Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible; The nobody's unsolicited campaign outline for the GOP in '16; On decking the "halls"

I. Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible

Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible is a talking silent picture, really, or if you like, an opera or ballet set to film.

The acting in Ivan is at least as overwrought as in any silent picture, and without the silent picture's excuse of being compelled to tell its story visually, and more than that, Ivan is positively operatic or balletic in its staging and contrivances and theatrics and dialogue, but it may be because it's so very far over-the-top, so unabashed in it, and so alien, that Ivan is excused all that. Eisenstein had been a theater man and a director of silents, and it shows. Anyhow, art can't be faulted for being no more or less than it claims to be, only for pretensions to something other or greater than it is.

Ivan is nothing if not anti-German, but nonetheless for that it might justifiably be counted as a later specimen of German Expressionist influence, although it has to be said that the Nazis were not the greatest admirers of the Interwar German school of Expressionism so the Expressionists may qualify as "good Germans". The picture goes so far into Expressionism as to shoot the shadows of the actors cast against a wall for the climax to the scene where Ivan expounds his geopolitical strategy of allying with Elizabeth I and England against the Germans and Livonians, with Ivan's shadow towering over his subordinate's and arching over the shadow of Ivan's armillary sphere which stands in for a globe.

To observe that Ivan drips with politics -- ideological, geopolitical, and personal -- and politics of the bluntest, most bludgeoning sort, would be facile, because it was after all a Soviet film commissioned by Stalin personally. Communism makes politics of every element of life and has done since Marx and Engels, and Stalin was the most totalitarian of Soviet totalitarians, so when Joseph Stalin orders a biopic on the Russian tyrant he most admires, that'll be a political picture. What's less excusable is the apologia in Ivan for Stalin's murderous paranoia: even in his the middle of his siege of Kazan, Ivan is warned gravely that Tartar arrows aren't to be worried about so much as the boyars back home, who are in the film one-dimensionally villainous, forever self-seeking and plotting, forever traitors and rebels against unitary, central command.

And as masterful as any element of Ivan is its score, by another Russian called Sergei, Sergei Prokofiev, who is by my lights among the toweringest composers of any nation or age. Prokofiev had scored Eisenstein's earlier Russian history talkie Alexander Nevsky, and worked that score into a cantata which is in its own right among the greater musical works of the 20th Century. The score to Ivan is very like Prokofiev: grand and dramatic, lyrical and fantastical, irreproducibly original, and at once 20th Century and ancient. For the theme Prokofiev composed a tangled, fairly Medieval-sounding, and even counterintuitive counterpoint, blared by horns with the effect of a stylized fanfare, as befits a king or in this case a czar. Well and truly a masterful score and reason enough to watch Ivan The Terrible.

II. The nobody's unsolicited campaign outline for the GOP in '16

Assuming the bitter end of this Age of Obama turns out anything like it bids fair now to do, with Republicans in Congress passing a pile of bills while Obama in his White House plays Julius Caesar and attempts the abolition of the republic in favor of his imperial say-so, I offer herewith a nobody's unsolicited campaign outline for the Grand Old Party in 2016:

A nationalized and coordinated Republican platform with highly specific agenda items, possibly for enactment within the first 100 days of the new presidency, and with the Republican nominee for president as well as the assorted Republican candidates for Congress singing from that same hymnbook.

Items like, say: "Within the first ten days, a new Republican president and Congress will welcome construction to completion of the Keystone XL Pipeline to secure a cheap and steady supply of crude oil to American refineries from our cousin-nation to the north, and to generate jobs and business direct and indirect without cost to the taxpayer." And useful subpoints like, say: "Abolition of Obamacare's 30-hours rule which has untold masses of Americans working part-time when there's work enough for full-time hours and full-time pay."

Etc., etc. I appreciate that this is more the way of campaigns in parliamentary systems and not historically in the American one, but I don't propose that it become a fixed feature of American national elections, and of course something very like it was managed in the Contract With America midterm elections of '94, only absent the coordination of presidential and congressional campaigns. Plus which, it may be that by 2016 Congressional Republicans have a modest mountain of bills already fleshed out and written up and awaiting only a president who'll put his signature to them.

