Living versus Touring

We are just back from what is becoming our annual vacation trip to Ogunquit, Maine.   We went the first time on our honeymoon in June 1972.  We had stopped in Boston to visit friends (who treated us to a memorable Bloomsday tour of Boston and surrounds) and then started for what we thought would be a trip up the coast of Maine.  Our first stop was Ogunquit, where we found a nice bed and breakfast for the night.  The next day, we decided to stay the week.  On our last night, our host introduced us to another honeymoon couple from Quebec and sent us out for dinner and a show.  While they spoke only French and we mostly English, we had a great time.  It was a memorable stay.  We had not been back since then, but in 2011 we drove up for another June visit and then went back again in September. We missed last year because we had just moved into our new house, but we couldn't wait to get back this past week.  Ogunquit has grown, but it has kept the spirit of an artists' retreat and high-end resort town.  But the real draw is the ocean, the Marginal Way path along the rocky coast, and the little restaurants, galleries, and museums that dot it and the surrounding area--the Yorks, Wells, and Kennebunkport.  No sooner had we returned than we booked another four nights in September.  I am sure we will do it again every year as long as we can handle the 9-hour drive.

Of course, we've already heard the complaint:  Why do you always go back to the same places?  There is a big world out there. Why not try something new?  It is a question worth exploring a bit.

Sure, the world is big.  But what is better, to skim the surface of many places or to get to know a few places that speak to you and, at whatever level you can, become a part of them and find within them whatever reflection they may have of the universal?  I've been to a lot of places over the years--every continent except Antarctica--and while I have enjoyed new sights and sounds, I much prefer when I can to linger, to get to know a place, to become familiar with it and to enjoy its essence.  Touring is interesting, but not satisfying.

This is true in other areas of life.  For instance, I've pretty much stayed with one area in my career--changing with technology, but keeping to the vision of how we use technology to connect people and ideas.  As a result, I think--or at the very least, I hope--that I've been able to make a greater contribution because I came, over time and by dealing with change within the field, to understand the underlying realities of the field.  I also became part of an ongoing and vibrant professional community and developed both professional relationships and friendships with colleagues from many places around the world who are connected by our shared commitment to the profession.

The world is a big place.  While we need to be reminded of its diversity, we also need to understand what holds us together.  We can best understand it, perhaps, not by trying to see it all, but by trying to experience a few parts of it as deeply as possible.  

Gerrymandered

Today is election day—an off-year election in which we will vote for local offices--school board members, the mayor, members of the borough council—and for a few regional and statewide positions, from district attorney to state supreme court judge.   These are elections that help define our sense of community.  Because we are still relatively new to our neighborhood, I took a closer look than usual at the voter’s guide and got a lesson in politics and community.

Pennsylvania is one of several states that are known for the impact of Republican gerrymandering—restructuring voting districts to create safe districts where chances that Republicans will be elected and re-elected.   I live in State College, PA.  It is a university town and, I know from the experience of living here for most of the past four decades, more liberal as a community than the farming communities that surround it.   One assumes it would be a relatively safe Democratic district.  So, I was not surprised but still dismayed to see that State College and its suburbs have been redistricted to be in two separate congressional districts.  State College Borough is one corner of a district that largely covers farming areas and small villages ending in Philipsburg—about 24 miles west of State College.  However, the townships that surround State College—where most of the university employees live—are part of another district that extends to the east and that also include small and rural communities dominated by Republicans.  The result is that all State College area residents are in safe Republican districts.  The State College area community has been divided so that we cannot vote as a community.  We have been artificially segregated so that we have no effective vote on statewide and national offices that are defined by districts. 

I am a Democrat and a progressive Democrat at that, although I did once vote for a Republican for President (he lost).   I care about keeping—and ensuring the purity of—our ability as individuals to be effective members of a community and to use government as a tool for helping others in our community live the best life that we can all make for ourselves and our fellow citizens.  The purpose of government in a democracy is to give citizens the means as individuals to ensure that all people have equitable access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Gerrymandering denies individuals the right to be heard in elections.  In this light, gerrymandering should be seen as a fundamentally unpatriotic act.

