Oh The Places I've Seen -- Well, At Least Some of the More Memorable Ones

Omaha Beach in Normandy France

In a few weeks the missus and I are going to the United Kingdom. We’ll be spending time in London and going for for our first ever stay in Scotland. It’s got me thinking about some of our recent journeys and the particular sites that have been most meaningful to me. Here’s a look at some.

I was walking from the city of Compiègne, France to the Armistice Memorial where the armistice ending World War I was signed. About half way there I noticed an abandoned railway line. I chanced to look down where there was a plaque noting the fact that from this site thousands of French Jews were boarded on trains for Auschwitz. It was chilling and I couldn’t help but wonder why it was so obscure. Seeing the plaque was as memorable as visiting the museum and memorial. To stand where so many had been transported to horrible deaths is…. Well you can imagine.

Just before we went to Berlin a historian I follow on Instagram had been in the German capital. She recounted finding, with the help of experts in the field, the spot where Hitler’s bunker was. This was where der Führer spent his last days and ultimately committed suicide. As did Eva Braun and Joseph Goebbels and family. Their bodies were burned on the site. There is no plaque there nor anything to memorialize the site less neo-Nazis use it to celebrate the fiend. It is as nondescript a spot as you can imagine between two buildings and near a parking lot. Standing there was, frankly, weird, realizing who and what had taken place there decades previous. 

I once took what was billed as a D-Day tour. This took me and others to the various beaches where allied forces landed on June 6, 1944 as well as to the American cemetery. Most moving was being on Omaha beach where the largest force landed and there was much slaughter. It was incredible to stand there and imagine the carnage that once took place on the very spot I was standing. Having seen Saving Private Ryan and having read extensively about the day I had a sense of what it must have been like but being on the actual site was moving. It was so peaceful and beautiful.

Last year I went to the Charles Dickens home/museum in London. To think of the great writer in those rooms and to see his desk and other personal effects, to know that he had created so much great literature there was extremely moving.

Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam put a lump in my throat and that’s without having had the opportunity to go inside. I was, however, dismayed to see people taking photos outside the house  smiling broadly and making the V sign. Disrespectful.

I found visiting the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. to be a moving experience. The site itself is magnificent and knowing that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” there was humbling.

Visiting 30 Rockefeller Center in New York is fantastic. Just contemplating the many great performers who have been in thebuilding, from Paul McCartney to Bill Murray to George Carlin to Tina Fey to Robert DeNiro to Martin Short to Gilda Radner and on and on and on.

In Rome  we saw the Roman Forum, an amazing site in the middle of a modern city. Here your transported back not a century but a millennium. Similar to this is Coliseum which also gives one a sense of awe, it having stood there for so very long. But as a cinephile what really struck me was the Trevi Fountain where the famous scene with Marcelo Mastrioni and Anita Ekberg from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was filmed. Now that’s history.

Living in Berkeley I often venture through Sproul Plaza. Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement began there and it was there that Savio delivered his famous “Put you bodies on the gears and wheels” speech. Dr. King spoke at Sproul once and of course it was the site of numerous demonstrations and police riots in the Sixties, some of which I attended. Occasionally when I walk through Sproul I’ll pause and remember what I saw there and what so many others have experienced on that site.

The Muse of White Ludwig Nine-Nine with John Oliver: Four TV Shows and a Book Are Here Discussed

Ludwig

There was much ado about nothing regarding season three of White Lotus. I enjoyed the first season and thought season two of the show was positively brilliant. But this latest iteration of the Lotus was comparatively flat. It was a slow build to nothing. I enjoyed most of the characters. I’ve always liked Carrie Coon, Parker Posey, Walton Goggins and Sam Rockwell and they were, not surprisingly, the highlights of the season. I particularly enjoyed the scenes with Rockwell. He was great with Goggins and his sexuality monologue was pure gold. But in the end the show itself petered out without providing any satisfying conclusions. Characters arcs that didn’t arc.

Meanwhile the missus and I are very much enjoying Ludwig, a new show on Britbox, the latest streaming service we’ve added to our TV arsenal. The title refers to the pseudonym of the title character, a nebbish and brilliant puzzle maker who steps in as a police detective when his twin brother disappears. He impersonates his brother in hopes of solving the mystery around his absconding and goes about using his genius to solve homicide cases. The show is set in Cambridge, which like other smaller venues of detective and cop shows has a sudden outbreak of murders. All the better for viewers. Ludwig is not your typical hero cop by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s great fun. We’ve watched four of the first six episodes of the inaugural season and enjoyed them all.