III. On decking the "halls"

I refer of course to the Christmas carol which per Wikipedia is a Welsh tune, with verses by a Scotsman, in English. Another of those ancient carols collected and published in the 19th Century, this one from the 16th Century.

The carol takes its title from those opening words of "Deck the halls". "Deck" there is applied in the sense of "decorate", which is remote to contemporary usage but not unknown. And surely "halls" isn't meant in that sense most familiar to us today, of "corridors"; surely no Christmas carol exhorts its listeners to adorn their functional little passageways and vestibules. Which by process of elimination leaves "halls" as in "great, grand gathering places": "Adorn and brighten your grand meeting places."

 And while I'm about it, I fail to see how substituting "Christmas" with "holiday" or "holidays" should appease the tiny, tyrannical minority of joyless atheists and secularists, except through semiliteracy: "holiday" means literally "holy day".

Story of the Cape Island boat

It happens that my grandfather not long before he passed helped settle a minor dispute as to the origins of the Cape Island boat. And he knew whereof he spoke. William E. "Bill" Smith was himself a builder of Cape Island boats in the 1930s and '40s and '50s, and was born at Centreville on Cape Sable Island near enough to the time of the advent of our Cape Island boat, in 1902, in a house built by one of the boat's inventors who like my grandfather and father and a good many other Cape Island boatbuilders was a carpenter when he wasn't a boatbuilder. Before he left us, Grampie explained that two men in Clark's Harbour on the Island were "building about the same thing at about the same time and about the same place," namely Ephraim Atkinson and William Kenny, known on the Island in their times as Eefy Atkins and Willy Kenny, and those two together are certainly the inventors of the Cape Island boat. My grandfather's pronouncement as I recollect it now went, "Eefy Atkins gets the credit for the boat, and he deserves it, but Willy Kenny was building about the same thing at about the same time and about the same place." My grandfather was quite adamant that the both men should share in the credit.

As to the name of the thing, Cape Islanders themselves use "Cape Island boat" because obviously a "Cape Islander" to them is a person, but outsiders use "Cape Islander", and outsiders further afield use "Novi boat" or "Downeaster". I take it that "Novi" is short for "Nova Scotia", but Nova Scotians know the boat as the "Cape Islander".

The principal idea of the Cape Island boat was to accommodate a forward engine, which would drive a shaft run through the length of the keel and fixed to an aft propeller, with a rudder mounted on the skeg directly behind, the propeller and rudder being fully submerged. The idea would succeed the sloop which had been the workboat of the Island and Municipality since their settlements in the founding migration of New England Planters in the 1760s.

The older Cape Island boats were not so long as a lot of their more contemporary descendants, very much narrower at their beams, lower at their sides, shallower in their drafts, and they narrowed more sharply toward their sternboards. The old-time boats were built low enough at the sides to where a couple strong men could pick a boat up by grabbing it around the gunwales at the stern, where anymore a man can just about stand upright in the draft of a larger Cape Island boat, "grounded out". And the tubbiest of today's Cape Island boats can run half as wide as they are long, where on the older boats the ratio of length overall to beam would be something like 3:1, and until not so very long ago 2:1 was unthinkable. But the fundamental design and idea of the Cape Island boat is unchanged from the earliest times.

The very old Cape Island boats dispensed sometimes with a wheelhouse altogether, making do with what was called a "spray hood", which is to say an oiled canvas stretched over a wooden frame to afford the pilot some shelter. The older boats were very often "straight sheer", or absent a "break", that diagonal step-up at the main bulkhead to allow for more headroom in the forecastle and more hull forward for higher seas. A pilothouse, a sort of windowed bump on the forward deck, was found on a lot of the older boats through to more recent times, before the hulls went tall enough to where there was no call for the extra forward headroom of the pilothouse.

The construction of those old, wooden Cape Island boats didn't diverge appreciably from the construction of wooden boats and ships more generally, but a point or two on wooden-age construction may be useful here. A Cape Island boat in those times began as what was called a "half-model", which is to say a hand-carved scale-model of half a hull, to be chopped into sections, measured, and scaled up for the construction of the wooden hull. A Cape Island hull is a lot of curves and not so many angles, and any hull must be perfectly symmetrical, so one side can't be duplicated exactly by hand and eye, but the one side may be measured and mirrored. The hulls as well as the superstructures on the old boats were built to their owners' specifications and so every inch of the half-model for a hull was amendable, 'til the boat was just so. Then among the finishing stages, "knees" or L-shaped reinforcements connecting the deck and bulwark were cut out of tree roots, where the tree met the ground.

