The Americans & Morgan Freeman

Well, I certainly didn’t see this one coming, the final episode of The Americans, that is. I didn’t see any way they were going to avoid a confrontation with their neighbor and FBI agent Stan Beeman. I was Mr. Completely. The Jennings had a final confrontation with Stan but it didn’t result in a shootout. Instead, Phillip somehow talked him into letting them go. They then made their careful way to the Soviet border, where they were met by a supporter of Gorbachev and taken to Moscow. The final scene has them looking at the city’s lights as they contemplate what their future might be. How ironic that this, their new home, isn’t nearly as much a home as their home in America was. But they’ll “get used to it,” Elizabeth says. “The kids will be all right,” she says. Henry, who will be taken in and cared for by Stan, will be all right, but what about Paige? Paige chose to abandon her parents when she gets off the train just as it was leaving the station. Will she be all right? Yes. Yes, that is, if she doesn’t take vodka as her next best friend.  We see her when she gets back to the safe apartment and knocks back a hefty shot of Vodka, leaving the viewer to wonder what will become of her. This episode showed me what the writers of a series can do and should do about allowing the actors to slow down and show us their faces, their real acting chops. Too many series consist of slam-bang dialogue with no time for nuance. The Americans was always able to slow down, especially in this last episode. I certainly hope the producers don’t decide to do a spinoff, showing us the Jennings, parents and children, in their next lives. We don’t need that spinoff.

Morgan Freeman is the latest to be allegedly guilty of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior. Inappropriate behavior, maybe, but not sexual harassment. He said, “All victims of assault and harassment deserve to be heard. And we need to listen to them. But it is not right to equate horrific incidents of sexual assault with misplaced compliments or humor.” I think the MeToo Movement may be going too far in charges like this. When does a compliment on a woman’s beauty become inappropriate? Are all the “blond” jokes inappropriate and demeaning enough to accuse the teller of inappropriate behavior? Is this joke too risqué to tell in mixed company?  A small boy was lost at a large shopping mall. He approached a uniformed policeman and said, “I’ve lost my grandpa!” The cop asked, “What’s he like?” The little boy hesitated for a moment and then replied, “Jack Daniels whiskey and women with big tits.” Come on, ladies. Lighten up just a little and remove this allegation against Morgan Freeman. After all, he drove Miss Daisy and he spoke up for all those marching South Polar penguins.

Countdown: Tonight we’re going to Outback for dinner. Or at least I’m going to try. Who knows if I’ll be able to make it without falling on my face? Yesterday, I went to see my dentist about putting in two implants to support my lower partial denture. Just as I was about to sit down, I went into a tailspin, one hand holding onto my portable concentrater and the other hand trying to find something to grab before I fell down. I somehow managed to get to another chair but it was a close call. The receptionist was aghast and kept asking me if I was all right and I kept telling her I just needed a few minutes to recuperate. But it was a close call. My balance has become so bad that falls are inevitable. My next step will be to get a cane, or move only with the help of a walker. Just another step in my descent, or if I’m looking for some heavenly reward, maybe it should be another step in my ascent.

Bit Coins & James Comey

Bit coins and their ilk. Boy, I must be a Mortimer Snerd dummy when it comes to money. What in hell are bit coins? And I see now that the bit coin frenzy has opened the door to a flood of new scams. Half the calls I get every day are scams of one kind or another, but I haven’t yet gotten any calls about buying this new currency. Probably tomorrow.

          On last Friday’s Late Night with Stephen Colbert we listened to what James Comey had to say about Trump and Comey’s being fired by Trump. The man speaks very well and fielded all of Colbert’s questions with lucid answers. I think I could vote for a ticket with him and Tea Leoni, either one for president and the other as vice president. He compared Trump to a Mob boss, both having this driving need to pull everything and everyone into the sink hole of their egos. “What’s in it for me?” Trump and Corleone ask. “I need your absolute loyalty and admiration. I don’t care what it takes to inflate my image. I don’t care if it hurts other people as long as it gets me what I want.” It’s not about making America Great Again; it’s about making these two great in their own eyes.

