By dealing at length with the simpoleon kvetching of Harkness, I don’t have to repeat the lesson with Zabel (who ought to know there is a vast qualitative and emotional difference between the printed word and the visual presentation four times life-size of graphic violence). My thanks to Boeff and Kropfhauser. They cannot know how much good their letters do in the struggle to sustain one’s passion in the face of such paralogia as Harkness wallows in.
The great danger of thinking (?) such as Harkness’s, is that it confuses artistic and esthetic selectivity, and standards for same, with censorship. As one who confronts censorship at ground level every day—as opposed to parvenus like Harkness who talk a good game but do nothing to impede the incursions of the Falwells—I recognize the difficulty of walking the tightrope. Nonetheless, it is a balancing act every intelligent, self-examining and concerned individual should practice, lest we fall into the bog with Harkness.
It is interesting to note, however, as addenda to the essay: in the year since it was published in the L.A. Weekly, (according to knife-kill flick maven Bill Warren, who is on top of such things, working as he does for the Motion Picture Academy), over 130 of these splatter abominations have been shelved. Though produced and slated for distribution, the outcry against this pollutant has become so great that the theaters and distributors have opted to pull back from further saturation bookings. The downside of the situation, though, is that they will all, no doubt, show up in our living rooms via cable, as their need for massive product permits of very little selectivity based on good taste or artistic value. But at least, a year later, the voices raised against this shit have had some effect.
Interim memo
Three months after this column was written, the Camaro bit it, and so, damned-near, did its owner. You can skip over to Installment 29 if your curiosity is piqued. But you’ve gotta come back here after you’ve read this column and then #29. And if we pull that off, we can talk over the Sudetenland.
INSTALLMENT 16: 5 FEBRUARY 82
Why Everything Is Fucked Up, Since You Asked.
Maybe this is the first dangerous step on the path to winding up like Napoleon or Genghis Khan or Ronald Reagan, but I think I’ve finally figured out the answer to why everything is fucked up.
Why are you fishing around in the closet for a jacket with straps in 36 short? This is serious, fer godsake. I’ve got the answer. It has to do with my car.
Lemme tell you about my car. I drive this 1967 Chevy Camaro I bought for cash new. It’s the upper-6 and it’s got more than 160,000 miles on it. Actually, it’s probably closer to 165,000 but for three years my speedometer was way off so by the time I got it fixed I’d lost a true total. But even at 160,000 miles in fifteen years, it’s a swell vehicle. What I’m talking here is a car that gives me between 31 and 40 miles to the gallon in the city. And last year, for instance, I put in about two hundred dollars’ worth of repairs. And it can beat a Mercedes away from the light if the need arises.
It’s dirty. I’ve got to tell you it is really grungy. On the outside. Inside, it’s clean, where people sit. But I haven’t washed it in eight years, as best I recall. (In 1974 a woman I was dating sneaked it off and had it washed and waxed because the dirt was so thick that friends of mine who would see the car parked outside a movie theater were leaving messages on the doors and trunk: ELLISON WASH THIS DISGRACE! DON BUDAY. But that was an overstepping of our relationship and a big mistake. Car didn’t run well for six months thereafter, till it built up a protective coating of shmootz again. Wonder whatever happened to that woman?) My car has a bumper sticker that says A CLEAN CAR IS A SIGN OF A SICK MIND. It’s not a crusade with me; it’s just my belief that if God, or Whoever’s-In-Charge, had wanted my car to be clean, God, or Whoever’s-In-Charge wouldn’t have filled the world with dirt.
I’m digressing. The point is, I have a fifteen-year-old car that runs like a sonofabitch, and even when a California Highway Patrol officer pulled me over on the Ventura Freeway because he wanted to buy the car—“It’s a classic,” he said, “the first year they made a Camaro, I’ll give you a thousand for it”—and I said no thanks and he gave me a ticket just to be a prick, even then I wouldn’t sell it. No amount of hassling by my well-meaning friends will make me part with that nifty vehicle in order to purchase some shiny new box-on-box Detroit iron or one of the sporty little Oriental runabouts with no trunk space and you ride with your knees tucked up under your chin. If I could afford a well-preserved 1949 Packard, well, maybe I’d consider it. But exchange my dear Camaro for some 1982 issue sop to the failing economy? No thank you.
