Southern Bookman

Random Thoughts: "Game of Thrones," "MASH," John Daly, Zion and "Catch 22"

Old Baton Rouge sports editor Bud Montet used to run a column called "Random Shots," which I grew up reading. Old Bud was a funny man. In Bud's memory, here are a few of my Random Shots for a warming Friday.

*What was the ugliest ride of the week, Danenarys Targaryen on her dragon or John Daly on his golf cart?

*Zion Williamson is warming up to the idea of playing for the New Orleans Pelicans. A bowl of gumbo and a beignet and he'll be fine. And if the NBA doesn't work out, there's always a home for him as a tight end at LSU. Or with the Saints.

*Tough to bet against the Warriors winning another NBA title. Golden State can lose Kevin Durant, and still win with Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. If the Bucks lose Giannis, they're dead. Same with the Blazers and Damian Lillard and the Raptors and Kawhi Leonard.

*Though I'm not a St. Louis Cardinals fan, I always get a tug of nostalgia when the Red Birds come to town. The Cards were my father's favorite team. As a boy in North Louisiana, he heard broadcasts of Dizzy Dean, Pepper Martin and the Gashouse Gang. My first major league game was watching the Cards of Ken Boyer, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock and the aging Stan Musial play the Houston Colt .45s. The Cardinals' logo is the best in all of sports, along with the Tigers' Gothic D and the Yankees' N.Y.

*I discovered another Texas writer, Grover Lewis. An early new journalism practitioner for Rolling Stone, Lewis apparently wasn't too particular about facts. In a piece about the making of Peter Bogdanovich's "The Last Picture Show" in Archer City, Texas, Lewis claims that he and "Last Picture Show" author Larry McMurtry witnessed a redneck beat up Elvis Presley at a Wichita Falls honky tonk. McMurtry in his "Literary Life" memoir convincingly denies the claim. Elvis did give a concert at Wichita Falls in the 1950s.

*With all of the "Game of Thrones" hoopla, the show comes nowhere near to matching the ratings of old network shows like "MASH" or "Dallas." Episodes of "MASH" still appear in Cable TV Land, and I'm surprised at how well they hold up. Again, the notion that HBO invented television with "The Sopranos" and "The Wire" is overblown.

*An eight-part Hulu miniseries of "Catch 22" involving George Clooney? Sounds intriguing, but Mike Nichols' film version dissipated a lot of the book's energy, casting doubt on a TV series doing better. The book's sprawling plot and cast of characters seem beyond the scope of a Hulu production. Perhaps the show will catch the book's essence.

There's a Catch 22 - I'd like to try the show, but I don't subscribe to Hulu. I'm more tempted to return to Joseph Heller's novel to see how it holds up after all of these years. Heller's anti-war spirit was groundbreaking when the book was published in 1961, setting the stage for the later Vietnam War movement. In those Cold War days, Heller's book caught a building wave. The book's anti-establishment spirit might spark again as Trump and the GOP carry out their subversion of democracy and the Constitution.

 

 

 

William Dafoe brings out Vincent Van Gogh's creepiness

I wanted to like "At Eternity's Gate," in which William Dafoe portrays Vincent Van Gogh.

Alas, director Julian Schnabel's moody 2018 film was a long slog, especially the many sequences showing Van Gogh strolling through woods and meadows as sad, sad music plays.

Dafoe tries his best with Van Gogh's earnest mystical dialogues, but he sounds like a college student who'd just discovered the wonders of art.

While Van Gogh was pretty ravaged at his death at age 37, Dafoe appears too old for the part. His enactments of Van Gogh's mental breakdowns don't illicit sympathy but the conclusion that Van Gogh was pretty creepy, and that the good folks in Arles couldn't be blamed for packing him off to an asylum.

The relationship between Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, played with flair by Oscar Issac, gives a few sparks without quite igniting. The famous gruesome incident in which Van Gogh slices off his ear after Gauguin tells him he's leaving Arles somehow lacks drama. I kept thinking what Quentin Tarantino would have done.

A dialogue between Van Gogh and a priest expressively played by Mads Mikkelsen brings one of the few moments of dramatic intensity.

Rupert Friend's performance as Vincent's loyal brother Theo is more compelling than Dafoe's. My empathy spiked whenever Friend entered the film.

Risking controversy, the film follows the theory that Van Gogh didn't commit suicide by shooting himself with a pistol. The film shows Van Gogh being fatally wounded by two teenaged boys playing cowboy. The murder theory claims that Van Gogh in his last hours never mentioned the boys.

Dafoe is an inventive actor, but he was more convincing playing the manager of a rundown Florida hotel, for which he received an Oscar nomination the year before. He's known for taking performance risks. His Van Gogh, however, hews too closely to the common perception of the artist as a genius misunderstood in his time.

