Sense and Sensibility

Frank McCourt and his “High Heart”

There were no rainbows in Frank McCourt’s Ireland. No twinkling-eyed Irish priests. No babbling brooks. No shillelaghs. There were songs, of course, romantic and pitiful and merry. And there were stories, of course, stories of honor, fealty and defiance that were so rich and hearty they were good enough to eat. They had to be; because in McCourt’s childhood, stories were the only sustenance he knew.

McCourt, who spent the last years of his life in Roxbury, Conn., wrote three memoirs and a children’s book, but he will inevitably be remembered for the first one, “Angela’s Ashes,” published in 1996. The haunting, harrowing memoir, which described the author’s impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland, squashed tired clichés about Ireland and replaced them with a bitter, astringent reality of grinding poverty.

 To Tolstoy’s proverb about happy childhoods being alike, he added a Celtic twist, now immortalized in the book’s chilling second paragraph:
 ”When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

In a literary landscape larded with wretched childhoods — a trend McCourt could reasonably lay claim to igniting — it was a daunting assertion. But the memoir that followed — a sour casserole of deprivation, drunkenness and dejection — more than confirmed the claim. “People everywhere,” McCourt wrote, “brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty, the shiftless, loquacious, alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”
 In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani acclaimed the work as “stunning,” written in “prose that’s pictorial and tactile, lyrical but streetwise,” and applauding McCourt’s emotional restraint. “There is not a trace of bitterness or resentment in ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ though there is plenty a less generous writer might well be judgmental about.” Petter Finn, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, called it “spellbinding,” and commended McCourt’s ability to “swerve flawlessly between aching sadness and desperate humor.”

The book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award and put McCourt, a former teacher at New York City high schools, on the literary map. McCourt was a lyric and fulsome story teller, and was generous with his talents, appearing frequently in Litchfield County schools and at the Litchfield County Writer’s Project. He seemed to thrive in the limelight; for several years, he and his brother, Malachy, performed something of a stand-up routine lampooning their childhood deprivations as an absurd twist of fate.
 Two memoirs followed: “‘Tis,” a more acerbic story of McCourt’s early years in the United States, bilious with envy; and “Teacher Man,” a beguiling string-of-pearls about his often trying, troubling and hysterical years in the New York City school system. While critics recoiled at the bitterness of “‘Tis,” “Teacher Man” gathered equivocal praise — Phillip Lopate in the Los Angeles Times saw it as “the best book in the trilogy.”
 What few critics could deny was McCourt’s mesmeric storytelling ability; his stories may seem rehearsed, but like a Catskills comic, he had a million of ‘em.
 In all the books, a singular McCourt style emerges. “To me, he extends the way of words of Oscar Wilde,” said James Mullan, who started the Irish Studies Department at Fairfield University. “He had the true, magical trick: To make of that which is horrendous that which is humorous.”
 McCourt brought what Mullan called a “high heart to what other people would kvetch or whine about.”

McCourt’s unflinching eye was both comic and compassionate. His style was lyrical, wry and witty. But most of all, it is McCourt’s heart — still intact after a sordid, pitiful, disillusioned youth — that keeps his work buoyant and unforgettable. In “Teacher Man,” he tips his hat to that past, recognizing its legacy of resilience and wisdom. As he put it: “My life saved my life.”

Oh, good, another gaseous opportunity

I am watching television at the pump.

I want to watch television while I am pumping gas about as much as I want to drink the gas spewing from the pump, but I have been ensnared. My captor is Gas Station TV, which discharges 4/12 to 5 minutes of visual effluent to hapless drivers who have stopped into one of the 12,000 gas stations in the country that “broadcast” its infernal prattle.

Gas Station TV is one more moth hole in the increasingly permeable membrane that separates private citizens from the insidious advertising industry. It “transforms the gas station to a highly sought-after media destination to inform and influence consumers at a desirable Point-of-Purchase, when they are mobile and can be influenced to take action at a nearby retailer in proximity,” according to its publicists. In other words, you’ve been ambushed at the gas station by an advertiser masquerading as a weather report. The only obstacle between you and that bag of Cool Ranch Doritos is 8 baby steps and $1.89.

Nobody’s going to nominate Gas Station TV for an Emmy, but you have to admire the ingenuity of the idea. With technologies like TiVo, DVR and the felicitous mute button, advertisers have had to do a lot of ducking and weaving to be heard. (Note to advertisers: We’re here! We’re here!)

But anybody who has taken to the open road in pursuit of a little silence can easily feel a little ambushed. Screens [Dash] in the doctor’s office, at the bank, at the airport, in the convenience store, at the checkout corner and [Dash] lest we forget [Dash] in your home have become the wallpaper of contemporary living. But unlike the benevolently mum wallpaper, these screens are talking, moving, bleating and otherwise niggling at your increasingly shattered brain cells.

This Orwellian nightmare is called “place-based media space.” The idea is that nobody stays still anymore. And even when they do, they have the indecorous habit ot muzzling commercials, which has the effect of flushing advertising dollars down the sewer. So advertisers have to get you where you live —- in your cell phone, at the gas pump, at Wal-Mart and in all those parenthetical places where you used to be able to try to get your head together.

