Author: admin

Today Ted Selker called me unexpectedly. He had been on his way to give the keynote speech at a conference in Barcelona but the security people at the airport wouldn’t let him leave the U.S. because his passport had been through the laundry one too many times. Apparently a ratty passport is now considered a threat to our freedoms and to our American way of life.

So I’m putting him up for the night tonight. We had great pasta at one of those amazing little hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurants that only New Yorkers know about, and then we spent hours happily talking about crazy computer interfaces.

Ted is the guy who is the most responsible for that little red pointer device on IBM computer keyboards (I’m using one right now – it’s what I used to draw that eye picture back in February).

Ted is one of those crazy inventors with all sorts of equipment and half finished devices in his basement shop, like the inventor Dick Van Dyke played in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I understand that people like this used to be everywhere back in the 1800’s. I We need more people like him in the world now. Not only do people like Ted make the world a better place with their innovations, but they make for really, really good dinner conversation!

I also think we need more inventors in the popular culture as role models for kids to emulate. We had MacGyver from 1985 until 1992, but that was a while ago. Who else has there been? Somebody help me out here…

Coincidentally, my friend Cynthia invited me today to see the Scorsese concert film Shine a Light. I say coincidentally because only yesterday I spoke of Placido Domingo – a man aged 67 in a performance that essentially conveys a romantic vision of a god. And only three days ago I talked about friendships between people of different ages, which prompted (to my great surprise) many comments touching on May/December sexual relationships – which I had not been thinking about.

Troy’s comments in particular seemed to wrestle with that question from both directions. On the one hand Harold and Maude is an ideal of the much older woman (played by Ruth Gordon) using a sexual connection to lead the young man (played by Bud Cort) away from his obsession with death. On the other hand, Troy also pointed out those unsettling relationships in which a man of seventy and a much younger woman have what appears (at least from the outside) to be a purely transactional relationship: He gives her luxury and she gives him the illusion of continuing life and vitality.

I say that this is all coincidental because Shine a Light takes a particular premise of The First Emperor much further. In Tan Dun’s opera we believe Placido Domingo’s Emperor to be a compelling and vital figure, but essentially a father figure – not a lover. That awesome voice is used to illuminate the soul of an attractive man, but decidedly an older man, concerned mainly with consolidating his legacy and power.

But in Shine a Light we are shown a different god. Where Placido Domingo was Zeus, Mick Jagger is Eros, god of love, lust and sexual potency. As Jagger is approaching 65, almost contemporary with Domingo, his figure of Eros becomes more interesting. When he was a beautiful young man in his twenties, it was an obvious choice. Everything about him exuded young sexual potency – from the come-hither eyes to the almost obscenely full lips, he was the ultimate sexualized boy-man, Peter Pan on testosterone, inviting young women out to play:

But now of course he looks completely different. His face is proudly craggy, an old man’s face. If anything he looks even more aged than his years. But the body is still that of a slender teenage boy, the eyes still flash with sexual mischief, and the energy is infinite. Cynthia and I compared notes after the film, and we realized that we had both been thinking the same thing: That when he was on stage singing and dancing, he was incredibly beautiful.

It’s not how he looks, it’s how he moves, the spirit that inhabits his body while he is up thre on the stage, as though one is seeing a Faun, a creature of pure pleasure and sexual delight. The concert was filmed at the Beacon Theatre in New York, and the filmmakers made sure that the front row of standing and swaying fans consisted mainly of beautiful young women, who all looked to be about eighteen.

I was particularly intrigued by the power dynamic between Jagger and these young women. He barely notices them – he is, after all, Eros and Dionysus all rolled into one, and they are mere mortals – whereas they can’t take their eyes off him. They seem completely mesmerized. When he sings Some Girls they are all transported. I know this is all conjecture, but at this point in the concert I got the sense that these fans were thinking: “This, right here and now, is what I wish sex with my boy friend was like.”

One concluseion to reach is that “age” is a red herring in trying to get a handle on human relationships – it is used as a signifier to stand in for other things, and the fit is not very good. The real tension – as I obliquely alluded to in a post several weeks ago – is between Eros and Thanatos. These represent, as Freud described it, the struggle within every individual between the will to life and the will to death – the constant battle between the joy of being and the pull toward annihilation.

Troy’s two examples: Ruth Gordon’s Maude and the old man “buying” the young wife, are actually on opposite ends of this scale. Maude is the Eros that rescues Harold from Thanatos. Her own real battles with death, including her obliquely referenced time in a WWII Concentration Camp, have pushed her to develop skills for embracing life, to the point where she is a healer – eventually this eighty year old woman takes the teenage boy to bed, and the film makes it clear that her influence has saved him from a life of morbid denial of joy.