The PGA springs forward with move to May

Basketballs are bouncing, bouncing, bouncing on the rim. Pucks are flying down the ice, and baseball fans still wearing winter coats to the ballpark.

And for the first time since 1949, the PGA golf tournament is being played in May, not August.

After years unfolding in brutal summer heat, the lesser of golf's four majors begins its new springtime schedule Thursday at Long Island's Bethpage Black, the tough municipal course where two U.S. Opens have been held. With cool weather rather than the traditional sweat-fest, the tournament will seem more like the British Open.

The PGA and TV carrier CBS believe the move will boost the tournament's standing. Or perhaps announcer Jim Nance wanted a longer vacation before calling NFL games. That transition from Nick Faldo to Tony Romo can be jarring without a sojourn on the beach.

While the move means the PGA won't compete with the always popular NFL exhibition games, the tournament still will have to contend with the NBA and NHL playoffs and Major League baseball games.

With no spring and early summer sports offerings after the Masters and NCAA basketball tournament, CBS saw the PGA move as a profitable entry into the season's sports market. Even preseason football rules the sports world, and as a major football broadcaster, CBS wanted to move away from late summer golf.

CBS hopes that Tiger Woods follows his comeback win in the Masters with a strong PGA performance. If Woods is in contention for a second straight majors victory, ratings will soar. In his prime, Woods won a U.S. Open at Bethpage Black.

The Long Island venue marks a historic return for the tournament, as The New York Times noted in a compelling feature Wednesday. Running photos of old-time champions Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen and Tommy Armour, the newspaper noted that the tournament was first played in the early 20th century on Long Island courses. Those were some of America's first exclusive country clubs, unlike the public Bethpage Black.

The PGA's old August arrival marked the end of the season, the coming of autumn. Now the tournament will be the second step of a truncated majors season. With the Masters in April, the PGA in May, the U.S. Open in June and the British Open in July, winning the grand slam looks even more challenging.

 

 

Farewell, Doris Day

Were Doris Day and Marilyn Monroe really so different?

Day, who died Monday at age 97, presented a wholesome, virginal image that contrasted with Monroe's smoldering sexuality, according to The New York Times' front-page obituary.

Times film critic A.O. Scott gave a shrewder assessment of Day's movie persona in the essay, "Hip Sex Goddess Disguised as the Girl Next Door." An accompanying photo shows Day in "Pillow Talk," sitting on the side of a bed wearing a slip and showing off her million-dollar legs. As Scott pointed out, Day in another movie with Rock Hudson sang a swinging number with an all-black group.

Monroe played the girl next door disguised as the hip sex goddess. Day and Monroe could have been sisters, Monroe wilder, Day the studious one who might binge on drinks during a crazy date.

Like Day, Monroe rose from meager beginnings. Both showed their greatest acting in conforming to manufactured personal lives. Both of their images were defined by made-up alliterative names.

The photo with the Times obituary shows Day with Hudson, whose gay sexuality the studios hid. Day wears elbow-length white gloves and a seductive white dress, as sultry and unapproachable as Monroe.

We could never imagine the Kennedy brothers having affairs with Day, but we could imagine Day dazzling JFK with a rendition of "Happy Birthday."

Monroe died young, a victim of drugs, her last movie made with Clark Gable, who also played the older man in a film with Day. Day lived for years in retirement, like Donna Reed rendered sexless and matronly by TV.

But before Hollywood created Day's virginal image, she was a dazzling sex star, bringing the movies a new type of independent woman, not as ethereal and purely sensual as the 1930s'  Jean Harlow. Day was the model for the blond Hollywood stars who followed, who displayed different aspects of her persona.

The 1950s and 1960s blondes appear on a spectrum of glamour, sexual promise, all-American fun and unattainability. Grace Kelly. Kim Novak. Jayne Mansfield, Doris Day.

The kaleidoscope shifts to Faye Dunaway and Jane Fonda. But they were not that far removed from Day. Fonda's Barbarella and Dunaway's Bonnie Barrow kept a touch of innocence.

The movie "Young at Heart" with Frank Sinatra, Gig Young, Ethel Barrymore and Dorothy Malone revealed Day's greatness as an actress. I never cared much for her work with Hudson, but Day gave an Oscar-worthy performance as the life-affirming young woman perplexed and attracted by the cynical loser played by Sinatra.

Day was also one of the last links to the great World War II generation of singers who could unite the nation with a song like "Sentimental Journey," recorded with Les Brown and His Band of Renown. As a 1940s pop star, Day was the female incarnation of Sinatra.

