I’m Sorry, But You Must Be Stopped Immediately. (An Open Letter to Nicholas Cage)

Dear Mr. Cage,

I know that you’re a huge Elvis fan, and so am I.

You have probably heard that story (I believe I read it in the 1999 30^th anniversary edition of Elvis’s post-comeback studio recordings, Suspicious Minds: The Memphis 1969 Anthology) where Chips Moman, the producer with whom Elvis would collaborate on the sessions, was trying to get through to Elvis just how out-of-touch he was, having spent the Age of Aquarius shuttling back and forth between Graceland and Hollywood, surrounded only by a crew of hanger-ons and lackeys who did little more than sit around and worship him.

The story goes that for some reason or another, Chips wants Elvis to go outside with him when they were meeting for the first time in California. Elvis tells him, no way, I’m the biggest star in the world and I’m just gonna get mobbed. Chips is able to finally convince Elvis to try it and the two men walk down the street in late-’60s Los Angeles. And Elvis is shocked at the fact that not only is he not mobbed, but that no one seems to even notice him.

The upshot was that Elvis sobered up (at least momentarily) enough to reassess his situation and work with Chips, who was pretty much the only producer of his mature career to challenge him on material and performance. In so doing, Elvis made the finest studio recordings of his life.

I relate this rock and roll version of The Emperor’s New Clothes because I fear that you are in a similar situation that Elvis was in in the late 1960s, and I fear that you may be surrounded by yes men and hanger-ons who don’t know or don’t care about the work you’re doing.

What follows is a manifesto of what one potential fan of yours would like to tell you:

1. You are 47 years old. There is no reason why you should be making action movies that would make Shia Labeouf look immature.

2. Your hot costars are young enough to be your children. Drop-dead blonde 20-somethings don’t fall for 47-year-olds, unless you are rich and can potentially be used to gain recognition, either financial or otherwise…Oh, wait, I see. Still, it doesn’t make it comfortable to watch.

3. People who talk like David Schwimmer don’t make realistic action stars. If you talked like Matt LeBlanc, there’d be no problem here. I think I could even work something out if you talked like Matthew Perry. But Schwimmer? You’d be better off if you talked like Courteney Cox.

4. You have an Oscar. Use it for something other than rubbing your back after a hard day of injuring yourself with stunts that mostly had to be done by a double anyway.

5. Return to your roots (and I don’t mean hairplugs). Accept the fact that as time moves forward, your film returns diminish. You cut your teeth on indie/outsider stuff like Birdy and Raising Arizona before breaking through artistically with Leaving Las Vegas. But then, you had one great action film (The Rock, although the Criterionites are still almost as pissed it’s #108 as they are that Armageddon is #40, but I digress) and one decent action film (Face/Off) before the long, sad slide into one generic blob of loud and crashy dreck.

6. Finally -- and this one’s probably going to hurt -- you should never play Superman EVER. EVER. EVER. You playing Superman would be like the equivalent of Steve Buscemi waking up one day and telling his agent, “Hey, I think I should play Mr. Darcy in a remake of Pride and Prejudice.” Or Sylvester Stallone deciding to direct and star in a remake of Hamlet. Or Bob Dylan convincing his label to record him crooning Bing Crosby-style Christmas standards. (Oops, scratch that last one…But you get the picture.)

I hope I’m not totally being totally disrespectful of your career or your talent. Please understand that this comes out of a deep respect for these things. I loved you in Birdy, thought you were charming in Moonstruck, and that The Rock was a lot of fun. Heck, I’ll even take 2,000 Miles from Graceland over your current work.

Which brings us back to the King. What I’m hoping is that, like Elvis getting his hard-to-take-but-much-needed wakeup call from Chips Moman, you too can take this advice and prosper into a late-period career worthy of comeback kids and late bloomers like Mickey Rourke and Bill Murray. Heck, you still have a chance to win a second Oscar before Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise land their first. But time is always of the essence.

And as I already mentioned, you are 47 years old. If you were Elvis, you would’ve been dead five years ago.

Regards,

Eric.

The Slickest Thing I’ve Ever Said (A Daylight Savings True Story)

I hate Halloween. Maybe it’s because I was born on Christmas, maybe it’s because I hate clowns, maybe it’s because I was always nervous around kid-centered social activities, but it was a day I never liked. It probably just boils down to my hatred of people wearing makeup, something that has made me one of the few people I know who is consistently unimpressed by The Wizard of Oz. (I think the movie sucks when it goes into color; I always want to see more of what happens in the black-and-white world.)

At any rate, I often avoided trick-or-treating when I was younger, preferring to stay home, watch television with my parents, and answer the door when trick-or-treaters came by. Sometimes I’d even dress in a “low maintenance” costume (usually a Boston Red Sox player) in case any of my classmates came to the door, so that I could play it off like I had already gone out and was now home. Hence, trick-or-treating was usually avoided; Halloween parties were out the question.

