Farewell, 2014!

Did a fair amount of walking the Earth in 2014, plus travel by air, rail and four-wheeled automobile. No ships this year, no bus, but one horse and buggy team. Madrid was a highlight, plus around Spain by rail and via London and New York City by jet. Walked Center City Philadelphia in cold weather in January (including Northern Liberties -- great name), plus visits to New Britain and Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania; afterwards, Memphis and Shiloh, Tennessee; Corinth, Mississippi; Hot Springs, Arkansas; North Carolina's Research Triangle area (where I began the first day of the year), plus Greensboro and Fayetteville; and New Orleans for quick sorties (much easier to fly in and take a taxi than drive, I've learned). Wanting to get to back to Detroit and Spain and also on to Cuba for the first time, maybe even Portugal. Interesting year, for sure. Got to spend time with lots of family and friends along the way, another benefit of traveling.

Saw many things while walking, and took photographs from time to time. One of the gifts of pictures is being able to see details that may have been missed or overlooked in person. The little red and gold hammer and sickle symbol embedded in this scene, for instance: it must have caught my eye, but if so, I would have forgotten were it not for this image. Turns out that it's the logo for el Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España (PCPE). Probably wouldn't see that in Kansas -- which is just another excellent reason to see places far from home base. Finally, people and places change with time, so return visits are equally eye-popping.

Happy trails, y'all! A salute to 2014!

Today's Rune: Fertility. 

'Call Me Burroughs: A Life' / Barry Miles (2014)

Clocking in at 718 pages divided into fifty-two chapters, endwords, notes, bibliography and index, Barry Miles' Call Me Burroughs: A Life (New York: Twelve, 2014) delivers a treasure trove of biographical detail, cultural history and social context. One of my favorite big reads of 2014. 

Within this hefty tome, we find everything from little William S. Burroughs' childhood visions (a la William Blake) of a green deer; his calling of the toads; and instrumental collaborations with other artists -- Allen Ginsberg of course, Jack Kerouac for a time and Brion Gysin, among many others. 

In 1937 while in Prague, Burroughs had an emergency appendectomy and remained in hospital for seventeen days: "before antibiotics, peritonitis was lethal, so he was fortunate" (page 65).  The same year, he married Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, who was Jewish, in order to help her escape to the USA from the encroaching Nazis. 

That's "just a little taste." 

By the 1970s, the period when Burroughs was living at "The Bunker" in New York City and also associated with the Hotel Chelsea, he was befriended by Debbie Harry and Patti Smith, in the burgeoning music scene (which I've always found interesting). They remained friends, too. 

In his final years based in Kansas, Burroughs was visited by Kurt Cobain, a highly emotional "Burroughs fan." Given how weird Burroughs himself could be, one can't help but want to laugh or cry in response to his quip, after Cobain drove off from their meeting in October 1993: "There's something wrong with that boy; he frowns for no good reason" (page 620). Cobain committed suicide about six months later, a member of the so-called twenty-seven club.

There are lots of other precious tidbits peppered throughout Call Me Burroughs. I hadn't realized that Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968) was gay, for instance. Nor had I quite grasped just how dramatically Jack Kerouac had broken off from Burroughs and Ginsberg, for so many of his last years, largely because of Kerouac's (and his mother's) freak-outs. 

Thank you, Barry Miles!

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.    

Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman's Pilgrimage to India

Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt's Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman's Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011) works nicely in tandem with Thurman's wondrous autobiography. Some of the same ground is covered, often from a different angle, with the core of this book built around Thurman and the four-person delegation from the United States that extensively and intensely criss-crossed India in the mid-1930s. The parallels between Jim Crow in the USA, British imperial administration in greater India, the caste system and various other forms of socio-economic power interactions were clear, as were emerging methods utilized to change things up. Howard Thurman and his companions did their part in seeding the ground for change, embracing "interculture" and ahimsa, or "nonviolence" (a word Mahatma Gandhi is credited with having "coined" in 1920), a pragmatic and also transcendent long-term approach that begins with consciousness raising.   

