by Greg Proops
THE GENERAL
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, directors, 1926
Buster Keaton was a prop in his parents’ vaudeville act, ergo the name Buster. Keaton the director was a stunning technician as well as being wildly innovative. Mostly, he is dead funny. His sensibility plays modern because he never asks the audience to go it alone. Whatever mishaps befall him, he hits us with a silent plea, the look right to the camera. Sometimes that’s the whole gag; sometimes it is the payoff. Charlie Chaplin is more sentimental, Harold Lloyd more middle class. Keaton sets himself up to be beaten and then shows us brilliantly how to come through. The effects he achieved and the unbelievable stunts he performed defy physics. He pours a train into a river, and he runs the length of a speeding locomotive. In this film his artistry as a writer, director, and performer is in full effect. Buster is an acrobat who flies and falls and never changes expression. He is beautiful, and his eyes say everything. As with Lon Cheney and Garbo and Gloria Swanson, the face carries the day.
You will laugh out loud at a sepiacolored movie. Keaton ain’t sentimental, but he is arch in his own way. Start here and then watch a silent a month. You will come over to the quieter side.
BASEBALL II
What the Evil Old White Man Did
Organized baseball was started by corporate robber barons in the nineteenth century. That is why it is such an enduring American tradition. Baseball should ban white older men from owning teams. Here is a list of things the old white men who have always owned and operated Major League Baseball have been opposed to.
A) The radio. That’s right, they presciently anticipated that if the games were broadcast for free, it would hurt attendance. Most teams had no regular radio presence till the 1940s. Even then, they didn’t do all the away games but did cheap, in-studio re-creations. Our greatest senile president, Ronald Reagan, attained his firm grasp on reality in that atmosphere.
B) Letting anyone play who wasn’t white.
C) Hiring proper paid umpires. In the nineteenth century, one ump worked the game. He was way behind the plate, so he didn’t get clobbered with a foul ball. He more often got hit with bottles and food and drunkards running up to punch and beat him. Then when someone got on first, he moved behind the pitcher. Runners dashing from first to third rarely touched second, knowing the ump couldn’t see everything. In other words, cheating ruled.
D) Paying the players as human beings. Players were chattel till just a short while ago. Chattel means “slave.” The owners had a reserve clause allowing them to control who played for whom and for how much cake. It took till the 1970s and Marvin Miller, the labor negotiator, to organize the players into the strongest, most successful union in the United Snakes.
E) TV. Again, they felt suckers—meaning paying fans—wouldn’t come and spend their hard-earned clams at the rotting stadiums that brooded over the wrecked cities then. You got one crappy game of the week in the ’60s and ’70s, and it was always the bloody Red Sox. We freely admit that football and basketball are way better TV shows.
F) Shouldering the blame for alcohol abuse, speed, steroids, and the fantastically acronamed PEDs, or performance-enhancing drugs. In the olden days players were often drunk on the field. So were the fans. Then came the newer days and amphetamine, so the players could play the mad six-month schedule. Then the ’80s came and the players did lots of coke and the owners looked the other way and never offered substance abuse help. Then came ’roids. The players got huge and cranked giant homers. The owners watched, sat back, did nothing, and raked in the money for decades. Then the black man Barry Bonds broke the white guy Mark McGwire’s single-season home-run record and the shit hit the fan. Then came the outrage: Barry Bonds invented cheating, he was the devil, he was arrogant to writers, he gazed lovingly at his soaring taters much as Rembrandt appraised his canvas after painting a masterpiece. So he had a Barcalounger and a TV in front of his locker—that didn’t mean he was a demon. He was big, black, and didn’t make it easy to get a quote. Notwithstanding the fact he was the biggest drawing card in baseball, Barry was pilloried. The owners blamed the players for doing what they wanted them to do. Get huge and make the game popular with people again. Hypocrisy is so easy and fun and easy.
G) Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are the two best players of their generation. End of story. Did they use ’roids? Yes. Did everyone? Yes. Was it illegal when they did it? No. Are they any less moral than other players? Really? When you cheat at work by stealing a Post-it pad or eating someone else’s lunch out of the fridge, it makes you an ass hat. When Barry and Roger cheated, small children cried tears of joy. You decide who is a bigger charlatan.