This put me in a strange spot a decade later when a few of my closest college friends were throwing a Daylight Savings party. They originally wanted to throw a Halloween party, but an overlapping group of friends were already planning what was going to be the definitive one of the season. My friend Adam realized that Daylight Savings was happening a few days before Halloween that year and told everyone: “It’s a Daylight Savings party, but you’re encouraged to wear your Halloween costume.” It was a stroke of genius: No toes stepped on, no party spirit lost.

It made me think of my favorite episode of the most underrated television show perhaps ever, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, which had a short run in the ’90s on Nickelodeon. The show always had a surreal bent that separated it from anything else on the channel (let alone the fluff that they played on Disney), which in hindsight feels like a precursor to shows like Community and movies by Wes Anderson.

At any rate, they were the only show I’m aware of to do a Daylight Savings episode. In it, Little Pete decides he hates Daylight Savings and wants to fight against it, so he bicycles across the time zones of the country, racking up the extra hours gained in each. Meanwhile, Big Pete goes on a date with his best friend Ellen, only to have it turn disastrous when he tries to cross the line from friendship to romance. After regretting his actions, Big Pete and Ellen realize that Daylight Savings has given them an extra hour, in which they can redo their failed date and bring their relationship back to friendship.

So, suffice to say that the notion of a Daylight Savings party, even one in which you were encouraged to wear your Halloween costume, intrigued me. I had never been to a Daylight Savings party before.

I put on my college equivalent of a “low maintenance” costume: A tie-and-sweater vest-wearing Alex P. Keaton, complete with parted bangs and a copy of the Wall Street Journal under my arm. I am pleased to report that my costume proved so successful (this being an art party, where everybody usually stays in the costume), someone called me a baby-killer in the kitchen.

As I defended rightwing ideologies to leftwing extremists, I noticed my friend Katy (who hated “slutty” girl costumes and dressed like a cowboy) was getting drunker and drunker. When the party was winding down, a very intoxicated Katy (intoxiKaty?) was ready to make her way home. Even though she lived roughly a half an hour out of my way, I decided I was going to be a gentleman and help her navigate through the mean streets of suburban Pittsburgh, where many a lesser man has fallen prey to the well-lit winding sidewalks and charming front lawns. Through some brave combination of caution, diligence, and determination, I was able to get her home safely in one piece.

The next day, I ran into Katy in a computer lab. She had long since sobered-up and put together what had happened the night before. “Thanks for walking me home,” she said with a bit of embarrassment. “I feel bad – you really didn’t have to walk so far out of your way.”

“It was a Daylight Savings party,” I told her. “I had an extra hour to use, so I used it to walk you home.”

She smiled and gave me a look as though I had just said the slickest thing I would ever say.

Which I just had.

Giving Something Ba[ra]ck.

My wife & I just moved to Washington, D.C. -- the scenic Northeast Quadrant of Brookland, to be exact. So far it’s quite lovely. There’s no shortage of American flags or historical markers (or American flags on historical markers, or even, in the case of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, a historical marker for an American flag, but I digress), which is just fine by me.

One bonus of moving to Washington was that we would be closer by all sorts of good people we haven’t been near in a while -- immediate family, high school friends, college friends, post-college quarter-life crisis-era friends, and more.

But there is one person in particular that I am very interested to be living closer to: My good friend who I’ll refer to as Barack O., to keep his identity private.

Did you ever have one of those friends who only ever contact you when they want something? Well, Barack O. is that person in my life. He emails me personally all the time asking me for money. Although I never respond, he still keeps emailing me just the same. Every now and then he throws in an invitation to dinner, but somehow it never seems to work out.

I hope that living near him will cause us to run into each other on the street. If and when we do, boy will he feel awkward! I’ll say, “Hey man, it’s me, your good friend Eric! I know you know who I am since you email me directly almost every day. Funny to run into you now…I was just about to grab a coffee, but I’m short on cash. Can you lend me some money? Any amount, no matter how small, would be greatly appreciated. Getting me coffee will help keep the terrible agenda of tiredness at bay at a time when it is most crucial for my body to remain on the right course. With your help, I know we can do this together. God bless America!”

If that doesn’t get at least a buck fifty out of him, I’m gonna strongly reconsider calling Barrack O. my friend in the first place.

Building iMerica

There is a sense of size and grandeur that has always been central to the American mind – a land filled with an epic sense of vastness in both its physical (“From sea to shining sea”) as well as its mental (“All men are created equal”) identity. Part of the reason why people disagree upon a definitive American novel (my Huckleberry Finn could be your Moby Dick, or vice-versa, or both, or neither) or film (The Birth of a Citizen Gonewiththewindfather, anyone?) is because America is too large to fit into a 500-page book or 2-hour film.

Yet there is an inherently American identity that defies the vastness it thrives upon. I’ve been thinking a lot about this paradox as I’ve been mapping the terrain of my own personal epic adventure, setting up my iPhone. The fact that I’ve had it for well over half a year is irrelevant because what more is America than grand improvisation?