Countdown:  Not only are the spatial dimensions of my world shrinking, but the temporal frame is also narrower. Each day is shorter. I sleep ten or eleven hours each night and often nap during the day for an hour or more. Each day involves our morning ritual of juice and pills, coffee, some kind of pastry, and the Arizona Republic from front to back. Or in my case, from Sports section to comics and the daily jumble and the bridge hand to the USA Today section to the Opinions, political cartoon, and letters to the editor. The rest of the morning is spent either reading or writing a blog or writing letters to friends and relatives. Noon happens. We sit and read. Or often Rosalie will spend an hour or two working on several hard sudokus. Three-thirty happens and Rosalie will treat Charlie and Tiger each to half a can of Fancy Feast while I put together two Scotch and waters with, in a tribute to our old cocktail in years past, one large pimento olive, one large blue-cheese filled olive, one garlic chunk, and one cocktail onion. The ritual never varies. Five-thirty happens and we dine on simple fare—soup and sandwich, Marie Callender tv dinners, or leftovers from a night at Outback or Carrabba’s. As we eat, we watch Lester Holt tell us about horrific lava explosions, school shootings, plane crashes, Trump tweets (yes, still horrific), ending with a feel-good story of somebody’s noble act of heroism or generosity. Our evenings are devoted to the television series we’ve taken as our own—NCIS, Bull, Madam Secretary, The Resident, The Voice, Big Bang Theory, Mom, The Good Doctor. We fill in empty spaces with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or the saved nightly diatribes of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon. Ten-thirty happens and we escape to bed, where we wait for another day to break when we will ritualistically wade through another day in waiting for life or death to happen. And each day’s awake time shrinks by seconds or minutes. As the day shortens, all of what I once considered important becomes less and less so. Connections to friends and relatives no longer concerns me. I worry less and less about my children’s and grandchildren’s lives. I can’t even worry about the sorry state of affairs in the nation and the world. The world will survive this president or it won’t. I simply don’t care. And that statement leads me right into the third and most frightening area of shrinkage—attitudinal. The gray clouds of depression fill my sky. I no longer have much of anything to look forward to—no swimming, no movies, no trips to Disneyland or Vegas, no Wild Life Zoo, no CostCo or the mall. I still enjoy our evenings out for dinner, but I fear even those may not be possible much longer. I now look forward to the outcomes of sports on television. Will Tiger get another win? Will the Diamondbacks make it to the post season? How will the Cardinals fare with their two new quarterbacks? Without these or without my blogging and letter writing, I’d be locked inside my house, locked inside my head. I already spend too many of my hours in mental surfing, revisiting past places and people, listening to old songs, playing golf on one of my old courses, playing racquetball against my old opponents. I don’t know how to drive away these gray clouds and I hate it that they keep getting closer and closer.

The Voice & The Donald

          Finally, The Voice finale. All along I’ve thought Britton Buchanan would win, and up to the last ten minutes of the performances on Monday, I still thought he’d win. His original song was excellent, both the song and his rendition. His duet with coach Alicia Keyes was excellent. Of the four finalists he was the only one to perform without hiding behind backup singers. And then he chose for his third song “Good Lovin’ ” by The Rascals. He cavorted around the stage like a little kid, high-fiving those ubiquitous raised hands in the front row, smiling and laughing and almost clicking his heels as he made his way around the stage. How could Alicia have let him choose that song? It was just plain awful. And it took him right out of contention. I had thought he would win, followed by Kyla Jade, then Spensha Baker, and Brynn Cartelli last. Now I think the order will by Kyla, Spensha, Britton, and Brynn still last. I keep hearing in my mind’s ear this young man singing “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha. That would have done it. Instead he chose that silly “Good Lovin’ ”

          It’s been over a year since the FBI’s Robert Mueller began the investigation into Trump and Russia and the 2016 election. That’s too long. It shouldn’t take twelve months of foot-dragging to find out if Trump is or isn’t guilty of collusion or perjury. The man’s a liar. Just get on with it. He’s also a misogynist, a racist, a bully, an egoist and egotist, and he’s in over his head by about a hundred feet of water. The Second Amendment was put in place to prevent a tyrant from taking permanent political power. Should we fear that a man like Trump might possibly do such a thing? No but we should still fear him. This ignorant man has his hand on the red button that could bring about the destruction of our planet. Please, Robert Mueller, get on with it and help us get him out of office.

