I Am Stone Cold Sober, Occifer

My late and ex, a theater amateur in that best sense of the word that means for love alone, liked to tell the story of a summer repertory troupe in New England which became restive as, over a period of weeks,  wages were shorted or didn’t appear at all. Perhaps the management felt they could get away with stiffing second-string actors as long as their rooms and meals were all found. It is a brave man, however, who presumes to fuck with artists. As the curtain rose one night on the second act of some version of Tod Browning’s fairly awful Dracula play, the actor playing the undead Count rose slowly from his coffin — fingers of one hand over the side first, upper half gradually coming into view, you know the shtik. “If I’m alive,” he said in the rich, vaguely Eastern-European accents we expect of the King Vampire, “what am I doing in this coffin?… But if I am dead, why do I have to go to the bathroom?”

Legend has it that the troupe was paid full whack thereafter. I don’t know if it’s true, but it occurred to me early yesterday morning. If I’m asleep, how did I reach this familiar seat by the bathroom window? But if I’m awake, why am I seeing this in the back garden?

“There’s a frog on a bicycle in the back yard,” I said blearily as I crawled back into bed next to the Cute Engineer, who had spent the night after a marathon opera evening. I think he replied something like “bsiuytoihrslplk.”

David the gardener seems to have gone upbudget. For uncounted seasons he has suspended a used aluminum disposable pie plate from a stake, hoping to frighten off an increasingly brazen tribe of birds who pillage the tomatoes. It is quite a metabolism for such a work of craft to take the pie plate’s place, but he explained to me later that evening that his wife likes things like that. “I figured maybe that was it since I knew I hadn’t had a thing to drink when I saw it,” I replied.

I can’t decide if my excitement threshold has dropped to a dangerously low level.

Captain Hook

I used to watch the Danny Kaye show every bloody Wednesday night, but this was the moment of his that I searched and searched for once the Internet opened up the whole of filmed history to us. A few years back there was a grainy half-acceptable bit of it posted somewhere, but this one is worth passing on. A Peter Pan musical with Kaye as Captain Hook: you can have your Mary Martin version.

Bonus: when did we last behold such innocent joy?

They don’t make them like him any more.

Schubert’s Sentimental Viennese Sh*t

We were pulling out for the gym this morning when a bit of Schubert came on the radio — the Nocturne in E flat. (He liked E flat, I think.) Some music is romantic. Some is sentimental. And some slops ruthlessly over your shoes like the waves from a big lake of Spatlese and chocolate and Persian mint tea.

“Who was it Stanley Tucci played in that Branagh film about the Wannsee conference?” I asked the Engineer. We had watched it a year or so ago, a made-for-cable, underesteemed short piece based almost entirely on a surviving transcript of the event. The conference where they decided to kill all the Jews of Europe, and how to do it, you know, that one? I know more than a decent person should about the curious characters of the Third Reich but there are a few I am always mixing up. It was Eichmann, whom I am always confusing with Kaltenbrunner, that the often warm and fuzzy Tucci played neither warmly nor fuzzily. (Tucci resembles Kaltenbrunner far more than Eichmann, for what it’s worth.) Toward the end, after putting a recording much praised by his senior, the not inconsiderable violinist Reinhard Heydrich, upon the phonograph, Eichmann remarks: “I’ve never understood the passion for Schubert’s sentimental Viennese shit.” (About 5:18, here.*)

It is sentimental. Ruthlessly, full-bore, fifty-caliber, forty-weight and blow-molded sentimental. It works because Schubert felt the world that way, I think (especially after a flagon of Rhenish), and feared not to fling it out to us all in handfuls, like a delirious bridegroom scattering coins to the populace. I don’t know whether it’s more disturbing that a man can have the perspective of an Eichmann (which may have been a scriptwriter’s interpolation, but we all know them), or that a Heydrich can exist astride the disparate pillars of art and genocide. Or how much comfort it is that Schubert, dead at thirty-one, will live when people have forgotten their names, never mind confusing them.

____________________

*Downton Abbey fans: Yep. John Bates, aka Heinrich “Gestapo” Mueller. Isn’t thespian breadth wonderful?