You are not alone if you feel besieged by these ubiquitous screens. The average American has three televisions, two DVD players, one desktop computer and two cell phones at home. We spend, on average 4.5 hours watching TV a day [Dash] that’s more than we spend on any other leisure activity. Children 8 to 18 years spend nearly four hours a day in front of a TV screen and almost 2 additional hours on the computer and playing video games, reports the Kaiser Family Foundation

You would think that would be enough when you consider what Americans are not doing while they are blinkered to the screen. Teenagers aged 15 to 19 read for an average of 10 minutes a weekend, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. They play video games at a rate six times that.

So what do you do when you have a nation full of brain-numbed video junkies? Jack them up with more junk.

I cannot imagine who on earth wants to be transfixed by a television screen while weighing their seedless California grapes at the grocery store? I can appreciate that a little aggravation can set in while you’re standing six-deep in the express check-out line but that’s what those cheesy tabloids are for.

Similarly, I am sure that the well-intentioned executives at the bank merely want their customers to be well informed, but it can make a person queasy cashing a check while watching a CNN report on GIs blown to smithereens in Afghanistan.

I suspect these irksome additions are supposed to take customers’ minds off of the fact that their waiting, which has become some sort of crime against humanity. But to me, nothing expands the frustrating of waiting than the flatulence of wall-to-wall TV. If all Hell is breaking loose in the universe, I’m sure I’ll get a big clue-in when I get home and can turn the television on —or off— at my leisure.

Our Riveting Public Mourning

It was all about the music, we kept hearing.

And maybe it was.

Maybe it wasn’t the queerly androgynous looks. Maybe it wasn’t the chimp, the surgical masks, the glove, the baby dangling or the increasingly Caucasian features. Maybe none of it [---] the child molestations allegations, the freakish court appearances in pajamas, the surreal marital history [Dash] mattered. Listening to the mind-numbing hagiography that preceded yesterday’s orgiastic Michael Jackson memorial tribute, it was easy to believe that Jackson was just another uber-talented American entertainer, chronically misunderstood. It got so bad that even before a single performance, you were grateful for a pre-emptive weather alert that assured you that Tuesday’s severe thundershowers were not a precursor to the Apocalypse.

Yesterday’s mourn-a-thon, which began at dawn and droned on until nearly 4 p.m., was an elegy of epidemic proportions. It featured battalions of performers, preachers and politicians as well as a final, choking sob from his daughter that reminded viewers of the personal anguish of a very public wake.

And yet the whole, lurid, immoderate spectacle, from Mariah Carey’s tentative version of the early Jackson hit “I’ll Be There,” to Jermaine Jackson’s haunting “Smile,” was strangely riveting. At Tuesday’s memorial, Jackson’s real intimates [Dash] not the Jackson sycophants who have stumbled, sputtered, and equivocated through the last 10 days of non-stop coverage [Dash] but his actual friends took the stage. Some of their memories, like those of Motown founder Berry Gordy, of playing on baseball teams and swimming together, were sincerely touching. When Gordy, speaking about the 1983 release of “Billy Jean,” said, “Michael Jackson went into orbit and never came down,” you could dismiss the more sinister undertones of the remark.

The montages of Jackson videos [Dash] cinematic dance masterpieces that drew inspiration from Fred Astaire, through Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse [Dash] were the finest testimony to Jackson’s uncanny choreographic sense and enduring influence on the entertainment world. The memorial was oddly Motown-centric, even though Jackson’s biggest success came after he left that record label and went solo. Perhaps that was in deference to Jackson’s brothers, who sat in the front row wearing black suits, gold ties, sunglasses and a single sequined glove each.

Jackson, memorialized yesterday by people like Stevie Wonder, whose celebrity Jackson’s strangely mirrored and then eclipsed, was hardly the first American entertainer to warrant massive outpourings of public grief. From Rudolph Valentino, through James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, Americans seem to love their celebrities sensitive, child-like and chronically misunderstood. Even the Brits we have embraced [Dash] John Lennon and Princess Diana [Dash] had the kind of impish fragility that the culture simultaneously celebrates and condemns.

A trembling Brooke Shields, fighting off tears, said that Jackson’s “laugh was the sweetest and purest of anyone’s.” It was Jackson’s improbable artlessness [Dash] in an industry that hardens the delicate [Dash] that cemented his fan base and confounded his critics. Cynics found Jackson’s breathy, edge-of-tears ballads a ridiculous camouflage that masked Jackson’s unsettling peccadilloes. Admirers saw in Jackson a vulnerability and innocence that captivated and consoled. When Jackson triumphed [Dash] through boundlessly innovative creativity [Dash] it was a victory for Peter Pans everywhere.

Somehow when Michael Jackson sang and when he danced … we felt he was right there,” said Queen Latifah. “We had him. Whether he knew he was ours or did not know, he was ours, we were his.”

