GRACE NOTES
Some recent TV viewing:
As the The Passionate Eye documentary Dark
Side Of The Moon unfolded, I
experienced a growing sense of astonishment. Was it really
being claimed—with the stunning
spoken confirmation of the principals—that
not only was the Moon landing—at
least its pictorial representation—faked—by
Stanley Kubrick(!)—but that
Richard Nixon had ordered—with the
partial or unknowing collusion of Henry Kissinger,
Alexander Haig, Donald Rumsfeld, Lawrence Eagleburger and
Richard Helms—the murder of all
those—including General
Vernon Walters(!)—that
had taken part? Yup. It helped that I was also making
dinner at the time and missed any disclaimers, and I
realized I'd been had only when it was claimed Kubrick had
used a 2001
set in the creation of the legend. 2001 of course
was released in 1968, while Nixon didn't become President
until 1969.
Earlier, there had been some fairly obvious clues, such
as naming a NASA official David
Bowman and a Hollywood producer Jack
Torrance, but these could have been
Kubrickian jokes. Later, the New York Times
obituary (instantly recognizable by its typography) of
General Walters was attributed to the New
York Herald Tribune, a newspaper that
expired, if memory serves, with the great strike of 1965.
And of course there was the nagging question: If
Kissinger, et al, had made such shocking
disclosures, why hadn't these been front-page news well
before the documentary aired (originally in 2003)?
But I wonder how many who saw The Passionate Eye
last night came away believing that a sempiternal
conspiracy theory has now been established as fact? So
skillful were the French filmmakers's use of archival
interview footage that Dark Side Of The Moon is
surely the greatest ever con of its kind. At the end, the
CBC hostess took pains to warn us of the dangers of
manipulative documentarians, but one is reminded of Tom
Bethell's line that the greatest outrages
are not hatched in secret but instead proudly conceived in
plain view. The Iraq invasion, for instance. And every day
some worldly fool—Fareed
Zakaria comes to mind—assures
us that Muslim extremism (or Islam, as I prefer to call
it) is withering away.
Is it fair to mock the ignorant and
easily led for their gullibility? In Grade 3 (1963), we
were shown the infamous 1957
BBC documentary of the spaghetti farmers of
Switzerland. Afterward, the nun in charge induced one of
my classmates to confirm that spaghetti did indeed grow on
trees. You silly boy, she remonstrated, spaghetti is made
from wheat. Oh, how we laughed at the poor fellow! But
even as we did, I remember feeling tremendously relieved
that Sister hadn't called on me.
But we were only children. The voters are not, but they
might as well be, and the idea of an "informed
citizenry" is no longer even a polite fiction.
Indeed, I have more respect for anyone who thinks
spaghetti grows on trees or that Stanley Kubrick filmed
the events of 20 July 1969 on a lot in Borehamwood,
England, than for anyone who believed on 20 March 1993
that Saddam Hussein represented a clear and present danger
to anyone other than the long-suffering people of Iraq.
Yet such is "democracy."
PBS's American
Masters documentary on the great Bob
Newhart also presented something of a mystery. What
manner of man is he? By the end, I
knew as little about his personality as I had at the
beginning. The documentary concentrates instead on
Newhart's craft and features telling interviews with David
Hyde Pierce, Larry Gelbart, Tim Conway, Garry Shandling,
Tom Smothers, Dick Martin and, unfortunately, that
egregious Canadian David Steinberg, who has become a
fixture in programs of this sort.
Pierce reports that Bob Newhart offstage
is exactly the same as Bob Newhart onstage. And one has
only to watch a few minutes of his work to know that he is
possessed of a fierce intelligence and an almost feverish
intensity. Newhart was compared to Jack Benny, and he
acknowledged the debt, but Benny's mien bespoke a kind of
amiable tragedy, while Newhart has always seemed just one
further insult away from going postal. What made him this
way? He spoke a little of what seemed a moderately unhappy
childhood, but clearly he has little interest in (public)
confession, and the filmmaker, Kyra Thompson, had no
interest in pressing him—or his friends. I would have
liked to hear much more from them.
Newhart met his wife on blind date set
up by Buddy Hackett(!)—"You're Catholic,
right?" Now there's a story, but it remained
curiously underexploited. And why so little of contrasting
genius Don Rickles, well known to be Newhart's closest
friend for decades? There was also precious little
attention paid to Newhart's religious faith, but one has
grown use to this. Comedy is a particularly louche
branch of show business, and comedians have long had a
close relationship with strippers—stand-up being a kind
of psychic striptease—but the tensions his profession
must have caused in the mind (and soul) of buttoned-down
Bob remain largely unexplored as well.