In contrast, the archetypical image of the old man “buying” the young woman as a wife or companion is quite the opposite. In terms of life (as opposed to mere material wealth, which does not confer life) such a man is Thanatos – taking, not giving. He is in fact a vampire of Eros, drawing on his young wife’s vitality, since he has none of his own.

Jagger is very much in the former camp. Like all humans who become figures of Eros, he is erotically self-sufficient. He does not need the Other to provide his sexual empowerment and fulfilment – he embodies fulfillment. I think that the peculiar and enduring power of the holy trinity of American pop idols – Elvis, Marilyn and James Dean – is precisely that they are all erotically self-sufficient. People are drawn to the illusion of infinite Eros that they represent.

This image is precisely what Jagger is creating onstage, and the young women in the audience know this. I don’t think it is relevant whether any of those fans would actually sleep with him (they might or might not – I wouldn’t know), because that is not the transaction going on here. What they are drawing from him is the power of the fantasy that he creates of infinite sexual enjoyment. Because he gives, rather than takes, they see him as Eros, not Thanatos, even though he looks old enough to be their grandfather.

I think it is important, when we look at the dynamic between people, to account for factors on the Eros/Thanatos dialectic that transcend such relatively shallow categories as age, ethnicity or gender. For example, Oona O’Neil fell madly in love with Charlie Chaplin (they remained happily married for thirty four years) even though he was thirty nine years older than she was, and I strongly suspect she saw him as a figure of Eros. The bottom line is that we are drawn to those from whom we draw life.

Oona and Charlie Chaplin

We cannot change when we were born, or where we come from, or many other things about ourselves. But we can – any of us – choose to emulate Maude, to find ways of embracing Eros rather than Thanatos, and to continue at any age to reach out toward life with joy and a sense of fun. Sounds like a plan to me.

Today my friend Peggy invited me to the Metropolitan Opera to see Tan Dun’s The First Emperor, with Placido Domingo in the lead. An opera at the Met is always an overwhelming experience, a heady mix of pleasures: A non-stop ride of pure sensuality that you feel down in your gut, conveyed through technique so controlled and precise it makes your head spin.

In some ways it’s almost the opposite of the Broadway Theatre. On Broadway they work hard to create the illusion that we’re all just folks, that maybe you could go out for a beer with that person up there on stage if you happened to meet them on the right day. On Broadway people applaud when the star first comes on stage, no matter what the play or the role, just as they’d applaud a celebrity walking onto the stage of The Tonight Show.

An Emperor learns the great price of power

At the opera, nobody applauded the star’s entrance. I mean, what kind of idiot would start clapping while Placido Domingo is singing? You really don’t want to be making any sounds when he is singing. You just want to be there while it lasts, in a state of quiet ecstasy. When we hear him sing the role of Qin Shi Huangdi, China’s first emperor (he of the Great Wall and the Terra Cotta army), we know we are not in the presence of a fellow mortal – we are in the presence of a god. The wonderful illusion of grand opera is that these beings we witness upon the stage are creatures of mythological proportion, visions from our deepest dreams made flesh.

The Terra Cotta army

The First Emperor is unusual in that Tan Dun attempts to combine two great traditions that have virtually nothing in common – the traditional Peking Opera and our own Western opera. Hs solution is to not so much combine them as to let them live side by side – characters singing in the Eastern tradition are not so much part of the action as they are a greek chorus that introduces it, pulling us back to a time more than 2200 years ago.

I found myself wondering whether Domingo could have sung in the Eastern mode, but he was never asked to. And that was clearly the right decision – his skill is a culmination of decades of training in a very specific discipline, and that skill would not have transferred over to a completely different discipline. One might as well expect Michael Jordan to play baseball!

Placido Domingo filling the opera house with glorious sound

Tan Dun does indeed combine the two musical traditions where it can be made to work – in the instrumental parts. He incorporates such exotic elements as Chinese singing drums into the orchestra, to great effect. In one lovely moment, while the musician Qi Yao, sitting onstage, plays the traditional zheng (a large traditional zither-like instrument), she is accompanied by the two harpists in the orchestra pit. Suddenly we notice the similarities between them – two very disparate musical traditions coinciding and merging into one. I also liked the way the members of the orchestra were called upon to chant and rhythmically shout. From where I sat looking down at them in a box seat, I could tell they were enjoying themselves immensely. That kind of thing doesn’t happen very often at the Met.