"The delegation visited more than fifty cities during their tour . . . There were at least 265 speaking engagements in the 140 days the tour was in Asia, with Thurman speaking at 135 of the engagements" plus "interviews with [Rabindranath] Tagore and Gandhi." (Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman's Pilgrimage to India, pages 86-87).  The latter was the first meeting of Gandhi with an African American delegation, and it was a resounding success. 

During the Second World War (in 1944), Howard Thurman and his family moved to San Francisco and worked to build up the Church for the Fellowship of All People, an integrated, intercultural organization. Until then, there had been very few integrated religious bodies in the USA -- besides small groups in San Francisco, Oberlin, Philadelphia and Detroit, little success had yet been realized in breaking down race-perception barriers. "The need for whites and blacks [and others] to work together was precisely to overcome the abstractness of race relations lived in separate segregated worlds" (page 157). This was a new beginning at changing the status quo.

Reaching beyond the status quo is one of the many aspects of Howard Thurman's action-worldview that resonates with me. I am in accord with his thinking and his hopes, seeking to live, inspire and seed the opposite of what he called "The Tragedy of Dull-Mindedness."

Today's Rune: Flow. 

Charlotte Zwerin's 'Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser' (1988)

Sometimes the name and the named match perfectly. Such is the case with North Carolina-born jazz pianist-composer Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982). 

To gain insight into Monk's world, Charlotte Zwerin's Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988) is highly valuable as a record of the artist, letting us see him perform, stand still while walking in circles, mutter and sporadically interact with others in what appears to be quite an otherworldly manner. His original compositions are part of the jazz canon, complex and powerful -- "Straight, No Chaser," "Blue Monk," "Bemsha Swing," "Epistrophy," "Ruby, My Dear," "In Walked Bud" and "'Round Midnight" -- for example.   

Detroiter Charlotte Zwerin (1931-2004. Cinema verité director who worked with the Maysles' brothers on Gimme Shelter and made several other excellent documentaries) utilizes priceless archival footage in a highly effective manner. 

Zwerin, Bruce Ricker and Clint Eastwood co-produced Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (Eastwood especially helped with the financing). 

Monk's son T.S. (also a jazz musician) provides insight into his father's unsettled mental states (sometimes catatonic, in fugue states of sorts, as if checked out of Earth from time to time), and we gain an appreciation for Monk's wife and sort of chief of staff Nellie as well as his "special lady friend" and patron, Pannonica "Nica" de Koenigswarter, both of whom informally shared responsibilities for keeping Monk together. Finally, let's not fail to mention his withdrawal from the music scene into quietude during the last decade of his life, combined with his affinity for cats and a silent piano. From Koenigswarter's pad in Weehawken, New Jersey, Thelonious Sphere Monk could contemplatively gaze at the Manhattan skyline to his heart's content, never having to perform on stage again.  

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Battle of Nashville 150th (1864-2014)

A sequel disaster to the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, the Battle of Nashville took place on December 15-16, 1864. Once again, Corporal Samuel France, my paternal great great grandfather, served with Company E of the 31st Indiana Regiment on the Union side. Part of Wood's Corps, the 31st participated in attacks that routed the Confederate Army of Tennessee, poorly led here by John Bell Hood -- who later blamed his own men for his defeat. The Union side lost about 3,000 casualties, the Confederates, about 6,500 (including many overrun and captured). The battlefield was cold and muddy, a horrible thing now mostly forgotten. Let us here remember. 

Today's Rune: Signals.

p.s. the 31st Indiana lost eighteen casualties here. Map adapted from Wiki Commons. 

Robin Zasio: The Hoarder in You (2011)

Robin Zasio's The Hoarder in You: How to Live a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life  (Rodale, 2011) dovetails holistically with a series of other books I've read over the past few years, ones that cover existential philosophy, finances, savings, positive thinking, psychology, sociology, anthropology, ecology, and on and on. Worthwhile all down the line, and surprisingly consistent.

