A birthday

Deborah Clark meant little to me when last we passed one another between classes on 30 January 1968—we were only acquaintances—but that night she arbitrarily secured a place in my memory when she became the first of my contemporaries I knew to have died: a little over a mile from my home, of blunt-force trauma in an automobile accident. She’d be sixty-eight today. I retrieved this artifact from the accident site a few days later, and have morbidly retained it for over half a century.

Angry in 1963

Like many of us, I’m spending more time indoors than usual this year, and particularly as the Bay Area endures a prolonged spell of warmer than normal weather coupled with oppressive (by local standards) humidity and, today, smoke-laden skies. Although this sedentary way of life is doing nothing, or at least nothing good, for my boyish figger, I have been catching up on both my reading and on a substantial backlog of unscreened films. This is one, La Rabbia, “The Anger,” a curious artifact from 1963. Originally conceived as a meditation proceeding from the opening question “Why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war?”, the film began as a kind of video montage, mainly of newsreels of the postwar world up through the early sixties, with a spoken commentary written by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). Seeing Pasolini’s finished product, the producer, apparently afflicted with an early case of bothsiderism, trimmed it drastically and invited conservative writer, editor, cartoonist and gadfly Giovannino Guareschi (1908-1968; today best remembered, if at all, for his “Don Camillo” stories) to direct a companion piece along the same lines.

The resulting cinematic portmanteau pleased neither man, each of whom cordially detested the other. Guareschi, at least, knew what he was getting into; Pasolini was dismayed when he found his work yoked to that of the older man. Not surprisingly, each director approached the “modern” plight with different emphases. Pasolini (Marxist, homosexual), dreads the encroachment of American-style consumerism on the Italian proletariat, and applauds the liberation, then in progress, of the Third World from its colonial masters. Guareschi (Catholic, monarchist) despises American vulgarity, and deplores Europe’s withdrawal from its African possessions. Nor is he keen on Marxists, homosexuals or the uppity locals giving the colonialists such a hard time.

Pasolini’s half seems, particularly by contrast with Guareschi’s bitter and caustic take, optimistic, almost lyrical. I think it was still possible in 1963 to see in Khrushchev’s USSR the possibility of a humane outcome to the communist experiment without doing violence to one’s intellect, and Pasolini certainly appears to celebrate that prospect (for more on this subject run, do not walk, to your bookseller of choice and secure a copy of Francis Spufford’s astonishing Red Plenty), particularly in the lengthy paean to Yuri Gagarin’s epochal flight. Guareschi is having none of that, and his own considerably bleaker segment is interlarded with the most damning footage (Hungary 1956, Berlin 1961) that he can find. But Guareschi—whose Don Camillo tales, set in the Po Valley during the postwar years, and centered around the “frenemy” relations of a parish priest and the communist mayor of his village, I read in my youth, and which still retain their charm—hates lots of other things besides Marxism: he hates American popular culture; hates the sexual licentiousness associated with it; hates, hates, hates fags; hates the Africans who have been driving their colonial masters off the continent (“where whites and coloreds lived together in peace and harmony”).

La Rabbia was released in a few theatres, garnered tepid reviews, sank out of sight. Pasolini attempted, unsuccessfully, to have his name withdrawn from the film. Novelist Alberto Morovia published a scathing review of Guareschi’s portion: “When the boorish editor of an unnamable Milan magazine [Candido, founded by Guareschi in 1945] knocks on your door and asks you for an interview, do you let him into your house? When a producer asks you to make a film with Guareschi, do you agree? Don’t you know that you should not welcome the editors of certain magazines into your home? Don’t you know that you shouldn’t make films in the company of Guareschi?”

La Rabbia, nicely restored and released in an edition by “RaroVideo,” is an interesting cultural artifact, and I mainly enjoyed it. I must warn prospective viewers that near the end of the film there is footage of a Soviet experiment— Guareschi has included this as an example of commie depravity—that is perhaps the most shocking example of cruelty to animals that I have ever seen committed to film. It is preceded by diagrams, and I exhort anyone who sits through La Rabbia to avert his eyes for the next couple of minutes.

Just because

A dog and his squeaky toy, repurposed as a pillow. Sound asleep. Is he cute, or what?

