Monday, August 30, 2010

Fructification

Rosh HaShona is a-coming down the pike, which is to say, down the pike down which all major jewish holidays come.  It celebrates rebirth, and its symbol is an apple.  Puts me in mind of something....

“Hey - we got apples!”

L’s childlike glee was understandable. First, she’s 11 years old, and very much a child in some ways; second, her discovery had just made her new home a little more interesting and welcoming. It was a juvenile tree - still slim-trunked with plenty of breeze between its sturdy little boughs, but nonetheless in vigorous leaf with dozens of blushing globes hanging all over it. Her brother, 13 and conmmensurately jaded, feigned disdain but I saw through that. Finding a fruit tree - a legendary type of fruit tree, no less, a veritable tree of knoweledge - fructifying in their new backard was, at a minimum, a pretty good sign.

I could understand how they’d missed it previously. They had barely taken up permanent residence there, stilll flitting back and forth between the home where they’d grown up 500 miles away, and this new world where they’d just recently landed. Certainly they’d been at the new house long enough to have grown to appreciate some of its quirks and secrets, but there was much more to learn:

The secret clubhouse, the hobbit closets, the looming tower, the individually-wrought guard rails lining balconies with 270-degree, two-bridge views, the ghosts hiding in the hundred-year-old bricks that rise up in broad courses from the street to the heavy handcarved front door, the downstairs party room with its black-out shades and decoupaged powder room..... At this plaster castle towering above its hillside neighborhood, there was much for an 11-year-old girl to discover, and an apple tree on the flagstone path by the pool deck was only one more charmed artifact in a magical mansion. But as I watched her delighted eyes and careful fingers familiarize themsleves with the little apples on the little tree, the magic I saw at work was simple regeneration.

In 1991 I had been brunching with an unruly mob of likeminded friends, the sort of sprawling, rolling feast for which for years I lived. In a squalid little shack near USF we were eating and drinking ourselves one day into a blissful stupor, careless of any trouble or woe - until we noticed a wall of smoke had eaten half the sky. The east bay hills were ablaze. Ancient turpentine pines, stands of unctuous, ill-considered gum trees, groves of gnarly old oak and hillsidesful of century-old homes were consumed in flames and thousand-foot sheets of thick black smoke that stretched for miles across the horizon.

From way out in Frisco it looked impressive. I imagine that at closer range it simply looked like hell. By the time the embers cooled, 1500 acres had been reduced to cinders, with nothing left but the odd bit of masonry or paving stone to show where 4,000 homes once stood.

Many of the neighborhoods rendered that day to smoldering waste were in really good zip codes.  One such neighborhood, boasting proximity to trendy shops, BART lines, freeways and good schools - none of which were affected by the firestorm - was rebuilt with particular attention to detail. Grand new houses soon arose on the burnt-over remains of the old ones - houses of traditional design, so confident and assertive as to leave a casual visitor with a sense they’d always been there. Driving these sunny little lanes, the sense of permanence is tangible.

Nowhere is that permanence more evident than when one stands before the chateau which L has recently started calling home. Yes, technically, it was built on the cusp of the 21st century, but it’s a home that truly looks like it grew up where it stands, like a redwood tree, or perhaps it was carved out of the living earth like some luxe Canon de Chelle. As L traipsed up and down her twisting staircases, explored her lush pocket gardens and cavernous soundproof music rooms, lost herself among the patterns in the reclaimed bricks and the shadow-mosaics on the wending poolside paths, as she opened herself to the essential oldness of this place, she found an apple tree with apples on it, and she was delighted.

I tasted one of those applies, hardly three bites of flesh, sun-warmed at the skin, forest-cool inside. It was bitter and sour, unripe fruit from an immature tree.  That would soon enough change, I felt assured. In no time at all, that young girl would savor the honeyed sweetness of full fleshed fruit, and that winsome apple sapling would reach as high and deep as time itself. Both had already made a meaningful start. 