Zasio's tone is low-key but also firm. She approaches hoarding and cluttering as part of a continuum spectrum. Just as most everyone may have a touch of obsessive compulsiveness, so most people may tend to have issues with clutter, if not outright hoarding, at some time or other. (By the way, whether this is mostly a modern American phenomenon, I'm not sure: "we live in a land of plenty," Zasio notes on page 124, so there's less of a need for stockpiling duplicate items, for instance. Unless you're a survivalist, I suppose).

Zasio includes several psychological concepts ranging from cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), depression, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), generalized anxiety disorders, cognitive distortion, and biopsychohistory. Indirectly, she brings in what could be considered the idea of cognitive dissonance and the philosophy of existentialism (freedom, responsibility, individual choices made).

"People who hoard often script the future, but the script is typically not a realistic prediction," but rather a "cognitive distortion," perhaps one of many (page 21).

"What spaces in your house [or apartment, etc.] are not usable for the purpose for which they were intended?" (page 97),

I particularly love Zasio's profiles in chapter 4: "Clear and Clean;" "Neat But Dynamic;" "Controlled Chaos;" "Clutter Crisis;" "Borderline Hoarding;"and  "Collecting Versus Stockpiling."

Cognitive therapy and philosophical dynamics: if your decisions are based mostly on emotion, verify, challenge the idea that "I feel it, therefore it must be true" (page 104). Be vigilant against "all-or-nothing"  aka "dichotomous thinking."  Look for contradictions in thinking (yours or others), which force a beachhead of gray area, a middle ground of reality. Challenge "anticipatory anxiety," "distortions," "catastrophizing" and "emotional reasoning." These are usually, in the contemporary USA at least, "maladaptive" behaviors. Other things to watch for: "habituation meets procrastination," perfectionism that leads to decision-paralysis, and inertia.  Also: "You can be both lazy and have mental issues . . ." (page 17).   

One of the main thrusts that Zasio's The Hoarder in You has in common with the slew of other books mentioned earlier is the concept of mindfulness (here it's on page 145, for instance). Attention must be paid -- to the here and now as well as to the past and future. As far as quantity of stuff goes, put a cap on it, man! (page 165).  

Today's Rune: Harvest. 

Albert Camus: Algerian Chronicles (1958, 2013)

Given the recent release by the US Senate of "The Torture Report" (detailing American torture and general abuse of prisoners during the Bush-Cheney administration for several years after 9/11/2001), reading the new English translation of Albert Camus' Algerian Chronicles becomes more timely than ever. Why? Because Camus, writing of Algerian realities, and most sharply about La guerre d’Algérie / The Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) -- during which the majority of Algerians broke away from France and formed an independent nation -- spends a lot of thought and energy trying to figure out practical ways to safeguard the lives of civilians (especially women and children); guaranteeing the civilized treatment of prisoners; and seeking to minimize both terrorist attacks and revenge repression. 

This was a big deal for an Algerian Frenchman, but he died in a car accident at age 46 in 1960, two years before Algeria became independent, which he had hoped would not have happened with such abruptness.  

Camus' observations sound very contemporary. Apply them to just about anywhere in 2014, substituting "France/French" and "Algeria/Algerian" with any place or people you like. 

Camus in 1945: "French colonial doctrine in Algeria since the conquest has not been notable for its coherence . . . No historical situation is ever permanent. If you are unwilling to change quickly enough, you lose control of the situation . . . Because French policy in Algeria ignored these elementary truths, it was always 20 years behind the actual situation . . ." (pages 102-103).

In 1955: "The inexcusable massacres of French civilians will lead to equally stupid attacks on Arabs and Arab property. It is as if madmen inflamed by rage found themselves locked in a forced marriage from which no exit was possible and therefore decided on mutual suicide" (page 115). 