The Cape Island boat was of course a wooden boat, until the 1970s and later, before Reginald "Reggie" Ross of Stony Island -- which notwithstanding the insular name is another of the communities of Cape Sable Island -- added his chapter to the story. Reggie Ross had studied chemistry in England and was familiar with fiberglass technology and appreciated the value in applying it to the Cape Island boat, and sometime in the '70s he ordered the requisite supplies and built the first fiberglass Cape Island boat. Since that time and with an interim phase when the later wooden hulls were very often sealed in fiberglass, the hulls of Cape Island boats have been formed of solid fiberglass in fiberglass molds, a mold being a sort of inside-out boat, derived from a "plug" which is a wooden hull built more or less in the way Cape Island hulls were built from the earliest times. Cape Island boats still for the most part are "finished" in wood so as to be amendable to the specifications of their owners, with any woodwork that's to be exposed to the elements being sealed in fiberglass and gelcoat, a heavy paint based on fiberglass resin. But the larger part of the history of the Cape Island boat even now is the history of a wooden boat.

The Cape Island boat never was built for speed, but for seaworthiness and workability. One very fine fisherman from Maine observed that it was "like a tank." The Cape Island boat was taken up near and far -- my family boat business alone in its time built boats for the Island and province, for New Brunswick and Newfoundland, for Quebec and Ontario, for Maine and New Hampshire and Massachusetts and Connecticut, and indeed for Oregon -- and has been in service from its advent early in the 20th Century to this second decade of the 21st Century. That's testament enough, but they do say that the Cape Island boat was known even to Lloyd's of London, as a good risk.

At one point within my lifetime and by our count, or my memory of our count, there were something over twenty working boat shops on the Island; at the time of this writing the grand total would be countable on one hand, with fingers to spare.

(My little and fairly antique website for the family boat business may be found at McGrayBoatbuilders.com. Gone but not forgotten.)

Mid-Century Modern revived, Game of Thrones and Spoils of Babylon reviewed

I. Mid-Century Modern revived

This latter-day vogue for Mid-Century Modern may in some quarters be as insincere as the handlebar-moustache pendant on a teeny-bopper's necklace, and it may even be inspired by a basic-cable TV show, namely Mad Men, but in any event the revival of that rarefied art or "design" movement of the American 1950s and '60s antedating the annus horribilis of 1968 has by now attained something of a critical mass.

The principal term there is "Modern", and the irony is of course that from our vantage Mid-Century Modern comes across as rather traditional and quaint -- nothing could be more dated than Modern -- not to mention all-American and confident, and most especially ante-1968. As of 1968, Western Civilization was "deconstructed", and some us are picking up and patching together the pieces still, with uneven result.

Andy Warhol makes a serviceable illustration for art post-'68: Warhol had a very fine eye, indisputably, but a fashion stylist may have an excellent eye and yet no-one would confuse her with the fashion designer, and in that same way, Andy Warhol was not so much an artist as a cutter-and-paster of art, and his art amounts too much to isolating fragments from the creations of others for presentation as ironies. 

That sort of thing is all well and good for purposes of satire and so on, but it can't possibly answer a creative, constructive, cohesive movement like Mid-Century Modern. Art since the Fall of Western Civilization has been too often a sifting of the rubble, or a caricature or grotesquery of what came before, where the movements before that time had been constructions of gleaming new edifices. Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Mid-Century Modern, etc.: all brave new worlds in their times, and none of them "deconstructions". The Victorian and Baroque movements may have been derivative, the one of the Gothic Middle Ages and the other of Antiquity, but they took the past for a foundation and built on it, vigorously.

So we look on a movement like Mid-Century Modern with admiration or even envy, and look around at the desolation and destitution that the Hippies and their witless younger apers have made of our civilization, and we can do no better than to invoke the Last Good Age, the last time there was confidence and creation and civilization in our civilization.

