Bryan Fogel: 'Icarus' (2017)

Bryan Fogel's Academy Award-winning documentary film Icarus (Netflix, 2017) spotlights underground performance-enhancing drugs -- doping -- in sports. While doping itself is hardly surprising at this juncture (see Lance Armstrong), the international scale of usage, with the extensive backing of governments (such as Russia's) remains shocking and pernicious. 

Fogel's own willingness to stick needles into himself in order to improve his amateur bicycle ranking is also shocking, but the kicker is his burgeoning relationship with Grigory Rodchenkov, a Russian VIP in the world of doping -- a man who eventually turns on his overlords and is now in witness protection, no doubt with Vladimir Putin's enforcers even at this moment trying to hunt him down "with extreme prejudice." 

Icarus is riveting, considerably more so than, say, a film about Edward Snowden. 

Bottom line: all kinds of sports are compromised by such activities. Follow the money -- and the egos of competitors.  

Today's Rune: Harvest. Painting of Icarus: Jacob Peter Gowy, La caída de Ícaro (circa 1636). Museo del Prado, Madrid. 

Shawn Levy: 'Dolce Vita Confidential' (2016)

Shawn Levy's Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016) takes us on a wild Italian ride from about the end of World War Two until the mid-1960s. 

Barely five or ten years after the war, economic activity "mushroomed . . . recasting Italy from the buffoonish ally of Nazi Germany into a hive of style, culture, fine craft, genteel living, and even heavy industry."  (pages 195-196). During that time, it became one of the hippest places in the world to experience firsthand. 

There are so many characters in Dolce Vita Confidential, some large and some small, that one cannot help being drawn in. 

Consider Alfonso Antonio Vicente Eduardo Angel Blas Francisco de Borja Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, Marquis of Portago (aka Fon de Portago), a Spaniard by lineage and sometime race-car driver, and his philosophy of life:

"'I want to live to be 105 . . . I'm enchanted with life. But no matter how long I live, I still won't have time for all the things I want to do. I won't hear all the music I want to hear, I won't be able to read all the books I want to read, I won't have all the women I want to have. I won't be able to do a twentieth of the things I want to do. And besides just the doing, I insist on getting something out of it.'" (page 214).

In 1957, the Fon was killed in a racing accident while driving a Ferrari -- along with a slew of others -- at age twenty-eight.

In addition to memorable stories about film directors, actors, designers, photographers, expatriates, and trouble-makers, Dolce Vita Confidential includes very helpful endnotes, bibliography and list of films from the period, making it a nifty reference work as well as a tasty treat. 

Today's Rune:  Breakthrough. 

Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story (2015)

David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story (Simon & Schuster, 2015). Highly readable book focusing on Detroit as microcosm from 1962 to 1964. Interesting angles include Detroit's enthusiastic bid for the 1968 Summer Olympics, development of the Ford Mustang and Detroit's role at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair. Plenty of thought and space is devoted to race relations, economics, civil rights, music, architecture and dreams of a more holistic society.  

On May 1, 1992, Rodney King (1965-2012) asked during the '92 LA Riots, "Can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids?" Short answer then, before and since: "No." Easier to factionalize and fight or take flight than to harmonize and build cooperatively and peacefully. The dream lives on, though. At the bottom of Pandora's jar one thing remains: hope. 

Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story (2015) includes lots of big personalities, diverse people ranging from JFK to MLK, LBJ to Malcolm X, Lee Iacocca to the Fords, Walter Reuther and the Gordy family, C.L. and Aretha Franklin, Little Stevie Wonder, Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, Jerry Cavanaugh, George Romney, Alex Karras, and so on.

Above all that is now lost, I would have loved to have experienced the Flame Show Bar -- but there is still Baker's Keyboard Lounge, thank God. 

Today's Rune: Warrior. 

From Moscow to Detroit and Back Again: Gabe Polsky's 'Red Army' (2014)

Red Army, Gabe Poslky's 2104 documentary, hands us a heady cocktail of strong hockey suffused with bittersweet history. Man, it's chock full of pizzaz and a lot of RED. 

(Note: the great German director Werner Herzog is listed as one of the producers.) 

