, Jacqueline Kennedy. And almost exactly 60 years after Buddy Holly was lost in a plane crash, his fellow Cricket Jerry Naylor died in 2019.

May they all rest in peace.  Their work and their memory live on.

So with their passing in 2019, my world inevitably and inexorably got smaller.  These figures in the ground of my life leave me in a world of noisy strangers who can't understand me, or perhaps even see me, the Mad Hatter presiding over a phantom tea party, spouting nonsense.  I am left to live and grow and change--quite happily-- among the fixed stars of the past, and above all in the near and present.

  And what's that up ahead?  The first hour of a new year.

Note: In addition to previous posts here on Ric Ocasek and Jonathan Miller, I've posted on writers who died in 2019 at Books in Heat, and on Star Trek and Doctor Who related deaths at Soul of Star Trek.  

R.I.P. 2019: Jonathan Miller

Of all the people I didn't know who died in 2019, I was most saddened by the death of Jonathan Miller.  He was an important presence at various times in my life.

 When I was in college in the 1960s, one of my teachers (Douglas Wilson) mentioned this comedic satire by four young Englishmen called Beyond the Fringe. I soon acquired the album from their Broadway show, and pretty much memorized many of the bits.  In many ways it was life-changing, and certainly influenced my creative life for a long time.

The four members of Beyond the Fringe--Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Arnold Bennett and Jonathan Miller--were the Beatles of comedy.  Without Beyond the Fringe there would have been no Monty Python or Firesign Theatre, or possibly no Douglas Adams and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. 

 But this foursome was an artifical supergroup of funny guys from Oxford and Cambridge assembled by the official Edinburgh Festival to compete with its unofficial fringe festival comedies. After their Broadway success they disbanded, but while Bennett cultivated a career as a playwright, the other three stayed in the public eye throughout the 60s.  Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were the most visible, on British TV and a few Hollywood films (notably Bedazzled.) Miller was studying medicine, but kept get invitations to direct plays, TV shows and movies.

Meanwhile in my life, after intense periods in Boston and Washington I returned to western Pennsylvania in the late 70s.  I was freelancing for magazines and then working on a book, so my life consisted of short bursts of travel and long periods of relative isolation.  My intellectual stimulation came chiefly from reading, and was mostly embodied by precious moments on film and especially on television.

The Body in Question, Miller's series carried in the US on PBS stations about the history of medicine, was one of the programs of the golden age for such stimulating series that included Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, the James Burke programs, Robert Hughes' Art of the New, Ronald Harwood's theatre history All the World's A Stage, and Carl Sagan's Cosmos.  Probably the last were produced by Bill Moyers into the 1990s.  All of these were as important to my mental nourishment, sense of self, and my sanity.

Though Miller stopped formal performing, he was such an engaging talker that he was often featured on American talk shows, which were far more present and far more likely to hold some intellectual interest in the 60s into the 80s than since. In particular, he was given entire hours by Dick Cavett in the 1980s, often several strung together. His marvellous intelligence was inspiring and encouraging as well as stimulating. Miller's talk was absolute sustenance to me in those years.

 While I was aware of Miller as producer and director of several Shakespeare plays for the BBC project of filming all of them, and I'd heard him talk about at least one of them, it was years later in California when I was writing regularly about theatre that I watched tapes of these productions provided by the Humboldt University library.  It was then that I read with great interest his 1986 book Subsequent Performances, about approaching new productions of classic plays. Even more recently I caught up with his provocative 1960s television adaptation--or reimagining--of Alice in Wonderland on DVD.

directing Alice in Wonderland

In these and other ways, Jonathan Miller was a presence in my life over 5 decades, even though I didn't know him, never met him, and never saw on stage a production he directed.  Now, since his death was announced in November, I've been reading about him (including in a 1992 book, A Profile of Jonathan Miller), re-reading Subsequent Performances and watching what I could find on YouTube. There's actually quite alot: many interviews--including the 80s appearances on Cavett and several with Clive James, who died the same month as Miller--and a couple of television dramas he directed.  I've deepened my knowledge of the man and his achievements.