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver continues to be the best thing on television. His most recent episode on Trans Athletes is a perfect illustration of this. Oliver makes compelling fact-based arguments and manages to inject humor into even the most depressing of topics. He also brilliantly skewers the pompous, the wrong-headed and the arrogant, always using the weapons of logic and truth. Like most great comedians Oliver is clearly a very intelligent person. Humor often comes from insight and being able to view the world from different angles. In looking for what is funny in given situations the comic explores different aspects of both the mundane and the critical It would be criminally unfair to praise the show and not mention the outstanding team of writers and researches who work on it.

Over the last few years I’ve been watching various beloved sitcoms chronologically . I’ve delighted in such programs as Seinfeld, Schitt’s Creek, Community, Parks and Rec, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, Frasier and currently Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It’s impossible for me to mention Brooklyn without noting that it’s star, Andy Samberg was a student of mine in days of yore. I can say that I made him what he is today. It wouldn’t be true but I can say it. When the show first aired I watched it to support Andy not expecting much but it quickly became must-watch television. Like most good sit-coms it had a terrific ensemble cast, clever writing and lots of laugh. In it’s later years the show took on social issues. In the wake of the George Floyd murder it zeroed in on abusive police officers and the failure for cops to truly protect and serve. It was mostly successful. Occasionally laughs were sacrificed in service of the message but that’s not a bad sacrifice to make. The performance of Andre Braugher as Captain Holt and his relationship with Samberg’s Jake Peralta has shone through as one of the key’s to the show’s success. Sadly, Braugher died of lung cancer two years at the age of 61.

I recently finished reading a book called, Muse of Fire: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets by Michael Korda. (It is worth noting that this is a recent release in paperback yet the author is 91 years old. It gives us old writers inspiration.) Muse of Fire tells the stories of six British warrior poets from The Great War, four of whom died during the conflagration. The two who survived the war were Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves both of whom lived long, successful lives spent in the public eye. Sassoon, who lived until 1967, authored a three volume fictional autobiography called the Sherston Trilogy which I can heartily recommend. Graves, who died in 1985, was a prolific author most known for his memoir, Goodbye to All That (again I can offer a personal recommendation) and the historical novel, I Claudius. Two of those who didn’t survive the war remain well-known among poetry fans, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen. It’s also interesting to note that four of the six poets were either gay or bi-sexual and two (Sassoon and Owen) were almost certainly lovers. Much and indeed all of the later war poetry depicted the horrors of war, the madness of it and the incompetence of the generals and political leaders who continued to send generations of young man to be slaughtered. Muse of Fire provides many things including mini-biographies, an overview of the war and how the poet’s muse can work in strange places. Powerful, even at times beautiful poetry can come out of war and indeed all manner of human suffering. We often make art of what we can’t otherwise comprehend. Love and war are two prime examples; what better way to make some semblance of sense out of them then by creating art. Excellent book that deserves a very wide audience.

The Horror Movie That I Lived Through, Memories of Mother

My father was working in Lake Tahoe helping build an apartment complex that he would co-own with a group of investors. My mother and I had been up to visit him. We’d returned to Berkeley and received an invite for dinner at my Aunt, Uncle and cousins house in Orinda. I always enjoyed visits there. My three cousins were like sisters to me, especially the oldest, Helen with whom I was close.

We had a nice visit including a big dinner prepared my Aunt Elsa who seemingly had magical powers when it came to meal preparation. We returned home and as it was Summer I looked forward to the coming days and hanging out with my friends. I was about eleven years old.

But as soon as we got home my mother started angrily yelling. I don’t remember the specifics of what she said other than, “I hate those people,” in reference to those we’d just visited. I made a particular point not to recognize or remember exactly what she said in such states as if to do so would make them them real and her mania normal. 

I was torn to pieces when she started raving. I’d been enduring such horror for as long as I could remember. One never gets used to their mother raving like a lunatic. You just want it to end, you want to be left alone. You can’t bear the horrible sound of your mother’s voice in such unprovoked, unreasonable anger. It was an affront to normalcy. Ugly. Cruel. Heartbreaking.

Sometimes her ravings were directed towards a wall or a lamp but on this day, though she wasn’t “speaking” to me, I was in the direct line of fire. She even followed me into my bedroom. There was no escape. Mom was so close that covering my ears did no good, nor did playing a record on my little turntable. How I could have used noise-cancelling headphones!