The pleasure of giving respect

I’ve been thinking recently, four years after he died suddenly at eighty, about my old boss Spindle. He was “Gerald Spindle,” “Jerry” to some, “Mr. Spindle” to others, “Chief” when I addressed him directly, and “Spindle” when I alluded to him. This was in no wise a token of disrespect. On the contrary, when I delivered a spoken tribute an audience of ≈150 at a retirement luncheon held in his honor a quarter-century ago, I observed that the honorific was supererogatory: “Does one say Mister Thor? Mister Zeus? No. These are forces of nature, personified, and titles do not obtain or apply.” Spindle was Vulcan, God of Steel, Smithy to the Olympians—the metaphor was more apt than you strangers might imagine.

In his magnificent short story “A Bullet in the Brain” (a PDF transcription can be found here), Tobias Wolff’s doomed, unpleasant protagonist briefly recalls—doesn’t, actually—“the pleasure of giving respect.” But I do. I worked for Spindle for five years (most of us were rotated from one office to another after a year, but the fierce head of the steel products branch was so dreaded that, when I volunteered each year to re-enlist, management was relieved to avoid the bitching and complaining that might otherwise have ensued) from 1982 until 1987 when, greatly to his ire and disappointment, I took another gig in order to get out from under his boss, who had taken a considerable and consequential dislike to me. What was contemplated at the outset to be a temporary assignment ended in consuming the remaining thirty years of my alleged career, and while in consequence this depressed the bottom line, it was better for my mental health. I grieved that Spindle regarded my defection at the outset as a betrayal, but following an interval of reproach I worked myself back into his good graces, beginning with a flattering and well-deserved article about him published in the house organ.

Following his retirement in 1995, Spindle and I remained in regular contact, mainly by phone, several conversations each month, and secondarily by email; occasionally by post. He was a bottomless fount of knowledge on military history—WW II informed the childhood of a precocious youngster, nine by VE Day—and of films: to the extent I am conversant today with cinema as an art form, I owe this almost entirely to Spindle’s tutelage.

He died suddenly in 2016. In the preceding weeks he had spoken—turning eighty, as he had that February, tends to focus the mind on these things—of putting his affairs in order. A flinty midwesterner (he once copped to a tendency to “squeeze the nickel until the buffalo shits”), he wanted to arrange his estate without the costly participation of an attorney. I told him that I’d see what I could find online. Alas, a cerebral episode took him out before I’d even begun my researches, and his estate ultimately fell into the hands of a court-appointed trustee. I do not doubt that a generous slice of administrative expenses were extracted.

Still: “the pleasure of giving respect.” I’ve enjoyed this a few times during my adult life, but at this point, probably not again. Have I ever been, will I ever be, the object of this? Dunno. I’m inclined to doubt it.

Above: Master and journeyman, circa 1985

Borne in the USA

At the kind suggestion and arrangement of my younger brother I spent a fortnight in London and environs last summer, my first time across the pond since Tony Blair was PM, and Lina’s first time ever farther than a mile off the US East Coast. A pleasant time was had by all, not least because we secured transatlantic passage via somewhat costly “business” class, which provided us with something approximating beds, and with in-flight fare a cut above the pretzels and peanuts grudgingly provided those in steerage.

Upon our return from that green and pleasant land, we disembarked at the airport in San Francisco, dodging the 350 passengers awaiting Customs clearance—three international flights had arrived within a quarter-hour of one another—by means of our “Global Entry” passes, a system that permits Real People who can afford the tariff to bypass the hoi polloi as they trudge sullenly through the lines.

The filth and squalor on the train back to our neighborhood, and visible on the streets, were striking: nothing much changed from our departure the previous month, but a shock upon seeing this with the impressions of a civilized country fresh in memory. Indeed, returning earlier from a daytrip to Oxford, I looked at the comfortable, tidy villages from the train and thought “they wouldn’t let me live here if I asked.” And for the first time, belatedly, I realized that I was a prisoner in my own land, a grim and grimy police state.

Bummer.

From the presidential nightstand

The way we live today

I must say that I’m not really enjoying the 2020 remix of Abbey Road.