Everybody loves Bob, it seems, but I
don't believe it. Imagine the scene in 1960. A 30ish
accountant still living at home, a Chicagoan Rupert Pupkin,
instantly becomes America's most popular comedian
(and puts Warner Bros Records on the map), and not only
has he not "paid his dues"—he
has no previous experience whatsoever.
(Something Martin Scorsese missed in The
King Of Comedy: surely
Newhart would have been Pupkin's inspiration?) The
jealousy from his peers must have been tremendous. One can
easily imagine the gloating after his first two television
series failed. Yet Thompson gives us nothing of this.
Perhaps Newhart is an example of what
everybody might become by simply doing right. One great
virtue of Thompson's documentary is her demonstration of
how Newhart's strength of will resulted in the revolution
in situation comedy that was The
Bob Newhart Show. He insisted on
realism, and he got it. No children, for a start (and to
the end) because he hated cute. And as Suzanne
Pleshette remarked, Newhart was not going
to play the perennial pitiful American husband. He refused
to be Dagwood Bumstead.
Ah, Suzanne Pleshette. RJ
Stove notes below the great (and today
mostly forgotten) attraction of the "ever
soft, gentle and low" female voice. Pleshette is
second only to Joan
Greenwood in this department, but that does
not fully explain why I so love Emily Hartley. A beautiful
face and body, but also kind, modest, demure, sexy without
being a strumpet, lacking utterly the aggressive
hatefulness that is second nature to sitcom spouses and
now America's womanly ideal. She was the perfect wife.
There, I've said it.
Emily and Bob: A match made in heaven
Kevin
Michael Grace, 4.53 am, 25 July 2005►
FROM THE ANTIPODES
Quick as a flash after I'd posted my 50th
birthday self-quiz, the journalist, author
and composer
RJ
Stove sent me the results of his own
Proustian examination. I was rather put out because he did
a much better job than I did. (My friend Sarah Kelly's
answers to the first 20 questions can be found here.)
It seemed a pity for Rob's light to remain hidden under
the bushel of my correspondence, so I got his permission
to post it here.
RJ Stove: Man of many parts
1. What is your present state of mind? Panic-stricken.
This is nothing abnormal.
2. What is your greatest fear? Not death but
senility.
3. What is your idea of perfect happiness? Being
back in the Oxfordshire village where I spent much of my
childhood, except that now it is probably a filthy
crime-infested imam-infested London exurb.
4. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
Emperor
Franz Josef, because he had all the boring
virtues and none of the meretricious vices.
5. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Can't
decide between aggressive homosexuality and moral
cowardice. Thus, choose any morally poltroonish screaming
homo, and he will be the epitome of everything I find most
deplorable.
6. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Of
all my vices, one stands out: telling people what they
want—rather than what they need—to
hear.
7. What is your greatest extravagance? CDs.
8. What is your favourite journey? To the
international departure section of Melbourne's airport.
Even Myanmar, I suspect, would be an improvement on
Australia.
9. On what occasion do you lie? When fearful of
offending people, which is, a lot of the time.
10. Where would you like to live? See question 3.
Failing that, France's Loire
Valley would be nice, if it's anything like
what it was when I visited it in 1990.
11. Which historical figure do you most despise? No,
not Henry VIII, but Lloyd
George. He had it all: mendacious
image-mongering, identity politics, fraudulent
soak-the-rich rhetoric, bloodthirstiness, hatred of
"absolutist" civilizations abroad, contempt for
his long-suffering female enablers and a mega-Clintonesque
case of ants in the pants. Unlike Henry VIII, he didn't
even pretend that religious considerations dictated whom
he got his rocks off with. Unlike Roosevelt, he warrants
no indulgence on the grounds of paraplegia.
12. Which living person do you most despise? So
many candidates, so little time. But for sheer
despicability it would be hard to match Bob
Hawke, the wretched cunning narcissistic faux-prole
(sort of like an alcoholic version of Lloyd George) who
sleazed and crocodile-wept his way into the Prime Ministry
of Australia. He held that office for almost nine priapic,
drunken, inverted-snobbery-infested years, winning four
elections and losing none. Probably the masses deserved
him, though this seems a harsh verdict to pass on any
masses. Even Paul
Keating and John
Howard were improvements on Hawkie the
Hoodlum.