My goal, with equal parts love and obsession, is to strip America down to its bare essence and within the confines of a 14 GB iPhone, such that, the next time I ever get stranded on a desert island (with an outlet), I can keep the essence of America on my phone, and thus, keep it with me at all times. (And, of course, still have room for unrelated non-American things like my Beatles albums and the complete works of Shakespeare.)

I call my grand project iMerica.

What follows is a list of the core documents of my country-within-a-country, the essence of a City upon a Hill in 14 GBs or less.

Documents

The Historical Documents Ap, from StandardWorks. Covering over four centuries of American speeches, articles, court rulings, war papers, poems, and song lyrics, this ap will get you a basic all-in-one American desk reference; included are the founding documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Articles of Confederation), as well as every presidential inaugural speech (including Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, one of the finest speeches ever given), and all of the other usual suspects (MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” and the Emancipation Proclamation, Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech and a complete copy of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”), as well as such light reading as the Mayflower Compact and the Federalist Papers. All this, and Nixon’s “Checkers” speech too!

Books

I can’t afford a Barnes & Noble Nook (TM) (the “TM” stands for “Too Much”), so I just downloaded the free Nook (TM) ap and some cheap B&N editions of some classic literature and turned my iPhone into a Great American Bookshelf. Minus the sexy Barnes & Noble Nook (TM) cover case, of course.

Nonfiction

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. It’s said that if you were lucky enough to own books in the early 19^th Century, you owned two: One was the Bible and the other was this. A pioneering autobiography/self-help/history/memoir that defined the American character almost as soon as it appeared. So charming, fascinating, and inspiring, no one ever seems to notice that it ends years before the American Revolution even begins. (Or perhaps, like the Great Experiment that frames it, it remains unfinished.)

Essays and Poems, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Declaration of Independence of American intellectualism, and one of the finest philosophers the country would ever produce. Ever wonder what people did before they could watch movies with sophisticated story-telling or television shows with ensemble casts and overlapping story archs? Just open to one of Emerson’s essays and try to keep up. In its own way, it’s as thrilling as any Martin Scorsese movie or Law & Order episode you’ve ever seen.

Walden and Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau. A nineteenth-century Into the Wild, this is the writing of a man who escaped his country by the very tenets it was established upon – reinvention and independence – to break life down to its essence and redefine it for himself. Walden was the sprawling epic, while “Civil Disobedience” was the concise essay, two halves of a whole that reiterated one of the chief rallying cries of the Revolution: Don’t Tread on Me.

Fiction

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. An extended meditation on the depths of American obsession, as played out in a high-seas epic, and interspersed with the history of the whaling industry, c. 1850, for no apparent reason. Great God, where is the ship?

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. A white boy and a black man go drifting down the Big Muddy on a raft, and the rest is history. (Or, perhaps, culture.)

The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. A history of the Guilded Age disguised as a children’s fantasy book; with all due respect to Ms. Garland & Co., this was the original book that was better than the movie.

Poetry

Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. Epic, brilliant, weird, and self-indulgent, Whitman stakes a claim for the American voice – a modern, unpredictable thing that can’t be held down by rhyme schemes, narratives, or anything more than a hip-yet-calculated whim.

The Collected Poems, by Emily Dickinson. Written in seclusion by a woman who spent most of her adult life self-exiled in her bedroom, she produced short, concise poetry that is among the finest ever penned; exploring love, loss, life, and death, her work was as universal as her existence was solitary.

The Essential Tales and Poems, by Edgar Allen Poe. A stunning look at the dark side of American life, which went on to influence everything from southern gothic writing to film noir and gangsta rap – all while inventing the detective novel.

Music

The Complete Hot Fives and Sevens, Louis Armstrong. If jazz music is America’s answer to classical, Louis Armstrong is its Mozart. As the first important soloist, Armstrong and his bandmates worked out not just how jazz should sound, but also how it should feel; the result is a joyful and exuberant music, knocked off in loose, late-night recording sessions that redefined freedom in music and music in freedom.

Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band, Duke Ellington. As the first great jazz composer, Duke Ellington was the ying to Louis Armstrong’s yang – his music was all about form and structure and organization. This incarnation of his band (named after bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster) is generally considered the finest big band ever assembled, and with cuts like “Take the A Train,” it’s easy to hear why.

Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday. A two-disc overview of Billie Holiday’s peak years at Columbia, where she literally reinvented how a vocalist could sound (not to mention what a vocalist could feel and be), twisting words and skirting the beat with a gardenia in her hair and a tear in her voice.

Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, Frank Sinatra. The cream of Frank Sinatra’s legendary collaborations with arranger Nelson Riddle, this is the Chairman of the Board at his mature, mid-’50s peak. Don’t believe the Sinatra hype? Just put on “You Make Me Feel So Young” and try not to swoon.