Her postwar recordings of classics such as "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" and "It's Been a Long, Long Time" display flawless diction and phrasing. While the productions are over-orchestrated with lush strings and background singers, she raises them to the highest artistic level. Her vocal inflections explore the lyrics' full emotional register.

Day's "Que Sera Sera" was one of the last 1940s-'50s style of pop songs that became a hit in the heady days of rock and teen angst. Again, she overcomes the sickly sweet arrangement, her expressive singing bringing out the timeless truth in the simple lyrics.

The countercultural era that pushed Day into retirement produced Peggy Lipton, who died just before Day. Lipton presented a different kind of TV blonde on "Mod Squad," young and hip, and eager to hook up, or so we imagined.

But she too, like all of the Hollywood blondes, had to retain an element of the girl next door.

 

Las Vegas recevies renown as literary town

Not only is Las Vegas booming from the Supreme Court legalizing sports betting in our land of the free. Along with landing an NHL hockey team and the Oakland Raiders, the glitzy desert mecca is now a hot spot for literature.

The gambling and entertainment town associated with Frank Sinatra, the Rat Pack, Howard Hughes and the Mafia now hosts a high-toned literary festival and supports a bookstore known as the Writers' Block, according to an article in The New York Times Monday by John Williams, who also writes some of the newspaper's best book reviews.

Why shouldn't Vegas be a literary town? The glitzy desert mecca is more than the strip. It's the home of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, no longer a national basketball power, but possessing a fine writing program.

Art critic Dave Hickey, author of the well-praised collection "Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy," once taught at UNLV.

Las Vegas has been the site of a number of memorable movies, most prominently "The Godfather: Part II." Unless you prefer "Viva Las Vegas," and who doesn't like Elvis and Ann-Margret?

The city also received literary and cinema notoriety from Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

As far as art goes, some even like Las Vegas' iconic sign.

Believer magazine, the literary and pop-culture journal that for some reason I've never warmed to, now publishes from Las Vegas, according to Williams. The publication was losing money until a Vegas-based foundation gave it a money infusion.

Good to know that reading is a bigger pastime in Vegas than slot machines. I wouldn't place money on it though.

 

 

Harper's Kevin Baker finds Green New Deal the best hope for American future

The Green New Deal offers the best chance for surviving climate change, Kevin Baker argues in a persuasive article in the May Harper's magazine.

Rather than the impractical, quixotic, absurd chimera painted by critics on the left and right, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's plan for a non-carbon economy outlines the most realistic course for the country's future, Baker says. While critics believe that half-measures can be taken, the Green New Deal expresses the truth that a total economic makeover is required. 

Baker turns to the Roosevelt New Deal for models of the full-scale action needed. Along with Depression-era Soil Conservation Service programs to restore dust bowl land ravaged by disastrous agricultural practices, Baker gives an extensive history of the Tennessee Valley Authority's transformation of poverty-stricken rural areas of Alabama and Tennessee.

Acknowledging that the TVA's damming of the Tennessee River looks environmentally destructive now, Baker makes a convincing case for a full-scale mobilization to end carbon emissions. Whether the TVA's massive electrification projects give the best model is debatable. Perhaps a proliferation of smaller projects would prove more effective.

While Baker ignores that World War II brought the biggest changes to the U.S. economy, his look back at Roosevelt's new deal illustrates that the United States once had the political will and social commitment to make major changes. While flawed, the Green New Deal offers a workable blueprint for that same level of unified action.

 

 

 

Katha Pollitt revisits 1969 Harvard student strike

Nation columnist Katha Pollitt attended the 50-year reunion of student strikers who shut down Harvard University in 1969.

Pollitt expressed pleasure that the aging radicals are still leftists who have followed socially conscious careers. None have become investment bankers or hedge fund sharks.

Displaying her usual wit and clear writing, Pollitt delves into the ideologies of competing left-wing groups whose dogmatic disputes all too often bogged down the era's campus politics.

Despite the internecine squabbles, the Harvard SDS took control, bringing such gains as an outstanding African-American studies program and the construction of affordable housing.  Pollitt also notes that the strike led to a longtime ban of ROTC from campus.

While I've read extensively about the 1969 student riot at Columbia, another center of Ivy League radicalism, and the free speech movement at Berkeley, I didn't know about the Harvard action until reading Pollitt's piece. The Harvard strike sounded a bit more well-ordered than the actions at Cal and Columbia.

Pollitt notes that the Harvard strike received little faculty support, crediting the eminent philosopher John Rawls for bailing out the students from the Cambridge, Mass., jail.

During the reunion, the old leftists from what was then the new left also met with today's student activists, whose main challenge is climate change, not the Vietnam War.

While Pollitt took a satisfied tone, I felt the same regret that rises whenever I hear on the '60s channel, "This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius."

