The Hermit's Notebook

Sat, 24 Dec 2005 20:12:57 GMT

(12/26/05 note: Since I wrote this I have changed the hosting for my new blog from Typepad to Blogger. The link in this entry is correct.) This is it. Various technical uncertainties have caused me to make today's my last Salon-blog entry. I will take this opportunity to impart crucial information to readers, regarding the future of my blogging. What tweaks I make more to this blog--technology permitting for a few days yet--will be to pieces in the sidebar links. For the foreseeable future, all new entries and updates I make will be to my new blog: In the diaspora. You're warmly invited to visit me there and to update your blogrolls. The new site is very much "under construction" this week and will burgeon rapidly in coming days. Warmest holiday wishes to all, and stay tuned.

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 22:31:06 GMT

The December rains washed out my phone connection. No dial tone meant no internet, and I was at loose ends all yesterday evening. Deciding it was time for the lounge chair, the afghan, and some "empty calories," I walked to the supermarket nearby. A tub of chocolate pudding briefly held my attention, but I soon settled on the December 26 issue of People Magazine. I have a grudging respect for this Time-Warner rag. There are things I could say about its editorial biases, but won't. Instead, I will say it's tightly written, its photos of celebs are engaging, and its attitude is welcoming, folksy, and generous--not snotty. For years, I've looked forward to reading People in the waiting room at the doctor's or the mechanic's, or whatever. Every several months I like to buy my own issue. The Best of 2005 issue doesn't disappoint. The gowns are glam. The couples are charming, and the babies are cute. If you're neither royal, nor particularly photogenic, but you've managed to make the papers somehow, then People may still do a spread on you. There's an article about Michael Schiavo, widower of Teri, with a picture of him at her grave-stone. His memoirs will hit stores this spring. You know what I like about People? I like the snippets about Hollywood personalities whose names may not quite be household words, but who the People editors think are worth your knowing about. I had already bonded with Teri Garr, an earthy and smart character actor who battles multiple sclerosis, when I heard her inteview on Fresh Air. Then I read the come-on for her memoir, Speedbumps: Flooring it Through Hollywood. The write-up contains the tidbit: "she once took a hammer to the windows of a cheating beau's house." I loved her all the more. Without crossing the line into disrespect, People doesn't take its mega-celebs--e.g., Tom Cruise--or their romances, quite as seriously as the subjects themselves seem to. Along with the spread of the besotted Tom and Katie Holmes is Rosie O'Donnell's reaction to Tom's remarks earlier this year about psychotropic medication: the boy needs to be brought down a notch. Teasingly, near the Cruise-Holmes feature, People also includes an item called "It's Over," about celeb couples who have gotten together with much fanfare, and then split, at warp-speed, during the year. Elizabeth Edwards, wife of the 2004 Democratic VP hopeful, garners a story about her successful 2005 lumpectomy and chemotherapy for breast cancer, also her holiday plans. All things transform, all things pass. That's what I really like most about People, that's why it captivates me. Critics say People hard-sells a culture of ephemeral, shallow fame. It's a bread-and-circus venue that insults everyone's intelligence and their most humane aspirations; we should all be reading Noam Chomsky. On the other hand, I read People for its celebration of the great American myth of the reinvention of the self. People is about celebs, who, as a group, tend to have the means to reinvent themselves, and are attractive enough that we care when they do. Self-reinvention is the archetype that underlies the People weight-loss stories, the People successful-rehab stories, the People true-love-found stories, the People career-leap and rags-to-riches stories. The magazine offers comfort and encouragement, as much as escape.

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 05:12:57 GMT

Big changes in the offing, sports fans. After soldiering along in Radio for two years, I have opted not to renew my Radio subscription when it expires. Salon has not sent me a renewal notice yet, but if my memory serves, I should still be able to publish updates on the current subscription until New Year's Eve. It would be nice if the powers that be would send me an official reminder to renew. This limbo feels a bit like doing a backstroke in a pool and never being totally sure when you're going to conk your head on the side. Maybe you've never had that experience. In this transitional period, while I can still blog in Radio, I will be getting comfortable with my new blog, working out kinks. I have decided to use Typepad for my 2006 authoring and hosting. It's not free, it's actually somewhat more expensive than Radio, but I really like the environment and I blog enough to justify the minor additional expense. I have been really frustrated with Radio, hence my impending switch. But I have loved the Salon community. It has been my blogging "cradle" in many respects. I have it from a techno-birdie that it will be possible to have updates to my Typpad blog appear in Salon's Recently Changed Weblogs index, though I'll no longer be hosted here. This pleases me very much. I want it to be true. I have also ordered DSL, which won't affect my blogging in any way that matters to readers, but which feels like a big deal, in the waning of the year. As I have soldiered along with Radio, I have also been a loyal dial-up customer, with the same ISP since 2001 or something. I'm not gone yet. I hope never really to be "gone"--gone, as far as this community is concerned. I'll be making more entries before my Radio subscription runs out--goodbyes, and the like.