H) Playing baseball on the West Coast. The major leagues had no team west of Milwaukee for almost one hundred years. Guess they figured too many burning wagons and such.
I) Negotiating. There is a popular trope that goes, “I would love to be an athlete. I would play for nothing.” Right. What happened to the love of the game and all? The truth is, everyone in every line of work negotiates to get the best pay they can all the time. The owners of all sports teams, who are mostly white and rich, with a very few exceptions, negotiate relentlessly to pay the concession workers less, to charge the fan more for tickets every season, to screw the towns they play in by threatening to leave unless the taxpayers buy them a new corporate revenue dome, and on and on. But if players, whose careers are limited, want to be compensated, they are greedy. That argument makes anyone sound like an angry, white, portly guy hosting a shouty all-sports radio show called 99 the Weasel or Petey and the Cracker.
J) Anything good. Owners have turned ballyards into noisy, mindless, NASCAR-intelligence-level, nonstop-sensory-overload video game joints. Baseball is a stately, boring game with sudden breaks for action. Every moment doesn’t have to be celebrated with giant ads and hideous music that sounds like a toaster dying. Parents and children can speak civilly to one another at a baseball game because only an organ is playing. Baseball at its best is church with spitting.
K) Children. Yes, that’s right. The owners hate children. Kids don’t understand what a lockout is. They cry when the team moves or a player is suspended or Tim McCarver is mixing a metaphor with a mistake. Tickets in L.A. are over $100 apiece to sit near the field down the line. Kids always have that kind of ready cash. Baseball is also notoriously racist and male. What is not for a young mind to love?
POETRY IX
William Blake
(1757–1827)
Blake saw God when he was four. His parents were skeptical but did not make him go to school. So that worked. They taught him to read and write at home. Blake next saw a tree full of angels when he was nine. At ten, he announced he was going to be a painter, so the folks sent him to art school. He took up poetry and became an engraver’s apprentice. One of his assignments was to sketch the tombstones at Westminster Abbey. He retained his Goth outlook as an artist his whole life. Blake was a real free thinker who detested governments and the church’s tyranny. He wrote much about it and rolled with Thomas Paine, who helped start our revolution with his pamphlet Common Sense, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the noted feminist. Blake was working on illustrations for an edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy up until his death. He remains a unique poet and talent. This joint is lengthy, but it rhymes and you have to bend some of the words to make them rhyme. I suggest the William Blake cocktail. Two ounces of anything hard. Wave your hand over the glass, gaze at the heavens, and swallow all at once. Then read this bear.
Auguries of Innocence
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
A dove-house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell thro’ all its regions.
A dog starv’d at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin o
f the state.
A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.
A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipt and arm’d for fight
Does the rising sun affright.
Every wolf’s and lion’s howl
Raises from hell a human soul.
The wild deer, wand’ring here and there,
Keeps the human soul from care.
The lamb misus’d breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher’s knife.
The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won’t believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever’s fright.
He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be belov’d by men.
He who the ox to wrath has mov’d
Shall never be by woman lov’d.
The wanton boy that kills the fly
Shall feel the spider’s enmity.
He who torments the chafer’s sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.
The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief.
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the last judgment draweth nigh.
He who shall train the horse to war
Shall never pass the polar bar.
The beggar’s dog and widow’s cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.
The gnat that sings his summer’s song
Poison gets from slander’s tongue.
The poison of the snake and newt
Is the sweat of envy’s foot.
The poison of the honeybee
Is the artist’s jealousy.
The prince’s robes and beggar’s rags
Are toadstools on the miser’s bags.
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro’ the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
The babe is more than swaddling bands;
Throughout all these human lands
Tools were made, and born were hands,
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;
This is caught by females bright,
And return’d to its own delight.
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,
Are waves that beat on heaven’s shore.
The babe that weeps the rod beneath
Writes revenge in realms of death.
The beggar’s rags, fluttering in air,
Does to rags the heavens tear.
The soldier, arm’d with sword and gun,
Palsied strikes the summer’s sun.
The poor man’s farthing is worth more
Than all the gold on Afric’s shore.