 He brought a fearless originality to his theatrical productions, while at the same time endearing himself to the people he worked with--particularly actors--with his humor, encouragement and respect for their own creativity.  Though he was the victim of clueless criticism, he got good notices as well.  Many of his theatre productions were hits with audiences, and several of his opera productions ran for decades.  Though I probably would not have agreed with some of his interpretations, they were dazzling in their daring and internal consistency.

directing John Cleese in BBC Taming of the Shrew

Though he brought conceptual frameworks to his productions, and coordinated designs (often selecting painters for his designers to see), he felt his contributions as a director were in details--in small moments and gestures by the actors.  His approach was informed by what his novelist mother told him was a function of fiction: to make the negligible considerable, and the forgettable memorable. The job of directing, he felt, was directing attention.

He used his experience as a doctor observing everything about a patient to collect small human gestures which he suggested to his actors.  To the madness of Lear and other characters, he brought medical knowledge of how disorder or old age are expressed in concrete behavior.

Bob Hoskins and Anthony Hopkins in
Miller's BBC-TV Othello

While his interpretations were sometimes controversial, they were always grounded in history and based on a particular logic, about about how people actually behave rather than some metaphorical conceit.

Some changed how many plays are now approached.  For example, after his working class Iago (Bob Hoskins), no production of Othello can ignore the precedent.  He made the racial components of Othello and The Merchant of Venice more realistic by softening the apparent differences, while revealing and sharpening racial divides in The Tempest--also an interpretation no subsequent production can ignore.


He enlivened classics like Hamlet and Lear and several Chekhov plays partly by emphasizing characters that are usually played as minor, such as Claudius in Hamlet. He approached opera as another kind of play, bringing new interest to audiences.

Those who worked with him often mentioned his humor, and the sense of rehearsal as play.  "For me, what is attractive about the stage is contained in the name of what it is we do," he wrote.  "It is a play and is playful."

In A Profile of Jonathan Miller, a notable number of actors and producers name Tyrone Guthrie as Miller’s closest resemblance in directorial style. In addition to his humor, they also mention his warmth with actors, inventiveness and keen eye for behavior. He began productions with a strong sense of time and place, and with a visual style selected, but collaborated closely with designers and actors to produce effects that worked for them, the audience and the show.

Miller’s work in directing opera transformed opera productions down to the present. Robert Brustein claims that Miller’s direction of Robert Lowell’s Old Glory transformed American theatre. “Alot of stage directors...know only about the theatre and not too much about anything else,” observed opera orchestra conductor Kent Nagano. “Jonathan knows about everything.”

In addition to his knowledge and intelligence, Nagano adds, “That’s what he brings into his productions—a sense of everyday life.”

  Miller directed tragedy, and in every play he looked for the irony.Whether or not it is a tragic irony, in the 1980s Miller helped found the UK's Alzheimer's Society and was an  its president for many years, using his skills and presence to bring attention to the previously obscure disease.  In 2019 he himself succumbed to it.  His mother died relatively young of early onset Alzheimer's, but Jonathan Miller, who once said he would be satisfied with living 80 years, made it to 85.

May he rest in peace.  His work lives on.

Poetry Monday: Prejudice Against the Past

The Prejudice Against the Past

Day is the children's friend.
It is Marianna's Swedish cart.
It is that and a very big hat.

Confined by what they see,
Aquiline pedants treat the cart,
As one of the relics of the heart.

They treat the philosopher's hat,
Left thoughtlessly behind,
As one of the relics of the mind...

Of day, then, children make
What aquiline pedants take
For souvenirs of time, lost time,

Adieux, shapes, images--
No, not of day, but of themselves,
Not of perpetual time.

And therefore, aquiline pedants find
The philosopher's hat to be part of the mind,
The Swedish cart to be part of the heart.

Wallace Stevens

RIP 2019: Ric Ocasek

Every late December I post names of people of significant achievement who died during the past year, especially those who don't always make the major media lists.  This time I thought I'd write a little more about a few figures that spark particular memories; whose deaths were more personal to me, even though I didn't know them personally.