Legendary Country Singers, Hank Williams. The closest thing we’ve got to a single-disc retrospective of the king of modern country music; it’s hard to narrow it down to an hour when virtually every song he recorded was a classic. Consider this an overview, with nowhere to go but up.

King of the Delta Blues Singers, Robert Johnson. So much has been written about Robert Johnson it has become impossible to separate the myth from the man. Did Johnson really sell his soul to the devil in return for a sudden proficiency in blues music? Maybe not, but it sure as hell sounds like he did…

Elvis at Sun, Elvis Presley. Elvis “invents” rock and roll music on “That’s All Right Mama” and nine other sides, amongst the finest in rock and roll. The remaining nine tracks are the surviving masters (and one alternate take) of his output at Sun; what it lacks in quantity is made up for its brilliance, influence, and vitality – this is music you literally can’t get tired of. Have you heard the news?

Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan. Beginning with the storming “Like a Rolling Stone” and closing with the epic “Desolation Row,” this is Bob Dylan’s finest hour, and he doesn’t miss a beat. He sings of lovers, trains, confusion, and friends in music that blurs the lines between rock and blues, country and folk, past and present, comedy and tragedy, life and death. When he sings of needing a dump truck to unload his head partway through the album, you take his word for it.

Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen. On the Road remade into a hipster’s daydream with Elvis’s bravado, Dylan’s imagery, and Phil Spector’s production values, this was music that staked its claim to greatness through the act of mapping it out, music that tried very hard, and somehow still delivered on its own golden promise.

At Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash. I once decided that if America had a voice, it would sound like Johnny Cash. This is his finest hour, singing songs of love, home, prison, and death to a crowd that meets his fuel and fury every step of the way.

Live at the Apollo, James Brown. Rhythm and blues as redemption as the Godfather of Soul begs, borrows, and screams his way through another night on the uptown chitlin’ circuit.

I Never Loved a Man The Way I Loved You, Aretha Franklin. With the title track, the Queen of Soul took the fervor of the church and brought it into the bedroom; with the landmark “Respect,” she then brought it out into the streets.

Film

Citizen Kane.* The greatest film ever made. It’s everything they say it is and more, benchmark in filmmaking and production, and also a fascinating production that has barely aged since it was made. It succeeds where so many other films have failed because it understands that in America, success and failure exist back-to-back to each other, as opposed to on two separate planes.

[* – Citizen Kane will be on sale digitally for the first time on September 16; I am literally counting down the days until this occurs and being careful to leave ample room in my iPhone for when it does.]

King Kong. The greatest movie ever made. All big and spectacle, this paved the way for the great American tradition of the blockbuster – the granddaddy to Star Wars and Indiana Jones and Titanic and Avatar, and better than all of those movies without any of the Technicolor and not a single computer graphic in sight.

Television

The Dick Van Dyke Show, “That’s My Boy?” Until the “Sammy’s Visit” episode of All in the Family comes out digitally – the most perfect half-hour of television comedy if I’ve ever seen it – this will have to do. The finest of all the early family comedies, probably because it was also just as effective as an early workplace comedy, this episode is included here for its trailblazing surprise ending that unwittingly defuses two hundred years of racial strife in one glorious moment of comedy.

The Bible

The KJV Bible Ap, from Tecarta Bible. Okay, so this predates America, but you could’ve fooled me – from the moment America deemed itself a City upon a Hill, it used the Bible as its chief reference and touchstone, the passion play against which its national drama could unfold. Any lip service about separating church and state failed centuries ago to such an extent that we don’t notice how much religion is in our national rhetoric not because it isn’t there, but because we are long since numb to the fact that it is everywhere.

Alright, so that’s roughly four pages of American documents that can provide a basic skeleton for your own little iMerica. From there you can add to it what you wish; like the country it encapsulates, this is an improvisation powered by freedom and reinvention.

I know I for one am gonna be on the continual hunt for when or if iTunes ever releases “Steamboat Willie.”

Sound Treasoning: A Brief History of the Fall & Fall of Recorded Sound

The music industry is dead. Hate to break it to you, but it is.

Actually “dead” is too easy a term to use here, one that sacrifices the forest for the trees. A better word to use would be “in transition.” In fact, I’m convinced that the closest thing the music industry has seen to its current state (or lack thereof) of the last ten to fifteen years was about a century earlier, when sound recording was reeking havoc on the sheet music industry. Think about it – until around the turn of the 20^th Century, the music industry was built around sheet music. If you wanted to listen to music, you made it yourself in your parlor. If you wanted to get some, there was a nineteenth century version of iTunes for your convenience: Song peddlers who came door-to-door, who would sit down at your piano and play “audio clips” of the songs you were interested in. You bought the ones you wanted, forgot the ones you didn’t. Sound familiar? (No pun intended, of course.)