Camus' stance was  unequivocally against the use of torture by anyone for whatever stated reason. (Let me state here that I, Erik Donald France, agree with Camus 100% against any justification for the use of torture).

". . . how can one be outraged by the massacres of French prisoners if one tolerates the execution of Arabs without trials?  Each side uses the crimes of the other to justify its own. By this logic, the only possible outcome is interminable destruction" ("A Truce for Civilians," page 142).

It's all a fascinating and still urgent existential response to the "actualities" of the world. 

For more, here's a fuller citation: Albert Camus, Algerian Chronicles. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer with an introduction by Alice Kaplan. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Haravrd University Press, 2013. Originally published by Gallimard as Chroniques algériennes, 1939-1958 (1958 and 2002). 

Christopher Nolan: Interstellar (2014)

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) joins a handful of viscerally memorable -- as well as thoughtfully absorbing -- non-franchise science fiction movies that have swept over the Earth sometime in the past fifty years. It's of the same audacious caliber as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

A week after seeing Interstellar, its striking images are still roiling through my mind -- especially during altered dream states. 

Besides Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris / Солярис (1972) - which I have only seen in Russian with no subtitles and am not even quite sure I understand it as of yet - or Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), or Philip Kaufman's 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or Ridley Scott's Philip K. Dick-inspired Blade Runner (1982), Interstellar really gets into some good nitty gritty questions about existence and being, freedom and time, space travel and consciousness, memory and identity. 

And that's about all I have to say on the matter for now.  

Coda: if you're into this kind of thing at all, Interstellar is definitely worth seeing on the big screen.  

Today's Rune: Signals. 

Hiding Out in the Casbah: Julien Duvivier's 'Pépé le Moko' (1937)

Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937) bears seeing once, twice, thrice. . . or more. Professional criminal Pépé le Moko (Jean Gabin) is holed up in the Casbah / Kasbah quarter of Algiers / Alger in between the world wars -- and he's really trapped. The police can't grab him from within the labyrinthine (or labyrinthian, if you prefer) recesses of the Casbah, but they will nab or kill him if he leaves it.  Excellent premise for the whole film.

Besides Gabin, who has been fantastic in everything I've seen him in, cherchez la femme: actually there are two key paramours involved -- Inès (Line Noro), from Algeria, and Gabby (Mireille Balin), from Paris, the latter carried along to Algiers by her Daddy Warbucks while he's on (colonial exploitation) business. Also involved are fellow criminals of dubious stability, numerous Algerian "hosts," French and Algerian police and Pépé's crafty, somewhat smarmy frenemy-nemesis, Inspector Slimane. 

Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko is not only a fun and imaginative movie, it's also an absorbing cultural artifact wide open to consideration from various engaged perspectives (postcolonialism, feminism, etc.).   

The tone of Pépé le Moko moves along and includes dark as well as comic moments -- very much like HBO's The Sopranos. The paramours have real "sex appeal" (a term used in the film itself), covered by humor. What have Pépé and Gabby been doing so clandestinely in the Casbah? "Painting watercolors together," Pépé quips.

The movie, which has been remade by other directors under different titles, is based on the 1931 novel Pépé le Moko by "Détective Ashelbé" (aka Henri La Barthe, 1887-1963). 
  
Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.

The Differences

"Art is educating, provocative, and enlightening even when first not understood . . . creative confusion stimulates curiosity and growth, leading to trust and tolerance. . . . It was not until I realized that it is the celebration of the differences between things that I became an artist who could see." ~ Robert Rauschenberg (1984)

Rauschenberg: Collecting and Connecting. Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, November 28, 2014. Link here. Runs through January 11, 2015. Click, click, click . . .

Mesmerized at the Greek Festival, Saint Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church, Fort Worth, Texas, November 9, 2014. 

Everything we need to "see" is all around us. 

Today's Rune: Signals.