Sense and Sensibility

Shout Hallelujia and Just Get Happy

A confession: For most of my life I have harbored a deep and abiding suspicion: It pays to be shallow.

While many of my more cerebral pals might deride a mutual acquaintance as a frivolous dingbat, I would think: I wish I could be like that.

“Uggh,” they would say, “That woman is a blithering ninny. Did you ever meet anyone who talked so much and said so little?”

“Terrible,” I’d say. But I’d silently churn with ambition toward the superficial. How much better it would be to prattle on about pillow swatches, “American Idol” and the Kardashians than fret over eschatology and the persistence of evil in the world? Never again to be paralyzed by a persistent brown study; Clucking like a hen over “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” and “Dancing With the Stars;” Reciting my entire caloric consumption from the day before, certain that another soul was hanging on my every gristly nibble.

The The unconsidered life seemed not only well worth living, but so much less burdensome. Who needed to slog through this brooding mire?

Happy people, it turns out.

Researchers from the University of Arizona have found that people who spend their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier. “By engaging in meaningful conversations, we manage to impose meaning on an otherwise pretty chaotic world,” Dr. Matthias Mehl, author of the study, told the New York Times.

According to Dr. Mehl, even if your attempts to find meaning fall flat – you’ve consumed an entire chicken Caesar salad and every last roll in the bread basket and still can’t understand how a divine creator could let annihilation despoil the earth, you’re still going to be happier. That’s probably because you’ve got somebody across the table equally as flummoxed as you.

But at least you talked. And at least you had someone to talk to, which, researchers say, is critical in the pursuit of happiness.

Researchers have been telling us a great deal about happiness these days, belying those cynics who carp that all these eggheads whittle away their time in worthless abstractions. Bah!

Very Smart People have been spending buckets full of bountiful research dollars investigating critical issues like what makes us happy. Most of that research has concluded that pretty much everyone has a “set point” for happiness, suggesting that the chronicling miserable are effectively certain to stay that way, so you should stoop wasting your time telling them to buck up.

One of them is Dr. George Valliant, director of a 72-year old study of 268 men who entered Harvard in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage, divorce and old age. Valliant has pretty much decided that what makes us happy is not what happens to us, but how we respond to it. In other words, Johnny Mercer was right. You’ve got to Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.”

Other researchers, like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University, suggest people are often clueless about what will make them happy. For instance, people at work generally believe they’d be happier at home, only to return to their burrow, where they are miserable, passive and bored.

Group activities tend to help our happiness levels, Csikszentmihalyi asserts, even if you’re a sloth like me and moan about not wanting to get out of your sweat suit and go anywhere. If you must bellyache, it is best to do so with another grouch in a public place, preferably while smiling.

Recent research found that those who smile a lot are usually happier, have more stable personalities, more stable marriages, better cognitive skills and better interpersonal skills. That is more than enough to make you hate them, but if you want to be happy, you should resist the temptation and grin up a storm.

Try humming a little Johnny Mercer.

It’s sure to put a little Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah in your day.

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.

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.

Rain, Rain, Make My Day

Did I get off on the wrong plane and land in Dublin?

No, no, it can’t be. In Dublin the sun actually shines in the summer.

The sun. That’s right. That large, honey-lemon orb that’s gone AWOL since Memorial Day.

The sun has made fewer appearances this summer than Whitey Bulger in the North End.

As of Monday, rainfall totaled 8.35 inches this month in New York’s Central Park, more than triple the normal 2.17 inches for the period. In Hartford, there has been 3.61 inches of rain this month, compared to a normal of 2.26. If you look really, really hard at the weather icons in the upcoming days, you do see some sunshine ahead. (Oh, wait, those are lightening bolts.)

Television meteorologists are trying really hard to explain why we are getting saturated this summer, showing you their super cool Doppler and their high-tech Accu-this and Accu-that, but it all boils down to the same thing: “Rain happens.”

I don’t even bother to check the forecast any more. It’s like waiting for the results on a test you know you bombed.

Every now and then the sun shows up on a video, like Osama bin Laden. (Here’s a conspiracy theory: Is it just a coincidence that both Osama and the sun have bin> missin’?)

I was really going to try to be good this summer and avoid the sun. Can you believe it? I was afraid of ultraviolet rays. I didn’t think rust would be the real risk.

And not only rust but despair. Yes, good, old-fashioned, bleak, dismal, gloomy, alarm-clock-what-alarm-clock despair<$>.

No one is happy. OK, maybe immigrants from The Scottish Highlands are happy, but unless your idea of tropical involves mud and mushrooms, you’re pretty miserable. The only way to get rid of misery is to share it. So you hear a lot of conversations that go like this:

“This weather<$>.”

“Don’t even say it.”

“Have you ever<$>?”