II. Three points on Game of Thrones

The sort of schtick of George R. R. Martin, author of the Song of Ice and Fire novels from which Game of Thrones is adapted, is that he makes things awfully, appallingly hard for his characters. Martin writes from Thomas Hobbes' formulation of "the life of man" in a dark-age "Naturall Condition of Mankind" as "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short". He places his characters in bad situations, then makes things worse for them, and then worse still.

Martin is expert at invoking actual Medieval history and mythology, like Tolkien with whom he shares two middle initials. Beowulf comes readily to mind as a Martin blueprint, in its combining of real and fantastical, in its horrific, limb-severing gore, and in the implication found in Beowulf by its interpreters of the old pagan pantheon of gods giving way to the monotheist Christian Trinity. Martin is worthy of the obvious comparison to Tolkien, who was a devotee of the Dark Ages Anglo-Saxon universe that produced Beowulf.

People do make a fuss about Martin's early-going execution of Ned Stark, who is one of the few fairly unalloyed white hats of the story, inasmuch as killing off a hero to the readership or audience is supposed to be unconventional and a sacrifice for an author. But it strikes me that Martin milks that execution like a fat cow, to the point where I reckon it was no sacrifice at all: Lord Stark of the North is elevated in death to a saint, and his life and execution are invoked to where yes-siree-good-ol'-Ned-Stark becomes a sort-of shorthand for all that was good and might have been, and all that's been lost and might be again. Stark serves the story in death more than he could've done as a going concern.

III. Not quite three points on The Spoils of Babylon

IFC's spoof epic miniseries. Highest commendation possible for style, but the show is sparse for jokes, and what jokes there are, are weak, like as not. Will Ferrell accounts for the better part of the jokes, in his prologue and epilogue commentaries as author and director Eric Jonrosh, and Michael Sheen takes his small role to the nth degree and delivers the funniest line of the show outside of Ferrell's parts ("Louisa May is my guide and my compass"), but otherwise the laughs are too hard to come by. And the show's a cliche of leftism and grinds its axes indulgently.

What Spoils of Babylon gets altogether right is style. It's art, in its way, and manages to make jokes of its art; it elevates style to an end in itself, and a comic end. I'd almost credit it as a novel genre of comedy which might for want of a better appellation be termed here Aesthetics Comedy.

But it may be that the inside-out-turning comedy of this early 21st Century will come from conservatives or libertarians or anyway non-leftists, because those sorts haven't been captured by the conventions of the age.

Observations on moving to Houston

On moving to Houston from parts more northerly, a fellow is liable to observe first that palm trees here are a commonplace, and it does seem that most anything photosynthetic will take and thrive under this sun and in this soil and with this moisture. I can't imagine that there's a more treed, flowered, and shrubbed jurisdiction on God's earth. And Houston's roaches are so very big, I almost think I ought to apply for a hunting license before squashing one.

Houstonians don't tan so much as roast. The sun can be a violent, angry thing at this latitude. I'm given to understand that Houston is hot or warm for something like ten months of the twelve, and I almost wonder if it only turns winterish at all in respectful observance of Christmas: 90-some-odd degrees on December the 25th would after all be an affront to Christmasness.

They claim Houston is the fourth most populous city in the Union anymore, and having been fairly terrorized by the big-city traffic and rents here, I'm disinclined to dispute them. It's no laggard for square mileage, come to that: I've been on the road for 25 minutes and imagined that we must've crossed city and county lines, then appealed to the map and discovered that we hadn't got out of our corner of Houston. There are entire states in New England and the Mid-Atlantic not so awfully bigger than Houston.

Anyone accustomed to the tic-tac-toe board that is the map of Tulsa, OK will observe that the streets of Houston were not plotted on a grid at right angles by some civil engineer, but run at all angles, and curve and swerve, and follow their own courses and logics and histories. Houston was after all founded in the 1830s, when a street still was something that just sort of happened, as people and goods moved from one point to another through features natural and manmade.

A Tulsan will observe also the unidirectionality of Houston's streets, and the great, mounded, gardened islands segregating their two sides, with their requisite U-turning. The grander of Houston's overpasses writhe and rise into the clouds like Jack's Beanstalk, and are formidable structures unto themselves, constituting miniature metropolises of columnar towers.