When Ric Ocasek died, I was surprised to see that he was a few years older than me.  It wasn't only that he routinely claimed to be much younger, but that he didn't emerge as a rock star until the late 1970s and especially the 1980s, as the lead singer and chief songwriter of The Cars.  By the time the Cars broke up in 1988, Ocasek was 44.

This revelation adds extra delight, for it might be thought that by that time I was past the age of being engaged by pop music.  And there he was, making it.  In fact I was still listening and still making my own music, though I was admittedly in my last years of attending to the latest releases and hits.  My interest dwindled by the mid-1990s, except for following a few favorite artists, like Sting and Paul Simon, as my listening turned to other sources (African, Native American, the off-center work of Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass, etc.) and types (deepening my listening of jazz, pop music of earlier eras, and classical.)  But in the 80s and early 90s--particularly the first decade of MTV--I still kept up, and one of the bands I liked was the Cars.

Despite his exotic looks, Ocasek turns out to have a background I recognize, as he grew up in Baltimore and Cleveland.  He was apparently in Boston at the same time I was in the early and mid 1970s, though I don't recall noticing any of his bands then.  He might have been reading my music stories and reviews in the Boston Phoenix.  When he did break out with the Cars in the late 70s, I recognized his look from the popular J.Geils Band.  We used to see its members around Cambridge a lot.

I read one story on his death in which the writer--a southern California boy--identified the Cars literally with his teenage car culture.  Boston, where the band assembled, didn't really have a car culture.  What I associate with the Cars in my life is the last era in which the parties I went to would almost always include dancing.  I miss those days.

It was the last great pop era of dance, thanks to Michael Jackson and MTV videos. The Cars had that distinct New Age edge--their first albums had an art band feel-- but basically, their hit songs would have passed muster on American Bandstand of the 1950s, when the criteria was "It has a good beat.  You can dance to it."  In fact, it was hard not to dance to a Cars song.

The Cars string of hits was remarkable, and though they made 5 albums in their heyday, their Greatest Hits (first issued in 1985) contains everything I remember.  Some were songs he'd written years before, but once they broke into prominence, Ocasek rose to the occasion and gleefully constructed new sounds from familiar chord progressions and tunes in the pop/rock canon.   He was also capable of poignant ballads such as "Drive," and hybrids like "Heartbreak City," with its undercurrent of sadness.  Its these backbones that keeps these tunes alive, even as the then-cutting edge use of synthesizers can sound dated.

His lyrics however were unique.  He apparently had a background in poetry, particularly of the Beat era (at the band's Hall of Fame induction he named checked Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the now all but forgotten Richard Brautigan), and let his imagination take him through songs that alternately seemed straightforward and dangerously ambiguous.  He could sum up a chronological age and an era in a line like "you think you're in the movies/everything's so deep."



That line is from the Cars most celebrated hit, "You Might Think," immortalized especially by a groundbreaking video--it won MTV's first annual Video of the Year award-- that featured the model Paulina Porizkova, who Ocasek met shooting the video and subsequently married.

Ocasek made solo albums--I remember having one, which I liked--and produced music for a lot of other artists.  The surviving members of the Cars reunited for a performance at their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.  Ocasek died in September 2019.  May he rest in peace.  His music lives on.

Boss and Shout

What could be more natural than the sheer exuberance of "Twist and Shout" being revived by the most exuberant live rock artist of his generation, Bruce Springsteen.  Here is a performance before a massive crowd in Brazil, the final concert in the 1988 Amnesty International benefit tour.  You'll see Sting on stage, and catch a glimpse of Peter Gabriel, both of whom were headliners along with the Boss.  Catch this super enthusiastic, super hip crowd as they anticipate the move from "Twist and Shout" to the older song at its root, "La Bamba."  