It was amazing how long she could go on without succumbing to exhaustion or without her powerful voice cracking. (Odd to remember that her elocution and diction was so perfect.)

That day I had to take it, she’d invaded my space and there was no getting her out. I’d have rather taken a physical beating, it would have made more sense.

After I don’t know how long (time is an odd concept in such circumstances) she stopped and left my room. I immediately forget that anything out of the ordinary had happened. What else was I to do? Dwell on it? I never cried, I never brooded, I never grew philosophical and I never told a soul. I wanted to put it out of my mind. I wanted to live in a world where my mother was normal or dead. 

No one else knew. My mother could turn it off when others were around, at least until I was about thirteen when she could contain herself no longer and the demons came out in front of my father and later others including my older brother who’d left home for college a few years before.

But for now it was our little secret. I couldn’t imagine saying to my father, “sometimes when you’re not home Mom starts raving like a loony bird, screaming and yelling and saying foul things about any and everyone.” No, that would have been impossible. At least for me. So it was my burden to carry. 

I don’t know this for a fact but I’m relatively certain that later than night while I slept Mom came into my bedroom and put the covers back on me because I had a tendency to kick them off at night. Sometimes I was aware of her presence. It was weirdly comforting. The next day she would have done the chores around the house and made sure I had a nice dinner. I never went without a meal and Mom never neglected the laundry, dishes or anything else. That was for later years when she’d added heavy drinking to the mix.

The next day I would have gotten out of the house early and connected with friends. I’d have not thought about the previous day for one second. I had a remarkable ability to compartmentalize. The awful scenes propagated by my mother were in a box. 

Only when I returned home would I dread my mother. As I approached the front door I would have been full of trepidation. I never knew what was on the other side. Would mom be “normal”? Would she be raving? Maybe worst of all she would be perfectly fine as I entered the house and found a snack and sat in front of the TV only to start raving and raging after I’d gotten comfortable. It was impossible to completely relax when I was growing up. I could never be sure what was next.

Thankfully she could and would turn it off when others were in the house. Then I was protected. How I hated it when my father went to work in Tahoe. I had no protection. Once he was back the nights, at least, were safe.

It was about two years after the evening described above that it all came tumbling done. Mother could contain the beast no longer. Dad and later my brother were exposed to her lunacy. She coupled this with moving out of the master bedroom and denying my dad any manner of affection. She also went on wild spending sprees, buying junk mostly. Jewelry, a chest of drawers we didn’t need, expensive knickknacks. My poor father was devastated. His world had collapsed underneath him. He could make no sense of it. He tried gamely to tell me it was menopause — something I’d never heard of. But I wasn’t buying it. I knew she was nuts and had been for as long as I could remember. Even at this point I said nothing to my father about how this was no new condition but merely something she could no longer control.

Then she started drinking. Bad got worse.

My father and I went to see the family doctor. He said that absent her being a threat to herself or anyone else we could not commit her. Well, she was no physical threat but she’d done a fair amount of damage to me in ways that still manifest today. PTSD forever.

You can imagine how I welcomed high school graduation and escaping to a college that was hours away from Mom. I spent the rest of her life avoiding my mother. Who could blame me? 

I’m occasionally visited by the awful memories of my youth (as well as the many good times I had). I still don’t cry over it. I’ve talked about my mother to a string of psychiatrists and therapists and counselors over the years. The fact that some have been skeptical of my story has compounded the pain. I’ve written a lot about mom too. Who knows how much it helps? It all happened, it’s all over and it was all painful beyond words.

I don’t generally watch horror movies. I lived through one.

My Top 30 Films From 1950-1974 (third of four in a series)

The Last Picture Show

Regular readers of this blog (I'm looking at you Gwendolyn Crustacean of Comptche, California) will recall that two months ago I published a list of my top thirty films from the first quarter of this century. I followed that last month with my top thirty from the preceding twenty-five year period (1975-1999). Next month I'll list my top thirty from 1925-1949. This month I offer my top thirty from 1950-1974. You're welcome. Not surprisingly it was much more difficult to narrow down the many films I love for this list than the previous two, in large part because the time period includes the first five years of the Seventies, my favorite decade of films and the fifties and sixties were a golden time for foreign films. You will note there are five films on the list directed by Ingmar Bergman and four from Federico Fellini. You will also note that I include an honorable mention category at the end. This was because even after listing thirty pictures there were still five greats that deserved a mention. Finally, seventeen of the thirty films listed are in foreign languages as are three of the honorable mentions.

