This photo relates to the post below.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
The Trial of the Century, or Long Live the King
A couple of days in the country was about all my Dad could handle before getting restless for civilization---which meant a 60 mile drive to Nashville to see the latest James Bond film or something that was getting good reviews in the papers. As the eldest son, I usually rode shotgun on these trips. I'm not sure what inspired this more ambitious road trip, but one day in mid-August we left McEwen TN for another small town, Dayton. Dad wanted to see the home of the infamous "Scopes Monkey Trial" which had been dramatized in a famous play and film called "Inherit the Wind".
I was 16 and about to enter my senior year of high school in Tampa. My dad was a preacher & teacher & also an in-demand lecturer on Creationism. He travelled the country talking about the subject in scientific as well as Biblical terms and was well-versed in both areas of study (after my dad passed away two years ago his sister Retta revealed that he'd been accepted into MIT but couldn't afford the housing). My dad collected everything he could find ever printed on the subject of Evolution (my passion is creativity and I have the same penchant for books and articles on Surrealism). We were used to traveling together, I'd been with him to various parts of the US by plane & car---sometimes I'd read aloud to him from the scriptures or a book of non-fiction as he drove. So the 200 miles to Dayton was an easy trip for us. As we pulled into Dayton, the first thing I noticed were the whittlers. Old guys in overalls with wood chips piled up around their feet. My dad could talk to anyone anywhere (like the time he talked his way past security and management to meet the Monkees or our visit to Nauvoo, Illinois: both subjects of future essays). He kneels down and starts talking to the old timers. I take the lens cap off my camera and begin taking photos. One guy points with a whittled stick indicating "yonder" and says we need to talk to the guy in the cafe about the Monkey Trial and boy howdy sure he remembers the hoopla "clear as day…it was the Trial of the Century". And he wasn't exaggerating. The trial was conceived as a publicity stunt in 1925 to bring attention to the tiny town of Dayton, Tennessee and in that ambition it succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. The nation's two greatest orators--William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense---focused the eyes and ears of the nation on Dayton---the first live nationwide radio feed broadcast the proceedings and numerous reporters--among them H.L. Mencken---sent daily dispatches to their home newspapers describing the drama of the trial.
We walked down the street to Robinson's drug store and its tiny tables where the whole scheme was hatched. In the 1920s the drug store was the social center of small town America where people gossiped and chatted over soda pop & phosphates. Newspapers dubbed Robinson's pharmacist "The Hustling Druggist" in honor of his role as the mastermind of the whole circus. We started talking to some more old timers there who were happy to share their memories of the events and they started pulling photos from the archives out. I took more pictures. Dad could tell we were on to something. He gave me a five dollar bill & told me to get a couple of legal pads. This was exciting stuff and we were there, documenting memories and faces and the stories they told us. The game was afoot. Suddenly we were a team of investigative journalists. They took us to the courthouse & gave us a tour. It was undergoing renovations so there wasn't a lot to see there but we could feel the power of history, the energy of the focal point of "The Trial of the Century" though more than 50 years have passed the hype is still lingering like an aftershock, feeding off the energy field of an oversized historical behemoth celebrity entity. The Famous Hyped Event. A genuine and uniquely American invention. Both real and phony. Kind of like Elvis.
On the drive back to my grandparent's house, we heard the news. The King is dead. Elvis had died that day in Memphis. Every radio station was playing his music. Celebrities and fans were calling in with anecdotes and memories. Everyone seemed to be in shock. This road trip was teaching us something about America and Americans. Fame, fortune, how the blazing spotlights of publicity machines can blind one's eyes or drain one's soul---I'm not sure exactly what those lessons were. Probably nothing that profound. But it was something to talk about. And we talked and listened to each other and Elvis and other Americans on that long ride home.