Poetry Monday/Merry Christmas

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

William Wordsworth
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality
 from Recollections of Early Childhood"

Joyful Noise

There can't be many songs from the pop/rock canon as purely joyful as the Beatles' "Twist and Shout."  That's the soundtrack to what also may be the most joyful moment in movies (though in HD you can hear some marching band horns were added.) Shot on the streets of Chicago by John Hughes, in Ferris Bueler's Day Off (1986.)  En-joy.

Your Daily Lear: Lewis Carroll

Today's guest author is Lewis Carroll, from his "Melodies," part of Useful and Instructive Poetry (which, as you might have guessed, is a joke.)

There was once a young man of Oporta,
Who daily got shorter and shorter,
  The reason he said
  Was the hod on his head,
Which was filled with the heaviest mortar.

His sister, named Lucy O'Finner,
Grew constantly thinner and thinner;
  The reason was plain,
  She slept out in the rain,
And was never allowed any dinner.

Lights in the Darkness (with Update)

Amanda and Cameron at the impeachment rally in San Jose on Tuesday. 

New York City

San Francisco

Virginia

Des Moines, Iowa

San Jose CA

Sherman Oaks Galleria, southern CA

Photos from Impeachment demonstrations across the US on Tuesday, captured from San Jose Mercury News online.  Follow the link for all copyrights.

The House of Representatives appears to have more than enough committed votes to impeach Homemade Hitler.  On Tuesday, several Democrats speaking in Congressional session pointed out that the crimes described in the first article of impeachment are ongoing, and that they continue to be a threat to the integrity of the 2020 election.

Also ongoing are other instances of abuse of power, which threaten American democracy with the actions of dictatorship.  What the impeachment hearings have revealed most of all is the willing complicity of other members of the administration, the Republican leaders of the Senate, and the entire Republican party.

The Democrats in Congress had the constitutional responsibility to investigate and impeach.  Millions of Americans added their voices upholding the Constitution and the rule of law by supporting these efforts, including the thousands who marched on Tuesday.

All of this is preliminary to the decisive 2020 elections.  But all of it is necessary. A constitutional democracy requires responsible citizens and officeholders.  In the end, calculations of political consequences are secondary. They cannot be predicted anyway.

Update Wednesday December 17, 2019

The U.S. House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump, on two articles charging him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, both high crimes against the Constitution of the United States.

In a new development, it is now uncertain when the House will send the articles to the Senate for trial.  In an unprecedented insult to the Constitution and his own oath of office, Senate leader McConnell has announced that he will follow White House direction, and that he in no sense will play an impartial role, with no question as to the outcome of the trial.  Democrats have been denied the right to call witnesses.  Since a fair trial is therefore impossible, the House may deny the Senate the opportunity--or at least the fairly immediate opportunity--to in effect declare Trump acquitted.

Poetry Monday: The Breathing

The Breathing

An absolute
patience.
Trees stand
up to their knees in
fog.  The fog
slowly flows uphill.
         White
cobwebs, the grass
leaning where deer
have looked for apples.
The woods
from brook to where
the top of the hill looks
over the fog, send up
not one bird.
So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.

Denise Levertov

Krugman on Climate and Politics: Origins and Ends

It may seem that the US government's persistent failure to address the climate emergency with the required urgency, and in particular the Republican party's intransigence, is a byproduct of larger political forces.  After all, it is extremely rare to see this threat to the survival of civilization and life on Earth as we know it as the subject of the top story of the day.  At best, it is an afterthought.  So it must be a low priority politically as well as in the real world.

But economist and columnist Paul Krugman sees the Republican response to the climate crisis as central and generative--as how this all started.

There is no one writing today who thinks and writes with such clarity as Krugman, so I can do no better than to quote his most recent column at length.  It begins:

The most terrifying aspect of the U.S. political drama isn’t the revelation that the president has abused his power for personal gain. If you didn’t see that coming from the day Donald Trump was elected, you weren’t paying attention.

No, the real revelation has been the utter depravity of the Republican Party. Essentially every elected or appointed official in that party has chosen to defend Trump by buying into crazy, debunked conspiracy theories. That is, one of America’s two major parties is beyond redemption; given that, it’s hard to see how democracy can long endure, even if Trump is defeated."

