Governor Gloom Still Alive

When I was in college at the University of Denver in the 1980s, Richard Lamm, governor of the state of Colorado, was making national news. “People who die without having life artificially extended are similar to ''leaves falling off a tree and forming humus for the other plants to grow up”, is an example of one of his frank statements, earning him the nickname, Governor Gloom. I was assuming that he had died, but when I googled him I found he is still very much alive. According to Wikipedia Richard Lamm is currently a professor at my alma mater. He is a novelist and occasionally writes controversial articles. Why haven't I heard about him for so long?

The simple answer is that he no longer holds such a high profile office. But the more interesting answer can be found in the meditation on how times have changed. While Gov. Lamm was unique in his time, doom and gloom has since become the coin of the realm, the standard rhetorical currency of our time. Right or left of the political spectrum, we hear it constantly.

Republican candidate Rick Santorum invokes old-time indignation often. Lucifer is incarnate, his minions eating away the morals in literal ways. Stalinist legislations from the White House force abortion drugs, bought by employers under the onerous, monolithic Obama-care. An evil pall lies over the land, legacy of J.F.K., whose vile speeches are enough to cause Santorum to actually retch.

Less on the explicitly moralistic side, and more on the fiscal side of Gloom and Doom, was last year's great “chicken” game over the rise of the Federal Debt Ceiling. When Republicans took control of the House in the midterm elections they felt empowered to deny Obama's tax increase proposal alongside spending cuts. It looked like the U.S. was about to default on its debt, but at the last minute they agreed on some spending cuts and a debt rise. It was a white-nuckler.

Forever there is a gnawing fear about the astronomically, incomprehensibly high national debt, and what it portends for the future of Social Security and Medicare: an uneasy sense of doom somewhere out ahead. The same uneasiness can be felt in the EU, when similar “chicken games” play out, such as the recent agreement over Greek debt and bond holders' final haircut.

Doom and Gloom is equally important, perhaps even more important, on the left of the political spectrum. Climate Change policy is full of Doom and Gloom. The planets' population spirals forever upward, while resources dry up. Cities and countries crumble and flood, from New Orleans to Haiti, to Fukashima. Tsunamis, rising sea levels, and increasingly volatile weather patterns cause disasters or “reverse miracles” that could have been described in the wrathful prose of the Old Testament.

Back to Governor Gloom, here's an interesting predictive quote: "The U.S. economy will be debt-ridden, with structural unemployment nearing 20 percent. The U.S. will have the lowest percentage of capital investment and lowest growth in productivity and savings of any major industrialized country. The middle class will be wiped out by these inter-related economic predicaments. …”

Davy Jones

Hey Hey We're the Monkees!

The decade of the 60s hung in the air still, but only in the form of flotsam and jetsam. In the early 70s we kids didn't know what it all meant. Strange chemicals lay as chem trails in the cultural ether--Agent Orange, LSD, PCP, THC--and the ferrous-smelling molecules of recent assassinations, a heavy aerosol of blood droplets from RFK, MLK, Manson, and Kent State. Before Commercial News Network took over, the three old TV network ushered into our family rooms graphic scenes of  the marching carnal house that was Viet Nam, as presidents LBJ and Nixon painted themselves into corners.

Relief was at hand Saturday mornings when The Monkees took over.  Playing in a slot sandwiched by cartoons, this program was a zany adventure featuring a wholesome boy band, whose driving force, apparently, was Davy Jones. The style of filming was inspired by the proto-music videos of Beatles    zaniness. Jones and his Monkees, however, were not as testy as the original four, hardened as they were in habits from the underground years in salty districts of Germany and England.

After interest in 60s psychedelia ebbed, team-player Jones parlayed his career into a successful second phase as a valuable character in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Disney's ride at Disney World featured a roller coaster passing through a world of automated skeletons, spawning a model-building craze for the macabre. Concurrently, the works of H.P.Lovecraft gained sway, offering a cosmology lead by the tentacled one, Lord Cthulhu, crypt-keeper of the cosmos.

