Five Hundred and Still Counting

Only six months ago that I wrote about the eighth “anniversary” of this blog. When I posted my last entry BlogSpot reminded me that that was my 500^th entry.  The reasons I write were fairly well summed up by what I wrote in that anniversary piece, part of which is included below. 

When I started this, who knew I’d keep going.  I certainly didn’t.  It was an experiment which still makes me wonder, why?  Perhaps it’s because I sometimes don’t even know what I think until I put my hands on a keyboard.  Writing requires thought, working things out in a way speaking does not, and certainly thinking is completely unnecessary (in fact thinking is the enemy) when forwarding mindless email chains. 

A consequence of writing in this space is “thought accountability.”  I have to take responsibility for the views expressed here which change over time. If others tap into my stories, photographs, and views, benefit by them, identify with them in some way, or are bored by them and never return, so be it.  I chose not to support a comment section in the blog, but one can reach me at lacunaemusing@gmail.com.

One thing I mentioned below is my intent to lessen the focus on family history, not only because of

Age 9

privacy issues, but I’ve covered the essentials.  At the same time I am purging some of the physical “stuff” associated with that history.  The older one gets, the more things own you. In that regard, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester is enthusiastically accepting much of the memorabilia I have from my family’s photographic studio, the history of which I have detailed in this blog. It will be suitable home for those materials, accessible to future generations.  Once they have received everything, catalogued it all, and digitize much of it, I’ll provide a link in some future entry.

And further along those lines, there have been a number of emails back and forth with the The National WWII Museum in New Orleans regarding my father’s unique scrapbook of his service during the War and ultimately I’ll be donating that to them, once I digitize all his letters and locate the photographs he took during the war which are not in the scrapbook itself.

With the completion of that donation, I will be through with not only writing about those pieces of my family’s history, but putting the physical evidence in strong hands for preservation.  Maybe if I didn’t write this blog I might have been less proactive in this regard, another benefit.

So, from my “anniversary” issue….

Can it be?  Eight years writing this blog.  That’s the amount of time I spent in grammar school. Those eight years in PS 90 seem to be light years in the distant past, but at the time they were an eternity.  And four years in high school were equally drawn out, anticipating adulthood, the point at which I could leave the turmoil of my parent’s home.  Time accelerated in college, came on full speed during my career and raising a family, and now it’s a year in a blink.

I think I’ve been true to my “mission statement” in this space -- essentially an eclectic, kaleidoscopic diary. There have been 480 entries thus far, enough to fill at least five printed volumes.  Content has morphed into more about theatre, literature and still some politics and economics, but less about family history.  I’ve pretty much covered that, and the older I get the more I’d like to move on. 

Nonetheless, I still write about things which are fairly personal, always hesitating about what I “put out there.”  As this blog has evolved, so has the digital world, data mining for all sorts of nefarious reasons.  And the digital world has moved way beyond blogs to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumbler, social networks where a momentary impulse can be just thrown out as a developed thought.  Not here.   Traffic building has not been my intent.  According to Google, in eight years there have been 86,021 page views. Some web sites do that in a minute. Most land here via searches (not for me, but topics I write about) and frequently those are image searches as I’ve incorporated countless photographs in this space

The most viewed entry is one in February 2011 about the Maiden Voyage of Oceania’s ship ‘Marina.’ Not far behind in fifth place is the one I wrote on my open heart surgery, only two months later 

Without going into details of the latter, it is truly a twist of fate that I made it through that voyage without ending up in the freezer with the flowers (a favorite repository for those who die on cruises).  Of course I didn’t realize that I was so vulnerable at the time (although we’re all vulnerable all the time). I suppose that is another reason I write this blog:  it is a record and it allows me to reflect on my life and matters of living, to have a documented trail.  I go to it when memory fails.

I add this coda, something I came across in my files while searching materials for the George Eastman Museum.  My father had saved it and obviously so did I.  It is the first letter I ever received -- about a month after I was born, from the War Price and Rationing Board of the Office of Price Administration during WW II.  This presumably contained ration coupons – a bit of history including the address of my parents’ first home, an apartment house which is still standing.

Our Decaying Infrastructure

The following is such an important, well-reasoned article that I am “republishing” it in my blog (by permission), something I’ve never done before.  It encapsulates some of what I’ve written about our infrastructure over the years. How do we, as supposedly a First World country, tolerate a transportation system that is definitely Third World?  It is all part of kicking the can down the road (no pun intended), with no agreement on an overarching plan.  It has become ingrained in our politics, the one of “I got mine, you get yours.” Our transportation “system” has become an expression of individualism and class warfare.  