Then in two paragraphs, Krugman summarizes the latest data and implications of it that has escaped the big headlines this week (go to the column itself for the relevant links):

However, the scariest reporting I’ve seen recently has been about science, not politics. A new federal report finds that climate change in the Arctic is accelerating, matching what used to be considered worst-case scenarios. And there are indications that Arctic warming may be turning into a self-reinforcing spiral, as the thawing tundra itself releases vast quantities of greenhouse gases.

Catastrophic sea-level rise, heat waves that make major population centers uninhabitable, and more are now looking more likely than not, and sooner rather than later."

He notes that taking action to address the climate crisis "was never going to be easy," but that the chief barrier has been extremist (which has become its mainstream) Republican denial.  He reiterates that this is not a byproduct but historically an origin of current Republican decadence:

"As I’ve written in the past, climate denial was in many ways the crucible for Trumpism. Long before the cries of “fake news,” Republicans were refusing to accept science that contradicted their prejudices. Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the “deep state,” they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.

And long before Trump began weaponizing the power of the presidency for political gain, Republicans were using their political power to harass climate scientists and, where possible, criminalize the practice of science itself."

Krugman points out that many of the architects of this extremist strategy have been rewarded with high federal and White House positions and influence.  In addressing why Republicans have gone down this road, he points to the enormous political contribution to the Rs by huge fossil fuel corporations, and to the "halo effect" that accompanies doing something good, like addressing the climate crisis. If that happened, then this might make addressing other problems more popular, but Rs oppose any progressive or liberal programs.  So they must oppose them all, especially one so comprehensive.

But he also admits that:

The truth is that even now I don’t fully understand how things got this bad. But the reality is clear: Modern Republicans are irredeemable, devoid of principle or shame. And there is, as I said, no reason to believe that this will change even if Trump is defeated next year.

Krugman concludes:

The only way that either American democracy or a livable planet can survive is if the Republican Party as it now exists is effectively dismantled and replaced with something better — maybe with a party that has the same name, but completely different values. This may sound like an impossible dream. But it’s the only hope we have.

Broke It

Yesterday voters of the United Kingdom may well have done what Hitler could not do: they set the UK on a path of destruction.  Who would have believed that it would end with conscious self-destruction.

 Until this day it was possible to believe that the referendum that started the bloody process of taking Great Britain out of the European Union had been an aberration, a combination of misunderstanding, apathy and sinister manipulation. But it appears this time the voters went into this with no doubt of what they were voting for.

They voted to retain as their Prime Minister their very own blond monster, the British Trump, Boris Johnson. Like Trump’s Republicans, the Conservative Party abased itself to serve him. Remember that Johnson literally threw out of the party those members of Parliament who dissented from his orders. This totalitarian act should have been met with institutional censure and his removal, but the Conservative Party swallowed it, and now they are owners of Johnson’s ongoing evil.

The effects of this vote may take some time to see, but eventually the UK will likely suffer enormous economic and political consequences, that will probably ripple through western Europe and around the world. Scotland is almost certain to secede, and Northern Ireland is more likely to rejoin the Republic of Ireland or become completely independent than it is to remain in the UK.  That is, if Brexit turns out to be real and not just the politically popular marquee on an illusion.

If the world is to address its greatest threats—most of them related to the climate emergency-- it will need to be more united, not less. Most importantly, it will need a common body of laws to keep its conflicts from becoming self-destructive. This is a big step in the wrong direction.

It can only shake any confidence that the US will right its own course in its 2020 elections. Right now the Republican Party is, without dissent, shamelessly and consciously defying the Constitution that is the most sacred of America's body of rules, that embodies the principles that are the very backbone of the nation. And it looks increasingly like they will get away with it, and enhance their chances of retaining the White House and continuing the country’s current path to totalitarian self-destruction.

The US and the UK survived Hitler because they had extraordinary leaders in FDR and Churchill. There was no such leader to oppose Boris Johnson in the UK, and it is beginning to look like there may not be one in the US to successfully oppose Trump.  Some pundits point out that a (slight) majority of UK citizens wants to stay in the European Union, but they keep losing elections.  Let's hope that's not prophetic in our case as well.