That car is a gem. It starts when I turn the key; and it runs like Sugar Ray Leonard after a hard fourteen rounds. Maybe you have a car that has served you terrifically for a long time and you know what I’m talking about. There is no anthropomorphism about this, I don’t call my car by some pet name, I don’t deify it or get crazy when some schlub scrapes the fender; it’s just car and it does what it’s supposed to do. I feel no need to change it every three years just so I “look good” on the street. A car is a thing to get one from here to there with the minimum of fuss. An overhead-cam outfit is no substitute in a rational universe for a mistress, despite all the sociological tomes equating one with the other in the minds of macho American males.
The radio in my car is also an integral part of my having found the answer to why everything is fucked up. It is a Blaupunkt. I had it installed in an old Austin-Healy I owned in 1965. Bought it for cash new. Never gave me a moment’s aggravation it was built so well. And when I bought the Camaro in ’67 I pulled it and had it transferred. Not until November of last year did it begin acting up. So I tried to get it repaired. First half a dozen radio repair joints made faces and said, “Aw, hell, this is an old piece of shit; no point in trying to repair it. Cost you as much to repair it as to buy a new one. Now look at this dandy EarBuster Royale we have over here, it’s only two hundred and…”
So we took it to a Blaupunkt agency here in town and got more of the same. No parts. Old radio. Forget it. Buy a new one. As if we were asking them to perform some hideous sexual obscenity unpracticed since the time of the Druids.
My assistant, Ms. Marty Clark, a sensible woman of vast positive qualities and inordinate intelligence, upbraided me for wasting so much time on this project. “Things are made to fall apart,” she said. “The center cannot hold. Let go of the past. Buy the new and let me get back to important work, you loon!”
I persisted. My argument was this: we have become a nation of marks, a country of fast trick Johns. Kadodies. Jamooks. Country bumpkins being fleeced every day for every farthing in our bib overalls. Planned obsolescence, a concept that Americans as recently as forty years ago would have found anathema, has become a shrug-the-shoulders-and-accept-it way of life. We expect the toaster to go on the fritz in thirteen months, just after the warranty expires. We expect the digital watch we bought at The Akron to begin running backwards, widdershins like the White Rabbit’s timepiece, after a year of faithful service. We expect the screws to come loose in the lawn chair after one summer in the sun. We expect the roof to leak even though the reshingling company swore it was watertight and charged us half our yearly income.
No, I said, determined to fight this to the last bastion, this is a quality piece of goods, this Blaupunkt. The company is known for making sturdy product and to hell with these lazy bastards who are too featherbedded to do a proper repair when they can high-ball us into buying some new piece of crap that’ll conk out in six months. I want this radio repaired, I said, stamping me widdle foot in pique.
So we wrote directly to Blaupunkt and laid all this on them. Will you stand behind your reputation or won’t you? And we managed to reach someone in that organization who felt as I did, and they took the radio and repaired it. Cost: $22 plus another $14 to have it pulled and reinstalled.
Are you getting my drift here? A seventeen-year-old radio that never screeched or went out on me was repaired for a pittance.
It was, and is, quality goods.
I’ve read statistics that proved most young married women between the ages of 20 and 35 don’t want to buy furniture that will last fifty years. They want what is called in the stick trade “borax.” Color-coded junk that falls apart in three to five years so they can garage sale it and buy all new flotsam that won’t last beyond the time it takes the kapok in it to get digested by the smog.