True, there are vast geographic differences between our country and those in Europe and much of Asia which have vastly superior public transportation.  The automobile is still part of the key in traveling in less densely populated places (nonetheless we are also allowing our bridges and roadways to crumble).  But the woeful transportation options in our cities and their adjacent environs -- and this especially true for virtually the entire Northeastern corridor -- is just inexcusable for a country of our resources.  It is also goes against the environmental grain – the need for carbon emission reduction.

It is not sufficient to merely duct tape our failing infrastructure; we need a plan and a commitment.  This would create jobs as well.  Do we have the right stuff politically?  I commend this article from the blog “The Conversation” and hat tip to Barry Ritholtz for bringing it to his readers’ attention:

Why is the U.S. unwilling to pay for good public transportation?

John Rennie Short, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Officials in Washington, D.C. said this week they may have to shut down portions of the Metro subway system for months because its piecemeal approach to maintenance is no longer sufficient.
The disclosure follows a shutdown of the entire Metro system on March 16 for 24 hours. Three-quarters of a million people use the system each weekday, so the inconvenience and cost were considerable.
The reason: frayed electrical cables discovered in at least 26 locations that posed an immediate danger. Closing the Metro was probably the safest thing to do.
Just two days previously, an electrical fire in a tunnel forced stoppages to busy commuter service. In September 2015 a train was stuck inside a tunnel, and passengers choked for over an hour as smoke from a fire was accidentally pumped into the train. One woman died. In the last six years 15 people have died in seven separate incidents.
A system that opened to such fanfare in 1976 is now crumbling. It is a depressingly familiar story that is not limited to urban public transport. The U.S. has a major and growing infrastructure gap – though chasm is a more appropriate metaphor.
The quality of a country’s infrastructure is directly linked to its competitiveness because it makes businesses more productive and improves the quality of life. Why has the U.S. let its public transit slip so far?

From First to Third World

The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation’s infrastructure a D+. Its report from 2013 depicts a woeful tale of deferred maintenance. More than 70,000 bridges are in need of repair. We need around US$1.7 trillion for our surface transportation alone.
The week that the D.C. metro was closed, I was in Zurich, Switzerland. The contrast could not have been starker. There, a ticket is good for rail, bus and tram. It is clean and efficient, a widely shared experience and a deep source of pride. Most people in the country use public transport in the cities to get around. It is a vital part of urban public life.
In international comparisons, the U.S. is falling further behind. To fly from either Seoul or Shanghai into Los Angeles airport is to make the journey from a First World to a Third World airport. To fly into New York’s JFK from Zurich or most European capitals is to fly from the future into the past.

For people coming and going to Dulles – the main arrival point for international travel – there is no Metro rail station, which would shield travelers from road traffic. Sean_Marshall/flickr, CC BY-NC

And when you arrive in Los Angeles or New York City airports, the public transport connections are often nonexistent or inadequate. If you fly into Dulles, the main international airport for D.C., you will wait in vain for a train to the city (although buses are available). The Metro has yet to link the city to the airport, 40 years after the system opened.
Now Switzerland, which ranks at the top globally for overall infrastructure, may be a reach for the U.S. But when the U.S. ranks 16th for infrastructure quality, easily outranked by countries such as France and Spain, then we should start worrying.
There are substantial costs to the decline of our public transportation system. Closures, accidents and inefficiencies cost individuals and companies and reduce the efficiency of our national economy. Poor infrastructure means Americans spend $120 billion each year in extra fuel and lost time.
To some extent, this state of affairs should be no surprise.
Our competitors are out-investing us in the vital infrastructure necessary to make our economy efficient and internationally competitive. Even when our public infrastructure spending is higher than our competitors, it is less well-targeted because decisions are more politically motivated than based on economic rationality.
We seem unwilling to pay for public services. Our declining road system, for example, is funded by the Highway Trust Fund, which is derived from a gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon. It has not been raised since 1993, and more fuel-efficient vehicles means less revenue. Raising the gas tax is not considered politically feasible, even in a time of declining gas prices.

What went wrong?

At least four reasons can be cited for the decline in the quality of urban public transportation.
The first is the early and continuing embrace of the private car as a form of urban transport. In Europe, expensive gas and restrictive land use measures kept people in dense cities, and urban growth followed along the lines of mass transit, reinforcing and consolidating their use.
In the U.S. growth spread across a landscape of freeways and motorway exits, encouraged by federal investment in the national highway system in the 1950s. As low-density suburban sprawl spread, public transport became less viable. New suburbs and Sunbelt cities constructed in the last half of the 20th century were built around the private automobile.