Don''t Believe Me Just Watch: It's All Dance

This has to be the best edited video of its kind.  Watch these classic movie dancers with funk music and draw your own conclusions.  Besides, it's great fun!  For a better view, go to its YouTube location for its slightly larger default view. (It doesn't look too good any larger.)

Poetry Monday: The Palm at the End of The Mind

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.


Wallace Stevens--perhaps the last poem he completed.

History of My Reading: Tales of Power

The 1960s psychedelic moment (subject of the previous entry in this series) was a gateway to other areas of inquiry, as well as to new understandings of human societies.  For example, the paradigm for mind-expanding substances leading to different cultural understandings of reality as well as spiritual dimensions was the series of books by Carlos Castaneda that began with The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge in 1968.

Told in the first person, it relates the experiences of an apprentice to a Native expert in medicinal plants such as peyote, who becomes an apprentice to this man of power.  From the beginning but especially later on, the literal truth of this account has been questioned, but these books changed the vocabulary in a lasting way.

Part of their importance is expressed by anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt in his introduction to the first book.  Stating that "This book is both ethnography and allegory," he writes more generally of anthropological work among Indigenous peoples that "the world is differently defined in different places.  It is not only that people have different customs...It is, rather, that the worlds of different peoples have different shapes.  The very metaphysical presuppositions differ: space does not conform to Euclidean geometry, time does not form a continuous unidirectional flow, causation does not conform to Aristotelian logic..."

Many experienced or at least glimpsed what Casteneda called "nonordinary reality" in the 60s through psychedelics.  Here was a link to ancient cultures that explored such realities, with something like a system of meaning explored in these books.

I have a specific memory of reading The Teachings of Don Juan in Boulder in 1969, where it was widely read in the counterculture.  But I really became interested in the series when I read Tales of Power in 1974,  then the previous two books (A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan.)  I eventually read the following four books in the series, which concluded in 1987, with a further elaboration in 1993's The Art of Dreaming.  

Each volume after the The Teachings moved farther away from a direct connection to psychedelic substances, as Carlos no longer needed them to gain access to this non-ordinary reality of Don Juan.  In this sense, it mirrored the counterculture. Psychedelics--including cannabis--contributed to interest in other areas, such as Native American cultures more generally, Eastern religions or practices, and ecology.

Some of the leaders of these awakenings were also veterans of the so-called Beat Generation, such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, so there were several streams feeding into these tributaries of interest.  But there were other figures who arose directly out of the 1960s counterculture, including a figure who had a huge following in the Bay Area, named Stephen Gaskin.

A Korean War combat vet, Gaskin taught English at San Francisco State.  Turned on by his students (who started the process by taking him to see A Hard Day's Night) he began holding a class in which he merged ideas from a number of areas of interest to the psychedelic generation.  These blossomed into his Monday Night Class, which drew thousands to hear him at the Family Dog ballroom in San Francisco.

Stephen (as he called himself) spoke in the vocabulary of that culture, organizing elements of Eastern philosophies and western religions, psychology (often Jungian) and esoteric sciences.  He particularly talked about "fields" of energy and telepathy.  These were not only discourses that emerged from stoned culture: most of his audience was stoned when they heard him.  (As he told them "stoned" is derived from "astonished.")  This added another dimension, so when he talked about "this matters" in both its meanings--as consequence and as physical stuff-- his audience felt the implications of the two together with an extraordinary depth.

Some of these talks were transcribed in a book, Monday Night Class.  I attended several of these sessions, which were mesmerizing but also at times overbearing. I recall escaping from one to walk by the ocean for awhile.  But his basic messages were simple and profound and in all senses, sensible:  We have all we need, including the ability to be more conscious and change for the better.  We can figure it out and act, peacefully and compassionately.

Stephen also organized the First Annual Holy Man Jam at the Family Dog in 1969, which included appearances by Ram Dass and Alan Watts.  (I was there, and I still have my ordination certificate as a minister of the Universal Life Church from this event.)

