I was obsessed with James Dean in college at Northwestern. I had this Phil Stern photograph of him (left) on my wall. I saw the movie adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden for the first time and I was messed up by his intensity. There was something unbridled about his emotion that appealed to a 20-year-old. My acting teacher said to go with it.
A few months later, working for XS Magazine in Fort Lauderdale, I got to interview Julie Harris, who kissed him in that movie. She wasn’t overjoyed that I asked about shooting with James Dean when what she really wanted to talk about was Driving Miss Daisy, which she was doing at the local playhouse. Can’t blame her. The woman is a living legend herself. (Two years ago, I had another East of Eden one-degree: I rode an elevator with Lois Smith at the James Hotel in Chicago. I wisely kept my mouth shut that time even though I also wanted to hug her neck for Frank Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.)
Some people are living lodestones. They get under the skin of other people. You can’t explain why.
Blackwell’s Corner, a half hour east on 46, was where Dean got his last refreshment break. That place was torn down years ago, and the new construction tries to cash in on his gruesome death with a fudge shop and forlorn half-stocked shelves of nuts and ’50s souvenirs. There are signs all but begging people to spend money there. It’s pitiful.
It’s hard to believe that in 2014, it’ll be 60 years since East of Eden came out. When I see clips now, I can recognize that he was totally out of synch with his co-stars. They were more stagey, more calculated. They felt like every other 1950s movie. During his silent scream at being rejected by his father, he was modern, an exposed nerve, and still is, because he was like a beautiful walking wound.
Anyway. I always wanted to see where he died, a place in the forlorn middle of California close to sunset on September 30, 1955. But it was so far away. It’s in the middle of nowhere. I’ve been to San Francisco countless times, and I’ve been to Los Angeles countless times, but at no time have I casually been in the scrubby in-between a half hour east of Paso Robles, California. (more…)
There’s a story about why those six graves are set apart like this. The video explains.
I feel ghoulish for admitting this about a place where 13,000 people died in just over a year, but Andersonville has a very special place in my heart.
I wanted to go for years. It nagged at me, the way Harpers Ferry did until I finally went and made it the first real post on this blog. And the minute I pulled into the parking lot for the very first time, in 2009, I was struck with the brainstorm that wound up becoming “AfterShark,” my post-show for ABC’s Shark Tank. Before I even went inside, I’d scribbled the concept down. It feels uncomfortable to say it, but something revelatory happens to me every time I visit here.
A few weeks ago, I went back, in the red-earthed rolling hinterlands of mid-Georgia, for the third time, this time to research a big project I’m working on. It was mostly empty, as it always is. I think that’s a shame. Americans should know what happened on their turf. We shouldn’t forget about it. We shouldn’t excuse it. Andersonville makes me indignant about ignorance.
So I made this quick video about it: what it looks like there, what happened there. It’s quick, and I hope it’s evocative. (more…)
Cheers to Bob Gurr, who both shaped my childhood and drinks my favorite adult beverage. (Photo: MiceChat.com)
My regular readers know that I am passionate about how the past is preserved. We, as a culture, are so obsessed with money that blow our heritage off all the time. That’s one reason I wrote a new article for Travel + Leisure about the original Disney attractions that Walt knew best.
The destruction of Walt Disney World’s Snow White’s Scary Adventures, which happens on Friday, distressed me enough for me to write a slideshow feature about the oldest Disney rides, and for it, I talked to Bob Gurr, an Imagineer who helped build Disneyland in 1955 and went on to be a crucial designer for the park’s most seminal rides.
That same passion for making details about our past available to everyone has inspired me to put Gurr’s full interview on this blog so that anyone can read his words. Magazine and Web articles can only put so many words into stories before people’s click fingers get itchy. But there’s no reason the words of someone as esteemed as Gurr should be left on the cutting room floor. (I also salvaged a choice nugget from an interview with Anthony Bourdain last year.)
I asked Bob to discuss a few Disneyland attractions that he had a hand in, and the way Walt Disney figured into their creation. Some of his recollections won’t be new to Mouseheads, but they are full of reverence for the process, and considering the cultural importance of the results of that process to American culture, it’s worth putting on the record anyway. Here’s what Bob said, in his words. (more…)
When it came out, it was a flop. Not surprising, since it’s a children’s movie that contains a shot of a chicken getting beheaded (it’s during the boat ride scene). The author of the original book, Roald Dahl, despised it. But repeated showings on network television in the 1970s, when there were only a few channels and scant opportunities for kids to watch programs of their own — the beheading was excised for that — made this a beloved property of the post-Moon Shot generation. Gene Wilder’s wild-haired, is-he-or-isn’t-he performance, though wildly different from the squirrelly, goateed Wonka of the book, was a harbinger for modern sarcasm. He also gave the movie the heart it needed to endure — something Johnny Depp, in his unleashed, twerpy interpretation couldn’t muster. Look at the picture. His off-kilter performance is still worth a meme, 41 years later. (more…)
There are many things about Broadway musicals that make me shift in my seat. One is when the heroine winds up alone on stage and sings wistfully, and at agonizing length, about how lonely she is. Another is the power “I love you” ballad the two leads slam out together, climaxing with a seismic belt and the obligatory applause.