          More on the Nobel Peace Prize. Wiley’s Non Sequitur today suggests that the Devil may be a more fitting Peace Prize winner. Or did he mean someone else?

Great Novels

          I know I’ve written quite a bit about the books and series I’ve loved over the years, so forgive me if I repeat myself. My goal here is to point out what I consider are the best novels in American literature. I’m ignoring European novels because I, like many others, haven’t read some of the great ones, like War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, or those two confounding novels by James Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

But before I get there, I must once again explain my reading habits. From the very beginning, I’ve always found writers I like (love?) and then read all their works just as fast as I can, like a dog with rawhide knots, chewing and chomping until they’re all gone. When I was very young and first felt the bite of the reading bug, there was L. Frank Baum and his Oz series and Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Tarzan, Mars, Venus, and Pellucidar series. Later, in high school, I went from genre to genre, immersing myself in one type for a while, then moving on to another. In science fiction I read all of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and others; in Westerns, mainly Luke Short and Max Brand (but never Zane Gray); in detectives, Mickey Spillane and Bret Halliday (but for some reason, not Dashiell Hammett); in historical fiction, Samuel Shellabarger and Thomas B. Costain. These were the four genres I read, but I also read an assortment of novels outside these boundaries, like the early James Michener and Arthur Hailey.

Much later I decided to catch up on the best and best-known writers of the first half of the twentieth century, all of Hemingway and John Steinbeck (but not William Faulkner because I wasn’t yet ready for him). Much later, I returned to the easy stuff, again like that hungry dog—Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, Dick Francis and his English horse racing novels, all of Stephen King’s massive production, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series (three times), Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder series (two times), Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series (two times), James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheau series, and Ed McBain’s 87^th Precinct series (two times). Later still, John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers series, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, Jeffry Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series, Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole series, Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware series, and Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series.

Now I can return to my original reason for this journey through popular American writing (with the exception of Dick Francis, the Englishman). Which do I consider the greatest American novels? My reading of literary fiction pretty much ended in 1970 or 1980. Too much work involved, too little time. I consider the 19^th century classics and find Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which is considered great by many critics, but not me. Same for Melville’s Moby Dick. As Twain said, “Classic. A book which people praise and don’t read.” In the 20^th century there are Hemingway’s novels, but I think he’ll be considered a writer of great short stories, not great novels. In 1962 John Steinbeck, like Hemingway and Faulkner before him, won a Nobel Prize for Literature, but I’m convinced the Nobel Committee was looking for an American that year and Steinbeck was the best they could find. The Grapes of Wrath might be a great novel, but all the rest are pot boilers (with the possible exception of East of Eden). And back to Faulkner. I and others might praise him for his complex style and his complex creation of the generations who inhabited his Yoknapatawpha County, but other than The Sound and the Fury, most of his novels get lost in a Mississippi fog.

All right, here we go. Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage are the best of the 19^th century. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 are the best of the 20^th century. And their reverse order? 5. The Red Badge of Courage 4. The Catcher in the Rye 3. Catch-22 2. The Great Gatsby 1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (with the probable European parallel, Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield).

That should do it for my reading habits. I promise I won’t ever again subject you to it.

Tiger, Obesity, Tv Trends

          What a nice Tiger weekend. He proved at The Players’ Championship that he can compete in, probably even win, a PGA tournament. His last two rounds—a 65 and a 69—were signs of the old Tiger, and indicators of a new Tiger, one who could win not just any old event but one of the majors, like this year’s Open where he could hit those vaunted stingers he made famous in his last Open victory. I and a bunch of other lovers of golf hope so. He is undeniably a shot of adrenaline in the arm of golf. He will next play in Jack’s Memorial Tournament in three weeks, an event he’s won five times. Maybe he’ll make it his sixth.