With all that, it was in essence like all grand opera – a tale of blood and revenge, great hatred and even greater love, and the workings of fate in all of its magnificent cruelty. And everything portrayed with opulant visuals slendidly realized and sweeping music beautifully sung. Yet it all came down to those voices, giving us a glimpse into the passions of gods. I ended up thinking about something a music critic once said: The two most essential elements of grand opera are sex and the dominant seventh chord.

He’s a very modern thinker with a very modern mind
And overall exemplary of much of humankind

In ordinary circumstance cantankerous of mood
Disinclined to listen, and quite inclined to brood

Self-appointed arbiter of all things a la mode
Intent on self-expression in adornment and abode

His lofty thoughts ascending into gossamer hot air
Believing that he radiates a certain savoir faire

He’s supremely overbearing, sublimely misdirected
Secure within his mind that he’s a leader (unelected)

“I assume you’ve read that article? I really liked the quote.
I hope you’ll understand the implications for the vote.

“They really should have listened when I said as much last year.
Oh you never heard me say that? Perhaps you weren’t here.”

There is no use even arguing, you might as well agree
He is one of nature’s creatures and it’s best to let him be

For there’s nothing to be done, there is nothing one can say
The species homo hubris, I’m afraid, is here to stay

Is it possible for two people to be connected across the gulf of differing times of life? I have friends who are at various stages in their lives, different from my own. Some are younger, others older. Let us acknowledge right up front that people are concerned with different things at different stages of their lives. Yes, there is enormous individual variation, but a life has an arc, and in the various stages of life, from birth to coming of age to mating to death, we don’t generally have the life arc of Martians – any more than we have three eyes in our head – we have the life arc of humans.

Of course we can connect with someone whose age differs greatly from our own, up to a point. if the older person channels that part of their being that still remembers their younger self. But can we get beyond such trickery? Can there be a true meeting of souls that defies the conventions of age and chronological caste?

I would love to know other peoples’ opinions on this.

Clarissa enjoyed her walks. She considered herself to be a sociable creature, yet she was acutely aware that this amiable quality was, paradoxically, wholy contingent upon frequent access to opportunities to be unsociable. As she walked along, feeling the gentle breeze from the river upon her parasol, she mused to herself how delicate is the quality of tolerance amongst one’s fellows. There were many who regularly sought out her company, in fact craved it. Yet she was quite certain that, without her long walks, and the opportunities they afforded for quiet thoughts and inward reflection, she would quickly cease to project that pleasant persona which was assumed by those of her general acquaintance to accurately mirror her inner nature.

Clarissa was acutely aware that her “inner nature” was far more turbulent and dark than was generally suspected. She smiled ruefully to contemplate what might transpire were some unfortunate soul, seeking the uninterrupted pleasure of her company, to be granted his wish. That inner fire within her bosom which others could but dimly perceive, which in fact unfailingly drew the attention of ordinary mortals as the flame draws the moth, and the true nature of which she rather artfully deflected from the eyes of man, nonetheless burned with a heat that was perhaps not best suited for providing warmth and comfort to others.

The calm of the river, the coolness of the midafternoon breeze, the soft firmness of the earthen ground beneath her feet, these were her balms, the silken threads from which she would oft return to refashion her disguise. Three elements of nature, the power of air, earth and water taken together, could conquer the fourth – for a time.

Of all the mortals she had known, it was a continual source of surprise and delight to Clarissa that there was one whose company she did not feel any need to ration. For it happens that from time to time fire will find itself in the company of steel. Upon those happy occasions the former will serve, not to destroy, but merely to temper and to strengthen the latter. For the flame, weary of the danger that it might immolate all in its path, these are happy occasions indeed. To dance and burn brightly, to be a thing of beauty rather than of pain and despair, what spirit would not be heartened by such moments?

She was lost in these thoughts, her eyes cast downward toward the earthen path before her, when she saw a second shadow upon the ground, joining that of her parasol. Somewhat startled, she looked up, and found herself staring into a familiar pair of steel gray eyes. At the sight of those eyes Clarissa broke into a broad grin. For the first time in days she felt a truly untroubled gladness.

“Howdy ma’am, sorry if I startled you,” he said, tipping his wide brimmed hat. “There’s a little matter that I’ve been meanin’ to talk over.” He gazed down for a long moment, as if searching for his thoughts within the shadows on the dappled path. Then he squared his shoulders, and looked back toward Clarissa with a shy smile. “Guess I just been tryin’ to work up the courage.”