But the third, and by far the worst, is the newest bad habit of modern musicals: songs with a lyric written in the second person. These are the songs when the character in question, once they’ve broken into song, can barely utter the word “I.” Instead, they layer their words with “you,” distancing themselves from the outburst and rending musical moments like a stack of platitudes of bumper stickers. They sound like musical fortune cookies.
I think I blame Sondheim for this modern stylistic entrenchment. In 1970, his main character in Company reached his big epiphany about loneliness while singing “Being Alive” in the second person.
Someone to hold you too close,
Someone to hurt you too deep,
Someone to sit in your chair,
To ruin your sleep.
He went on like that for a few verses because he had to. He was a character who couldn’t embrace his needs, who shelved them while his loved ones developed and moved on around him. Finally, in the last verses, he switches to the first person, indicating he’s finally made his personal breakthrough.
Somebody, hold me too close,
Somebody, hurt me too deep,
Somebody, sit in my chair
And ruin my sleep
And make me aware
Of being alive,
Being alive.
It was a good song. It worked. And the trick of using the second person worked for a good reason. Bobby wasn’t fully an “I” yet. He was all super-ego, and resisting the naked urges of his ego. I suspect that in some ways, he reflected Sondheim himself, who takes an intellect-first approach to writing and perhaps by constitution isn’t automatically emotive. (more…)
A year ago, I first visited Rosewood, Florida, the site of a horrific racist massacre in 1923. Someone imagined a black man raped a white girl, and it exploded from there. I found the paltry memorialization of this American tragedy to be disquieting. I wrote about my first visit to Rosewood on this blog (click here to read that post, see the pictures, and read the depressingly politicized plaque).
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to return. Rosewood is in Levy County, where Florida State Road 24 meets County Road 324, a few miles east of Cedar Key on the Gulf of Mexico. This place once buzzed as a miller of cedar for Faber pencils. Now it’s quiet.
My first trip there was too unsatisfying, bereft of the vibration that turmoil usually leaves. I left without a sense of the gravity of what had happened there. If I hadn’t known beforehand, I never would have realized that this dusty, overgrown, fire-prone patch of coastal Florida land had hosted any event of note, let alone one charged with such fury, terror, and bloodlust.
This time, I battled the seasonal swarm of lovebugs to shoot a little video of Rosewood so people can see it for themselves. It appears, on the face of it, to be a dreary, sun-baked little outpost of pickup trucks and scrubby trees. It seems like nothing special as long as you remain ignorant.
But of course, the woods most people zoom past once were once the setting for unimaginable savagery. (more…)
You already read my blog, and thank you for that. I put a lot of thought and effort into my topics and writing here.
I always post some of my other goings-on through my Twitter feed. Not everyone follows my tweets (and even those I do can’t keep an eye on my feed 24/7), so I’ll round up a few links to a selection of the coolest things I’ve been up to in the past few months.
I have two features in the editing pipeline at Travel + Leisure. They will be sequels to my recent feature for them about America’s Most Beautiful Neighborhoods.
BBC World: Expert appearance on Fast Track, discussing the South Korean theme park boom. I’m at 4:04 and 9:33. And they spelled my name wrong. I’ll know I’ve made it when they don’t spell my name wrong. Then again, that’s what Condoleezza Rice has been saying for years.
I have also hosted four “The Savings Experiment” segments for Bank of America: on filing your taxes, buying drugstore items, and cable TV service (which is in post-production). I’ll embed those in a future post.
The re-mainstreaming of the musical could be said to be a decade old this year. It was in 2002 that the movie version of Chicago was released and subsequently snatched up the Oscar for Best Picture.
Ever since, pop culture has been chasing the genre again. Sometimes it’s a wild cross-cultural and financial success (Glee,Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog), and sometimes a miserable flop of torturously inept proportions (the 2005 adaptation of The Producers).
Although the musical departed the pop culture mainstream along with jukeboxes and crooners, there’s still enough money in them — if they’re done correctly — to have been a constant lure for the past decade. What was once a pet genre, invoked only in private or in some kind of pastiche such as Pennies from Heaven, is now being taken seriously again on its own terms, for its own unique language.
Much of the thanks go to Howard Ashman, the genius wordsmith who returned Disney to its groove, and to its black bottom line, with The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. He died at the peak of the AIDS holocaust before he could rightfully claim the credit that Michael Eisner greedily usurped as his own. But where Ashman laid the groundwork for pop culture re-acceptance of the musical with modern idioms, his work, whether it was for Disney Animation or for Little Shop of Horrors, seemed to always spring from an awareness that musicals work best in a candy-colored, backlot-imagined, hyper reality.
After all, modern audiences’ brittle, Vietnam-fired sensibilities are troubled by the musical’s annoying tendency to feature characters who unnervingly break into song. Problematic, that, and the clearest way around that intellectual short circuit, as the syrupy-sweet set designers at MGM’s Freed Unit knew, is to bathe productions in a surreality that excuses the transgression of song. Ashman’s greatest triumph was knowing that, and knowing the one medium — animation — could support song best. (more…)
It’s everywhere, burrowing into my ears. I can’t concentrate on what people are saying anymore. I hear only it, pervasive as an undertone hum. I count the number of times it appears. It drills my senses with its numbing, senseless repetition. I’m being driven mad!