          Food and Fatties Revisited. I’ve written several times about the obesity epidemic in our country—too many grossly overweight people dining too often on high-caloric foods, junk foods, our worship of consumption that we see in all the eating contests—hamburgers, hotdogs, pancakes, pies, steaks, chicken wings, pizza, etc. That leads me to a question about fat-food hamburgers. Why have so many fast-fooders gone to bigger and bigger burgers stacked higher and higher in a bun? How can anyone even this his mouth open enough to consume it? Here’s a picture of several prize-winning burgers shown in the Arizona Republic.

Doesn’t that look awful? Just the sight of it makes me want to vomit. The usual stacker these days is made up of two beef quarter-pounds, several slices of cheese, two or three onion rings, two or three slices of bacon, lettuce, tomato, and a slice or two of jalapeno pepper. How can anyone eat that much? Why would anyone even want to eat that much? So, we publicly acclaim huge burgers and eating contests while too many in the world are starving.

          Television Trends—shorter and shorter series seasons, longer and longer waits between seasons. I just read that The Orville won’t start Season 2 until December 30. That’s nearly a year since Season 1 ended. I may have forgotten what I was watching after that long. The Americans is another one that took so much time off between seasons that I wasn’t able to keep the various plot lines straight. I’m glad they’re ending it after this season. I can’t see any way to end it except with Elizabeth and Phillip getting killed in a shootout with the FBI, probably headed by their across-the-street neighbor Stan Beeman, with daughter Paige’s move to Russia with their Russian handler Claudia, and with son Henry’s being comforted by Stan. How else can Elizabeth, in light of her killing so many people, end up anything but dead? Another sad bit, the sudden end of The Last Man on Earth, Will Forte’s really strange series with which I fell in love. The very last episode . . . ever . . . has the group surrounded by hundreds of gas-masked people. What should have been a cliff-hanger leading into the next season becomes a cliff without any hanging on.

Countdown: Although my stamina remains pretty much the same, way down there, I now have to realize that most of the things I used to do are no longer available to me: like going on any vacations, no Vegas to see Penn and Teller, no Disney Land to see Snow White, no trip to the zoo, no trips to CostCo or the Arrowhead Mall, no movies at Harkins, no swimming. In other words, I’m now resigned to a life within the confines of our house. The days now become a set routine of coffee, toast, the Arizona Republic, a blog every three or four days, televised sports, letters to friends and relatives every two or three weeks, saved tv shows, watching the antics of Charlie and Tiger, and then to bed. Pretty much the same every day. That’s a description of how restrictive my world has become.

The Voice & Tiger

I’ve written about The Voice several times, but it’s now time for another comment or two. I earlier praised this talent show because it put its emphasis on vocal quality, downplaying looks and performance skills. Even the blind auditions were strictly about the vocals and not the looks or performance. But that was in the past. This season seems to be more about performance than voice. And all the peripheral noise too often drowns out the vocals—too many backup singers, the band too loud, the audience screaming their approval during a performance. I want to hear what each one is singing. I’ve said in the past that they should have at least one episode in which all the singers have to sing a cappella. That would certainly separate the wheat from the chaff. The final ten contestants this year aren’t nearly as good as those from past seasons. I see only two who deserve to win—Britton Buchanan and Jackie Foster. Here's the one who should win but probably won't.  And I wish they’d spend less time listening to the judges and more time listening to the singers. And please, Carson Daly, get off those too long dramatic pauses before announcing who’s been saved. Just announce it.

           This week we get to see Tiger in action at the Players Championship on Pete Dye’s dreaded TPC course. I hope he can get his putting woes behind him. He was just awful last week at the Wells Fargo with more than thirty putts for each of his rounds. That’s most uncharacteristic. He and Phil are paired together for the first two rounds of the Players. Should be interesting to see how they react to each other. All the big boys are in the field—Spieth, Johnson, Day, McIlroy, Thomas, Fowler, Rahm. How will they all play the 17^th? Will Tiger make the cut? Will he actually contend in this tournament that he’s won twice? We won’t know until late Sunday, and I and a lot of other golfers and non-golfers will be watching the drama unfold. Let’s go, Tiger.