13. Which words or phrases do you most overuse? "I'll
think about it." Meaning, naturellement,
"I have no intention of doing what you ask but am too
wimpy to tell you so to your face."
14. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
She's now in an enclosed convent in England. Therefore,
for all practical purposes, she is dead to the world.
15. What is your greatest regret? As the old Jewish
joke says, "I wish I had never been born, but
scarcely one in 10,000 is so lucky." Other than
having been born, my greatest regret is a lifetime of
insufficient ruthlessness. I would like it to have been
said of me, "He was a complete tyrant; we were
terrified of him, but he was also a straight
shooter."
16. When and where were you happiest? I keep
saying: Question 3. This is getting a bit repetitive, n'est-ce
pas?
17. If you could change one thing about your family, what
would it be? Living in another state.
18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what
would it be? Being handsome would be nice. Being rich
would be nicer still.
19. What do you most value in your friends? Courtesy
and punctuality. The talent for avoiding four-letter words
every five minutes is also a useful one for friends to
have, I find.
20. What is your principal defect? Back-biting,
which derives from placing a fantastically high premium on
politeness, so that I tend to gossip about enemies behind
their backs rather than reprehending them to their faces.
21. What to your mind would be the greatest of
misfortunes? The greatest worldly misfortune (dying in
mortal sin would be in a class of supernatural horror by
itself) would be complete isolation, with nobody giving a
toss about whether one was alive or dead, except the dog
which has taken to eating one's corpse.
22. What would you like to be? A leader, preferably
one with Napoleonic charisma. I wish!
23. What natural gift would you like most to possess? Unselfconsciousness.
24. To what faults do you feel most indulgent? Lack
of formal education. If this is a fault at all, which I
often rather doubt.
25. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Tolerance. Well, strictly speaking, tolerance isn't a
virtue at all, it's a pseudo-virtue, so among genuine
virtues, I find "generosity" the most overrated.
26. In what country would you like to live? What part
of the words "question 3" does Vanity Fair
not understand?
27. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Staying off drugs. It would've been soooooooo tempting to
join the culture of complaint and say "I can't help
being a crackhead; I deserve lots of taxpayers's funding,
gimme gimme gimme."
28. What do you regard as the lowest depths of misery?
Loneliness.
29. What is your most treasured possession? The
gift of writing. I eschew any chemical which is likely to
impair that.
30. What is your most marked characteristic? Being
a soft touch for any boor with a grievance. Being a soft
touch for any boor, full stop.
31. What is the quality you most like in a man?
Perhaps it would be better to say that the quality I like least
in a man is girlish manipulative indecisiveness. From
this, people can infer the quality I like most.
32. What is the quality you most like in a woman? A
nice voice. I've known some not particularly beautiful
ladies who were nevertheless ABSOLUTE KNOCKOUTS, because
their voices were like Cordelia's: "ever soft, gentle
and low".
33. Who is your favourite hero of fiction? Jeeves,
first, last and all the time.
34. Who are your heroes in real life? Tempting to
say "Lefebvre,"
but my choice would be his Boswell and tireless champion, Michael
Davies, RIP.
35. How would you like to die? In a state of grace,
yes. Also: with something to leave to my relatives other
than a mountain of debt.
36. If you were to die and come back as a person or
thing, who or what do you think it would be? Knowing
my luck, a soiled Kleenex.
37. If you could choose what to come back as, what would
it be? No idea. Maybe a software program that never
gets obsolete?
38. What is your favourite: colour, flower, bird and
occupation? Navy blue, yes! Among flowers, roses.
Among birds, I can't go past ducks. Among occupations,
anything that requires individual physical craftsmanship
and a definite outcome. Maybe a civil engineer?
39. Who are your favourite writers, composers,
painters, and poets? First, among authors, the
Catholic squad. Both halves of the Chesterbelloc, plus
Waugh, Roy
Campbell, and Léon
Daudet. Also Michael Davies. (Catholic
squad, musical division: Palestrina,
[and see here—Editor]
Franck
and Reger.
Painting division: Memling,
the Van
Eycks and Zurbaran.