Encouraged by the construction of the highway infrastructure, Americans moved out to the suburbs and started to rely more on cars, rather than public transit, to get into cities. www.shutterstock.com

Over time, Republican-dominated suburbs came to see mass transit as a special Democratic interest and voted accordingly. For example, the mayor of Nashville’s plans for public transport last year were blocked by state politicians and right-wing national interest groups.
Second, as cities were designed to meet the needs of the motorist, mass transit systems that had been owned by private companies were abandoned or effectively dismantled in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s because they were losing money.
As a result, many mass transit systems were taken over by municipalities. This led to a high-cost, low-revenue system dependent on the vagaries of federal, state and city funding. Meanwhile, car drivers were economic free riders, not charged for the social costs of their accidents, pollution and congestion.
The third reason is that all infrastructure ages and needs costly maintenance and continual improvement, yet funding is often constrained.
Even when new transit systems were built, such as in D.C., or existing ones were upgraded, as in New York City and Boston, they still had to be maintained, which takes up large chunks of public money without the benefit of a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Building something new gives politicians a photo opportunity, replacing a frayed electrical cable does not. And there are many other claims on government such as pensions, schools, Social Security and a large military. Our infrastructure chasm is a quiet, slow-moving but relentless crisis only brought into focus when wires fray to the point of immediate danger.
Across the country, transit systems have a backlog of deferred maintenance. Chicago Transit Authority, for instance, spent $5 billion on infrastructure upgrades in the past five years, but needs another $13 billion. Cities in the U.S. have a repair backlog that amounts to $86 billion.

Private affluence and public squalor

Fourth, there is a deeper tension in the U.S., first noted by economist Kenneth Galbraith, between private affluence and public squalor.
Many of us, it seems, have lost faith in the public realm. The private car is the embodiment of U.S. individualism. The decline of our cities' infrastructure is one expression of loss of faith in the public realm as a place of beauty and efficiency and an embodiment of what one journalist refers to as “our anger and our pessimism.”
This thinking has made our cities less about shared experiences and more a place of different lives and separated spaces.
There is some room for optimism. A series of reports highlight the advantage of investing more in public transport. And as more people want to live in cities in dense walkable neighborhoods, the demand for public transport is increasing.
Ridership rates vary by city and with the price of gas, but the overall usage trend is upwards. The top 10 transit systems carry 12.6 million people each workday.
And millennials lack their parents' and grandparents' love affair with the automobile. We may be at the cusp of a generational shift in attitudes to the car and mass transit. Cities and cars were never a good fit, something more people appear to be realizing.
Urban public transport may come to be seen as a more desirable, more sustainable, more equitable way of getting around the city. If only we can remember to ensure we have enough money to replace those electric cables before they pose a serious danger.

John Rennie Short, Professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Son – There IS Blood

When I wrote about a similarly entitled novel & Sons by David Gilbert, I asked the rhetorical question of who might replace our great contemporary writers, such as John Updike, John Cheever, and Philip Roth among others.  I had suggested we might look at the work of Jonathan Franzan, Jonathan Tropper, Brady Udall, Eric Puchner, Jonathan Lethem, Chad Harbach, Dave King, Jess Walker, as well as David Gilbert, all mentioned in this blog. 

Based on his second novel, The Son, here is another name for this list, Philipp Meyer.  I recently read his first novel, American Rust, to see whether I wanted to invest the time in the nearly 600 page The Son.  It was a sound investment!

As in the case of American Rust, it is a story told by different characters, but unlike American Rust, this is a multigenerational novel, skipping back and forth in time, and on a much, much larger scale.  If American Rust is a microcosm of the contemporary economy, this is a macrocosm of the dark side of the American soul, with overtones of Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos and Herman Melville.  It is also historical fiction, well researched, particularly in the ways of the Comanche. 

Expansive in scale, it takes place mostly in Texas over more than a century.  I kept thinking of the movie Giant which I remember seeing as a kid, a sprawling film about a Texas family and oil, James Dean’s last film.  At some point in the novel the movie is actually mentioned so Meyer too was acutely aware of the same in envisioning location.  One could also think of the recent movie There Will Be Blood, based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil.

At the heart of The Son are violence and racism, man’s plundering nature, and the Darwinian reality of the weak being devoured by the strong and them, in turn, becoming victims themselves, if not with their very lives, their souls.

The “story” is begun by the patriarch of the McCullough family, Eli, who as a thirteen year old is abducted by the Comanche, having to witness the brutal murder of his mother and sister.  This is only the beginning of scores of brutalities in the novel; one needs a thick skin to wade into the evil of man portrayed in these pages. Be prepared to metaphorically drink turtle and buffalo blood.  