1. The Last Picture Show (1971) Bogdanovich

2. The Godfather (1972) F. Coppola/The Godfather 2 (1974)

3. Winter Light (1963) Bergman

4. Chinatown (1974) Polanski

5. The Searchers (1956) Ford

6. The Seventh Seal (1957) Bergman

7. La Dolce Vita (1960) Fellini

8. A Clockwork Orange (1971) Kubrick

9. Sunset Blvd. (1950) Wilder

10. Cabaret (1972) Fosse

11. Nights of Cabiria (1957) Fellini

12. 8 1/2 (1963) Fellini

13. The Emigrants (1971)/The New Land (1972) Troell

14. Amarcord (1973) Fellini

15. Umberto D. (1952) DeSica

16. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) Herzog

17. Through a Glass Darkly (1961) Bergman

18. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Kubrick

19. If….(1968) L. Anderson

20. L’Eclisse (1962) Antonioni

21. A Woman Under the Influence (1974) Cassavetes

22. The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) Rossellini

23. Psycho (1960) Hitchcock

24. Shame (1968) Bergman

25. The Burmese Harp (1956) Ichikawa

26. On the Waterfront (1954) Kazan

27. Persona (1966) Bergman

28. Vivre sa Vie (1962) Godard

29. The Great Escape (1963) J. Sturges

30. The Apu Trilogy: Pather Panchali (1955)/Aparjito (1956)/The World of Apu (1959) Ray

Honorable Mention:

The Last Detail (1971) Ashby

Red Desert (1964) Antonioni

Night of the Hunter (1955) Laughton

Rashomon(1950) Kurosawa 

Closely Watched Trains (1966) Menzel

Battleground Berkeley: My Tour of Protest Sites from the Sixties

Downtown Berkeley 1969

I don’t really remember how the tear gas felt. I remember what it did, but I have no recollection of the tearing of the eyes, or the choking. But I remember the difference in the pepper fog and how much harsher it was. I vividly recall the adrenaline, the excitement, the fear of the police charging at us nightsticks raised.

I am a veteran of the Sixties protest movement. I saw action on several occasions, representing the left. I had been in rebellion against authority from a young age but it was the sight of a helicopter spraying tear gas overhead in May of '69 that proved a seminal moment, radicalizing me forever.

I tried to convey these feelings last Thursday when I took a group of students from the school where I teach on a tour I called Battleground Berkeley. (I teach English to people from other countries as I’ve been doing for the past fourteen years.) Battleground Berkeley was a school “activity” the first I’ve led at Kaplan where I’ve had the privilege of teaching since September.

Among the students on the tour were individuals from several South American and Asian countries, including a Vietnamese and and a handful of Europeans.

I was uniquely qualified to led the tour for not only did I participate in some of the more famous protests, but I have extensively researched and read about those times. They form the backdrop of a novel I've written. 

We met in a classroom where I gave them some background on the protest movement in Berkeley which got its impetus with the Free Speech Movement in 1964. I then discussed the Third World Liberation Front Strike of 1967 and various protests against U.S. participation in the Vietnam War and the draft. I then discussed People’s Park in 1969. I showed photos from the era starting with one that showed the national guard in downtown Berkeley with the current site of our school in the background.

I finished this part of the activity by reading an excerpt from my forthcoming novel, The Blood of Love, which is set in Berkeley in the Sixties. 

We were within two blocks of Haste Street, where you would turn left to get to the park, I was stunned to see battalions of police. Then someone turned on a fire hydrant. The cops didn’t hesitate, without warning they started shooting tear gas canisters at us. Marchers responded by throwing rocks. The scene had changed dramatically in a matter of seconds. A peaceful march had become a pitched battle.

People screamed, people shouted angrily, people looked for anything they could find to throw. Many threw the tear gas canisters back. I was in a state of disbelief. 

I turned to Cyrus, “They tear down our park, then when we march in peaceful protest they attack us.”

I emerged from incredulity feeling the raw power of anger. Cyrus and I joined a cluster of protestors on Haste Street below Telegraph. Like my compatriots, I threw anything I could get my hands on. 

I picked up a coke bottle, hurling it through the air. Then I found a chunk of brick and tossed that. A canister landed among us and exploded. I ran south down Telegraph. Cyrus and I were separated. 

Looking back I saw a woman in a nurse’s uniform being beaten by cops. Looking forward I saw someone leaning against a car watching. A cop came up behind him putting him in a chokehold with his nightstick.

I saw different types of police: Berkeley City Police, UC campus police, Highway Patrolmen and later, Alameda County Sheriffs, the dreaded Blue Meanies.