Yessir, that was the good ol’ days of the music industry, back when Tin Pan Alley was a real place and the only digital recording around was the divots on a player-piano cylinder. But then along came the advent of sound recording – first wax cylinders, then coil cylinders, then circular discs (all of which was the BluRay vs. HD of its day…Remember HD? Or better yet BetaMaxx? Or the minidisc?).

I once had a professor who said the most radical invention in human history was the invention of recorded sound because it had absolutely no precedent. Motion pictures had photographs before them, which in turn had daguerreotypes. The telephone had the telegraph, and, um, people shouting really loud before that. Really tiny handheld devices had relatively small computers before them, which in turn had relatively enormous room-sized punch-card computers before them.

The point is that no one was trying to discover recorded sound while sitting under an apple tree or flying a kite during a lightning storm – Thomas Edison just sort of stumbled upon it while pursuing other seemingly important things that I can’t remember the details of now. But there it was. Sound vibrations captured in foil.

(My above-mentioned professor went so far as to claim that when introducing the first sound devices through nineteenth century informercials – that is, traveling around the country like a small medicine show – in which they would show the audience a live band behind one curtain and a cylinder player behind the other, the audience always picked the live band because they had no concept of sound existing any other way; even though the record was scratchy and flat to our ears, for them sound was sound.)

At any rate, this all sent the sheet music people up in arms over what “really” constituted music and who owned it. In truth, however, it was just the thing that made music so awesome – that it was an invisible, instantly fleeting experience – was also making it very hard to make a buck off of. But as what always happens in our country, an industry sprang up relatively quickly around it, which was strong and powerful for over a century.

Until these days. Once again, music’s etherealness is doing in the big dogs and for over a decade now, we have Chuck D on one side arguing for the music’s freedom and Lars Ulrich on the other arguing for artist’s rights, kids are having hard-drives full of pirated music being confiscated by the law, the idea of a “record label” has shifted so much that a once iron-clad reality has become an experimental liquid.

All of which is not necessarily a bad thing. America is nothing if not a country whose very ideals – freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of all that Declaration of Independence stuff that everyone assumes is in the Constitution (it isn’t) – forces it to constantly question, challenge, reinvent, and adapt. Why shouldn’t our music do the same?

Which finds us in a very odd predicament. The history of recorded sound is nothing if not using sound to make a bigger and larger statement – hence, the one-sided disc gave way to the two-sided disk, which in turn gave way to the multi-record album (so named because it was made up of several record sleeves bound together, not all that different in size and feel of an old photo album), which in turn gave way to the LP (about 20 minutes on each side) to the cassette tape (about 45 minutes on each side) to the CD (80 minutes of glorious, digital sound).

The recent trends in the music industry (or lack thereof) appear to be refocusing things on the single, the A-side, the hit. The albums that had stopped being physical albums around the time that the Greatest Generation were first taking advantage of the G.I. Bill were now being used by their grandchildren in the most abstract of terms: “I’m gonna buy this album on iTunes.”

Or more accurately, “I’m gonna find a copy of this album online and download it.”

Given the amount of sound that can be packed into a modern listening device – and if my collection can be considered an accurate representation, I have three and half days of music on my iPhone and over a month and a half of music on my iTunes – coupled with the ease of sharing that accompanies digital technology, we have an entire generation hoarding music, the majority of which they will likely never listen to.

What we have then is a camera obscura of the observation that began this piece. Perhaps things aren’t going back to the single song so much as people now have the capabilities of gathering lots and lots of albums’ worth of material, thus making it a sort of radioactive freak stepchild of the progression from the single to the album to the cassette tape to the CD. For, in downloading song after song by itself, aren’t we just ultimately gathering a library far beyond what could be held in a 200-disc Case Logic book, or perhaps, even a shelf-lined living room?

If this strikes me as natural, it also strikes me as very American. The history of this country was built upon the notion of Manifest Destiny, that is, the idea that the land is bound to be ours, so we might as well grab it now. It is of course a self-fulfilled prophecy built upon the same logic that drove MacBeth (and we all know how that turned out), but it is also an intrinsic reflection of our national character. Namely, I see it, I should have it, I will have it. Isn’t that the story of America in three phrases or less? If so, the whole thing seems closer to the myth of Icarus than anything to flow out of William Faulkner’s pen.

And if rock and roll is a quintessentially American artifact (which I believe it is) on the same level as the cotton gin, Coca-Cola, and Superman, it only goes to show that its postmodern incarnation is still playing out the same battles that we thought were long resolved when we mis-learned the story of Custer’s Last Stand.

Or even better, go find a copy of Larry Verne’s “Please Mr. Custer,” a stupid novelty hit that topped the charts the same year that JFK took office (it also made #9 on the R&B charts, if you can imagine that), and download it illegally. This is precisely what I thought I had done when I went through a novelty song kick last year (pick to click: Johnny Cymbal’s cover of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” theory in the form of “Mr. Bass Man”), only except that it’s not there among the 20,773 songs in my iTunes library.

Apparently a bigger facet of the American identity was in fact driving the day: The freedom of choice.