The memorial was not without its clumsy moments. Michael Jackson sold more than 750 million records, but until Tuesday, basketball fans never knew that Jackson was responsible for Magic Johnson’s success as a point guard. Mourners could have done without a representative from the Congressional Black Caucus and “Britain’s Got Talent” 12-year-old wunderkind Shaheen Jafargholi. The memorial should have properly ended with Jermaine Jackson’s stirring “Smile,” but by the second hour, it seemed, like Jackson’s life, to spiral out of control.

The inevitable “We Are The World” finale had its predictable cathartic effect, with Jackson’s children, looking bewildered, taking the stage with the whole Jackson clan. The sobs of Jackson’s daughter Paris, saying that her “daddy has been the best father you can imagine” was a chilling coda to a celebrity circus that, for the Jackson children, is just beginning.

Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com.

Art Can Be Funny, Can’t It?

Humor hurts.

It stings worthwhile targets – hypocrisy, vanity, licentiousness and pride. But the bite that sends the rest of us into paroxysm of laughter generally comes at someone else’s expense.

Fortunately, they usually deserve it.

“A Touch of Humor,” now on exhibit at the William Benton Museum of Art at the  University of Connecticut-Storrs, is a peculiar assortment of prints and paintings that are, if not rip-roaring funny, at least amusing and occasionally worth a chortle or two. This limited exhibit includes works from the 17^th century to the 20^th and is particularly rich in the work of Adolph Dehn, a print artist whose arch, cutting works appeared in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

Not all of Dehn’s work focused on fat nuns and dimwitted priests, but that’s what’s on display here and, in light of recent disclosures of sexual abuse, seems particularly pointed.

The line between satire and humor is a bit like the line between wry and ribald, and the exhibit tends to float clumsily between the two. Its first images ‑17^th century French engravings of a Frecnh woman beating her husband and, its companion, a Frenchman beating his wife, are unsettling enough to underscore the disturbing current that runs through this exhibit and its companion, the more sinister “Punch & Judy: Handpuppets, Politics & Humor.”

Violence is a disquieting companion to humor‑ whether Punch is clobbering Judy to death or a lodger is dumping his chamber pot onto William Hogarth’s disreputable English crowd below. No exhibit on humor would be complete without Hogarth, but his misanthropic perspective is so unyielding that it can be souring. Old biddies sneering superciliously at flamboyantly dressed Frenchmen is one thing. But Hogarth scoffs, too, at the prudish French Hugenots filing soberly out of their humble church as he does the black man fondling a white woman. Even the starving urchins ravaging pie crumbs from the street fall under his censure.

Daumier, with his brilliant, sardonic flair, had a far less damning sense of humor. He was helped in that by his brilliance at caricature – and by the era in which he lived, so flush with flaneurs. He makes great sport of one here, getting smacked in the eye by a snowball, but it’s all in fun. One wishes the exhibit had a bit more of Daumier and a bit less Hogarth and Dehn.

Dehn, at least in this incarnation, saves all of his derision for the Catholic Church. His humor is less ironic than sarcastic. Nuns and priests paint in the outdoors, blind to the beauty of naked women or satyrs around them. Two clerics in the Bois de Boulogne attempt to advise two luscious vixens, steeling themselves for temptation or ready to pounce (with Dehn, these things are unclear).

Outside of religion, the most fertile (ahem) topic for satirists is sex and there are a few good representatives here, including Dane’s image of a lanky, maladroit teenager with an equally gawky girl, with the caption, “You Know My Dad Seems To Know Quite A Lot About Sex.” Today, that’s a caption with a frisson of “American Beauty” attached. But George Hughes’ painting “Company Arrives Early,” is much funnier and less disturbing. Hughes bisects the painting vertically in this image of a split-level at twilight. Downstairs, a boy on a black-and-white tile floor calls up to his parents that company has arrived. From the thick-waisted, staid appearance, it looks like the boss in his wife. Meanwhile, following a black, snake-like banister toward a scarlet red upstairs, a wife in her black garters and a just-showered man in his rather louche bathrobe, react with horror.

This piece, like Frank DiGioia’s “Wedding Feast,” which looks like a still for “My Big, Fat Greek Wedding,” reminds us of the great human appetite for silliness. Camp works.

But not quite as well the gratuitous cruelty of Punch & Judy. Nearly every European country has its version of Punch & Judy, which emerged from the Italian Commedia Dell’ Arte in the 17^th century, which says something about the public’s appetite for impenitent villainy. The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry has lent several dozen gorgeous, colorful Punch & Judy puppets, all vividly creepy. There’s Punch, with the pointed Renaissance hat, crooked nose, jutting chin and hunchback, dropping his baby to his death. There’s his wife, Judy, rapping him about the head for the murder, to which Punch responds the only way he can, by stealing the stick and clubbing his wife to death. He then goes off philandering with his paramour, Miss Polly.

All of that might be iniquitous enough – to say nothing of Scott Peterson-esque ‑  if not for the slew of authority figures who try to penalize Punch. The fact that Punch subverts all of them – the cop, the judge, the devil, death and even the hangman – says something about our vexatious relationship with authority. The fact that Punch & Judy has been making people laugh for more than three centuries says perhaps more than we want to know.

 Contact: Tracey@TraceyOSh.com.