Eli tells his story in chapters spread throughout the novel, in the first person, sometimes in retrospect, sometimes in real time.  He and his brother are taken by the Comanche as slaves and Eli is given the name “Tiehteti” which he explains “meant pathetic little white man.”  This is the one thing he vows not to be as he grows up in the tribe, finally rising through his own barbarism to a position of respect, at which point he is “traded” back to white society as there was a premium paid for the return for white captives.  Eli becomes a mercenary with the Texas Rangers and ultimately sets out on his own to build an empire, first in cattle and horses and finally in oil.  Along the way, the skills and savagery learned as a Comanche serve “Colonel McCullough” (as he is known from his Texas Ranger days) well as an empire builder.

The conscience in the novel is his son, Peter, who is overwhelmed by the Texans’ treatment of the Mexican natives of Texas, Mexicans who predated the whites before the Civil War. Once the Civil War ended, there was a steady influx of whites and finally when oil was discovered there, their arrival was as fast as they could dispatch Indians and Mexicans to their graves.  Peter is horrified and seeks redemption by falling in love with the sole survivor of a Mexican family destroyed by his father and his henchmen.  Peter’s story is detailed from the pages of his diary which has survived due to a development that only a spoiler could explain, so enough said.

The other main character is Jeanne Anne, grandchild of Peter and great-grandchild of Eli, into whose veins all this bloodletting and empire building ultimately flows.  She must make her way in the world of men, ruthless ones at times.  J. A. McCullough’s chapters are also intermingled, out of chronological order, Meyer writing her tale in the third person.

She grows into this world of men who perhaps thought that she was a slut or a dyke or a whore. A man trapped in a woman's body; look up her skirt and you'll see a cock. A liar, a schemer, a cold heart with a cunt to match, ridden hard and put up wet. Though she shouldn't take it personally. No one meant anything by it. To be a man meant not living by any rules at all. You could say one thing in church and another at the bar and somehow both were true. You could be a good husband and father and Christian and bed every secretary, waitress, and prostitute that caught your eye. They all had their winks and nods, code for “I fucked that cheerleader or nanny or Pan Am stewardess, that maid or riding instructor.” Meanwhile, the slightest hint she was anything but a virgin (excepting [her] three children), would get her banned for life, a scarlet letter.

She’s the one who has to manage the empire during the time of burgeoning oil prices and shady land grabs.  Behind every great wealth is a great sin and behind it all is the sense of a Godless universe of natural selection.

Peter watches his father burn down the hacienda of his long-time Mexican neighbors, an old established family, the Garcia’s: …he is not of our time; he is like some fossil come out of a stream bank or a trench in the ocean, from a point in history when you took what you wanted and did not see any reason to justify.  I realize he is not any worse than our neighbors: they are simply more modern in their thinking. They require some racial explanation to justify their theft and murder. My brother Phineas is truly the most advanced among them, has nothing against the Mexican or any other race, he sees it simply as a matter of economics. Science rather than emotion. The strong must be encouraged, the weak allowed to perish. Though what none of them see, or want to see, is that we have a choice.

Jeanne has her own view on the topic: Even if God existed, to say he loved the human race was preposterous. It was just as likely the opposite; it was just as likely he was systematically deceiving us. To think that an all-powerful being would make a world for anyone but himself, that he might spend all his time looking out for the interests of lesser creatures, it went against all common sense. The strong took from the weak, only the weak believed otherwise, and if God was out there, he was just as the Greeks and Romans had suspected; a trickster, an older brother who spent all his time inventing ways to punish you.

The overarching philosophical view of Meyer is expressed by Jeanne as well (helpful to be doing Google lookups to get the full scope of Meyer’s research): As for JFK, it had not surprised her. The year he died, there were still living Texans who had seen their parents scalped by Indians. The land was thirsty. Something primitive still in it. On the ranch they had found points from both the Clovis and the Folsom, and while Jesus was walking to Calvary the Mogollon people were bashing each other with stone axes. When the Spanish came there were the Suma, Jumano, Manso, La Junta, Concho and Chisos and Toboso, Ocana and Cacaxtle, the Coahuiltecans, Comecrudos ... but whether they had wiped out the Mogollons or were descended from them, no one knew. They were all wiped out by the Apaches. Who were in turn wiped out, in Texas anyway, by the Comanches. Who were finally wiped out by the Americans.

A man, a life - it was barely worth mentioning. The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and had themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story. And yet here she was. Breathing, having these thoughts. The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean, but despite all the butchery, here you were.

The writing is prodigiously powerful, the research exhaustive.  One could say this is a Western novel, but it is so much more: it is the promise of great things to come from Philipp Meyer. 