With all of its excesses, the '60s protests brought real gains in civil rights and concern for the environment.

But, capped by Donald Trump's excruciating win over Hilary Clinton, the country now appears in full retreat from those progressive accomplishments. With malevolent Mitch McConnell packing the courts with Trump's regressive judges, the reversals appear intractable.

A new generation of activists raises hope, but so far their efforts lack the momentum of the 1960s. The threat of climate change and mass extinctions is even greater.

 

 

Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old" Makes World War I Experience Real

Except for bad teeth, the World War I British soldiers in Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old" look like guys you might see today at a soccer match or in a pub.

The colorized and computer-enhanced film footage from the British Imperial War Museum makes the men in the trenches seem contemporary, as if seen on the TV news. The voices narrating the film come from oral history recordings made in the 1960s, '70s and '80s.

Their youthful faces, camaraderie and good humor in the midst of appalling primitive conditions testify to a lost sense of duty. They share with aplomb indignities, absence of privacy and the presence of death.

The compressed narrative roughly follows the war's progress, from the army's mobilization to their lives in the trenches, to their experience off-duty, to the final victory over Germany. The film doesn't correspond to major battles. According to reports, scenes of soldiers going over the top of the trenches are from rehearsals, not actual battle.

No French or American troops are seen. Dead German soldiers and German prisoners are frequently shown, and the British narrators admit an empathy with their foes, whom they fondly call "Jerry."

One narrator says the British felt closer to the Germans than they did to their French allies. The British and Germans come from the same working class occupations and close-knit families.

The colorization is a little unnatural, but realistic enough. Jackson and his crew adjusted the film speed to do away with the herky-jerky movements associated with early 20th century movies.

Their war ended 100 years ago, launching the 20th century's brutal history. Jackson's film makes us feel that we know the common soldiers, that they are like us.

Widespread species extinctions threaten human existence, report warns

The dinosaurs were killed off by a meteor. Now, we are the meteor rapidly destroying life on Earth.

Human activity at its present rate will bring the extinction of a million plant and animal species, according to a U.N. report.

The extinctions are the largest in human history, the report found. Human life depends on the threatened ecosystems, the report warned.

While climate change exacerbates the loss of life, the primary causes come from human activity like deforestation, poaching, and overfishing.

Natural habitat is being lost at accelerating rates. In Thailand, rain forests are being turned into palm-oil plantations, devastating wildlife habitats. The death of coral reefs threatens marine diversity.

The report had a ray of hope. "Through transformative change, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably," concluded Sir Robert Wilson, who led the research for the Intergovernmental Seience-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Such a transformative change will also be required to reduce carbon emissions and lessen the devastation of global warming.

Those sounding the alarm about climate change and widespread species extinctions keep saying that humanity has time to take action. Instead, the world accelerates faster and faster toward disaster.

 

The Portable Dorothy Parker brings back lost world of champagne, and the morning after

Posman Books at Ponce City Market is a bright, cheerful store with a good if shallow selection of books. Along with well-stocked shelves, books lie upon tabletops and tucked away in the space below.

The bookstore's Atlanta location is its only one outside of New York City, where it operates at Chelsea Market, a development similar to Ponce City Market and I believe run by the same company, and at Rockefeller Center.

Concentrating more on paperbacks than new hardback releases, Posman like other bookstores offers gifts, cards, buttons and other items. I was tempted by art-deco posters from different Atlanta neighborhoods, but they were not quite distinctive enough.

The children's section appeared ample, covering the entire back wall and jutting down a side wall, but I didn't peruse it, my children's book days now long gone.

Perhaps I overlooked them, but I didn't see a few recently released books, especially bios of Nelson Algren and John Hersey. Now that I think about it, I didn't come across any biography and memoirs section. I was happy that the poetry offerings are fairly extensive.

A high point was a well-laden table of new Penguin Classics deluxe editions, with fresh new covers displaying imaginative artwork. I was tempted by new editions of "The Dubliners" and "Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass," but decided upon "The Portable Dorothy Parker."

What a treat. The book reprints the full text of the original Portable Dorothy Parker, released in 1944, which showcased her famous short stories and witty, mordant poems. The brassy Jazz Age fizz is tinged with bitters.

In the new edition, that original text in augmented by a selection of her acidic theater reviews and essays for the early Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, along with her later work for Esquire. The book also gives a selection of her letters, including a couple of early ones to her father and sister.

The selection makes clear a major reason for the decline in magazines; writers like Dorothy Parker are gone. Today's humorous essayists lack her light touch, her skill at seasoning her sentences with personal asides. Today's young humorists do a lot of throat clearing before getting to the laughs, which all too often fizzle.

Dorothy Parker's barbs fly right to the target, and land with a sting.