From this action-packed yet thoughtful film, viewers will catch a pretty good glimpse at the arc of international sports (specifically ice hockey) and dueling propaganda machines within the context of the Cold War, ranging from the 1950s to the end of the Soviet Union -- and then spilling into the 21st century. There are dramatic twists and turns, especially toward the end. Believe me, это дикая поездка.  

Red Army features two of the elite Red Army hockey team's biggest coaches, Anatoli Tarasov (1918-1995) and Viktor Tikhonov (1930-2014).  The latter comes off as a ruthless bastard, with Tarasov as the more favorably critiqued. The cagey Tarasov is shown combining disciplines, studying hockey tactics, chess strategy, the Bolshoi Ballet's precision and the energy of boogie woogie. Brilliant.   

The Red Army dudes end up playing in the NHL for a while, and five of the top guys help the Detroit Red Wings seize the Stanley cup in the late 1990s, which is when I move to Detroit and get to see them play. 

What goes around comes around -- but I won't give away the ending here or now. Who knows? Just maybe you might check it out.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.  

Kang Je-gyu's 'My Way' / 마이 웨이 (2011): Take Two

Shirai (Fan Bingbing), one of the characters in Kang Je-gyu's My Way / 마이 웨이 (2011) is a Chinese sniper. There were thousands of women snipers engaged in combat during the World War II period-- none of them American. Consider Lyudmila "Lady Death" Pavlychenko, a Ukrainian Soviet sniper who killed 309 Axis men. Women snipers fought during the American War in Vietnam, as is depicted in Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film, Full Metal Jacket (Ngoc Le plays a Viet Cong sniper).    

Another element of Kang Je-gyu's My Way / 마이 웨이 (2011): the runner. The two main characters compete in races before the outbreak of war -- just as in Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981). In both films, running is another way to spotlight race, class and socio-economic competition. It makes one think of the Olympics, the ancient Greeks, The Iliad and the "tribal core" sports of the 21st century. It also might make one think of the Robert Altman film MASH (1970), set during the Korean War of 1950-1953, and prison films like Robert Aldrich's The Longest Yard (1974), as well as Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire (1981), which among other things deals with anti-Semitism. In My Way, there is not only the runner vs. runner aspect; at Normandy, we see Axis soldiers playing football (i.e. soccer) before the coming Allied invasion.

Kang Je-gyu's My Way / 마이 웨이 (2011) also deals with prisons, POW camps, gulags, concentration camps, forced labor and all of their most terrible conditions. Indeed, the German title for the film at its 2012 release in Germany was Prisoners of War -- in English. 

Since forever, it seems, POWs and prisoners in general have been treated very badly. Who would want to be trapped in an Iranian or North Korean prison? Or a Chinese, German, Russian, Turkish one? Or a French or British penal colony? During the American Civil War, both sides treated POWs in an abysmal manner, leaving them -- their fellow  Americans -- exposed to the elements, malnourished and decimated by infectious disease. Captured freedmen and free black men were either executed or sent back into, or into, slavery. Today, groups like the so-called Islamic State execute prisoners en masse. I doubt treatment of prisoners in ancient times was a pretty picture, either. 

Why are prisoners treated so cruelly? It's so easy -- too easy. Millions of prisoners -- civilians and soldiers, grownups and children -- perished while in prisons, camps and gulags during WW2. Millions more died in captivity after the war, never returned by the captor nations to their home countries -- or expatriated and then imprisoned-to-death in their home countries. My Way reminds us.

Today's Rune: Growth.   

The Night-Blooming Cereus: A Version

I was introduced to the night-blooming cereus by English architects John Adams and Marina Dunbar in the summer of 1991, in Clapham, London SW4, while boarding at their customized avant-garde house on Macaulay Road, and interning at English Heritage, where John also worked.

The situation during the summer months began straightforwardly but became increasingly complex.  At the outset, John Adams had put up a flyer at English Heritage seeking a boarder (a fairly typical way to supplement household income in London at the time, and to keep creative energies flowing, I suppose), and, via my sponsor (US-ICOMOS*), I was simultaneously seeking a place to board, so the twain met neatly, working out for both parties. If memory serves, I paid sixty pounds per week for room and board at John and Marina's in Clapham, and the same (which became a discount, at first a slight source of tension) when relocated to Bob and Tatiana Blagoveshenskaya Dunbar's (Marina's parents')  labyrinthine flat off Bentinck Street (London W1U) due to unforeseen  circumstances. 