“It’s just so ‑

“No kidding.”

“You said it.”

“What can you do?”

In fact, we in New England have a right to be extra miserable because we know that this parenthesis between mud and frost is truncated enough as it is.

Now that we can scratch June off the beachcomber radar, we’re looking at two months before we have to haul the turtlenecks out again.

In fact, some of us are sorry we put ours away.

In Greek mythology, the sun was personified as Helios, a hot-looking dude who drove a chariot drawn by horses from the East to the West, bringing light to the Earth.

Clearly, Helios took a wrong turn and because he’s a man, he refuses to ask for directions.

Dan and Sadie’s Magnificent Journey

No, it’s not your imagination.

That bicycle was hauling a dog. Sadie, a 3-year-old golden Labrador retriever, is enjoying the cozy accommodations while her owner, Dan McCrady, bikes 850-miles from Annapolis, Maryland to Portland, Maine.

The pair has been pedaling through Connecticut this week.

McCrady,, a 61-year-old federal government retiree, is riding a recumbent bike, complete with a commodious trailer typically occupied by toddlers, from his home in Annapolis, to Portland to raise awareness for the East Coast Greenway Alliance, which links major cities between Maine and Florida, often using old rail or canal lines, like the linear path in Cheshire, where McCrady biked Wednesday. While the Greenway is a recreational boon for fitness buffs, McCrady’s goal was not to be the poster boy for the Greenway Alliance. Not at first, at least.

McCrady, who was an Information Technology specialist with the government, is simply a guy who likes to challenge himself. Since his retirement from federal service at 55, he has returned to college to get his bachelor’s degree, run a marathon, obtained his pilot license and become a magician. And, oh, yes, he also took culinary classes at his local community college so he’s chef to his wife of 33 years.

Biking from Maryland to Maine just seemed another challenge. And what better way to do it than with man’s best friend?

“She learned how to get in the trailer instantly,” says McCrady, a medium-built man with a short-cropped gray beard. “But it took her about a week to get used to riding in it.”

Lest anyone imagine Sadie is just a trailer potato, McCrady notes that Sadie jogs alongside the bike for at least 10 miles of what is typically a 55-mile daily ride.

McCrady, who has biked a three-day, 200-mile ride with a friend every year for the last several, expects the entire bike trip will take 22 days, with two days off a week to rest. After all, he says, “I’ve never done anything like this before. The first time I got off the bike I slept for 22 hours.” Initially, McCrady figured his challenge would just be a bonding experience for him, his dog, and the bike. But he figured that it would cost more than $2,000 for accommodations alone. So he contacted the Greenway Alliance, and suggested his ride could help raise awareness of the East Coast Greenway. Only 20 percent of the Greenway is off-road; the Alliance would like to make it 100 percent.

The Alliance agreed and supplied post-card size informational cards, which McCrady hands out to interested observers, as well as flags and a shirt emblazoned with the Alliance’s name. McCrady’s recumbent bike which was donated by Sun and Solvit products donated the trailer.

McCrady travels with a computer and blogs about his experience daily at www.firstgiving.com/danandsadie. That site also allows supporters to make donations to the Greenway Alliance. Since he began his ride on May 23, McCrady says he’s raised nearly $4,000. He hopes to raise $10,000 for the organization by June 13, when he expects to finishe in Portland. On Wednesday, McCrady stopped in to Cheshire Bike and Repair Shop to adjust his bike and true his wheels. Sadie ambled over to the sidewalk, where she slept, her chin resting on the cool cement. “The first week was awful,” McCrady said of the ride. “It was hot; it was humid; there were hills. By day eight it was fun and it’s still fun today.”

While riding through a sketchy section of Bridgeport earlier this week, McCrady said he noticed a toothless, gesticulating man running toward him, shouting. “I seen you!” the man hollered. “I seen you.” McCrady was alarmed but the man said, “I seen you on the 12 o’clock news.” McCrady stopped, shook the man’s hand and let him pet Sadie. As the man walked away, McCrady heard him mutter, “I done caught me a celebrity.”

For more information, visit www.firstgiving.com/danandsadie.

 

 

 

 

 

The Gentelmen Who Lunch

Talking with the gentelmen who lunch

First time he met Ernie, he was flyin’, I’m telling you, flyin’ down Bennett Avenue in this race-car contraption he made out of a pair of roller skates and an orange crate. Kid’s a nut, he’s thinking. Kid’s an absolute nut. Steering this thing with two wooden sticks. Couldn’t have been more than 10.

Dominic Mauriello guffaws, a big, gasping, phlegmatic laugh that bounces his pal Anthony Pecukonis around a little. At 85, Pecukonis is the baby of the group, a short, triangular-shaped man wearing an ecru short-sleeve shirt with an image of the Virgin of Guadeloupe pinned to his chest pocket.