I drifted a block further down Telegraph to Dwight Way. A few feet from me someone I knew named Chris was felled by a blast from a shotgun. “They’re shooting birdshot at us!” Someone shouted. A protestor who’d been a medic in Vietnam tended to Chris.

The Blue Meanies were shooting at us. 

This was new. 

This was war and we were unarmed. 

There was a malevolence to police actions. The helmeted monsters were like alien robots programmed for mayhem. It was Chicago all over again. A police riot.

It was impossible to reconcile what I was seeing with the America I’d grown up pledging allegiance to. The supposed representatives of law and justice, those charged with serving and protecting the people, were attacking us — wantonly, viciously, with malice.

A girl to my right screamed “fuck you! Fuck you pigs!” With such rage and power that I was shaken — at the same time I sympathized with her.

I saw an elderly woman across the street knocked down by a cop. Demonstrators rushed to aide her. A man crossed the street to help. A cop told him to get back. “I’m a doctor, I want to help this woman,” he pleaded. The cop charged him, his baton raised. The doctor was lucky, he escaped. I saw some who weren’t so lucky. Most people who were caught, received beatings, sometimes from more than one officer. 

A jeep drove down the street spraying tear gas. It was a surreal scene of indiscriminate mayhem and vengeance.

Further down the street a police car was upended then set afire, sending thick flumes of black smoke into the air to mix with the white of the tear gas. In its angry beauty, Berkeley was resembling a battle field. 

Police and protestors were scattered over the area. Protestors were in groups ranging from a two or three to dozens. The police were hell-bent on exacting revenge for the objects being thrown at them.

I was an unarmed soldier without direction or purpose.

I was feral. 

I was a witness.

I saw people who clearly were not involved being shot at. I saw pepper fog machines indiscriminately spraying their foul and hurtful smoke. I saw protestors swearing and screaming as they threw rocks and bottles. I saw, to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, the best minds of my generation destroyed by anger: raging, hysterical, confused.

I came upon a tall young man who was bleeding from a facial wound. A medic from the Berkeley Free Clinic was tending to him. I heard someone say, “I did a tour in Vietnam, in a way this is as bad. At least over there the enemy wasn’t our own cops.” 

Back on Telegraph I was filled with impotent rage, watching a girl being dragged along the ground by cops and a protestor being struck repeatedly in the arms and back by another cop. I saw Blue Meanies aiming and firing at people who were running away. I wanted desperately to do something. Something more meaningful and effective than throwing a rock.

But there was nothing I could do. Nothing. I reared my head back emitting a full-throated primal scream.

Hours after beginning a peaceful march down Telegraph, I was spent. Bone weary, hungry, thirsty and permanently embittered, I walked home. Despite the mayhem, somehow I’d been spared, suffering nothing worse than stinging red eyes from tear gas. 

Our first stop was across the street from the school where there had been  a mass arrest of protestors during the People’s Park demonstrators in what was then a Bank of America parking lot. Those arrested were taken in buses to the county jail in Santa Rita where they suffered horrible mistreatment ranging from abusive language to beatings. Virtually everyone arrested that day was subsequently released with no charges preferred.

A block up form there is the Cal campus. I pointed out the spot where I avoided arrest through my nimbleness (I was a soccer player) on one occasion as I and other protestors fled campus. 

We walked up to Sproul Plaza with me pointing out the sights I saw and experiences I’d had as a young protestor (I was in high school). This included the spot where a tear gas canister landed in front of me. At Sproul I showed them where Mario Savio had spoken at the outset of the Free Speech Movement, where I stood when the helicopter spraying tear gas flew over head, where UC Student Body President Dan Siegel encouraged protestors to take back the park and incidentally where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once delivered a speech. We walked down Telegraph and I again pointed out various “battle” sites. I took them to People’s Park which is now surrounded by huge shipping containers to discourage any latter-day protestors. We concluded be seeing the roof where James Rector sat watching the protests when the Alameda County Sheriffs shot and killed him. There’s a plaque on the building commemorating the tragedy.  I told them how the violence was instigated by the police (at the behest of our government, particularly the then governor of California, the odious Ronald Regan). They were truly police riots.

I was peppered with questions which is unusual for foreign students. The Vietnamese man thanked me for protesting U.S. participation in the war that had ravaged his country.

With that we parted company. As I started my walk home the rain that had held off during our tour started to fall.

The next day at school I was told by higher ups that the tour was well-received and I should certainly do it again. Already looking forward to it.