Monday, August 23, 2010

The Doctor is Out

I was doing a little on-line research a few weeks ago and learned that the world had just changed. Maybe it’s not the worst change in history; it’s certainly not the biggest. Still, it is a significant change for me, one that caught me unawares but it deserving of some attention, liek the disbanding of a local minor-league sports team or the closing of a longstanding but underappreciated restaurant. The doctor is off the airwaves, and it doesn’t matter that I hand’t been particularly aware he’d even still been on them. I assumed he was; I assumed he’d so remain and endure into perpetuity. But nothing endures, truly, and doctors probably know this best of all. I guess it’s time I learned that lesson myself.

Let’s start at the beginning. My first clock radio was a landmark in my journey toward maturation. It meant that I had responsibilities and was expected independently to fulfill them. I could make myself awaken of a morning, or push that inevitability off by ten minutes per snooze. I could see how late I’d stayed up reading, and for how many hours after lights-out I’d lain awake awaiting sleep. Likewise, I could enjoy the best musical offerings that both frequency and amplitude modulation had to offer. I particularly recall plugging it in the first time and having it immediately ring out with the sound of Glen Campbell’s “Southern Nights,” a piece that remains a nostalgic favorite for me for that reason and none other whatsoever. My first clock radio endowed me with powers both chronologic and harmonic, and I liked it.

One aspect in particular about it that entertained me was the design of the volume and tuning knobs. Both were circular, equal in size, placed on the face of the radio about a centimeter apart from each other. Silver with black rims, their position indicator was a thick black line from the center to the edge. When both knobs were set to the indicator lines matched up, they rather resembled a pair of googly eyes. Put thick brows above them and a greasepaint mustache beneath from which a phallic cigar extended, and and you’d have a decent caricature of Groucho Marx.

At this time of my life I was a Marx Brothers fanatic. I had memorized gags, songs and scripts. Lydia the Tattooed Lady, Hello I Must Be Going, and others now lost to the obscurity of withered neurons and decayed dendrites - I sang them loudly and lustily from 2nd grade forward. I loved me my Marx Brothers and I got my fix anyplace I could. My clock radio, in this regard, was both a reminder and a source. I could look at it and imagine Rufus Firefly or Hugo Hackenbush waggling a comic gawk at me or rolling his eyeballs in ribald glee, but I could also tune in a radio program that made Groucho’s actual songs available for my listening pleasure as I lay comfortably abed.

It had been my dear old young neighbor across the street who’d first clued me in: was I aware of the weekly radio program devoted entirely to funny songs? In fact I had not been, and the reality behind this impossible-sounding claim shocked and amazed me. But, you know, in a good way..

Airtime was Sunday evenings, six to ten pm (four full hours!), on the local heavy rock station.  The station’s reputation for playing dangerous music by unsavory characters like Led Zeppelin and Spirit caused me some disquietude, but I was willing to brave those coarse, barbaric airwaves for a taste of classic novelty music by Spike Jones and the others luminaries that preceded him and followed in his footsteps.  Who, indeed, put the Benzadrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?  There was the Cockroach that Ate Cincinnati and the immortal Shaving Cream song and the marathon recapitulations of the Crepitation Contest.  Add in Groucho Marx occasionally singing about body modification, and there was no real way to keep me from listening - even when the final song of the weekly top 10 came on so late that I had to keep the volume of my beloved clock radio down to a minimum, breaking an in-house electronics curfew so I could listen to that last tune each week, the dials turned so their Groucho eyes seemed comically crossed.  It was silly, repetitive, and bad for my sleep schedule, but I didn’t care.  I was a going to listen to Doctor Demento on my clock radio, and no one was going to stop me.

This phase lasted at least two years.  It was a treasured ritual of mine to settle down in my room and have a nice intense listen to the D-D show.  I learned a surprising amount from novelty jazz and comedy rock - vocabulary, history, cultural sociology and musical forms, for a start, but also comic timing, satire and irony, and a perspective that has been an aid and comfort for me my whole life since.  Tom Lehrer, Martin Mull, and - let’s give credit where it’s due - Weird Al: Having their voices among my own, having “roly-poly fish heads” as part of my cognitive repertoire, made it easier for me to get through things sometimes.  Some times you’ve just got to eat them up yum.  And if you don’t know that I mean, that’s exactly what I mean.