Seven decades ago, these five guys were growing up in Waterbury’s Town Plot neighborhood, shooting craps against the walls of Tinker School, ripping pieces of aluminum off junked cars and hunting for mushrooms at Morris Dam. For the past four years, they’ve been getting together every Tuesday for their weekly lunch — two Tuesdays at Domars and the other two Tuesdays at a Chinese buffet whose name no one can remember. The entourage includes a couple of canes, about six hearing aids, a few dietary restrictions and a hunk of memories not printable in a family newspaper.

They call themselves the “Over The Hill Gang,” and Mauriello is the ringleader. Four years ago, this eighth-grade graduate who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day looked around his immaculate, lonely Prospect ranch and said, “What the hell’s the matter with me? I gotta get these guys going.” He picked up the phone and began dialing a few pals he knew from the old neighborhood. He hadn’t seen some of them in 40 years, but it didn’t matter. “These are my friends,” Mauriello said. “I got to get them motivated. They’re getting stale.”

Ample booths, sandwiches

So twice a month, they head for the robins-egg blue and cherry-red back room at Domars on Watertown Avenue in Waterbury. It’s an old place that used to be the American Legion Hall, where Mauriello was married more than 50 years ago, with Galante as his best man. Here, the blue vinyl booths are as ample as the Italian combos — which the guys get with ham, salami, capicola, Provolone cheese, American cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and roasted peppers. It’s the kind of sandwich, Galante says, you have to pick up with a mitt.

Mauriello’s desire to bring his friends back together may be, as he says, inexplicable, but research suggests that friendships play an important role in longevity. Last year, an Australian study found that older people who have close friends and confidants live longer than those who don’t. Conversely, the same study found that having close family ties had no discernible effect on survival.

All these guys — Mauriello, Galante, Pecukonis, Pat Spino and Chuck Bredice — are first-generation Americans. With the exception of Pecukonis, their parents were all born in Italy. Every now and again an Italian phrase slips out, like “mangia e statti zitto,” or, loosely, “shut up and eat.” All the men, except Spino, who was given a deferment, are World War II veterans. Their tattoos — which Mauriello and Galante both got from a Texan with a forehead full of them — have faded to the color of carbon paper. A few of the men, like Galante, have pieces of shrapnel in their bodies. None of them, except Pecukonis, went beyond the eighth grade. Pecukonis graduated from high school. They call him the professor. He’s been engaged for 60 years to the same woman. “Her father used to get after me,” Pecukonis says about his hesitancy to name a date. Asked when the big day will be, Pecukonis winces and gives the same answer he’s given for 60 years, “Pretty soon.”

He gives a similarly equivocal answer about success. “I come into the world with nothing, and I’ve got most of it left,” he says.

The rest of the men are widowers. “Nobody wants me,” says Galante. “I just got a maid who hangs around.” Next to him, Bredice, a beefy man with a long, broad face and basset hound eyes, guffaws. “Know any rich widows?” he asks a visitor.

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, Bredice was a Class A bowler, racking up victories at 20th Century Lanes on Phoenix Avenue, which sat just up the street from the Jacques Theater, a burlesque house. “Let me tell you something, honey,” Bredice says. “If you hung around on Phoenix Avenue, you were no angel.”

“Oh! That dive?” Spino says, tossing his head back, remembering the Jacques. “I used to sneak in there as a kid.”

No full nudity, though. “Oh, no,” says Bredice. “If you wanted them to take it all off, you had to P-A-Y.” Not that it bothered Bredice. “To me, the most homeliest thing in the world is a naked woman.”

“Ah, I don’t buy that,” Mauriello says.

“Then, when we graduated from the Burlesque, we went to New York,” said Bredice, who hustled money at a third-floor bowling alley on 6th Avenue. “I saw Gypsy Rose Lee. She was beautiful. I would’ve asked her for a date. She could’ve said no. Wouldn’t have bothered me. I’m Italian. I got a lot of bananas.”

On summer days, Galante and Mauriello would head for Hop Brook Lake, where they’d swim naked and then hop in their cars and race all the way to Lindy’s in New York City. There, they’d wolf down a strawberry shortcake for 25 cents and then race back to Waterbury — Dominic in his 1931 Oldsmobile convertible and Galante in his ‘32 Chevy. Once, at Lake Quassapaug, they were thrown into the Middlebury Jail for taking the paddle boats out longer than they had money for.

And these guys had big, Italian families. Bredice had six sisters and three brothers, in addition to his parents and grandparents, living at 20 Bennett Ave. On Sunday mornings when they walked to Mass, the whole street was redolent with spaghetti sauce so aromatic it would make them drool. “When you’re feeding 10 kids, plus a mother, father and grandparents, you don’t get spaghetti every day, you know,” Bredice says.