Alan Watts was a major cultural figure in the Bay Area, due to his years of radio and television talks, primarily on aspects of Zen.   I have several of his many books, but the one that was most current at this time was The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.  I probably also got the reprint of the long article Beat Zen/Square Zen/and Zen about this time, at the City Lights Bookstore.

Watts was the village explainer of Eastern and lesser known western philosophical ideas, relating them to politics, science and ecology.  But he was not a simplistic popularizer--he dealt with complexities and subtleties as well as exposition and making connections.   His prose on the page was clear and well-organized.  Though he had a touch of  bullshit ego in person, his English-accented voice and manner of speaking lent a down- to- Earth quality.  Many of his recorded talks are still broadcast and popular on YouTube.  The dated elements are more often about western society than Eastern systems.

A few years later, Stephen Gaskin led a convoy of some 25 vehicles (mostly old school buses) on a speaking tour through the states.  Some of those talks were collected in another volume, The Caravan.  I got a review copy of it at Boston After Dark/the Boston Phoenix in 1972, and judging from notations, I probably wrote about it.  Shortly after that tour, Gaskin led an even bigger convoy to Tennessee, where they set up a commune called the Farm.  Over more than 40 years it became the largest, longest lasting and most successful of the 60s communities.

Journalists scrambled to explain the psychedelic era and the "hippie scene," often with scurrilous results, occasionally sympathetically, as in We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us Against by Nicholas von Hoffman, who became more prominent in the 1970s, eventually becoming a commentator on 60 Minutes.  In this book he emphasized the Generation Gap, which stands out now as perhaps the most characteristic and almost unique element of the 1960s.

For those of us marooned in the Midwest, reading Tom Wolfe's account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was as close as we got to being "on the bus" at the high point of the psychedelic era in California.  Along with perhaps The Right Stuff, this tour de force remains for me Wolfe's best book.

But the book whose title at least first defined the era was The Making of A Counter Culture by Theodore Roszak, published in 1969.  In addition to the unique qualities of that minority of early baby boomers that comprised this counter culture, Roszak emphasized its rebellion against "technocracy," which harks back to Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd and before that to the work of Lewis Mumford.

In retrospect, what Roszak wrote now seems a highly personal view, questionable or clearly mistaken in some details, though he also got a lot right. But the book's biggest immediate and lasting effect was to give this phenomenon a name: the counterculture.  Only a few years before this book, the word "culture" in common parlance still chiefly meant opera and ballet, otherwise called "high culture."  Its meaning as an anthropological categorization was popularized mostly by Margaret Mead in her magazine columns and media appearances.

 It took awhile before Americans could see themselves as having a separate culture, and other peoples and other times having equally valid and self-justifying cultures.  Until then, there was just "civilization," the right way (the American way) with other peoples just ignorant and misguided, to be pitied, feared, reformed and/or subjugated. (This view, needless to say, recurs even in our time.) That other cultures could have different ways of doing things (like childbirth) or different metaphysical ideas simply meant they were wrong.

That their own children could be part of a separate culture (or, anthropologists insisted, subculture) was astonishing.  But the idea was widely discussed and debated, until it stuck.  It's been the counterculture ever since.

Roszak continued to write about the counterculture and its points of view, from the 1970s (Where the Wasteland Ends, Person/Planet) through to the 21st century, in a brilliant book that went by several titles until it settled on The Making of An Elder Culture.  Roszak also added another key idea to the cultural dialogue by coining Eco-psychology in a 1995 book of that title.

In the first decade of this century, Roszak and I began an email correspondence and maintained it for awhile.  I don't recall how it started.  I think we mostly discussed the publishing biz.  He sent me a copy of his 2003 novel, The Devil and Daniel Silverman, which I admired and enjoyed.  Roszak passed away in 2011.

The cultural--and countercultural--aspects of the 1960s cannot be disentangled from the political, mostly because of the Vietnam war.  The most important books I read on those subjects, coming soon.  Watch this space.