I realize now the real gift from that day is the memory of the last big road trip I took with my dad, just me & him on that road. A great adventure under our belts. He loved to quote his favorite author G.K. Chesterton, who realized he'd taken the wrong train and instead of being angry or depressed was exultant: "Adventure!". I don't know if he ever wrote anything about the Dayton trip (but my mom recalls so much of what he told her---excitedly of course---about the findings of our mission). I do know that some of the photos from that day would show up randomly in our family reunion slideshows and inspire the usual wisecracks about our '70s clothes and expressions but I would always think about the sheer excitement of dashing to buy a legal pad for my dad so he could get the story. We were collaborating as father & son and living life to the fullest on that day. My dad was a great preacher and orator but he was also a writer, cartoonist, printer and comedian. And a marvelous father and husband and friend and mentor. Ultimately, a great enthusiast for life. He had more fun than any of us on trips to theme parks and tourist attractions, unafraid to exclaim "This is fantastic!". Of course, places like Disney World make it easier for everyone to have somewhat artificial adventures for the inflated price of admission. But what I treasure even more are those memories of adventures in the real world. Adventures open to anyone, anywhere and anytime but so often overlooked in the rush of our daily lives. Nothing elaborate or expensive needed. My dad and his notebook and pens. And me with my camera and Kodachrome. Both of us sharing the enthusiasm of curiosity and the joy of life, investigating and reporting our findings.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Preston Sturges
Preston Sturges
Every fan of film comedy should be familiar with Preston Sturges, the writer/director who practically invented the so-called “Screwball Comedies” popular in the 1930s and 40s. There’s a crash course in the art of Sturges in a box set of DVDs called “Preston Sturges: The Filmmaker Collection” (Universal 2006). With seven films in this set, one could become a true fan of Sturges in a week’s time---although if you want to go out on Saturday night, the weakest film of the bunch “The Great Moment” is non-required viewing. At least two of the bunch are solid classics: “The Lady Eve” starring Henry Fonda and “Sullivan’s Travels” with Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake (she of the ravishing peek-a-boo hairdo). Part of the fun of watching these films is the brilliant thespian work of Sturges’ “stock company”---a group of character actors who each performed in several of his films. The most recognizable of these actors is William Demarest--who played Uncle Charlie in the “My Three Sons” TV series-- a guy who personifies the term “irascible”. Incredibly, these seven films were made during 1940 through 1944---a remarkable feat still unmatched today by anyone.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Kenneth Patchen: Poet of Humor and Protest
Henry Miller turned me on to Kenneth Patchen, one of the greatest, obscure original
American artists of the twentieth century. Miller’s essay, "Patchen: Man of Anger and Light" appeared Henry Miller turned me on to Kenneth Patchen, one of the greatest obscure unsung in a sublime book of essays entitled "Stand Still Like the Hummingbird". I began haunting used book and thrift stores, searching for the name of "Patchen" on the spines of old volumes. Eventually I began finding his books, he was quite prolific, dozens of titles were published (mainly by New Directions) in his lifetime (1911-1972). Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio and died in Palo Alto, California. In his time on earth he was a poet, novelist, playwright, visual artist and jazz-poetry pioneer. His concept of "the Total Book" was best exemplified by the rare, limited editions of his poetry and prose, in which fine bindings, experimental typography and one of a kind paintings actually brushed by hand onto the book’s covers combined to make each object a unique, lively, valuable work of vital pulsating creativity. Here’s a fragment of dialogue from SLEEPERS AWAKE:
"It is time that books began to whirl and dance…"
I thought you said writing books was bad.
"I’ve changed my mind. It is time that books be allowed to open into the unknown…."
What does that mean?
"Books must be allowed to get out of hand, to wander off on their own account…."
Listen to Ferlinghetti: "The first modern poet I ever heard of was Kenneth Patchen, when I was living in Greenwich Village about 1939. He and Kenneth Rexroth were the greatest political poets of the period after the second world war, and they were great love poets too. They are kind of the fathers of our generation of poets….Along with Henry Miller they were a kind of dissident triumvirate to me and were saying things no other poets or writers were saying."
If you are interested in avant-garde American literature you need to be at least aware of Patchen and at best become well-versed with his life and work.
http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/23
American artists of the twentieth century. Miller’s essay, "Patchen: Man of Anger and Light" appeared Henry Miller turned me on to Kenneth Patchen, one of the greatest obscure unsung in a sublime book of essays entitled "Stand Still Like the Hummingbird". I began haunting used book and thrift stores, searching for the name of "Patchen" on the spines of old volumes. Eventually I began finding his books, he was quite prolific, dozens of titles were published (mainly by New Directions) in his lifetime (1911-1972). Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio and died in Palo Alto, California. In his time on earth he was a poet, novelist, playwright, visual artist and jazz-poetry pioneer. His concept of "the Total Book" was best exemplified by the rare, limited editions of his poetry and prose, in which fine bindings, experimental typography and one of a kind paintings actually brushed by hand onto the book’s covers combined to make each object a unique, lively, valuable work of vital pulsating creativity. Here’s a fragment of dialogue from SLEEPERS AWAKE:
"It is time that books began to whirl and dance…"
I thought you said writing books was bad.