It is the word amazing.
The word amazing was once scrupulously applied to things that it actually meant, such as twenty-foot wedding dress trains and Sputnik. Things that truly amazed.
But today, this word is conversational herpes, an incurable earsore whose reoccurance is used to describe anything for which we’re too lazy find a more specific descriptor.
Just turn on the TV right now and count how many times people say it on the news, reality shows, and interviews. Whenever someone runs out of an ability to properly explain something with specificity, they run to the adjectival filler amazing. It’s cheap, industrial-grade description — the corn syrup of self-expression.
Even the most cursory of explorations will turn up descriptions spackled with wildly louche exploitations of amazing to describe things that aren’t really. In a few seconds of searching, I found amazing being used to describe, variously, a game-winning golf stroke, colored socks, Kirsten Stewart’s acting, and a Subway sandwich containing bacon. These things were not, variously, skilled, dorky, laconic, and savory. Or anything, really, that actually described them beyond an enthusiastically positive impression. They were all amazing.
Keep your ears open. You will suddenly hear many, many more appearances of this placebo word. More than you ever realized. Several instances in every discussion. And you’ll be driven crazy very quickly.
On a recent work trip aboard a cruise, the social director used it 11 times (I’m telling you I’m counting) in a two-minute speech designed to draw our attention to the skill of the service staff and the availability of the swimming pool on Deck 11. Just today, a friend used it to describe a brand of cracker and the aurora borealis just two sentences apart. Surely a snack food and the Northern Lights cannot both be accurately portrayed by the same adjective.
No, but the expediency of our conversation can be. It’s strictly a word we say but rarely write (except for on the most purple Internet post mills), such as gonna or lookit. No writer worth their ink would stretch the word much beyond the literal sense — to be jaw-droppingly dazzled, to be astonished to the point of being stunned — but even from the mouths of normally well-spoken geniuses, amazing overflows as a shorthand for anything positive.
Our tendency to use the word so sparingly in written English while it’s so egregiously stuffed into every other spoken sentence, almost makes it seem as if we’re nearly unaware that we use it as much as we do.
Looking on Twitter, where our communication is more conversational in vocabulary and tone, confirms the divide between using it in formal writing and when we’re palling around with colloquial symbolism. In tweets, the use of amazing pours forth, dozens by the minute, to describe everything from friends to concerts to dishes to songs. It does double duty as an adverb, too, as in “you did amazing,” but one battle at a time.
Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks usage of words and phrases in books, puts the written zenith of amazing around World War II, when the world was in cataclysm and certainly fit the adjective, but it’s been on a rising comeback for the last 20 years. But Google can’t track frequency in what we say. So I do it. Believe me, few of us can get through an anecdote without the word.
I wish I could say that the proliferation of amazing was just down to our expanding American idiocy, and proof that we are being turned into vanilla-vocabularied mouth-breathers through an educational system that’s being starved by our Hedge Fund Manager Overlords. But no, even the British Royal Family is doing it.
After a recent Diamond Jubilee tour, Prince Harry’s official statement went all amazed and shit. “The warmth of the reception that we’ve received from every single country that we’ve been to — including Brazil — has been utterly amazing,” the BBC said he said.
So much for The Grandmother’s English. Not that it’s without precedent: William Shakespeare’s characters, including Othello‘s Iago and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Hermia, sometimes professed to be amazed, but almost always in the sense of being profoundly dumbstruck. Only one character, John of Gaunt in Richard II, ever uttered the word amazing, and even then he was using it to describe the ghastly noise of God crushing the skulls of his enemies. An argument could be reasonably made that all of them were more strategic about their deployment of the word than simply praising a D.J. or a discount.
Often, the stultifying heights of amazing are apparently still not enough, as was apparently the reason with this junior high swim meet; in that case, and in many more besides, it was described as really amazing, which is the equivalent of totally awesome from the 1980s — as if anything is ever deceptively amazing or fractionally awesome. (In that instance, the speaker is an Australian, who know from their experiences with the cane toad and the Norway rat that they are historically defenseless against undermining invasions from the rest of the world, and this word is no exception.)
Using this word too much makes a even a well-spoken person seem banally agog, trapped in a bubble of over-stimulation, or worst of all, witless.
Pardon me for editing imprecise language skills like Inigo Montoya did over inconceivable, but bitch, please! I do not think that word means what you think it means. Don’t alienate your friends by confronting them over their amazing abuse. Also don’t turn it into a drinking game, or you’ll never recover. Just silently judge them, and vow to do better yourself.
Count ’em up, like I do, on Facebook posts, in chat show interviews, out of the mouths of reality show judges when they’re really phoning it in, and when your friends are talking about something they like but are thinking more about what they’re about to say next than being truly descriptive now.
Count ’em up, like me, and you’ll find it… well, you know.