Today I got together with a group of people and we made puppets. People generally brought materials they had around the house. I happened to have a big bag of wiggly eyes that I had bought years ago, mostly because I had been hoping that one day somebody would ask me to help make puppets (really). I also brought various pieces of felt and assorted unmatched socks, which was no problem, because my socks are all cannibals (once they are in my dresser drawer it is clear that they eat only their own kind) so I have lots of unmatched one-offs. And I even brought a glue stick, a portable sewing kit, and a little package of Krazy glue.

Somebody else brought pipe cleaners, and yet another person brought Elmer’s glue, and so forth. Between us we were very well equipped.

Cleverly I had worn a sweatshirt today with a big pocket in the front, so I could stuff everything into that as I rode the subway to the event with dozens of craft items stuffed in my pocket pouch, feeling quite the marsupial.

I was also feeling very generous, handing out extra socks to other puppet-making friends in need. There is something wonderful about knowing that somebody will be bringing to life something that you used to wear on your feet. Well, maybe you had to be there.

Actually one woman there was afraid of socks – some kind of phobia, she explained – so she turned down my gracious offer for a sock upon which to build a puppet. Neither she nor we knew what to call this syndrome. We realized that there may not be an Ancient Greek word for “sock”, as the odds are quite strong that socks were not worn with togas (somebody please correct me if I’m wrong on this score).

Once we were all settled in, we proceeded to build, chatting away and generally having a marvelous time. The next time we get together we will be creating a film starring the puppets. We have not yet worked out the details of the script, but we already agree that a Creation Myth for our group is called for: The heartfelt saga of how a group of people got together to do things like make puppets that can star in movies about how a group of people got together to do things like make puppets…

So now we have all our lovely sock puppets all assembled (as well as one paper plate puppet, from the woman who suffers from sockaphobia). I am feeling quite pleased about the whole thing. I think I’ll go Krazy glue some wiggly eyes onto something.

If I miss you, is that “you” you?
If you miss me, is that me too?
Who am I to you today,
And how is that me anyway?
If I were someone else instead
Would he be me inside your head?
I guess then he would be your me
This other person that I’d be.
And what if you were she, not you!
Is it to her I would be true?
    Well then, perhaps they would be we
    And we could just be you and me.

As I said yesterday, Gentleman’s Agreement is ostensibly a film about fighting the evils of antisemitism. It comes complete with a subplot involving John Garfield as an actual Jew who is far more heroic than Gregory Peck’s make-believe one.

John Garfield fighting antisemitism;
Gregory Peck and Celeste Holm look on

But it is also something Hollywood takes far more seriously: a romance. There are strict rules governing Hollywood romances, and Gentleman’s Agreement was, in addition to its heavyhanded political message, a Hollywood romance. Moss Hart’s screenplay went by the book: three acts, with each act serving a very particular purpose. In the first act, the Hero meets the Girl, and they both intuitively understand that they are destined to be together. In the second act, a conflict (ideally arising from character flaws) gets the better of them, and by the end of this act the hero and his love are separated.

This moment in a film is generally filled with despair: it could be anything from George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) stuck in the alternate universe where his wife doesn’t know him in It’s a Wonderful Life to Alex Fletcher (Hugh Grant) trying to pretend his character still makes a lick of sense after the idiotic plot twist that has separated him from his lyricist love interest (Drew Barrymore) in Music and Lyrics (audiences generally know when their intelligence is being insulted by lazy applications of the formula).

Finally in the third act the couple is reunited, wiser and stronger for having weathered their conflict. They and the audience now know that the two lovebirds will have what it takes to raise happy and well-adjusted children together, which is what all the fuss was really about, down there in the subtext.

As written by Moss Hart and directed by Elia Kazan, Gregory Peck’s character of Philip Green finds his dreamgirl in Dorothy McGuire’s character of Kathy Lacy. Although she is a sheltered girl-woman without any interesting thoughts or ideas, and no real sense of the world around her, Kathy has the qualities that post-War Hollywood knew were essential to being a good match for the alpha male: she is really, really pretty, and it is clear that there is no chance at all that she could ever symbolically emasculate Philip by being his intellectual equal.

In a formal sense of screenplay structure, the entire supposed theme of the film – the problem of American antisemitism – is merely a McGuffin to separate the guy and the gal at the end of the second act: Kathy uwittingly reveals that she herself harbors antisemitism. Until she shows that she can overcome this problem, the couple will not be able to get happily together again to start making those babies.

The rules say that this low point in the film needs to be signaled by an event that is utterly catastrophic to the hero’s psychic well-being. In the case of It’s a Wonderful Life, the (very effective) signal is George Bailey turning into a raving violent maniac. In Music and Lyrics the signal is Alex Fletcher betraying Sophie (Barrymore) in a way that is both ludicrous and wildly incompatible with everything the audience has learned about his character in the preceding hour (which is why it’s a terrible movie).