My stay in London started like a verse of Bob Dylan's "Simple Twist of Fate" and took off from there.  I'd end up with an English architect girlfriend, have dinners and wine with John and Nick (Nicholas) Dunbar, hear about Marianne Faithfull (John's ex-wife and Nick's mother) and Mick Jagger, discover how John Dunbar had introduced Yoko Ono to John Lennon, learn about Bob and Tatiana's life and film work in Mexico, Russia and the UK, hear about Marina and John Dunbar's twin sisters Jennifer (married to American poet Ed Dorn) and Margaret, speak at length with their son Lev (whose break in mental health was the catalyst for my relocation), hang out with Italian poet-sculptor and fellow Bentinck Street lodger Livia Livi, and yes, yes, see the great night-blooming cereus growing from what appeared to be latticework in a sort of solarium-and-socializing space at the Macaulay Road residence.

Marina Dunbar and John Adams told of the Mexican varieties of night-blooming cereus, the Queen of the Night. This strange and resilient cactus plant represented something about Mexico to them. In 1968, while Jennifer Dunbar and Ed Dorn headed to Paris to see the "disturbances" there, John worked as an architect at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the one caught up in the Tlatelolco student massacre and featuring the Black Power salute. Bob and Tatiana had married in Mexico City at the beginning of the Second World War, and had started their family there before being redeployed to the British embassy in Moscow. In a sense, the night-blooming cereus was Mexico.

The mystique of the night-blooming cereus came in its name and origin. It bloomed rarely, and at night. Maybe once a year, maybe more, maybe never. 

When I was preparing to return to the USA (or "States" as they would say), Marina gave me a couple of moistened leaves in a plastic bag, and back went strands of their night-blooming cereus to the Americas.  Twenty-one years on, several plants have sprung from these "mustard seeds." It's a hearty and weird cactus, this night-blooming cereus, though I have yet to see one bloom at night or at anytime at all, with my own eyes. In due time, I suspect. Somewhere, somehow. Meanwhile, the story of its origin remains for me as transcendent as the night-bloom of a summer's dream. 

Today's Rune: Fertility.     

*The US National Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a fully paid internship, enough to survive on overseas.  Pictured at top: cover of Night-Blooming Cereus: Stories by K.A. Longstreet (University of Missouri Press, 2002).
      

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975: Take Three

Göran Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011) contains so much material, I can barely tick off all that's shown or heard. In addition to MLK, we see Coretta Scott King (1927-2006). And the Black Power salute at the Olympic Games in Mexico City (1968). The Last Poets, inspired by Malcolm X and formed in 1968. Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, the Black Panther Party. Bobby Seale in Stockholm, saying "in the final analysis" -- a phrase nearly identical to today's "at the end of the day." Free food, free breakfast program hosted by the Black Panthers. J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO. Exile in Algiers, Algeria. Huey Netwon, From Russia With Love in the background. TV Guide taking issue with Swedish journalism. Emile de Antonio (1919-1989 -- director of In the Year of the Pig, 1968, and other influential films). The Attica Prison uprising (1971). Civil rights lawyer William Kunstler (1919-1995). Elaine Brown, Black Panther. Governor Ronald Reagan of California vs. Angela Davis (1972) and her aquittal; her earlier study wih Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). Robin Kelley, Sonia Sanchez, John Forté, Erykah Badu, Louis Farrakhan, Harlem and Lewis H. Michaux (ca. 1884–1976).        

The bonus "reels" are also well worth delving into in their own right. There's a heartbreaking section about Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005) and her bid for the presidency in 1972 -- ahead of her time, she was hopelessly outnumbered, defeated but unbowed. There's more with Stokely Carmichael. And there's a very interesting section on the 1974 trial of Joan Little in Raleigh, North Carolina -- charged with first degree murder for stabbing a rapist-prison guard with the ice pick he threatened to kill her with, immediately after he raped her. She was eventually found not guilty. 

Today's Rune: Harvest.   

Zeitgeist 1968

1968 mustard seeds. Chicano Power.

Jimi Hendrix: electric eclectic.

Black Power salute: Mexico.

Civil Rights: Northern Ireland.

Occupy the Factories: France.

Today's Rune: Partnership.

