To thine own self be true

culminating this Mother’s Day Weekend with SNL’s Alec Baldwin’s Trump eagerly drinking Clorox to keep himself healthy despite all odds during the WH coronavirus crisis. The black-hole death-spiral continues on an appropos self-inflicted note. The medieval image of the snake eating itself comes to mind: evil consumes itself ultimately.

The first significant disaster movie with credible special effects turns out to be a classic movie in several senses of the words.

Clark Gable stars as the charismatic bad boy Blackie, a Barbary Coast saloon owner in 1906. Spencer Tracy plays his serious childhood chum who’s become a priest and never tires of trying to convert Blackie to more moral ways. (Tracy’s 1st Oscar nomination.)

Jeanette MacDonald portrays an opera singer, torn between singing for her favorite man Blackie and for the city’s opera hall run by her conservative fiance played by Jack Holt. There are no less than four triangle relationships in the film including the above. Blackie and the priest also vie for the fate of MacDonald’s character. The opera manager’s mother also vies for MacDonald to marry her son. And a chorus girl is also pitted against MacDonald to win Blackie.

The film has olde cornball wise-guy one-liners, some opera singing by MacDonald and a few versions of “San Francisco”, the title song. It also has many realistic conflicts, several interesting minor characters, and many historic-looking sets.

In fact, there’s so much going for this film that you almost forget the suspenseful earthquake which steals viewers’ attention for the home stretch. A.W.S. Van Dyke accurately recreates the famous disaster with many realistic scenes and effects. I particularly like the scene in which the camera follows and tracks the two male stars as they walk into a large campground where survivors have gathered.

The ending is powerful and strangely hopeful and the DVD offers two endings to consider. There are also some nice extras to complete the package.

San Francisco is surprisingly entertaining with much to divert a viewer before, during, and after the earthquake. And many of the special effects are historically accurate and oddly affecting. Highly recommended.

The May 9, 2020 article in The Guardian about 6 real-life British boys’ survival on an island rock. Amazing this story has been unreported/under-reported until now. This will change your views of the author and the book.

(Two departed guys I still feel close to years later; their presence remains palpable in many ways)

Simply put, someone or something either is or isn’t. He, she, or it exists and has being or doesn’t. You’ll recall that life starts and ends that way in the form of presence or non-presence. In school, students were either present or absent (that is, not-present). A feeling went with that. One either felt like one was there (in class) or wasn’t (as we or someone else noted an empty desk). In some cases, we were the ones who were not present–at home with the mumps, skipping class, and so forth.

But with the experience of being absent from the group at school came another impression and that was that presence was a subjective state and that one could still experience presence and the presence of absent others and other situations even when in a changed scene or setting. Presence was potentially something one felt, imagined, and experienced all on one’s own.

As well, presence was not just something experienced in relation to environments. One could be thought of as a presence within a family, experiencing the presence of parents and siblings. Or one was aware of the presence of animals via owning a pet or visiting a zoo. Perhaps one experienced the presence of nature, as in the morning when stepping out into the freshness of morning air or when travelling to a memorable place such as the mountains or seaside. Poet William Blake said this best, perhaps: “To see a world in a grain of sand,/ And a heaven in a wild flower,/ Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,/ And eternity in an hour.” To know presence, then, is to connect and possibly transcend.

Most of us know, though, that presence is often or mostly transitory and ephemeral. And it is dependent ultimately on the presence of whichever people you choose to consider, including yourself. One day someone is there; another, he or she is not, and connections and entire worlds are suddenly, conspicuously absent, vanished, or blotted out by absence, death or memory losses. There is great value, meaning, and purpose in the simple fact of lived, shared, and experienced presence–a fact often only fully known, understood, missed, and appreciated belatedly. As Joni Mitchell once put it, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

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Further musings: No connection is possible without others, without presence. Wherever each of us is, our presence is capable of being experienced by others.

But do e-mails, text messages and social media network sites do justice to presence? (For one thing, they significantly omit the physical human voice which is our main, unique, expressive, identifying self.) Are they as good, strong, or personal as a phone call or a Skype communication (the latter with the extra advantage of mediated visual presence, especially during a pandemic)?

When it comes down to it, would you rather talk to someone via mediated electronic forms or spend time face-to-face with the presence of the same live in-person human being? What does live in-person presence give us that other mediated communications can’t?

(No, nothing quite like being in the same shared, live space with close friends and kindred spirits.)

Yes, we have to appreciate whatever dumb or good luck we can eke out in this new ‘normal’.

Very existentialist and Viktor Frankl-ish: our life comes down to the personal choices we make under very limited, limiting circumstances.

If extermination camp victims were able to do this, as Frankl reports, we of the pandemic world can, too. There is still freedom to choose or move.

is Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of a book on plagues. Very no-nonsense and frank. Something of a Cassandra, she doesn’t think the miracle vaccine will be unpatented (whoever the discoverer is will want to make a profit and not share it with the world) and that the vaccine will likely not be shared in any case with every corner of the planet, which it needs to be. Her view of the current problems, particularly in the U.S.,is that there is no overall goal for dealing with the virus, only agenda tactics at micro-levels. She is way more impressive and compelling than kow-towing, cowardly, smilling-at-any-bad-news Birkz ever was at her best.

Heard ‘less cars’ instead of ‘fewer cars’ on the tv traffic report. About the seventh instance of misuse I’ve heard of late.

That which can be counted is few or fewer.
That which is a more general, innumerable quantity is less.

We’re each on our own, basically. That song “All by Myself”.

(Something certainly in evidence in the States as Trump and the WH hunker down with unlimited medical support, and supplies while the rest of the country is left to fend for itself.)

playing loudly in the background as Trump toured an AZ mask factory yesterday. Spot-on. Some wicked guy in charge of music there making a point cleverly and absurdly. And T and none of the dopes in his entourage–all sans masks–noticed. (ps/Hope he is not hunted down and doesn’t get fired for this clever irony.)

Trump wants to paint 175 mi. of the border wall black for $500 million to 3 billion.
Now there’s a wise use of public funding a la Rolling Stones.