Either that, or Verne’s song – an intangible, ever-fleeting digital indicator of how far technology (and, I would argue, America) could go before turning back on itself – sucked no matter how it was played.

American Madness, American Beauty: Yvette Vickers, 1928 – ???

When I can’t sleep at night, I often peruse the obituaries. I am fascinated by the lives of these famous, infamous, and anonymous people, who I would have never heard about except in death. As a postmodern romantic who wants to keep the flame of their memory alive, I do what anyone in my situation would do: I post the obit to my Facebook page. It’s gotten to the point where a friend dubbed me “The Grim Reaper of Facebook”; when I do miss an obit that people think are worthy, they post it to my page with a little note.

One such time was earlier this month, when a friend from Texas posted a link to my page with the message: “Did you hear about this?”

I had not. The link was to an obit in the “L.A. Times” with the picture of a ’50s blonde with a headline that was as gruesome as the girl was beautiful: “Mummified body of former Playboy playmate Yvette Vickers found in her Benedict Canyon home.”

This was the rare obit that didn’t announce that a person had died, but rather that a dead person had been found.

Vickers was already living as a recluse when a neighbor began to get concerned when she hadn’t seen or heard from Vickers in quite some time. When the neighbor noticed yellowed untouched mail in the mailbox and spider webs on the front door, she decided to investigate further. Climbing through a window, she made her way through an endless tangle of junk – boxes of clothes, newspapers, and letters that were strewn everywhere and made walking through the rooms nearly impossible. Eventually, the neighbor reached a room upstairs, where she found the body of Yvette Vickers so far gone that her body had mummified beyond the point of recognition.

The police estimated that Vickers had been there for upwards to a year.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on August 26, 1928, as Yvette Vedder, she changed her name, moved to California, and tried to become a Hollywood star. She could be ruthless – after appearing in a nationally-televised White Rain shampoo commercial in 1955, she divorced her first husband because she felt he was holding her back, even though he had just bought her the 1920s Benedict Canyon home in which her body was later found.

And though she spent her final days as a recluse, she spent her prime years bubbling under in 1950s Hollywood. She became one of the first Playboy playmates, a B-movie star who had appeared in the likes of “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” (as a mistress, not the 50-foot woman), and a would-be Hollywood socialite who had dated Cary Grant. After a string of television and small movie roles, it seems that her career got permanently off-track when a major role opposite Paul Newman in the 1963 film “Hud,” was left almost entirely on the cutting room floor. She spent the next decade doing sporadic television work until a B-movie buff discovered her in the ’90s and helped her go into the cult movie circuit, where she went to conventions autographing old pin-up pictures of herself.

But then, it seemed, something snapped. Maybe it was the shame and frustration of being reduced to the convention equivalent of a freak; maybe it was the alcohol she seemed to be drinking more and more; maybe it was genetics (her parents had also become very reclusive in their old age). Whatever it was, it did her in good, and for the rest of her life, she was rarely seen and hardly ever left the house. Apparently she became paranoid, spending her final days scrawling notes about people she believed were stalking her in the margins of the books in which she kept her recipes.

Yet, all of the initial articles I saw left out the thing for which Yvette Vickers can be most recognized for today: She is the laughing blonde who frustrates William Holden by tying up the telephone line in the party scene of “Sunset Boulevard.” Although uncredited, it was her first appearance in a film and, perhaps, something of a break.

Of course, she is only in the film for a few seconds because the rest of the film is focused on an entirely different lady, the delusional and aging silent screen star Norma Desmond, who is played by the aging silent screen star Gloria Swanson. The film creates a bizarre world of fourth wall Hollywood self-reference – when Desmond is watching old films of herself, they are real old films of Swanson; when she has her old friends over for bridge, they turn out to be an uncredited trio of real silent film stars, including, if you look sharply, an aging Buster Keaton.

In portraying Desmond’s histrionics in equally comic and tragic turns, “Sunset Boulevard” is the definitive romantic portrait of American madness. Here is a grand old star locked away in her old 1920s-era Hollywood mansion, a tireless performer living out her days in a performance that nobody sees.

I have often thought that “Sunset Boulevard” portrays the quintessential version of American madness: Someone cut off from the real America, who then creates their own country in their mind.

The real-life version of this can best be found in “Little” Eddie Bouvier’s bizarre “performance” in the legendary “Grey Gardens,” which documents Bouvier and her mother (Jackie O.’s first cousin and aunt, respectively) madly living in the filth and squalor of a dilapidated Hamptons beach home. But shades of this can also be found, I believe, in Brian Wilson’s lost “Smile” album, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and James Otis’s final years. As Perry Miller famously theorized about the Puritans, perhaps the quintessential American identity is one who goes on an errand into the wilderness, fails to rivet the world on his their own, and is forced to retreat into themselves.