So I visited the doctor regularly and even talked to some of my closest friends about him, asking if they’d heard that week’s top 10 or trying to reconstruct some particularly delicious tun of phrase or gag.  Damn good times, people, and I admit it.  I was way into comedy as a kid and the Doctor Demento Show was a big part of that.  Hell, I still actually have an LP he issued of some of this biggest favorites.

My Dr D habit lasted a few years, but it did eventually gutter out.  My tune-ins grew briefer, more sporadic, less about the thrill of being exposed to new hilarities than about the ritual of doing what I’ve always done.  I never chose to drop my coverage with the Doctor. It just wound up happening that way.

By the late 70s I was pretty well past my Dr D phase.  Video tape, cable TV, theater classes and generally expanding horizons left me less time to focus on the radio; the playlist of novelty music, bawdy jazz, and goofball rock wasn’t growing very rapidly, and I too rarely heard anything new on the Dr D show to justify the time I once spent listening to it.  My love for Dr D faded.  It wasn’t him, it wasn’t me.  We just grew apart until I realized he was more an element of my past than anything else to me.  I never regretted a moment I spent with them - I just wasn’t spending any more of them.

Years passed.  I never got rid of my one Dr D LP but I really didn’t listen to it - it was archival, not active.  I still remembered a lot of the songs I’d learned from him, and even sang snippets of them to myself on occasion, but I really didn’t talk about where I’d learned them.  It was not a topic well-calculated to impress new friends at JrandSr High, Bigshot U, Law School, or the workaday world.  Dr D was a quiet chapter early in the book of y life, but a valued one nonetheless. Though I no longer checked in on him, I still cherished the surety that he continued at his old game I could listen anytime the spirit moved me, if ever I were to find myself so moved.

Well, I now know those days are finally over.  Even if I wanted to tune in again, I couldn’t.  After forty years on the air, after the glory of live performances at Magic Mountain and the intoxicating thrill of national syndication, by halfway through 2010 the Dr found himself with a mere five distribution outlets, small towns and isolated outposts, Alabama and Alaska and not much in between.  The nitrous oxide gigglebubblle had deflated to flaccidity.  The Doctor Demento Show, to which I’d not been a listener for 34 years at least, had left the air waves.  Sure, there’s still an on-line presence, I could download a decades-of-dementia playlist or a classic Top 25, but its just never going to be the same as scheduling a listen-in on my old Groucho-faced clock radio.  Hell, the old clock radio’s changes a bit too, but you know what I mean The doctor, for my purposes, has retired.  I’m hoping self-care will suffice in the future.

This one was delayed for a few days, as I worked my way through a bit of a kidneystone issue.  Unfortunately it hasn’t yet worked its way through me.  It’s not a very pleasant experience.  Make a note of that for future reference.  Hope to get more coming up and out at you when I return from the preposition market.  (downstairs.)

Saturday, August 14, 2010

The Mother of Monstrosities

I can hardly believe that I used to read fairy tales when I was a child.  My recollection of them is as macabre narrations of deformity, brutality, and malefaction. Abductions and death threats, forced labor and unnatural entities with malevolent powers - these seemed to me, even at a tender age, poorly tailored for easing a child into peaceful slumbers.  Vivid nightmares seemed more likely, and I had my share of those, inspired by infrapontal gnomes and sentient farmstock and other malevolent denizens of an evil otherworld.

Kids’ books today don’t take that angle.  The books I read to the munchkins are brightly-colored cheerful little stories about cooperation, weather, recreation and fire trucks.  Well, that’s probably three or four different books, but they’re all brightly colored and cheerful.  They teach counting and the names of animals, and maybe contain cute jokes.  You know what they don’t have?  Ogres.  Ogres and terror.  Those have been left right out, and it’s not like I even wonder why.  The old books were scary.  In fact, they still are.