Medical technology offered Jones an unusual opportunity around the in the early 2000s when cyclosporine, a imminosuppressive drug derived from a Norwegian fungus, was discovered. This allowed Jones to have one of the first human-cephalapod partial facial transplants. He thrived with his new role and look, bringing a prehensile realism to his role in the Pirates movies. Despite his unorthodox look and physical state, his recent death appears to be natural. 

Grandpa

While rooting around in my closet archives last night, looking for Indian artifacts, I found this pastel of my Grandpa, Walter Scott. I'm astonished at how the years have gone by--I did it way back in 1979--33 years ago?!  There's some anatomical awkwardness in the drawing, but it captures his essence well. 

He was a quite serious man, to put it mildly. But he showed a lighter side from time to time, such as during the day he sat for this portrait, wearing a yellow shirt.

Infinite vs. finite

Yves Tanguy was one of those guys whose lifespan is easy to calculate, born in 1900, dying in '55, at the age of 55. When I was young there were a lot of such figures, including my maternal grandfather, who were born around that time. It was always easy to know how old they were when they died. Now it takes better math skills to calculate lifespans.

I hadn't thought of Tanguy for some years, but his paintings were intriguing and important to me early on. Even when I was 7 years I gazed at this enigmatic painting, featured in a small art book:

The title, too, was strange:

"Mama, Papa is Wounded!" (1927)

Why are his paintings so accessible and intriguing to even the youngest minds? Perhaps it is because he used a variety of traditional strategies. He created a real world, full of great detail, sculpted with a uniform light source. Perspective is also uniform and linear, most evident in the shadows of the biometric forms.

This posting is actually inspired by reading an article by the art critic Herbert Reed, who interpreted this era while it was still avant guard. I especially like this photo of him gazing at a strange sculpture.  "Biomorphic form" was big then; we were fascinated by archetypes and the world of Carl Jung and the surrealists. We invented and distilled forms, rather than merely copying and quoting images as we tend to do now, in this post-modern time.


The visual world sure had a lot of bite in those days. The space in paintings looked infinite.  

Alfred Hitchcock was a filmmaker who liked to use artists who mastered this infinite sense of space, as shown here, a backdrop by Salvador Dali. He used backdrops and hanging miniatures to great effect in his films. That they were painted made his films not less real, but more real. The impression was visceral. I have the feeling now, when I look at art or film, that space is not so much infinite, as it is finite: numerical.

Many of the image-makers who come to the forefront now have some keenness as artists, but I have the increasingly common suspicion that they have gotten to their position not through their experience with the painter's palette, but more through their experience with number-crunching and codes. 

For example: the current series Spartacus, despite its wish to impose a visceral feel (certainly enough guts splashed about!), leaves us with a removed, gray feeling. Space is digital, numerical. No longer are video games looking more like movies; movies are looking more like video games!

"Dare Ya" Conrad Still Alive

The other day I watched another beloved early Columbo episode, Exercise in Fatality, 1974. The guest star was the once ubiquitous Robert Conrad, not only a good character actor, but lead role of a few different series, the best being the surreal Wild Wild West.

In the Columbo episode he played a cocky health club owner and money launderer turned murderer. Conrad was perfectly cast, the actor exuding cockiness and vitality. A bit later on he became well known as the guy who "dares ya", to challenge him, sporting a battery on his shoulder.

I wondered if he was still alive. I hadn't heard or seen a scrap about him in decades; such a vital man long silent in the public ether does not portend well. But lo and behold, when I googled him, I found him to be still in the land of the living. Apparently his shyness toward the public eye is due not to age, (of which there is some debate), but to a drunk driving crash in 2003. Driving a jaguar, he veered into a head-on collision. Like the Columbo episode, it turned out to be an exercise in fatality for the other driver, who eventually succumbed to injuries after years (according to his family.) Conrad seems to have recovered. 