"I’ve changed my mind. It is time that books be allowed to open into the unknown…."
What does that mean?
"Books must be allowed to get out of hand, to wander off on their own account…."
Listen to Ferlinghetti: "The first modern poet I ever heard of was Kenneth Patchen, when I was living in Greenwich Village about 1939. He and Kenneth Rexroth were the greatest political poets of the period after the second world war, and they were great love poets too. They are kind of the fathers of our generation of poets….Along with Henry Miller they were a kind of dissident triumvirate to me and were saying things no other poets or writers were saying."
If you are interested in avant-garde American literature you need to be at least aware of Patchen and at best become well-versed with his life and work.
http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/23
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Finding Kerouac
I first heard about Jack Kerouac in Tom Wolfe’s classic tale of the Merry Pranksters "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test". I was ravenously consuming any and all information about the 1960s and the Beatles. Both the Beatles and Kerouac make cameo appearances in "Acid Test". I wondered about this writer with such a strange French-Canadian name and why he wasn’t all that enthusiastic about hippies. The more I read about The Psychedelic Generation of the "turbulent sixties" (it must be some sort of federal guideline for documentarians to use this phrase when describing that decade of evolution) the more mentions of Kerouac I noticed. How he paved the way for the hippies by being the leader of the Beat Generation. I found my first Kerouac at the kidney foundation thrift shop in Tampa Florida. It was the second mass market paperback printing of "Desolation Angels" published by Bantam books in May 1971. The cover photo shows a bunch of naked longhairs sitting in a cave, much like the cover of a Grand Funk Railroad album called "Survivor" (I found a copy of that at a Salvation Army last year with some 70s ditchweed still lodged into the crease of the gatefold, again conforming to federal guidelines pertaining to poor-selling Grand Funk albums). I had spent some time as a bookseller in my college days and a co-worker said I should read "On the Road". I read it but didn’t get it. I was used to reading spy novels with intricate plots…I wasn’t ready for the truestory novel style of "Road". But finding "Desolation Angels" was a key event in my reading life, due to the helpful introduction by Seymour Krim, which was basically a mini biography of Kerouac and the Beats. That intro and the history of Beat life revealed in "Angels" enlightened me. And when I read in a Beatles book that Lennon read Kerouac, I had to read everything I could get my hands on. Not an easy task in those pre-internet days of the 1980s. Most of Kerouac’s books were out of print, so digging through thriftshop bookstacks was not the hip way to find his books, it was the ONLY way. As my collection grew over the years, I became fascinated with the way Kerouac’s books were marketed. The first paperback printing of "Angels" was published in 1966, around the same time the Beatles went psychedelic with "Revolver" and the hip world followed suit. The cover for that first printing showed a cool urban scene, the arch of Washington Square, urbane hipsters in the act of undressing. In the 1971 version---printed two years after Kerouac’s death---the hipsters literally have gone underground. They are totally naked, in a cavern, full blown hippies. The cover text was also aimed to appeal to the hippies, saying Kerouac’s work "immortalized the wild hopes and dreams, the fantastic excesses of a generation but also provided a floor plan for generations to come…clawing into life through drugs, perversion, literature and promiscuous sex".