One mite wrung from the lab’rer’s hands
Shall buy and sell the miser’s lands;
Or, if protected from on high,
Does that whole nation sell and buy.
He who mocks the infant’s faith
Shall be mock’d in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne’er get out.
He who respects the infant’s faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child’s toys and the old man’s reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.
The questioner, who sits so sly,
Shall never know how to reply.
He who replies to words of doubt
Doth put the light of knowledge out.
The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar’s laurel crown.
Nought can deform the human race
Like to the armour’s iron brace.
When gold and gems adorn the plow,
To peaceful arts shall envy bow.
A riddle, or the cricket’s cry,
Is to doubt a fit reply.
The emmet’s inch and eagle’s mile
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe, do what you please.
If the sun and moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out.
To be in a passion you good may do,
But no good if a passion is in you.
The whore and gambler, by the state
Licensed, build that nation’s fate.
The harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave old England’s winding-sheet.
The winner’s shout, the loser’s curse,
Dance before dead England’s hearse.
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro’ the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.
God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.
MUSIC IV
Folk
The communist movement and civil rights in America had a melody: the sincerity of Pete Seeger and the Weavers, the honest, unflinching humanism of Woody Guthrie. The Dust Bowl and the war had made the USA acutely aware that some had and some did not and never the twain. The folk music scene in New York is the consummation of black, rural, and ethnic sounds coming together in prison chants, union anthems, and folksongs with a message: freedom and equality are worth fighting for and singing about. Bob Dylan moved from the frozen wastes of Minnesota to the cauldron of New York City, where he played the joints and coffeehouses and reinvented himself from middle-class kid to troubadour and custodian of roots music. Folk music has a purpose, and it is the genuine pulse of rock, straight through to punk and rap.
COURT AND SPARK
Joni Mitchell, 1974
Joni Mitchell took no shit. A girl in a boys’ world, she could write and smoke and roll with the dudes as well as anyone. Joan Baez is the conscience of folk, and Odetta the soul; Joni is a game of pool in the back room with some drugs and beer. She had a hit early writing “Both Sides Now” for Judy Collins and was set to launch. Quirky, poetic, jazzy, and idiosyncratic with her own unique delivery, timing, tuning, and bizarre sense of humor (yes, Cheech and Chong, stoner comics emeritus, guest on this record). Joni Mitchell is in top form writing and singing and charming us. “Help Me” is amazingly sweet of her. “Free Man in Paris” is simply great pop. She went on to lay down the astounding Hejira, which is artier, but this album hits all the right notes melodic and dissonant. Get her and squeeze her and don’t let her go.
BLOOD ON THE TRACKS
Bob Dylan, 1975
You have to have one Dylan album to prove you have heard of the twentieth century. From Woody Guthrie to Leadbelly, from Jesus to strip joints, Dylan is teaching a credit/no credit course on American music. His snide, nasal warble gets nastier with every hearing. Deep invective and hatred mingle with sweetness and even longing. All great artists find the humor in tragedy; Dylan puts the tragedy in humor. Couples walk together in the park all the while being tangled up in blue. People disappear and reappear; there are t
oo many words, it is all of a piece. The most challenging poet to sing pop music, Dylan is not on your wavelength: you are dared to tune in to his. You may need a drink to bolster yourself, and when the small man starts croaking about how all the people he once knew are an illusion to me now, you may need a tissue to catch the involuntary tears. Essential to your betterment.
POETRY X
Matsuo Bashō
(1644–1694)
Bashō was a teacher and poet of seventeenth-century Japan. He favored seclusion and the countryside and, to understate the case, was a bit depressive. He, in essence, invented haiku, and his frog poem is the most famous of the tons he wrote. Bashō practiced Zen and is a definite influence on the Beat poets. In Japan, he is revered. His use of image is unsurpassed. The first poem is his most famous; the last poem is his farewell to us. In between, he explored the universe with rare economy and keen poetic intent.
The quiet pond
A frog leaps in,
The sound of the water
•
A cuckoo cries,
and through a thicket of bamboo
the late moon shines
•
This bright harvest moon
keeps me walking all night long
around the little pond
the setting moon
the thing that remains
four corners of his desk
•
In the moonlight a worm