Yvette Vickers is thus the most striking example of this I have come across yet – there she is, at the center of “Sunset Boulevard,” a stark portrait of American madness and failure that her brief appearance contrasts, a girl-next-door blonde beauty, bubbly and laughing into the telephone, oblivious to the rest of the film, oblivious to the fact that she would spend her final years all but living this film out.

R.I.P. Frank Buckles, 1901 – 2011.

Frank Buckles is dead.

The name might not mean anything to you, but Buckles is someone whom I have been following for the past few years as the last known living American veteran of World War I. Some two million Americans fought overseas in World War I (while another 2.7 Americans served in the Allied Forces during the war); Frank was the last – the final living witness of the epic event in which a young, idealist America made its way onto the global stage where it would play out the rest of its subsequent history.

But with all of this grandiose end-of-an-era junk, it’s easy to forget that Frank Buckles was a man – and one with a unique combination of strength, determination, and cleverness that helped him overcome the fact that he almost didn’t even get to serve in World War I at all.

Born on February 1, 1901, outside of Bethany, Missouri, a 16-year-old Buckles was inspired by a recruitment poster to join the Marines, who rejected him for being too young and underweight. Buckles then tried to join the navy, who rejected him for being flatfoot. Finally, in the summer of 1917, Buckles lied about his age and was enlisted into the army; well over eight decades later, Buckles told Defense Secretary Robert Gates that it was the only lie he ever told.

He sailed to Europe in the Carpathia, the boat that had rescued the Titanic survivors five years before. Buckles eventually volunteered to be an ambulance driver, which he had been told was the fastest way to get to the action. Although Buckles never got more than around 30 miles way from the frontlines, he helped to feed hungry French children and was awestruck by the relentless determination of the French soldiers in vivid memories that he would carry with him far into his old age.

He also experienced things that were unique to his time – specifically, witnessing British veterans from the Crimean War (which was fought in the 1850s) before being stationed in France, and talking with General John J. Pershing at a party after he got back home. (One imagines that if he’s not the last living person to have met Pershing, he must be in the last five or so…)

After the war, he worked for White Star – the shipping company that owned both the Titanic and the Carpathia – and spent much of his career traveling around on business. He was on one such business trip to the Philippines in December 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and took over the area. Buckles was imprisoned for over three years by the Japanese, eating his meals out of a tin cup he kept into his old age, and dropping some 50 pounds before being liberated by an American airborne unit in 1945. In the following decade, Buckles retired from the business world, and ran a cattle farm, where he would work until his early 100’s.

By that time, Buckles was becoming known as the country’s foremost advocate for World War I, serving as the honorary chairman of the World War I Memorial Foundation, which seeks to refurbish the long-forgotten District of Columbia War Memorial, built in the 1930s, and establish it as the National World War I Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., alongside ones for Vietnam and the Korean War, each of which suffered less American casualties than World War I.

Although arguably the most epic event in modern world history, Buckles’ fight has been a tough one, as World War I has been overshadowed by World War II to the point that it has become little more than a hazy place-keeper between the Civil War and World War II in popular memory. Most of this has to do with timing. Because World War I was fought over two decades before World War II, there were always less veterans around to keep it at the forefront of people’s minds, especially once you consider that the World War II generation’s children were the baby boomers, the largest generation that our country had yet seen.

Technical limitations also play a large part. Unlike World War II, where we have video footage and photographs of the storming of Normandy and Iwo Jima, there is comparatively very little footage of World War I, and of that footage, only a small amount is of actual battle. Finally, our nation’s level of involvement (or lack thereof) played a major part. World War I was primarily a European war, which the Americans jumped into relatively towards the end. Compared to America’s central place in World War II, its role in World War I was tangential at best. And even when President Wilson famously declared it “the war to end all wars,” the people were primarily interested in retreating back to their native soil for a more isolationist approach to world affairs.

But the die had been cast. Like it or not, World War I was the Pandora’s Box that established America on the global stage, setting the course of its history ever since. World War II may have been the more decisive conflict in terms of America’s role and the modern world it directly shaped, but it is like the Godfather II or The Empire Strikes Back – a sequel that arguably betters the original, but will first and foremost remain just that, a sequel. Its name looks us right in the face, but our “Greatest Generation” culture has caused us to single it out as a singular event, whereas it is more accurate to think of World War II as World War I, Part II. All of the tensions left unresolved by World War I (primarily the treatment of the Germans) set the stage for the better-remembered war, but for me, World War I stands above it because it is just that: the First World War. All of the trials and tribulations of our modern world – from war and peace to the United Nations to the global economy to our definitions of freedom and our self-appointed role as the world police – comes directly out of our less-than-two-year involvement in a war that was largely a stalemate between the two sides.

So where does this leave Frank Buckles? At 110, he was the last soldier of the battlefield, the final American participant in its first global epic. In 2009, Buckles made one of his final public gestures when he wrote a special Memorial Day letter to the American Veterans Center and the National Memorial Day Parade. In it, he reflected upon his service during the Great War:

After three years of living and dying inside a dirt trench, you know the Brits and French were happy to see us “doughboys.” Every last one of us Yanks believed we’d wrap this thing up in a month or two and head back home before harvest. In other words, we were the typical, cocky Americans no one wants around, until they need help winning a war.