Nobel Peace Prize

  

Some GOP senators have nominated Donald Trump for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize. I would think that giving him this award would be as inaccurate and indefensible as their awarding Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Dylan may be an influential writer of folk songs, but should he have been considered the best in the world for literature, putting him in with all the writers who are truly deserving of being called the best, putting him shoulder to shoulder with Hemingway, Faulkner, and T. S. Eliot? I don’t think so. Back to the Peace Prize. How could Donald Trump, this Trumpety Bumpkin, be considered a peace maker when he has done more than any other president to divide Americans as well as most of the nations of the world? How could he be compared to the true peace makers like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa? He can’t. That would be like putting a wolf in with the lambs. This consideration seems to be based on what these GOP senators see as a successful move on Trump’s part to secure a deal with Kim Jong Un to give up his nuclear program and all his nuclear arsenal, and to bring about a peace between North and South Korea. Trump isn’t a diplomat, and he may be walking into the lion’s den when he meets with Kim Jong Un. Rather than securing a peaceful resolution, he might be sent home with his tail between his legs. And Alfred Nobel must be spinning in his grave at the thought of a Trump award for peace making. He might even put a ghostly stick of dynamite under the whole awards business and put it to an end.

The Bridges of Madison County

        Another outing to the Arizona Broadway Theatre, this time for an unusual adaptation of Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County. I say unusual because it just seems like such an unlikely plot for a musical: 1960’s, a man comes to Iowa to take pictures of some of the iconic covered bridges there. He meets Francesca, who is somewhat unhappy with her life as a farmer’s wife. Simple plot, right? Obviously they fall in love but don’t know what to do about it. She has a son and daughter, a husband whom she met in Italy after WWII. She loves her husband but not in the same romantic way she loves Robert. The theme is also simple—what our lives are and what we wish they might have been. She decides to stay with Bud and her family and never again sees Robert. The score by Jason Robert Brown was good, although not very memorable or hummable, the vocals excellent, especially that of the two principals, Cassandra Klaphake as Francesca and Bryant Martin as Robert. The staging and set design was also unusual, minimalist, very theatrical. Modern theatricalism is the opposite of realism. In realistic theater, there is a distinct separation of the stage and the audience, with the actors pretending the audience isn't there and the audience pretending they’re looking through a window at the action on stage. All set changes are made behind closed curtains. Most of us got our first taste of theatricalism in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a play that openly acknowledges the audience, with set changes made in full view of the audience, with the character called the Stage Manager speaking directly to them and explaining what they are about to see. He carries a few props onto the stage as he speaks to them, telling them where the two households in the town are located. Then a boy comes on stage delivering imaginary newspapers. The stage manager is useful for shifting locations and changes in the times of actions. In The Bridges of Madison County, the sets are minimal, a screen door and a porch with a swing, a kitchen with table and chairs and a chandelier. There is also a technique similar to the chorus in Greek plays. Four or five people were seated to the rear, not a part of the action, but simply there as observers. Whenever the kitchen table and chairs are taken off, four people synchronize their removal; all set changes and the placing and removal of props are done as though to music. I’m not sure what purpose this theatricality served, maybe nothing, maybe a comment on the unreality of romantic love. This was definitely not my favorite musical and I’m reasonably sure I won’t remember it for very long.

            We don’t see many commercials on television anymore because we save nearly all shows and then fast-forward through the junk. But we keep catching the Century Link commercial in which a man tending a barbecue is explaining to another man what a good deal he got on Century Link, internet access and a fee that will never change. The other guy keeps interrupting him, saying, “Oh, yes, it will.” The barbecuer saying “No, it won’t.” This exchange goes on some three times. After the third time, I’m afraid I’d have had to pop the yea-sayer on the nose. Another one we see too often, the Toyota commercial with Pat Finn, the idiot sales guy. Although I don’t think I’d punch him, I would have to put a bag over his head. Amazing that Pat Finn could make an entire career out of playing this yahoo. Just give me the Geico Gecko and I’d watch him all day.