Work in Houston is done when it needs doing, even if that be on weekends or in the black of night, and road crews or paint contractors may be found on the job at all hours.

Church in Houston is a going concern, not a vanishing ancient rite practiced by scatterings of semi-fossilized stragglers.

I'm no foreigner to the American institution of the Walmart Supercenter, but until I came to Houston I never conceived of one with a wine aisle and a McDonald's in the parking lot, another at the entrance, and still another at the alternate entrance, for a grand total of three McDonald'ses within a matter of yards. Not to say I'm complaining.

Houston is so very rich, I'm reliably informed that a Third Worlder resident here declined a job offer of collecting litter and posting notices for $11.50 an hour, on account of it paid too poorly. Shiny late-model vehicles jam the streets and cram the parking lots, a towering metal-and-glass cupola which may or may not be a stylized representation of a pineapple embellishes a skyscraping new hospital, refrigerator ice-makers come standard-issue, and even the busted-up, dumpstered detritus are nice. I've never felt so poor.

I'm a fellow who's written lines like "Texas accounts for half the 'net new jobs' in all America for the year," and I've been preaching about economic systems and the fruit they bear since I was too young to be preaching about anything, and yet I have no capacity to process prosperity on this sort of scale. Houston and Texas are final proof that American decline is a policy, or the consequence of policy: if certain parts of this country were more Texan, there'd be no notion of American decline, and Churchill's "broad, sunlit uplands" would stretch before America today as in the three-and-a-half centuries 'til sometime in the late 1960s.


I may yet wind up singing "Take Me Back to Tulsa", but I'm privileged to be Gone to Texas.

Vlad the Throwback

Vladimir Putin is a throwback. For Putin, it's as though the 20th Century never happened. Which stands to reason, because for Russia generally the 20th Century was something that happened someplace else.

The 20th Century was very largely a continuation of the later 19th Century 'til sometime around the end of the First World War in 1918, and Russia was knocked out of the war in '17 by the Bolshevik Revolution and descended first into chaos and before long into that Hadean nightmare called communism, 'til the 20th Century was near enough to over. And because communism can't survive the exposure of its people to the alternative, the Soviet Union had of necessity to be a hermetically-sealed hermit-state which would shoot and kill its citizens summarily rather than let them walk across its borders and out of its system. So Russia skipped from the Edwardian world of 1917 to the 1990s, and passed the intervening decades in a bad dream.

The idea that annexing territories is the worst kind of gauche in international relations is novel, coming as it does in the 20th Century among the earlier phases of Western Civilization's project of dismantling itself and reducing the towering, gleaming skyscraper to a useless, miserable little heap of broken and twisted bits. Putin is a quite conventional nationalist and imperialist like is found from the dawn of time 'til sometime in the 20th Century, as alien to the West in 2014 as it is commonplace to every civilization 'til living memory. As though Putin had skipped the 20th Century.

Plus which, it has to be said, Russia is nothing if not self-consciously un-Western, and repudiating the vogues of our Western bien-pensants is a point of pride over there.

So Vladimir Putin is unbound by our decadent 21st Century Western notions of "international law" or even "morality", which in practice amounts to voluntarily binding one or both arms behind our backs in war against barbarians who want us all dead and burning in Hell. Putin's only constraints in the end are practical ones. Putin may be expected to push, in other words, 'til someone pushes back and draws the line that constitutes the geopolitical limits of his Russia. Putin may prefer to reconquer the old Soviet or Czarist empires by maneuver, but then, even Hitler won his early conquests of the Rhineland and Austria and Czechoslovakia and Klaipeda without a shot fired, and it can only be assumed that if push comes to shove, Putin will shove.

Barack Obama's Russia policy from the very outset has been capitulation to Russian demands and psychoses, as gestures of comity to bring about some mythical global harmony or anyway as an uncomprehending rote-Left reaction against George W. Bush. Obama's defense and foreign policies generally are to retreat and contract, which only invites trouble and raises the price of answering it, because threats and half-measures won't suffice without something bigger and badder behind them. If one may be permitted to mix metaphors, a serious president with a demonstrable capacity for pulling triggers and upsetting applecarts may need only rattle a sabre to get the attention of trouble-makers or would-be trouble-makers, but an Obama can wag his finger day and night without effect, because those trouble-makers have the measure of him and understand him to have not the constitution or even the interest to give force to his finger-wagging.