But that’s what makes America special – as much as we want to avoid war, we’re ready to sacrifice everything if that’s what it takes to make sure the bad guys don’t win. America’s entry into the war was decisive. Just 19 months after the first Yanks arrived, the guns fell silent.

There is a certain kind of power that goes along with witnessing. A similar idea can be found in Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic, when he recounts an exchange from 1993 in which Bob Dylan speculates upon the difference between himself and slightly younger artists like Bruce Springsteen. “They weren’t there to see the end of the traditional people,” Dylan said. “But I was.”

“What was he saying?” Marcus asks, before reflecting:

He might have been saying that as in 1963 he watched [Dock] Boggs, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Clarence Ashley, Buell Kazee, Sara and Maybelle Carter – “the traditional people,” standing on the Newport stage, for Dylan’s cryptically perfect phrase, both as themselves as a particularly American strain of fairy folk – he had learned something about persistence and renewal. Or he might have been saying something simpler, and harder: I saw a vanishing. He was present to witness an extinction, to see the last members of a species disappear. Thus it was left to him to say what went out of the world when the traditional people left the stage.

Marcus goes onto argue that through performance, one can play the role of someone signing a death certificate: “You were to certify that a certain race of people had vanished from the earth, which was also a way of testifying that they once had been large upon it – and as a result of your witnessing, what traces these people might have left behind were lodged in you.” He continues to the next step: “It’s a possibility that instantly raises its own question. What will go out of the world with you?”

It’s a powerful question, and one that speaks to witnessing and surviving, as well as, I believe, responsibility. Marcus was writing about southern folk musicians who came of age in the 1920s, as they were rediscovered by Dylan’s generation in the 1960s: “cut off by the cataclysms of the Great Depression and Second World War, and by a national narrative that had never included their kind, they appeared now like visitors from another world, like passengers on a ship that had drifted into the sea of the unwritten.”

As can be heard in the most striking song of this era, Geechie Wiley’s utterly bizarre “Last Kind Word Blues” from 1930, these people lived in a time where the First World War was behind them like a desert in the rear-view mirror. In the song, the singer uses otherworldly verses to conjure a land in which death looms everywhere and isolation is a way of life; when she sings of her lover’s last kind words – which are that if he dies in “the German War,” be sure to send his body back to his mother-in-law – it resonates deeply not just because it depicts a woman who is isolated from her lover by war and death, but because its singer is herself isolated in the strange time between the world wars.

But if the generation that came of age between the wars seemed out of place and archaic, the existence of a person who actually fought in the war – a real man, an actual soldier, alive and lucid in America – felt nearly inconceivable. Yet until 12:30 AM on Monday, February 28, such a person existed, the ultimate witness to not just his life and times, but America’s; he could remember when the Titanic sunk and how he sailed to Europe a few years later on the ship that rescued its survivors, he could remember the gruesome carnage of the French and British in World War I and the near-starvation faced while imprisoned by the Japanese in World War II; he was retired by the time Elvis made his first record in 1954, a senior citizen by the time Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a septuagenarian by the time Nixon resigned from office, a centenarian by the time of the September 11^th attacks, and a supercentarian by the time of his death, after which the country’s first African American president ordered all federal flags to be flown at half-mast.

With Frank Buckles goes an entire era, way of life, and history. World War I is now completely cut off from us as Buckles was the final veteran in this hemisphere to serve in the war. The only other people alive who served in any capacity are Claude Choules, who served in Britain’s Royal Navy, and Florence Green, who was a member of Britain’s Women’s Royal Air Force; Buckles was the final living World War I soldier in the world.

In the middle of an interview with the Library of Congress from 2001, Buckles paused a moment to reflect upon his mystic chords of memory:

Oh, and when I think about these things, remember, I've never told anybody about my experiences except my daughter Susannah and wife Audrey. And I never talked to people about it, because people didn't know I had been in the Army. But the pictures come back to me, they're pleasant things. The unpleasant things I don't remember those, I forget those purposely.

He was a living witness, the final of his kind, a good man who lived long enough to see the world change and have a small hand in doing so. One is tempted to turn to the highbrow quotes of military leaders and great men, but I most think of the character of Dilsey, the African American servant from The Sound and the Fury, a book written by William Faulkner, who himself was only about four years older than Buckles: “I’ve seen the first and the last…I’ve seen the beginning, and now I see the ending.”

* * *

To learn more about Frank Buckles and what you can do to help the WWI Memorial foundation, please visit:

http://www.frankbuckles.org/

To see the full transcript of the 2001 Library of Congress interview from which many of Buckles’ quotes were taken, visit:

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.01070/transcript?ID=sr0001