Gerrymandering, along with closing the government over ideology and threatening to force governmental default, constitutes something that is very dangerous to our democracy.  We tend to be very forgiving in this country.  In this instance, however, we need to work self-consciously and persistently to reclaim true Constitutional government.

Joan Didion's "Democracy"

Over the past few years, I have become a huge fan of Joan Didion.  It started with her last two books--The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights--two powerful memoirs that I think are, in some ways, unique artifacts of her generation of new journalists and, at the same time, examples of the best American writing of any decade.   I then went back and read her earlier "new journalism" work, which I found to have much greater staying power than most of the work of her peers like Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson.

Now, I have just finished one of her best novels, Democracy.  Published in 1984, it is set in 1975, in the days and weeks immediately surrounding the American withdrawal from Vietnam.  It is a remarkable piece of fiction, focusing on one woman, Inez Christian Victor, and her small circle of family, in the context of the political and social upheaval of the times.  The book would be memorable for the narrative style alone--Didion first-person narrates it as a journalist writing a novel, which gives her incredible ability to break the rules and focus us on the important issues.  But the story itself and the historical context are powerful in their own right.  Inez Victor and Jack Lovett are memorable characters, as is Billy Dillon, the political pro who constantly chimes in to re-contextualize what is happening.

Beyond that, Democracy speaks to the dynamics of American public and private life in a time of dramatic changes.  There are lessons in it for today.

The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights introduced many readers to her late in her career.  I hope, like me, they go on to discover her for what she is:  a great American writer and social commentator. 

Murder as Comedy?

We wanted to go to the movies.  The selection, however, was not encouraging.  There were 18 movies showing in town.  Of these, we had already seen two—The Butler and Blue Jasmine—and most of another, Planes (which our grandchildren tired of about halfway through, when the popcorn was gone).  The remaining 15 options were:

·      An action thriller about two government agents who find themselves on the run from a drug lord.

·      A youth movie in which the main character is enlisted to fight a super-criminal.

·      A futuristic thriller about a time when the rich live in space, leaving the poor to struggle back on Earth.

·      Another action thriller about a racecar driver whose wife is kidnapped.

·      A bio-pic about the martial arts guru who trained Bruce Lee.

·      The story of “a haunted family” that is “dangerously connected to the spirit world.”

·      A sci-fi flick about a woman who learns that “she descends from a line of warriors who protect our world from demons.”

·      A 3-D action epic about five people who rise from humble beginnings to perform on the “X-Factor.”

·      A mythic film about Greek gods who try to restore their “dying safe haven.”

·      A sci-fi action thriller in which the main character is “left for dead on a sun-scorched planet.”

·      The tale of a drug dealer who invents a fake family to facilitate a major shipment of illegal drugs.

·      A drama about a family who “comes under attack at a wedding anniversary getaway” by a “gang of mysterious killers.”

·      TWO buddy movies about hung-over drunks who confront the apocalypse.

·      A “comedy” about a mob family in witness protection program in France.

We decided to see The Family—the movie about the mob family hiding in France.  It had an a-list cast, led by Robert DeNiro, Michelle Pfieffer, Tommy Lee Jones.  It was billed by IMBD as an action crime comedy.  Critic Sheila O’Malley noted:

The Family" is a pretty uneven film, lurching from comedy to violence to sentiment, but it's best when it sticks in the realm of flat-out farce. The pleasure comes in watching the actors (Michelle Pfeiffer, in particular) submitting wholeheartedly to ridiculous situations. http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-family-2013

Perhaps the problem is that we went when the D.C. Naval Yard massacre was still fresh in the news.  The farce was not with me.   I knew, for instance, that, when the Michelle Pfeiffer character bombs a grocery store where she has been insulted, it was supposed to be funny as she walked away ahead of the explosion (which would have killed at least three people).   It wasn’t funny or farcical.  It was, simply, a family of sociopaths killing people right and left or being responsible for the deaths of mostly innocent people whose only crime was to be in their path.  Almost everyone gets killed, except the sociopaths who drive the plot.  Given that, in the real world, eleven people had just died in D.C. for being in the way of a sociopath, I could not find a funny moment in The Family.  I left feeling disgusted that our society has come to the point where we are supposed to laugh at this sort of thing.  The only saving grace to the film was the subplot about the family’s daughter, who says at one point, as she considers suicide after being jilted by her teacher/lover, “Love was my escape.”   