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 01:45:37 GMT

Last night I saw the film Good Night, and Good Luck. Set in the 1950s, the movie was about the role newscaster Edward R. Murrow played in the ruin of red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. The film is stunningly shot in black-and-white, and for the smoke tendrils curling from Murrow's cigarette, alone, you'd practically want to take up the habit, if you haven't. Not quite--but the picture makes my list of run-don't-walk treasures this year. The tension between the aims of "serious" journalism, and those of profitability, wracks the CBS network, Murrow's employer. That conflict strains relations between executives and the editorial staff, and Murrow really doesn't make any friends in the corner offices, choosing to do stories on McCarthy and his influence. We forget how timid and how fearful the culture of the 1950s really was--how manipulable was the American consciousness, and how vulnerable to demagoguery. The time was perfect for Senator McCarthy's depredations. But McCarthy himself wasn't telegenic. As the film makes clear, with real-life footage of the late senator accusing Murrow himself of communist sympathies, the visual medium was the senator's undoing. The Bush team in 2005 is doing a bit better than McCarthy did, on one score: Bush cronies understand packaging. They know how to use the mass-media to their advantage, in particular, how to "work" television. They are still in office. As I was watching that film, something somebody said the day before kept echoing in my head. I was at a meeting in San Francisco for the single-payer-healthcare lobby on Saturday. A man who identified himself as a retired truckdriver stood up and told the group: "The people in this room respond to logical arguments. But there are plenty of people who don't think like us, who don't respond to reason and logic. If we want single-payer to grow as a cause in the U.S., then we sooner or later have to learn how to talk to these people."

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 17:11:14 GMT

Thumpity-thump-thump,
Thumpity-thump-thump,
Look at Frosty go!
Thumpity-thump-thump,
Thumpity-thump-thump,
Over the fields of snow! Frosty the Snowman is a pedophile. Kidding aside, from a remarkably tender age, I had a jaded contempt for this seasonal ditty of the idiot premise and the cloying rhymes and tune. The childrens' song is actually "too much" for many children, I think. Since Friday evening, it has been hopelessly stuck in my head. Frosty, the Snowman is sort of the musical equivalent of a "s'more." You remember the campfire treat that combined a roasted marshmallow, a graham cracker, and a section of a chocolate bar? The chocolate is supposed to melt part-way, from the warmth of the marshmallow. The marshmallow itself is ideally not blackened, but carmelized a light-brown from the heat of the campfire. No, Frosty, the Snowman is one of the original songs of Christendom associated with the commemoration of Jesus' birth. Originally an oral tradition, it appears in written form in a Coptic manuscript contemporaneous with the Nicene Creed. Some scholars and translators, it should be noted, have preferred the reading bumpity to thumpity. Yeah.

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 20:46:21 GMT

Thumpity-thump-thump, Thumpity-thump-thump, Look at Frosty go! Thumpity-thump-thump, Thumpity-thump-thump, Over the fields of snow! The "sleigh ride" my friend and I took yesterday evening in a pontoon boat on Lake Merritt was pleasantly addlebrained. Not merely a "Christmas event," the planners tried to make it a "multi-cultural solstice celebration," fitting an extremely racially and ethnically diverse city. We on the boat took to the standard Christmas carols with gusto, and to the other holiday songs less familiar to us, not really so much. I'm afraid I laughed aloud during our tour-guide's solo rendition of "The Dreidel Song" (he was an Asian-American fellow in a Santa costume). Oh, we shivered on that boat after 7:00 PM. We were out in a forty-degree mist, a kind of dankness that soaks right into your bones. Because it was low tide (the lake is an estuary, remember), and because there was nobody walking the footpath by the water, anyway, for the chill, we missed the chance to pull the boat up alongside pedestrians and "carol to them." The boat operator kept the boat to the middle of the lake, fearing running aground in shallower water. Was the evening worth the $5? Definitely. While we were out, we got into an interesting discussion with fellow merry-makers about the mood of Christmas carol lyrics. A woman commented that the words of Joy to the World, about "the curse" and "thorns infesting the ground," seemed "somber" to her. Dear lady, no. I'll tell you the most somber Christmas carol still popularly sung, hands down. We didn't get to sing it last night, but it's We Three Kings. You remember the middle verse? Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume Breaths a life of gathering gloom Sorrowing, sighing, Bleeding, dying, Sealed in a stone cold tomb! Ooooooh, star of wonder, star of night... This, to be sung after swilling eggnog or champagne, amid the twinkling holiday lights of a cozy living-room! Is this an instance of a darkly incongruous holiday humor? Is it a touch of bitterness amid joy, ritualized in some religious celebrations? I'm thinking of the traditional Jewish wedding ceremony, with the crushing of the small crystal glass by the groom as the vows are said, to commemorate the sacking of the Temple of Jerusalem.