In Gentleman’s Agreement the evil appears in the form of Celeste Holm. Now, it’s important at this point to emphasize that Celeste Holm’s character, Anne Dettrey, is by far the most delightful person we meet in the film. As I said yesterday, she is brilliant, witty, gracious, has a wonderful sense of humor and is enormously perceptive and self-aware.

And yet, as written and directed, the second act slump – the emotional low point in the film, the terrifying pit of ultimate horror from which, once fallen, our hero can never escape, is the moment when Philip, left bereft by his apparent loss of Kathy, agrees to go out on a date with Anne.

Philip Green (Gregory Peck) with his two women

One would think that this turn of events would be a cause for celebration: Philip seems like a sensible fellow, and now he has finally gotten away from that wet blanket Kathy and found himself with a far more interesting woman. Yet the scene is played the opposite way: The independent career gal, brilliant, witty, good natured, fun and self-aware, is shown as the Enemy, the great destroyer, “She Who must be Slain”.

As far as I can make out, this is because she is supposed to be a spinster – a woman who is somehow past her prime, living for a career but secretly desperate for a man. And this makes her damaged goods.

There are so many ironies here. One of them is that Celeste Holm was actually a year younger than Dorothy McGuire when this film was made. Another is that a film which is so proudly and self-consciously focused on exposing the insidiousness of prejudice, is itself the embodiment of an especially snarky and destructive prejudice of its own – a prejudice against women.

There is a positive note to sound here, which is this: A movie that made this particular set of choices would make far less sense to today’s audiences. The enormous struggle by women to be valued as something more than pretty baby-making machines has been very successful – although of course there is a long way yet to go. In this age of the Internet, smart, independent and accomplished women are highly valued, and are recognized as sexy women.

So isn’t it wonderful that a great early feminist icon, the character of Anne Dettrey, was played by none other than the mother of the father of the internet?

When audiences responded to the sheer force of Celeste Holm’s sparkle and wonderfulness in the midst of an otherwise dreary and tendentious film, and the Academy rewarded her performance with a well deserved Oscar, perhaps that was the moment when the cultural tide started to turn. If so, what a wonderful Mother’s Day gift Ms. Holm has given to the world.

As I was saying… Ted Nelson’s mother happens to be Celeste Holm, one of the greatest actors of stage and screen in the twentieth century. The film for which she won an Academy Award – for best supporting actress – was Gentleman’s Agreement.

This film iteslf was a polemic about antisemitism. (a “gentleman’s agreement” is an unspoken pact – in this case the unspoken agreement in much of WWII-era America not to allow Jews into housing, social clubs, restaurants, etc.). The set-up was quite simple: Gregory Peck plays a reporter who has just moved to New York and is asked to do a story about antisemitism in America. To get the inside scoop, he poses as a Jew. As Peck’s character experiences antisemitism first-hand, he (and the audience) gets a raised consciousness. The lesson he learns is quite specific: The real enemy is not the obvious racist, but rather the ordinary “good citizen” who goes along with racism.

Peck and McGuire share a moment

The timing of the film couldn’t have been more fortuitous: It was released in 1947 – just two years after the end of World War II. As America learned just what had been done to European Jews in the war, the nation was in a mood to be sympathetic toward Jews, even though antisemitism was still rampant in the U.S.. The film won three Oscars and was nominated for another five.

There are several women in the film, and therein lies today’s tale. Peck’s main love interest was played by Dorothy McGuire, a beautiful actress who radiated a kind of youthful femininity. Another woman he encounters, played by the aforementioned Celeste Holm (Ted Nelson’s mom), is perhaps the only character with whom we in the twenty first century can immediately like and sympathize. Not just as written, but also as played by Ms. Holm, she is enormously self-aware, open-minded, brilliant, with a gracious wit and a wry and subtle sense of irony that one associates not with characters in films of the post-war era, but more perhaps with the characters of Joss Whedon and Candace Bushnell.

The reason I think her character is so important is that the film’s explicit plot of unspoken antisemitism laid bare is accompanied by a secondary conflict: The film plays Dorothy McGuire’s beautiful and sheltered heiress Dorothy McGuire against Celeste Holm’s brilliant, fun and independent minded career gal, to an effect that speaks deeply to the theme of the story, but in a way that I’m guessing was not intended by the film’s creators.

We conclude tomorrow on, appropriately, Mother’s Day.