Happy Mother’s Day From Philip Wylie

“When we and our culture and our religions agreed to hold woman the inferior sex, cursed, unclean and sinful — we made her mom. And when we agreed upon the American Ideal Woman, the Dream Girl of National Adolescence, the Queen of Bedpan Week, the Pin-up, the Glamour Puss — we insulted women and disenfranchised millions from love. We thus made mom. The hen-harpy is but the Cinderella chick come home to roost; the taloned, cackling residue of burnt-out puberty in  a land that has no use for mature men and women…

“Disguised as good old mom, dear old mom, sweet old mom, your loving mom, and so on, she is the bride and every funeral and the corpse at every wedding. Men live for her and die for her, dote upon her and whisper her name as they pass away, and I believe she has now achieved, in the hierarchy of miscellaneous articles, a spot next to the Bible and the Flag, being reckoned part of both in a way. She may therefore soon be granted by the House of Representatives the especial supreme and extraordinary right of sitting on top of both when she chooses, which, God knows, she does. At any rate, if no such bill is under consideration, the presentation of one would cause little debate among the solons. These sages take cracks at their native land and make jokes about holy Writ, but nobody among them — no great man or brave — from the first day of the first congressional meeting to the present ever stood in our halls of state and pronounced the one indubitable most-needed American verity: “Gentlemen, mom is a jerk.”

– Generation of Vipers, annotated 1978 edition

Protected: A Dedication

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Things That Happen In The Capital Of The Free World

Or right across the river, anyway.

1. I Will Destroy You With Mangoes

I used to get a massage in this building — in fact, it’s the place where, back in 1986, I met my first professional mentor, who eventually shared her lease with Sister Age some years after I became her mentor, and they both worked on me there, only the first lady I parted brass rags with after she had canceled my appointment on account of being “too busy” one too many times, and in passing given me one too many speeches about what was wrong with my answering machine message. She was from Northern Germany, a region where (at least from my observation) fault-finding is a form of folk art. Something in the water maybe.

Anyway the neighborhood is totally Latino now and there is this mini-mart called Miguel’s, where I have clear memories of unsuccessfully trying to buy an apple and a bottle of Deer Park when it was more of a video store, but apparently it has diversified now:

Police say German Cruz-Coreas, 49, entered Miguel’s Q-Mart on the 5500 block of Columbia Pike and demanded money from a store employee.

“When the employee refused, the subject proceeded to light coffee filters on fire and announced that no one could leave the store,” according to the Arlington County Police crime report.

The man started throwing mangoes and avocados at store employees and a 16-month-old child, according to Arlington County Police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck. He tipped over the store’s shelves, destroyed merchandise, broke the store’s slushie machine, and partially melted a television with the flaming coffee filters, Sternbeck said.

“He literally destroyed the entire store,” said Sternbeck.

Store employees barricaded themselves in a room inside the store during the incident, but the store’s manager was eventually able to subdue the man and hold him to the ground until police arrived and placed him under arrest.

Other than the Arlington PIO’s inaccurate use of the term “literally” (I drove by and the place is still standing), I am charmed by this account. I know of no television that would not be better for a little melting and no 16-month-old child that would not make me want to shot-put an avocado at it. But they hauled him off to the pokey anyway.

2. The Lunatics Are Running The Asylum

Gotta love the damage in the mug shot. This badass chick thing is catching on.

 

The chief of the U.S. Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Branch has been charged with sexual battery.

Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, 41, of Arlington, was removed from that position Monday afternoon, Air Force spokeswoman Jennifer Cassidy told Patch.

Krusinski, who worked out of the Pentagon, was charged this weekend by the Arlington County Police Department.

At about 12:35 a.m. Sunday, a drunken Krusinski approached a woman in a parking lot in the 500 block of South 23rd Street and grabbed her breasts and buttocks, according to Arlington police.

The woman fought him off as he tried to touch her again, according to police, at which point she was able to call for help. He was arrested and held on a $5,000 unsecured bond.

Krusinski and the woman did not know each other, police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck told Patch. She was not injured, he said.

Monday afternoon, Krusinski was removed from his position leading the Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Branch until more information could be obtained, Cassidy said.

“The thinking was it was best not to have him in this position right now,” she said.

The Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program “reinforces the Air Force’s commitment to eliminate incidents of sexual assault through awareness and prevention training, education, victim advocacy, response, reporting and accountability,” according to its website.

Further, “The Air Force promotes sensitive care and confidential reporting for victims of sexual assault and accountability for those who commit these crimes,” the site states.

Krusinski has served in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to Stars and Stripes.

Tuesday, the Pentagon is expected to release its annual report on sexual assault in the military, according to Wired.com.

[Credit: Arlington Patch]

Carl Sandburg

It is terrible to be a person who reads poetry, because you can be standing in front of your pantry looking at the splendid confections that are yours for the greenback at the local Trader Joe’s grocery chain store, and a trepidation occurs somewhere in your chassis, and you look around you at the washing machine and the computer-controlled HVAC system and think about how little of the world lives to this standard, and you think of Carl Sandburg.

The feet of the rats

scribble on the door sills;

the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints

chatter the pedigrees of the rats

and babble of the blood

and gabble of the breed

of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers

of the rats.

And the wind shifts

and the dust on a door sill shifts

and even the writing of the rat footprints

tells us nothing, nothing at all

about the greatest city, the greatest nation

where the strong men listened

and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.

The whole thing is here.