Tom Friedman's Take on Syria

Same War, Different Country - NYTimes.com
This column by Tom Friedman pretty much sums up my sense of the issues facing us in Syria and, generally, in the Middle East.  We need to take a broader view of how to help the people of the Middle East establish a stable political and social society.   In the end, the kind of interventions we've seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya don't seem to solve the underlying issues in these countries--issues that have shaped the lives in the region since before World War I.   Middle Eastern culture demands a different kind of balance among politics, religion, and economics than we have the in West.

We continue to need a strong United Nations--or the equivalent on a regional level at least--to deal with issues like these.  Take away veto power from any one country and let's start solving the underlying problems.

Boomer Music

The other day, I was driving home from the grocery store when the local radio station--which specializes in hits from the 60s, 70s, and 80s--announced "Baby, I Need Your Lovin'" by the Four Tops, noting that it dated from 1964. 

As I listened to this great oldie ("Baby, I need your lovin', GOT to have all your lovin'") it occurred to me, not for the first time, that I have been listening to the same music for the past half century.   I have some newer favorites--Jason Mraz, Jack Johnson, and others who have hit the scene at various mileposts along that 50-year highway--the music from my youth is still just as fresh and full of life as it was when I first heard it.  Maybe more so.

Why, though, is it still being played regularly on the radio?  When I was a boy in the 60s, my mother occasionally listened to old records (she had a good collection of 78s) from the thirties and forties, but I had no recollection of her regularly listening to music from 1915 or even 1925.  I heard a lot of old 1940s swing (Vaughn Monroe was one of her favorites) and the Ink Spots and Eddie Arnold, but nothing as old to her as I hear today on the radio.  I have to think that today's focus on the real oldies is a cultural phenomenon

So, why is there still a mass market for music a half-century old?  One factor, certainly, is that we Baby Boomers are a bit generation.  We have market clout, even as we begin to retire.  Is there more than that?  Is the music somehow indicative of a cultural shift that started in the 1960s and gathered steam in the 1970s?  There may be something to that. 

Regardless, I am glad to still be able to hear "my" music out there in public.  Keeps one young and tapping one's toe, glad for car air conditioning so I can keep the windows up and the radio loud.

Smelling a Memory

When I was in high school, back in the mid-1960s, I worked at Little Italy, a family-owned Italian restaurant in what is now Hermitage, Pa.  The restaurant was operated by a mother-daughter team.  Mrs. Combine, her daughter, JoAnne Bishop, and her son-in-law, Richard Bishop.  They had operated the restaurant in the Hickory Plaza for a while and then renovated a larger, stand-alone site on the corner of State Street and Dutch Lane.  I came on at the opening of the new site.  I was around 17 when I started as a busboy and had been promoted to short-order cook by the time I left at the age of 18.

Little Italy was a true family restaurant.   Other members of the Combine family operated restaurants nearby in West Middlesex, and it wasn't unusual for them to gather at Little Italy.  A booth near the kitchen was often occupied by friends and relatives, including the Bishops' young daughter.   As a high school student, it was great to be surrounded by an active and close family.

After I left, I lost touch with the family, although I have always had very fond memories of my days at Little Italy.  Just recently, I happened across an obituary for JoAnne Bishop in the Sharon Herald, our local paper.  It noted that the family had relocated to Las Vegas and that, later in life, JoAnne had authored her own blog--"I Smell a Memory."  Her daughter has since re-posted some of her mother's blog entries at http://blog.dot-two-dot.com/?tag=i-smell-a-memory .  In "I Smell a Memory," she recalls favorite holidays with her family and the food that she made to celebrate.  Then, she adds recipes.  It is a wonderful legacy.