I find it strange that I hadn't heard about any of this; Mel Gibson's incident got a huge amount of air time, chatter in the cultural ether, despite being more trivial. Perhaps it was the Iraq War, clanking into top gear that year, that overshadowed the interest.

Ur-prof Kenner

I can't remember the last time I read or heard Hugh Kenner,  the archetypal professor. Some days ago I was hearing some podcast from NPR featuring an author or authority, jogging my memory; something in the speaker's voice recalled Kenner's. There was an unusual quality about it, a sinus irregularity coupled with eccentric wit. 

I wondered if Kenner was still alive? The prognosis was was not too good, being that I may have last seen him 2 decades ago on some program like William F. Buckley's Firing Line. Sure enough, he departed this mortal coil nearly a decade ago, in 2003. Pictured left is how I remember him: classic seersucker and bow tie, with professorial hair.

His field was literature, often a guest on PBS shows. I probably first heard him discuss Waugh on an epilog to the first broadcast of Brideshead Revisted.

Do we still have characters like this in the audio visual public realm?  I tend to doubt it. The newer higher brow (and for that matter, lower brow) pundits are more telegenic.  The topics discussed are more pithy, less idiosyncratic. 

The Saturday Book

John Hadfield, editor and author, lived up into recent times (1999.)

Here is a bare-bones paragraph from Wikipedia, describing Hadfield's labor of love, and subject of this post:

The Saturday Book was an annual miscellany, published 1941-1975, reaching 34 volumes. (It) provided literary and artistic commentary about life in Great Britain during the Second World War and ensuing decades. It covered a range of arts, including ballet and music. Many writers contributed verse as well as essays.

The above paragraph is perfectly objective and correct, but arid. I am grateful that there is even a wiki entry; it would not have surprised me if the book were entirely unacknowledged in today's world. Its many thousands of beautiful pages have evidently fallen into obscurity.

A typically high-quality photo from the Saturday Book, which accompanied a history and guide to London street markets

I rarely meet a Briton who has heard of The Saturday Book; this seems odd, for the publication looks to be an institution spanning decades (1941-75), printed yearly around Christmas with craft and care as a substantial hardcover book. I have collected it for years, owning about half of the volumes. They are becoming rarer these days, but not overly valuable. Each new acquisition is the subject of anticipation, every page worth poring over.

Respective volumes have loose themes, amply illustrated with line art, photographs, and reproductions of various artifacts both in color and black and white. The books themselves are works of art, the typeface crisp as each engraving, printed with the slight relief of letterpress. Chapters and sections are printed on varying tints and textures of paper; this was the era when a great deal of thought and effort was put into printing.

A photo of a painting by James Pryde, which accompanied a monographic article, by Derek Hudson, on the unusual artist. Such essays were the norm in the Saturday Book, bringing to light forgotten and strange curiosities at each turn of the page, recalling the thrill of turning a corners within a quixotic, private museum.

The name Saturday Book implies leisure, weekend, or something done outside of one's real vocation. The entries seem to be products of extremely competent amateurs—amateurs in the old sense of the word, such as Sherlock Holmes being an Amateur (hence, the best) detective. Eccentricity reigns. Authorities and historians stroll down lanes of memory, opening up to us dear niches. Early cigarette trading cards, seaside paperweights, taxidermic dioramas of nursery rhymes...

What makes the Book so compelling is that it is a nostalgia for a nostalgia. Inevitably the writer will be describing some phenomenon wistfully, thinking of Victorian or regency times, around 1890 or 1912. That does seem to be a span back there, but it is within the living memory of the writer. 

In 1962 he is describing 1912—a scant 50 years previous: the same amount of time that now divides his writing from my reading of it. 

In this way there is a mystery and mysticism within each and every photo and word. The author's nostalgia transfuses into my own nostalgia. I imagine and smell the wooden desk and typewriter of that time, as well as the poignant smells of taffy, cigars and seaside from the earlier time, subject of the author's memory. 

The Saturday Book offers a window into a world that seems whole and wholesome, glazed or preserved not by one nostalgic layer, but two. Double-glazed!