Casablanca

The first time I saw Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, I saw it on a double bill with another Bogart movie, To Have Or Have Not, which I was also seeing for the first time.  I actually preferred To Have or Have Not!  It's based on a Hemingway novel, but it's basically about nothing but the sexual chemistry between Bogart and his co-star (soon to be his wife) Lauren Bacall. Yet darnit, that's enough!  It's sort of like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was really just about the friction between stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

On the subject of Casablanca, Roger Ebert pointed out that at the end Bogart could have got on the plane with Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid, because he'd just shot the Nazis who would have stopped him.  Sort of like in The Wizard of Oz when the Good Witch could have told Dorothy at the start of the movie instead of the end, that she could get home just by clicking her heels!  Every movie has some point you don't want to think about...

I once saw the movie Hideous Kinky with Kate Winslet as a British divorcee raising her kids in Casablanca or somewhere in Morocco in the '60s. (The kids had a habit of yelling out, "Bugger, bastard and bum!" They looked fun.) She was into Islamic mysticism, and really wanted to meet this big Sufi leader so he could reveal to her some big secret about life.  When she finally met him, he said, "Go home and raise your children."

There's also the poem "Casabianca":

The boy stood on the burning deck,

Then he got the hell out!

Aunts & uncles

I'm an uncle.  I have four nieces and one nephew, ages 17 to 29.  The first one was a bit thrilling, but I got accustomed to them.  I haven't seen much of them recently.

I have a Chinese friend who'd call my parents "Uncle" and "Auntie." That's an Asian thing, treating your friends as family.

Did you ever meet a bully who'd force you to the ground and twist your arm, and tell you, "Say uncle"? Or is it just a boy's thing?

On Welcome Back Kotter, Gabriel Kaplan would start the show by telling a joke about his uncle.

There was a Mad magazine article once with definitions for children.  One of them was, "An aunt is to give you clothes for your birthday, instead of toys." Another was, "An uncle is to pinch your cheek, and you can't pinch back.

Second acts

In a self-pitying moment, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "In American lives there are no second acts.  I disagree.  The most interesting American lives in particular are distinguished by their second acts.  It goes back to the age when pioneers had little to keep them in the east, so they went west to make a fresh start.  And even to the immigrant forefathers making a fresh start in the New World!

I think of Washington and Eisenhower going from General to President.  Or outstanding ex-presidents John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter.  Or someone like Vito Corleone going from godfather in the first part of the movie to his son Michael's adviser in the last part.  Or the silent movie actress Louise Brooks writing important essays about Hollywood in her later years.  Even Fitzgerald's life had an interesting second act:  the sadder but wiser writer of The Last Tycoon, "Babylon Revisited" and the letters to his daughter Scottie.

I also think of Ulysses Grant, whose life had five acts!  In the years before the Civil War he was largely a failure in military and civilian life; in the Civil War he became a triumphant general; as U.S. president he was a well-intentioned failure; as ex-president he was a failure on Wall Street, ending up deeply in debt; in the last act, dying of cancer, he wrote a courageous memoir whose sales restored his family's fortune, which has stood the test of time.

(P.S.: Actually, someone said that what Fitzgerald really meant is that American lives only have a first act and a third act!)

Forts

I grew up in Sackville in southeastern New Brunswick.  Nearby was the National Historic Park of Fort Beausejour near the Nova Scotia border.  Back in 1755 this was a French fort facing British Fort Lawrence on the Nova Scotia side.  Then the British conquered it and renamed in Fort Cumberland.  Later, during the Revolutionary War, some American rebels attacked it but couldn't take it.

Those forts are interesting historical places.  My mother was born near Fort Louisbourg in Cape Breton, and I've visited it several times.  But I don't remember visiting Fort York in Toronto.

I used to do research at the University of Toronto's Robarts Library, whose design is so brutalist and intimidating that someone nicknamed it Fort Book!  Have you ever seen those British puppet cartoons like Stingray and Thunderbirds?  Those puppets would look at home in Fort Book!

A letter

People don't write many snail-mail letters any more. (I had to mail someone a cheque the other week and we didn't have any stamps in the house!) But I like the feel of having something on paper that you can even save.

Some twenty years ago I spent eight months in London, England, researching my Ph.D. thesis.  My sister Moira wrote to me a lot.  A few years ago I was searching for something in my room and found a big stash of these letters!  Rereading them took me back to that time.

I must say that Moira is very good at writing letters.  I remember a couple of years before I went to London when she was teaching English in the Czech Republic.  I wrote in one letter to her that I'd never done anything really adventurous, not like what she was doing now.  She wrote back, "Adventure isn't all it's cracked up to be!  The best adventure is getting some work done." Can't disagree.

These letters she wrote were full of funny details, like "P.S.:  Stay away from those London School of Economics loonies!" And her handwriting was very neat. (I'd also saved a letter from my father, but his handwriting is barely legible!)

Pickles

Whenever I eat a Big Mac, I remove the pickles first. Did you know that in England a Big Mac has relish instead of pickles?  If they got rid of pickles, would I notice?  Probably not.

In September my mother used to use fresh tomatoes to make chow chow pickles.  I always like the smell when it was being cooked.

Can't think of much to say about pickles.  Back in my hometown there was a guy called John McNichol who was nicknamed Pickle.  My grandfather called the CBC newscaster Knowlton Nash "Old Picklepuss."

There's a British actress called Vivian Pickles.  She played Mary, Queen of Scots in Glenda Jackson's TV series Elizabeth R.  And I've heard she had a funny role in the cult movie Harold and Maude.

Vandalism

I remember that when I was a teenager we had some little poplar trees growing on our front lawn.  We went away on vacation for a week or so, and when we came back someone had hacked them down!  I've always resented that.

When I was in school, textbooks experienced a lot of vandalism.  A book with the title Language Arts would get changed to "language farts." Someone wrote in the front of one book, "In case of fire, turn to page 37." On page 37 he wrote, "I said in case of fire, fag!" Someone else wrote, "In case of fire, throw in!"

In college I used a desk on which someone had written, "Washington owned slaves and blew dope and they won't admit it." I also recall seeing a garage door on which someone had scrawled, "Mr. X was here!"

In my hometown, there was a street sign near the high school that said "Dufferin Street." (There were several streets named after Governors-General.) Some high-schooler added a bit of paint to turn it into "Bufferin Street"!

There's a Calvin & Hobbes episode where Calvin saw Suzy drawing on the sidewalk with chalk and joined her.  He said "Gee, I've never been a real vandal before!" and she said "It isn't vandalism!  The stuff washes right off." So Calvin lost interest, of course.

Punk rock

When I was a teenager, I liked punk rock.  Not that I listened to it much, but I liked the whole idea of it.  Dare to be negative!

I didn't have a lot of heroes in my adolescence, but Johnny Rotten was one of them. (And Sid Vicious' version of Sinatra's "My Way" is a classic!) The movie Sid and Nancy has some good lines: "How do you spell 'holiday'?" "S-H-I-T!"

Not that I'd ever want to pierce my ears or nose or get tattooed or such.  I don't get the appeal of body art.

I was visiting Great Britain in June of 1979, just at the time of the Wimbledon tennis tournament where John MacEnrone's loud-mouthed tantrums got him the nickname "Superbrat." I liked him.  I guess he had a punk appeal for me.  Like my favorite Frank Zappa song, around the same time, which went, "You're an asshole, you're an asshole..."

I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker where a young musician made a phone call and said, "Hello, Mom?  Punk Rock is dead and I'm coming home in 15 minutes!"