These enthusiasms date from well before my conversion,
BTW.) As for non-Catholics? Among authors, Wodehouse,
Housman, and Dorothy Parker. Among composers, Wagner and
Sibelius. Can't think of any non-Catholic painters who
appeal to me all that much. Maybe the Hudson
River School? In fact the visual arts in
general are the arts that mean the least to me.
40. What is your motto? "The worst is not, so
long as we can say 'This is the worst.'" King
Lear, of course.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.33 pm, 23 July 2005►
ROMAN POLANSKI DATES ANEW AND
THERE'S NOTHING I CAN DO
O tempora, O mores—but
it's reassuring to know there's one thing that always
remains the same: Britain's libel law. Still a goldmine
for creeps and phonies. Roman
Polanski, the (not by choice) French exile,
has a won
a ₤50,000
judgement
against Vanity Fair for its claim he had attempted
to work his shrimpy magic on a woman directly after his
wife's grisly demise.
According to the Telegraph,
Polanski, who
has lived in Paris since [a] sex scandal in America, was
said to have made advances towards Beatte Telle, a fashion
model, at a restaurant just days after his wife was
murdered. The Vanity Fair article, celebrating the
40th birthday of Elaine's, a Manhattan restaurant, claimed
that Polanski stopped off in New York on his way to the
funeral.
Quoting the
author Lewis Lapham, the article read: "The only time
I ever saw people gasp in Elaine's was when Roman Polanski
walked in just after his wife Sharon Tate had been
viciously murdered by the Manson clan."
Mr Lapham said
he was with a friend and "the most gorgeous Swedish
girl you had ever laid eyes on" when Polanski asked
to join them and began "inundating her with his
Polish charm."
"I watched
as he slid his hand inside her thigh and began a long,
honeyed spiel which ended with the promise, 'And I will
make another Sharon Tate out of you.'" The filmmaker
told the High Court that the allegations were "the
worst things ever written about me."
First things first: "Viciously murdered," Mr
Lapham? As opposed to all those non-vicious murders?
Second: "Polish charm." I really must
congratulate you on a heretofore-unheard euphemism.
As to the "the worst things ever written about
me," one suspects Roman of being modest. How about
not just written about but testified at court proceedings,
of taking a 13-year-old girl and pretending
to be a photographer for French Vogue,
plying
her with champagne and drugs, then "performing
cuddliness" on her, then, after
ascertaining she was not
on the Pill, buggering
her.
But back to the "defamation" of 1969:
Polanski admitted that the
first time he had sex after his wife's murder was about
one month later. "It was all casual sex for years
after Sharon's death," he told the court. "I was
unable to maintain any lasting relationships after her
death."
Yes, deathless romantic Roman Polanski waited a month,
a whole month, after his wife's butchering before shtupping
another woman. And surely that is worth ₤50,000.
Unless one considers what my Oxford defines as
defamatory: attacking the good reputation of.
But
it's best not to be too literal about such things, nu?
Roman, if ever something were to
happen to me, would you date again?
Kevin
Michael Grace, 9.59 pm, 22 July 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
His chief emotion, in spite
of being puzzled—and in spite of
dreading her sarcasms—was relief.
Lennon Mark loved his wife; he was in love with her. The
thought of her being in danger had reduced him to utter
misery. In the long traffic-jams in which so unbearably
the Bentley was delayed on his way there, Lennox had
contemplated the possibility that Martina might have been
badly injured, even killed. He had realized that the death
or non-existence of this woman whom, presumably, everyone
else on the planet regarded as a monster of rudeness and
selfishness would be unendurable. The grief would be
terrible, beyond bearing.
—AN Wilson, My
Name Is Legion
Kevin
Michael Grace, 2.37 pm, 21 July 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Many tributes
have been paid to the achievements of the late Sir Edward
Heath: his feats of seamanship; his one-sided feud with
Margaret Thatcher; his supposed "statesmanship"
in "taking us into Europe"; his consistent
support of Communist-Capitalist China.
But I shall
remember him as the Prime Minister who sacked
from his Cabinet the one man, Enoch Powell,
who dared
to speak the truth about mass immigration
and its consequences for his country, transforming it
utterly from what it had been for centuries and will never
be again.
—Peter
Simple
Kevin
Michael Grace, 6.37 pm, 21 July 2005►
HOT HOT HEAT
Apologies for the lack of posts. Had meant to post thousands
of words over the last few days but found myself utterly
enervated and unable to do much more than loll and sleep.