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 01:53:55 GMT

Ah, marvelous Morgan. He's inspired much content of mine these past couple of years. I am thinking today of a quip of Morgan's I would not have a prayer of running down again, to link to. Alas. He was describing his horror of a hypothetical "The Eagles' California Christmas Album." Morgan dislikes The Eagles, a pop-country-Western band, for what he sees as the vacuity of their music. He dislikes Christmas, the old pagan solstice traditions misappropriated, as he sees it, for a Christian celebration "without theological significance." I got the feeling from Morgan's "album title," too, that our fellow blogger--a Manhattanite--has a particular dread of the juxtaposition of "California" and "Christmas." You look at it one way, Morgan's dread--if I read his remark correctly--is justified. You get the arbitrary grafting of Christian celebration onto pagan solstice tradition--that's one layer of fakery. Then you get the sparkling synthetic "snow" of December alongside palm trees flapping in sixty-degree breezes, and that's layer two of fakery--absurdity, really. On those grounds, I guess the notion of the "California Christmas" is pretty offensive. Speaking of which, the City of Oakland is going to be holding a series of "sleigh-rides" in a decorated pontoon boat on Lake Merritt this coming weekend. Those private gondola rides around the lake, by contrast, cost something like $60 (you'd only want to do that on your honeymoon, and who'd honeymoon in Oakland?), but this holiday production is on the city's tab. You only pay $5, and you sing carols and get treated to hot cocoa afterward. Or was that hot cider? The city isn't publicizing this event online, that I can find, but has distributed paper flyers. Yes, the fakery is over-the-top. It's certainly not going to be lost on intelligent young children, who are just bound to ask questions. Calling a decorated pontoon boat a "sleigh," indeed. Most of us adults don't mind the climate-fakery in the California Christmas celebration, as long as we're not already too offended by the holiday itself. Most kids, after it's explained to them, don't really mind it, either. If we locals want to get away from climate-fakery, without slamming the door on the Christmas holiday altogether, the older, Latino neighborhoods of the Bay Area offer sumptuous seasonal displays that include blossoms. In terms of the local climate, warmer-weather holiday decor with roots in California's Spanish-Mexican past is certainly more authentic than resin-acrylic "icicles." But the Yankee culture that came to California with statehood isn't going away, and neither are the holiday trappings that felt "right" to Northeasterners and Northern Europeans. The fake snow and the silly songs about "sleigh rides," we will always have with us. It's all kind of funny, and look at it one way, that's a good thing. The humor of the synthetic-snow-and-palm-trees is like the "spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down." Well, if it's this goofy, a cultural display with a misbegotten religious celebration at its core can't be so offensive. You also wonder about the role of humor in the earliest adoption of Christian Yule traditions--at least I do. It would have derived from incongruity. The feast of Saturnalia usurped by replicas of a baby born in a barn? The social and political dynamics were entirely different back in those days, they can't be compared to whatever politics underlie the Christmas-snow-in-California. The need of the early post-Roman rulers to force their religion on the masses was real. The humor, if it played a part, only greased the wheels of the propaganda. Now, about that "sleigh" ride tomorrow. It's pretty zany, I can't believe the city would spend money on the seasonal charter of a garland-bedecked pontoon boat. I'm looking forward to it, though. I don't think I've been out on Lake Merritt in a boat since college--half a lifetime ago--when I worked out with the crew team. For the chance to sing holiday favorites--which was supposed to be part of the $5-package, remember--I've always rather enjoyed Oh, Come All Ye Faithful and Hark, the Herald Angels. But I draw the line at Frosty, the Snowman.