Used to watch an old man who made luggage. Used to go to his shop in Evanston, Illinois and watch him work. He was a sad old man. He recalled having made fitted luggage for Galli-Curci and Caruso. Intricate, beautiful goods with cases that fitted inside cases, with hand-tooling and the finest leathers. He pointed to the plastic imitation-leather wrapups his shop now sold, and he sighed. “No room for craftsmen now,” he said, his old eyes seeing past glories. “Nobody wants to spend good money for luggage they’ll dropkick out of the airplanes.” We expect the pithecanthropoids at the airport to bash up our luggage.
And that, at last, is what has everything fucked up.
How the hell can we be surprised that American car makers are going down the tubes? The Japanese make better cars. How can we strut around still believing in American Know-How, when all the VCR gear comes from over there? How much pride in craft can an average laborer in an automobile plant take in ten thousand unpainted door panels that swing by him each month to get one rivet driven into them? How can workers feel anything but distanced from purpose in their lives when they never see that something they’ve built with their hands has turned out solid and professional and useable?
The guy who built the lovely art deco dining nook that Carol Barkin designed for me comes back again and again to look at it with pleasure. When they had it on the cover of Designers West he took as much pride in it as Carol or I. His name is Leon Opseth, and he’s a painstaking craftsman who is forced to throw up the usual wallboard-and-stucco boxes we’ve come to accept as “okay,” just to stay in business. But he hates that shit. He comes back here to my house to look at the Art Deco Dining Pavilion (as we call it) because it took him the better part of a year to build to order. It is as much his as mine or Carol’s.
They built my dear old Camaro to last in 1967, and they built my Blaupunkt to last in 1965, and Leon built the Pavilion to last in 1980.
And the typewriter I use is an old Olympia office machine that has typed millions of words and only the! and the L key are giving me any trouble. And there’s a little French bootmaker in the Valley who charges only fifteen bucks to put new soles and heels on my thirteen-year-old boots, instead of the $25 everybody else charges for doing a slovenly job.
What has everything fucked up is that the idea of doing a superlative job with pride and craft, for a reasonable price, has fallen on sour days. Most of us want the fast buck, and we don’t want to stand behind what we did if, in fact, we ever felt any responsibility for that single rivet.
But if that’s the way we believe the world has to work, if we accept being jamooks hustled by three-card monte hustlers in multinational mufti, then one day a hundred million years from now when the human race has succumbed to planned obsolescence, and hoi cockroaches polloi have taken over, and they excavate the ruins of my house, they will still find a chair I’ve got downstairs that is 50 years old and is in top condition.
And they will look at the chair and be able to deduce just how our body was bent and what we looked like. Because that chair was built to do one job: to be a chair. And to keep doing that job forever.
And maybe I’m ready for that 36-short straitjacket, but I suspect the time has come as Recession and Depression and Stagflation strangle us, to begin insisting that what we make, and what we buy, last as long and work as well as my crummy old Camaro.
Interim memo
Yes, I know I repeated the quote from Günter Eich in this column. Chalk it up to cataphasia. Also, the penultimate paragraph makes a reference to one of the letters you found at the end of Installment 15. Never let it be said an Ellison forgets.
Letters reprinted with permission from the L.A. Weekly
INSTALLMENT 17: 16 FEBRUARY 82
How to Make Life Interesting
The subject is boredom. The sepulchral malaise of our aeon, induced by great gobbets of leisure time afforded to all, without the concomitant rise in group or individual imagination that would provide innovative ways to spend that free time.
Boredom. Tedium, ennui, lassitude. World-weariness and jaded appetites. The day begun with a yawn and ended with fog. Lives safe from the stalking sabertooth or the Black Plague, yes indeed; but rich, filled with various excitements, new endeavors and random adventures? Pshaw! An after-dinner colloquy on the merits and demerits of supply-side economics can hardly be equated with the thrill of stalking the Minotaur through his maze. Enhanced computer photos of Mars come back to us from NASA and reveal that the surface of the Red Planet bears no resemblance to Bradbury’s wonderland of beercan-filled canals and spiderweb crystal cities. Mars looks like Nevada’s Fairchild Desert, only not as lively. Primetime television actually allocates hours to Merv, Mike Douglas, Donny & Marie and Jerry Falwell. Athos, Porthos and Aramis, yes, to be sure: but Jerry Falwell? Oh, my. Boredom, tedium, ennui and ho as well as hum.
