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Sunday, October 21
THE DIFFICULTY OF DEALING WITH GOD
by
Lloydville
on Sun 21 Oct 2007 09:08 AM PDT
 A guy is talking with God and he says, "God, what is a million years to you?" God says, "A million years is a second to me." The guy says, "God, what is a million dollars to you?" God says, "A million dollars is a penny to me." The guy says, "God, could I have a penny?" God says, "Sure -- just a second." Wednesday, October 17
THE DARK FIFTIES
by
Lloydville
on Wed 17 Oct 2007 02:08 AM PDT
 We sometimes think of the Fifties, the Eisenhower years, as a time of blandness, naive optimism and conformity. As a kid in the Fifties that's how it seemed to me -- I took everything at face value. I was a member of the Mickey Mouse Club -- I had the ears.  Looking back today at the popular culture of the Fifties, with wiser eyes, perhaps, the picture is much different. The sunny side of things looks like the thinnest of veneers. Film noir flourished in the Fifties. Pulp fiction got unspeakably bleak and harrowing. The subversive sexuality and energy of rock and roll bubbled up from the black underclass with astonishing ferocity. Some white performers tried their best to tone it down, but it stayed dirty. Ed Sullivan could present it as a kind of vaudeville novelty act, but kids knew better -- soon it would become the soundtrack for everybody's life.  The Beats had already started turning on and dropping out, in an unsettling but compelling rehearsal for the Sixties. At the time it seemed like a bizarre aberration.  The film cycle depicting middle-class teen-aged angst and rebellion was born.  An old guy to the Brando character in The Wild One: "What are you kids rebelling against?" Brando: "What have you got?"  Low-budget sci-fi movies retailed images of apocalypse by the score.  Even the kinder, gentler manifestations of popular culture reveal, on closer examination, dark undercurrents. Charles Schulz said this of his mildly satirical comic strip Peanuts: "All the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away."  And consider the apparently frivolous comic visions of Frank Tashlin -- which are, if examined closely, savage deconstructions of popular American culture.  Indeed, the more you look at Fifties culture the more it comes to seem that those mouse ears weren't at the heart of it -- they were distractions from a deep national anxiety, a brooding sense of dread that permeated everything. Sunday, October 7
CHANCELLORSVILLE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 07 Oct 2007 11:21 PM PDT
 If you visit the Civil War battlefield of Chancellorsville, in the Virginia countryside west of Fredericksburg, you can find at the intersection of two small country roads a marker at the place Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson met around midnight between the 1st and 2nd of May of 1863 to plan the next day's action. They had between them 40,000 men and they were facing a Union army of 70,000 men. Jackson had a startling proposition for Lee. His scouts had found some dirt roads through the woods that twisted around the right flank of the Union position. Jackson proposed that he lead his 28,000 men over these roads and fall upon the Union flank from behind. Lee pointed out that while Jackson was marching, he himself would have only 12,000 men with which to hold the 70,000 Union troops in place. Jackson nodded -- yes, that was about the size of it.  I like to think of the look in Lee's eyes as he contemplated this more or less insane idea -- they must have burned with joy at the boldness and fearlessness of Jackson plan. Lee thought about it for a moment and told Jackson to go ahead. Jackson made the march pretty much undetected -- reports of it that reached the Union officers on the right of their line were disbelieved. They were just too preposterous.  Jackson rounded the Union flank and attacked at dusk. The whole Union right collapsed and the whole Army of the Potomac was set in a panic that was just barely contained. It was one of the most stunning victories for an outnumbered army in all of military history -- but it's costs were high. Riding to the front to assess the progress of the action, Jackson was accidentally shot in the darkening woods by his own men, and would later die of his wounds (in the bed pictured below,) never resuming his command. The victory also emboldened Lee to make his second invasion of the north, resulting in the catastrophe at Gettysburg.  Ironically, it is the death of Jackson, and the defeat of the South, which allows one to admire the feat of arms that Lee and Jackson pulled off at Chancellorsville. Their cause had a great wrong mixed up in it -- the institution of slavery -- and no one can look back and wish they had won. But Jackson's death was a measure of expiation -- enough to let us love him and Lee for their genius and audacity and courage. It fixes the moment of their greatest triumph in amber, in a beauty outside of time. Monday, October 1
THE GHOST CITY CHAMPIONS
by
Lloydville
on Mon 01 Oct 2007 01:12 AM PDT
 Fall is in the air -- you can tell, even out here in the middle of the Mojave Desert, because the Mets have just completed their annual Autumn collapse. After dominating their division for almost the whole season, with what looked like the best team in baseball, they decided in the end to just dry up and blow away, like leaves in the wind. It was one of the worst late-season collapses in the history of baseball, and the Mets didn't go down fighting -- the whole team just seemed to stand around, staring blankly into space, waiting for the nightmare to consume them. The Mets have been my last real connection to the city of New York. I have a lot of friends who still live there but they visit Vegas regularly, so I think of them as Vegas friends now. But the Mets seem to have taken on the qualities of the new New York I couldn't live in anymore -- rich, bland, complacent, without grit, without character. I think the time has come to let them go -- let them fade into the old ghost city that exists now only in my memory. In that city, they will always be champions. When Willie Mays, playing for the Mets at the end of his career, decided to retire, he said, "There always come a time when somebody have to say goodbye." Goodbye. |
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