The brief bios in the back of my Kerouac paperbacks always stated that he died in St. Petersburg in 1969. When I found out more about these later years, in the comprehensive biography "Memory Babe" by Gerald Nicosia, I began to see Kerouac as a human being, not the "Hippie Homer of the turned-on generation" or "the man who launched the hippie world, the daddy of the swinging psychedelic generation". Those descriptions were a load of crap designed to sell books. Jack was bumming rides into Tampa so he could party with college students and professors in dive bars. "Memory Babe" included the addresses of these long-gone dive bars and of his last house in St. Pete. I was astonished to learn that the Wild Boar Tavern was about a mile from my apartment, so I rode my bike to that address and had an epiphany. Jack Kerouac was a guy who wrote books and got famous and it didn’t make him happy. He would have been better off toiling in obscurity---read by a handful of admirers in the underground scene---than being misunderstood by millions and misrepresented by a few corporate publishers who sought massive sales and cared not a bit for this singular artist. I made a pilgrimage to St. Pete to look at the house where it was said his last meal was a can of tuna. I went to all the thriftshops and used bookshops in St. Pete (the best of which, Haslam’s had a great limited edition of "Visions of Cody" in a class case that I coveted for months. At $100 it was out of my price range but it was still cool to gaze at its cover, whose title had been written in crayon by the man himself). A bookseller at Haslam’s told me Kerouac would come into the store wearing a hardhat for disguise and look to see if they were stocking his books and most people thought he was a bum. Not a Dharma Bum, just plain old crazy hardhat wearing bum. I traveled all over the south and the Midwest in the 80s and the 90s and no matter where I went, I always had to stop in every thriftshop and used bookstore I could locate. The best finds were in the grungiest places. For $5 I found a hardcover first edition of "Desolation Angels" in a shop in Tarpon Springs. And the owners of used book stores in America are almost always eccentric, fascinating people so there were plenty of bizarre behaviors and conversations to relate to friends upon returning home.
Now in the 21st century, most of what Kerouac wrote is in print (40 plus books of poetry and prose published so far and more in preparation) and readily available at your local super bookstore. I still, to this day, continue to seek out the secondhand shops when traveling because there’s always one rarity I need ("Pull My Daisy"---anyone have an extra copy?). But vintage Kerouac books are harder to find and if they do have them, they are all displayed in glass cases. And it’s not the same to "win them" on ebay. That feels like cheating to me and its certainly not as much fun as scanning the spines of row upon row of Harlequin romance novels and blockbuster suspense thrillers just to find that one rough nugget in book form of a human tale by a man with that weird name told instantly and interestingly with a singular and spontaneous voice: Kerouac.
The brief bios in the back of my Kerouac paperbacks always stated that he died in St. Petersburg in 1969. When I found out more about these later years, in the comprehensive biography "Memory Babe" by Gerald Nicosia, I began to see Kerouac as a human being, not the "Hippie Homer of the turned-on generation" or "the man who launched the hippie world, the daddy of the swinging psychedelic generation". Those descriptions were a load of crap designed to sell books. Jack was bumming rides into Tampa so he could party with college students and professors in dive bars. "Memory Babe" included the addresses of these long-gone dive bars and of his last house in St. Pete. I was astonished to learn that the Wild Boar Tavern was about a mile from my apartment, so I rode my bike to that address and had an epiphany. Jack Kerouac was a guy who wrote books and got famous and it didn’t make him happy. He would have been better off toiling in obscurity---read by a handful of admirers in the underground scene---than being misunderstood by millions and misrepresented by a few corporate publishers who sought massive sales and cared not a bit for this singular artist. I made a pilgrimage to St. Pete to look at the house where it was said his last meal was a can of tuna. I went to all the thriftshops and used bookshops in St. Pete (the best of which, Haslam’s had a great limited edition of "Visions of Cody" in a class case that I coveted for months. At $100 it was out of my price range but it was still cool to gaze at its cover, whose title had been written in crayon by the man himself). A bookseller at Haslam’s told me Kerouac would come into the store wearing a hardhat for disguise and look to see if they were stocking his books and most people thought he was a bum. Not a Dharma Bum, just plain old crazy hardhat wearing bum. I traveled all over the south and the Midwest in the 80s and the 90s and no matter where I went, I always had to stop in every thriftshop and used bookstore I could locate. The best finds were in the grungiest places. For $5 I found a hardcover first edition of "Desolation Angels" in a shop in Tarpon Springs. And the owners of used book stores in America are almost always eccentric, fascinating people so there were plenty of bizarre behaviors and conversations to relate to friends upon returning home.
Now in the 21st century, most of what Kerouac wrote is in print (40 plus books of poetry and prose published so far and more in preparation) and readily available at your local super bookstore. I still, to this day, continue to seek out the secondhand shops when traveling because there’s always one rarity I need ("Pull My Daisy"---anyone have an extra copy?). But vintage Kerouac books are harder to find and if they do have them, they are all displayed in glass cases. And it’s not the same to "win them" on ebay. That feels like cheating to me and its certainly not as much fun as scanning the spines of row upon row of Harlequin romance novels and blockbuster suspense thrillers just to find that one rough nugget in book form of a human tale by a man with that weird name told instantly and interestingly with a singular and spontaneous voice: Kerouac.
Monday, May 18, 2009
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