World's Fair

E.L. Doctorow's World's Fair (1985) culminates with two 1940 visits to the 1939/1940 World's Fair at Flushing Meadows Park, Queens, New York City, but much of the story takes place during the 1930s in or near the Bronx. Doctorow's semi-autobiographical tale centers around Edgar, the primary narrator, and his extended family. The finely articulated attention to detail and subtle character development allows the author to steer clear of any need for dramatic conflict; life during the Great Depression provides challenges enough. There are hooligans, yes, but most overt villains are off the stage, in Europe and elsewhere.

A few chapters are narrated by Edgar's mother, an aunt, and his older brother Donald, all as if told to Edgar, who was a young boy in the 1930s. For the most part, Edgar's childhood is described in a way that melds his contemporary boyhood consciousness with an older Edgar's reconstructions. This hybrid method works very effectively.

I really like World's Fair. It reminds me of my family's trip to the 1964/1965 World's Fair, located on the same grounds as the 1939/1940 version.

The most recent American World's Fair was the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans. The earliest possible return to the States would be in mid-2017, but given today's selection of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as host city for the 2016 Summer Olympics, I wouldn't hold my breath. Expo 2010 will be in Shanghai, China.

For anyone under thirty or so, you'll either have to travel far or wait a good long while for the experience; meantime, I recommend Doctorow's novel.

A perfect companion novel to World's Fair is Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004); although it imagines Charles Lindbergh as having been elected president in 1940, it, too, is packed with autobiographical family details comparable to Doctorow's.

Today's Rune: Fertility.

1980 and the End of the 70s

Unearthed some fun stuff from the late 70s and 1980. Here, "REGULAR" gas goes for seventy cents a gallon; "NO LEAD" for seventy-three cents. A GULF station. I don't remember where or why this picture was snapped.

By the end of 1980, prices shot up sort of like today in relative terms. 1980: The Iranian Revolution, Iran-Iraq War, The Carter Doctrine, Soviet War in Afghanistan, the Moscow Olympics boycott, the emergence of Ronald Reagan and George Bush and "voodoo economics."

I signed up for Selective Service on August 15, 1980, or at least that's the official government "Date of Record."


Visited my sister Linda (and Aunt Sue) in Atlanta several times in 1980. Here, Linda is doing archaeological fieldwork during MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) construction.


An example of stuff unearthed during construction. Lots of stuff remains underground. Let's not forget artifacts from the American Civil War and the great fires of 1864 and 1917.


The Kinks, Fox Theatre, Atlanta, October 20, 1980. Jim came along for this trip.

So much happened in 1980, I'll probably create a separate Virtual Archives link to house pertinent images and text.

Writing Prompt: For those thirty-three and above, what do you remember about 1980?

Today's Rune: Signals.

The Theatre of the Olympics

The ubiquitous protests spinning in advance of the Chinese Olympics serve as a good reminder of how much theatre is involved in the institution. Now it's because of the Chinese crackdown in Tibet and China's growing power on the world stage. In 1980, the USA boycotted the Soviet Olympics because of the invasion of Afghanistan. The Eastern Bloc retaliated by boycotting the American Olympics in 1984. If the USA was hosting them this year, there would be boisterous protests of American involvement in Iraq and -- haha -- Afghanistan. It's nationalistic theatre. And corporate sponsorship. And only lastly sports.

Still, things could be worse. Consider the 1916 Berlin Olympics -- cancelled. Why? All those pesky U-Boats, I suppose, in the middle of the Great War. Or it could be the Nazi Olympics of 1936 -- held in Berlin after all. Or the Tokyo Olympics, cancelled due to the invasion of Manchuria. London was out in 1944 due to the Blitz and all that jazz. The entire Cold War period saw the injection of pomp and systemic imperial rivalries. Let's not forget the Mexican Army shooting down hundreds of students at the Tlatelolco Massacre and Black Power salutes at the 1968 Olympics. Or the Palestinian attack on Munich's Olympic Village in 1972.

Yes, it could be worse. Let the games begin! Unfortunately, we've got nearly four months to go before the actual "Games of the XXIX Olympiad" do begin.


Still, regardless of everything, China is most definitely on a roll. Here, for instance, is a model from Shanghai Fashion Week and furthermore, there are only only 751 days to go until the Shanghai Expo / aka the 2010 World's Fair! The theatre never stops . . .

Today's Rune: Fertility.