Lately these impressions have been refreshed and confirmed by my alternate-nightly read-downs to my son.  I’ve dug out my old Treasury of Children’s Literature, 500 pages of throwback bedtime fare, copyright 1955.  Some of the stories are classics from Aesop; some are excerpts from Defoe, Stevenson, and other icons of family-friendly lit - but a whole lot of it consists of graphically illustrated stories of angry giants and malicious elves.  Paging now through that well-worn tome, its cover frayed and spattered with the paint we applied to my bedroom walls when I was in the fifth grade, the same old familiarly lurid pages still ripped and torn out and taped back in again, it’s easy for me to recall the chill I felt as I perused it as a new small person long ago, tracing the sinews of a monster’s towering shanks, soaking up the impending execution of an enchanted goose, or just letting my eyes flit across the frolics of numberless pixies careening recklessly to their doom.  Even in their most benign incarnations, the tales of faeries were hardly children’s fare.  Grimm, indeed, and gruesome too.

My late return to these macabre morality stories with their inappropriately evocative illustrations has also brought to mind one sunny day in the mid ‘80s, a time when I’d long since put away my treasury of creepy stories.  I was pretty sure I was a grown-up and well beyond the gnarled grasp of bewitched and wizened fingers.  I was out on a grown-up excursion - at Hancock Park, where L.A.’s original (that is, paleolithic) culture, as preserved in the famous mid-town tar pits, meets its received culture, preserved in the several serene pavilions of the county museum of art. It’s a good-sized park, though possessed of scant appointments besides the museums - just broad flat lawns and plenty of vitamin D.  A friend and I were relaxing in the sunshine after perusing some art, allowing our minds to absorb the images and creations to which we’d exposed ourselves, when, with neither warning nor preparation, I saw Mother Goose.

I’d seen her before, of course, in sanitized artists’ renditions.  She’d always been cleaned up, gussied and prettified, a benevolent bubbeh with friendly feathered followers meandering along behind her.  A ruffled snood, a modest apron with decorative patches in complimentary colors - she never really evoked the dark scary imagery I associated with the stories I associated with her.  But when I finally saw her in the flesh, I realized quickly enough that the Mother Goose to whom I’d grown accustomed was, at best, a whitewash, if not a total misrepresentation.  She was not a “mother” in any sense of the word I’d ever known.  She was a mother of monstrosities, was she not?  - And seeing her in the flesh, I sensed viscerally that monstrous quality lurking under her wattled skin.

I don’t mean to be cruel here, I see a lot of people on a regular basis who are far from aesthetically pleasing.  But this woman was in a class all her own, so much so that I recall her to this day, a quarter-century on.  Her skin, as I said, was wattled, with deep flaps under her chin and wrinkles like geologic rifts cleaving her face into segments like some gothic revival woodcut brought to life.  Leathery and flaccid, her face drooped at brow, nose and chin, as if it hung loosely from her huge ears.  Her neck craned forward, a natural extension of a hunched back that dangled her head far ahead of her tottering feet.  She carried a sack - a crude bag stuffed with detritus and jetsam; the bits of its contents I could see through its gaping seams and flapping top could even only charitably be called garbage.  Her clothes were shreds of rough ripped fabric held together with dirt, and her shoes were mostly plastic bags she’d wrapped around her feet.  Her body was too thin but looked too tough as well, like a crooked man’s crooked cane; her fingers, gripping the straps of her suspicious sack, gleamed like gnarled branches.  And her eyes shone with bitter brightness, dark diamonds glinting with suspicion and anguish in the glare of the mid-day sun.  All the pain, abnegation, and sorrow that flowed through every tale of goblins and witches seemed to seep almost visibly from her clotted pores so I felt I could taste it in the air that stagnated in her wake.  And behind her, growling in the backs of their long greasy necks, a straggling gaggle of city-wise geese waddled with malign distrust.

Mother Goose, she obviously was, and the very personification of every dark musing that had haunted my childhood.  Of course, as a child it had all been antiseptically theoretical.  In the flesh, there was no mistaking what she represented.  To share such things with children seems tantamount to abuse.  It was pretty close to that for me as an adult, to tell you the truth.