What ever became of the exciting life as lived by the Cro Magnons we envy in the new film Quest for Fire? Sleeping out in the thundering rainfall, slaying great beasts with pointy sticks, ripping steaming entrails from the prey and savoring a gourmet meal hunkered down among one’s hairy peers? As one with Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy—who “wept that he was ever born…loved the days of old when swords were bright and steeds were prancing…he dreamed of Thebes and Camelot—Miniver Cheevy, born too late, coughed and called it fate, and kept on drinking”—as one with Miniver we lament the highflown adventurous excesses of times before we came to this place of sighs.
The frontiers, we are told, have been condominiumized. The golden horizons merely reflect the lights from the Golden Arches. New dimensions do not exist. The best we can hope for by way of stimulation is a full expansion to 60 channels of cable television. Forgive my temerity, but what we’re talking here is not Prometheus stealing fire from the gods.
So what, you ask me, is our alternative?
Well, imagine my delight that you should inquire.
Creative activities in the area of cursory interpersonal relationships, I reply. Random encounters. Casual contretemps guaranteeing a smack rush of adrenaline. I speak here not of zipless fucks or tawdry goodbarism in Santa Monica bars. What I commend to your attention is the carefully-orchestrated play-action situation in which danger, action and adventure manifest themselves throughout the humdrum of your everyday life.
Lemme give you a f’rinstance.
Last week, about Thursday, I had a dental appointment out in Pacific Palisades. After Bob Knoll was done with me, I made my usual hegira to Mort’s Deli, a place where they know how to make a cheeseburger well-done without it tastes like the ashes of Nineveh.
I’m sitting there at a table eating, when I chance to overhear the conversation at the next table. Call me an eavesdropper if you will; call me madcap; call me a pisher…but even as you and you and you, I have this terrific peripheral hearing that picks up the sound of tectonic plates deep in the Earth, crunching as they turn in their seismic sleep. Not hearing the conversation at the next table, that would be a trick.
The focus of the conversation was a sleek young woman of the sort that I, in my irrational bigotry, perceive as scion of wealthy Beverly Hills parents: a shimmering creature with legs waxed and floating soft lenses in turquoise. She was wearing either a Capezio leotard by Rudi Gernreich or one of those Jane Fonda Workout cotton leotards from a boutique on Robertson. My familiarity with specifics in this area is not letter-perfect. It was a black leotard. Over it she wore Ralph Lauren shorts in a horizontal stripe pattern of magenta and cerulean blue, and a Bonwit Teller blouse. Her sweatband was by Head. Her sneakers were by Adidas. R
alph Lauren again for the leg warmers. She had not been jogging. She did not sweat, neither did she perspire nor glow. And of this I am certain: she toiled not, neither did she spin.
This creature of idle hours, chatting and Fresca-sipping in the late afternoon when all her more responsible sistren [sic] were slaving in windowless offices under the lash of insensitive sexist junior executives, was skimming across the shallow surface of what passed for conversation with a pair of young men in their early twenties who resembled, in my twisted view, Via Veneto pimps. Truly such could not be the case, as they spoke something resembling English (though the recurrent phrase “fer-shooor” seemed alien argot), and they were clearly of the same social set as She-Who-Must-Be-Pampered.
Though I surely denigrate them unjustly by suggesting their hands had never been sullied by exposure to common labor—the boys no doubt make substantial livings selling Grit and the young woman probably has expertise running a McCormick thresher—the substance (if one conceives of tapioca as having substance) of their conversation was as follows:
An Edge in My Voice Page 18