Theatre Roundtable: Directly Speaking

One of the many benefits of Dramaworks in West Palm Beach is the diversity of their offerings outside the productions on the main stage, in particular their ongoing educational program Dramalogue which is “a series that explores all aspects of theatre, in conversations with or about the industry's top professionals and master artists.” This year’s program is one of their best and last night’s Theatre Roundtable, Directly Speaking was, for me, particularly fascinating and relevant.

This was a live question and answer session about directing, trying to answer the question “what, exactly, does a director do?”  The participants were among the leading directors in South Florida, Joseph Adler the producing artistic director of the GableStage, David Arisco, the artistic director of the Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre, William Hayes a founding member of Palm Beach Dramaworks as well as its producing artistic director, and J. Barry Lewis, Dramaworks’ resident director and who also directs plays at other area theatres. Hayes and Lewis were the moderators of this spellbinding discussion.  Between the four directors on the panel, they estimate having some 400 plays under their directorial belts!

What impressed me was not only the content of their discussion, but their passion as well.  These directors are devoted to their craft; it is both an art and a process.  I was also struck by how closely directing relates to the role I fulfilled during my career, publisher. To be one for nearly forty years required the same degree of passion.

Joseph Adler likened his directorial career to pushing that absurd rock of Sisyphus up the hill, trying to reach the peak, but always being condemned to not reach it and having to do it all over again.  To him, it has always been the attempt to achieve perfection, but having to settle for the act of directing as being an ongoing learning experience.  I can relate. During my career as a publisher; the more I learned, the more I discovered there was to learn.

The director’s role is to present the play as the author intended and to get all the artistic aspects of a production in alignment to achieve that purpose, stage design, lighting, costuming, blocking and movement of the actors, not to mention the auditioning process as actor selection is as critical as getting the actors to understand the director’s vision and to act in harmony. 

Amusingly, someone said when a play is good they commend the actors but when it is bad it’s entirely the director’s fault! It was also said that a leading actor’s off night is always much worse than an average actor’s average night, especially if an actor goes “rogue,” changing interpretation after a play opens.  The production will then most likely stray from the director’s vision of the play.  And, unknown to most audiences, once a play opens (and in the South Florida regional theatre scene that occurs in most cases less than a month from when they first start to work on a play!), the play is no longer in the director’s control; it is handed off to the stage manager.  So the director has precious few weeks to get everything working together.

While there are overlapping choices of types of plays presented at the three theatres represented in the discussion, each has its specialization as well.  David Arisco’s background in musical theatre, as well as the size of Actor’s Playhouse’s 600 seat main stage has resulted in more musicals while Joseph Adler’s intimate 150-seat theater in Coral Gables’ Biltmore Hotel has gravitated to more experimental productions.  Dramaworks 218-seat theatre is also intimate but Hayes and company have focused more on well-established contemporary dramatic works, with some musical theatre during their summer programs.  And next week it is opening its new 35 seat Diane & Mark Perlberg Studio Theatre on the second floor for its also new endeavor, the Dramaworkshop, a lab for developing new plays, the first one being Buried Cities by Jennifer Fawcett. 

All of this reminds me of my publishing days. We too would have overlapping publishing programs, particularly in academic publishing, but we also forged our way into unique reference programs and even occasionally a competitive trade book (one published for a general audience).  Each press would generally be known for a particular specialty.

Unlike many commercial enterprises (and except for the university presses most publishing is a for-profit endeavor – or at least that’s the intent), book publishing is different as each book is a “unique product.”  Plays are similarly unique, each needing a creative team to produce it.  The director of a play is its CEO, very often involved in the selection process itself, and then heading up his creative technical team, and the actors, to present the author’s vision and to please his audience. 

As in theatre, we had to do justice to our authors. In publishing, our team was comprised of advisory editors (to help select the publishable material or to develop new works from scratch), copy editors, production editors, marketing specialists to make sure the book reaches its intended audience, designers for promotion and for the book itself, and then the back office business -- royalties, sales receipts, customer service, etc.  And there are similar business requirements to run a successful theatre, including fund raising as ticket sales themselves usually cover only about half of a regional theatre’s expenses.

I make these observations as those were the thoughts running through my mind listening to these great directors speak.  They were talking about a creative process I identify with although I neither have the knowledge or translatable experience to direct a play.  Ask me to produce a book, no problem! So no wonder I’ve become a “citizen reviewer” of many of the Dramaworks’ productions, and some other theatre productions as well.  Dramalogue helped bring out the sense of parallelism to my working life.  The “invisible hand” of the director is not so dissimilar to working with a creative publishing team.