Couldn't figure out why until I checked out the apartment
thermostat at 10.00 am this morning: topped out at 40
degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). There you go.
Victoria boasts a temperate
climate (with little humidity, unlike Metro
DC, where poor bastard Jeremy
Lott writhes nightly in a puddle of his own
ooze), but my apartment faces east, and the mornings are
thus unbearable, at least for anyone raised in a
British-Canadian home. I note that the historic
high for July 22 was reached in 2002 at
31.5 C, which meant that the temperature in my Saanich
bedroom must have reached 110 F. I'm kinda surprised in
retrospect I didn't kill myself (or someone else). If Jim
Kunstler is right in his prognostications,
then prostration-induced homicides are the wave of the
future south of the Mason-Dixon line.
In any event, I'm back at it today. Promise.
View from the Princess Pembroke: Not exactly as
illustrated
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.05 am, 21 July 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
When deprived of his
identity, man becomes violent in diverse ways. Violence is
the quest for identity.
—Marshall McLuhan, Letters
of Marshal McLuhan
(And see here)
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.34 am, 19 July 2005►
POETRY CORNER
All The World's A Stage
Seven ages: first puking and mewling;
Then very pissed off with one's schooling;
Then fucks; and then fights;
Then judging chaps' rights;
Then sitting in slippers; then drooling.
—Robert
Conquest
Kevin
Michael Grace, 12.50 am, 18 July 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
The terrorists
would achieve only one end, said the Sun: "To
make this nation ever more determined that those who
violate our way of life must never win.
"Throughout
history," the tabloid went on, "we have fought
on the side of good and we never surrender, whatever the
cost."
The Daily
Mirror's editorial was almost identical: "All the
fanatics achieved was to score a devastating own goal.
Once again the British people will triumph over
evil." And the Daily Mail agreed that
Britain's courage and resolve was "more than equal to
standing up to men of violence who seek to destroy our
country and the values we hold dear."
I don't argue
with these sentiments. I don't care if the writers of
these editorials had no other purpose than to please and
comfort their anxious readers. I sincerely hope that they
were right—that the British really are determined and
strong enough to protect "the values we hold
dear"—but what does the popular press consider
these values to be? What is the "way of life" it
is so eager for us to preserve? In normal times, when we
are not at war or subject to terrorist attacks, it
encourages the most ignoble urges of the British people:
greed, prurience and selfishness. It glorifies
celebrities, extols riches and promotes glamour.
If, as I like
to imagine, a majority of the British aspire to tolerance,
compassion and law-abiding decency, the popular newspapers
do not picture them in this way. They are portrayed, on
the contrary, as bitter and envious.
When the
popular newspapers adopt a high moral tone, it is usually
in defence of people's right to indulge their nastier
instincts without interference. Any attempt to do good for
others is condemned as "bossiness" or
"political correctness."
The only drum
they consistently bang is patriotism. They don't mind what
we are best at, so long as we are best at it. If we are
more liberal than other countries, that is good. If we are
more authoritarian, that is good, too...
[So] when
something frightful happens, like last week's terrorist
attacks, and the popular newspapers start talking grandly
about "the values we hold dear," one can't help
noticing that they don't seem to have any values at all.
—Alexander
Chancellor
Kevin
Michael Grace, 12.43 am, 18 July 2005►
PENSÉE
The cruellest thing in the world: waking from a
beautiful dream.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.03 pm, 17 July 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Some years
ago, when I compiled an
anthology about England, I concluded that
the most typical English characteristic, common to the
great men of all ages, was a firm belief that everything
was going from bad to worse, the country going to the dogs
and that, in the words of Private Frazer in Dad's
Army, we were all doomed.
That went
along with the opinion of historian AJP
Taylor, that the British, unlike other
European nations, had never thought much of their
politicians and that this was a very good thing.
It is when we
start patting one another on the back and telling
ourselves what a fine lot we are and what a very fine
fellow Mr Blair is that we ought to start worrying.
It might also
be a mistake to persuade ourselves what a fine city London
is or that Londoners—defiant, resilient or
whatever—are the salt of the earth.
For myself, I
shall continue to think of our capital city as a noisy,
dirty place where you are going to be ripped off by greedy
shopkeepers and hoteliers, a dump, in other words.
—Richard
Ingrams
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.10 pm, 16 July 2005►