And the West in 2014 isn't much in the mood for anything costly or causing of discomfort, any more than we were in the mood in the 1930s to confront Hitler on his assorted acquisitions, least of all to uphold the sovereignty of Ukraine or Georgia or whatever other old Soviet satellites and Czarist colonies Putin has in mind to reconquer.

So Vladimir Putin is liable to have things his way, and the Lord only knows how far he'll go along that way, unless and until someone pushes back and wins the shoving-match and a very different president of the United States sits in the Oval Office.

Monty Python apostasy

Python is the standard for comedy in the English-speaking world and thus the world more generally, Monty Python's Flying Circus is sick-makingly funny, including post-John Cleese, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the standard for feature-film comedy in the same way that Flying Circus is the standard for TV sketch comedy, and indeed even the Python LPs are by times miracles of comedy, but...

John Cleese had it more or less right when he walked away from Flying Circus after the first three seasons, or "series" as they call seasons over there. Python was of a particular time and place, it could only exhaust itself and achieve a point of diminishing returns before long, and anyway less is more.

Python and the Holy Grail is cheap and cheerful; it's episodic to the point of being practically glorified sketch comedy and doesn't succumb to service of a plot; it bookends the TV series, so that the Flying Circus spirit hasn't yet gone out of the Pythons; it's All-England, England being the font of comedy in the world and the sort-of infrastructure for a very great deal of Python; and most of all it's comedy for comedy's sake -- comedy first, second, and last and none of your dreadful politics or pretensions, thanks very much.

The two later Python features Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life depart from that Holy Grail formula and are disappointments for it. Life of Brian commits the comedy sin of taking itself seriously. It's politics, it's insufficiently episodic to liberate itself from its point-making plot, its setting and subject could scarcely be any less comic, and it comes too late, after the spirit had passed.

Meaning of Life is at least a compilation of sketches, but it too much presumes to be a proper movie, a big-deal feature film, it has a weightiness if not an air of menace about it which acts as a wet blanket on the fun of the TV series and Grail movie, and by the time of Meaning of Life there wasn't material or spirit enough left in the Pythons to fill a feature film. The Pythons were too old and too changed for a reprise of Flying Circus, and anyway the time for Flying Circus had come and gone.

Which is not to say there's no life after Python, only that the Pythons stayed too long at the fair. Of all the post-Python projects John Cleese's Fawlty Towers is far and away the greatest and incidentally also the proof positive for the Cleese Doctrine of less is more, that series lasting all of two seasons and 12 episodes all told. Cleese was good in Fish Called Wanda and he near enough to hijacked Cheers in his recurring role there, so outshining the rest of the show as to have diminished it in his wake. Cleese doesn't miss too many opportunities to trade on his brand, whether in Schweppes TV ads or Harry Potter cameos, etc., but he's an institution and a sort-of ambassador for Britain, and anyway he was the one Python who got it right, that the thing to do was walk away and quit while Python was ahead.

I dearly love Michael Palin's movies and travelogues post-Python, although those don't presume to be comedy proper; they're more humor than comedy per se. Graham Chapman was a hard-case drunk and died too young, of cancer. Eric Idle has inclined more than I can abide to showtunes. Terry Jones is a politician with jokes. And Terry Gilliam who really never was so much a comic as a visual artist has made of himself a leading exponent of fantastical filmmaking.

And another thing: the Pythons didn't invent comedy or TV comedy or TV sketch comedy or even British TV sketch comedy, and would never pretend to that claim themselves. Flying Circus was derivative of Spike Milligan's Q, and Milligan's Goon Show before that, and the Pythons generally were products of England and of Austerity Britain and of the good schools and of the English way of humor, which goes back further than I'm able to put a finger on.

All that said, I suppose I'm relieved in a way that the Pythons did return to the trough one time too many, or several times too many, because otherwise we might be compelled to venerate them as demigods and despair of attempting humor ourselves.