No, most days, you’re pulling peppers from the garden and eggs from the chicken. Once or twice a week, the fish guy puttered down the street with a crate full of fish on ice, tooting a horn to attract customers. All the men grew up with kitchen gardens and often slaughtered a rabbit or broke the neck of a chicken. “Keep the blood,” Spino says. “Fry it up.”

“They knew how to cook,” Galante says of the mothers on his street. “Could make a meal out of anything.”

Bredice folds his hands across his ample belly, knits his sausage-size fingers together and shakes his head. “Oh, you don’t get soup like that any more, no sir.”

These days, the minestrone at Domars will do. For an hour, the men reminisce about their Ford Fairlanes and Plymouth convertibles, of the circus coming to Brassco Park, of coasting down hills with an empty tank of gas and sneaking into strip joints and dice games.

They talk about Florida and Foxwoods and share the tiny little stray thoughts that creep into a man’s mind when he’s reached a certain age and lost the gaggle of pals he once took for granted. They talk about everything and nothing at all, until next week, when they’ll do it all again.

c. Republican American, 2008

Here’s where I say U.N.C.L.E.

Your satellite is bigger than mine

The man from U-verse came yesterday.

I thought door-to-door salesman went out with Willy Lohman and the Milkman, but here was U-man, at my front-door, clipboard in hand ready to Sell Me Something.

Or actually, not to sell me something, as he pointedly protested while the door closed on his face. He was there to Save Me Money. A bundle of money, to be exact.

AT&T U-verse, is AT & T’s foray into the competitive TV provider business. If cable and Internet companies can dangle phone lines in front of your eyes, AT &T wants to be able dangle TV in front of them. This TV would come over fiber-optic wires and would provide IPTV — Internet Protocol Television — which would compete directly with cable and satellite TV.

(And, by the way, if you’re still among the fossils with TV antennae, you are entirely within your rights to be confused.)

The buzz word today is bundle. Today’s companies want to provide you with a bundle of savings by bunching up your cable, cell phone and Internet bill into one, tidy package. It’s a bit like a car package. Sure, all you want is air conditioning. But you’re going to get the automatic windows, Rear Window Wiper/Washer, satellite radio and automatic eject button – all for one low price.

But for a thrifty, a-la-carte admittedly high-maintenance New Englander like me, these prix fixe meals seem a little excessive. If all I want is air conditioning, I should be able to get it and it should cost less. This bundling feels a little gluttonous. I feel like I ordered the chicken and got the pork, meat and ziti diner all for $1 more.

The first thing I told Mr. U-verse was “I don’t want cable.”

Perhaps it was the queerness of the statement that threw him off. Yes, I have rabbit ears Yes, I’m an anomaly. No, I don’t miss cable. Yes, I can live without “Sponge Bob Squarepants.” Call me stoic.

This seems to be the right time to be thrifty, puritanical and cheap. But with a national economy that is 70 percent dependent on consumer spending, this kind of attitude seems no only miserly but unpatriotic. And yet improvidence seems even more gauche, which is why retailers are trying to eke out as much as they can from you in the guise of saving you money.

It’s no wonder that consumers, the engine of the economy, are filling a tad flustered. We’re told spending is imperative to resuscitate the economy, yet chastised for our years of wanton extravagance.

The U-verse bait seems to epitomize this dysfunction: To embrace frugality – that is, lower my bill – I have to buy more – not just the phone, but the Internet, cell phone and cable. Such a bundle will purportedly save me all kinds of money, but it doesn’t really square up to the central question, which is: Do I really need all this stuff?

Much of the economic boom years were sustained by blurring the distinction between want and need, which may be why untangling the two now is so prickly.

Over the last decade, spending on entertainment outpaced overall expenditures, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. The average American spends more on entertainment than on gasoline, household furnishings and clothing – and nearly the same amount as spent on dining out, according the BLS.

Unsurprisingly, among the 20 percent of households with more than $77,000 a year in pretax income, more money is spent on entertainment – $4,516 a year – than on health care, utilities, clothing or food eaten at home. How is that possible? Largely because we have given the luxuries the same degree of indispensability as necessities.

Not long ago, The Washington Post reported that the average consumer riffles “through an average of 12 bills a month for such frivolous diversions as TiVo, the Internet and cell phones.” Add up the phones, Internet, cable, satellite radio, iTunes, streaming music and the TiVo and you’re looking at an easy $200 a month.

Here is the Gordian’s knot of the financial collapse writ small. I’d like to help Mr. U-verse build the world again, but I’m growing exhausted by the ceaseless updating, revamping and redefining of household essentials. It has made me exhausted and a tad jaded. I’m more than willing to get this economy humming again, but not at the expense of sacrificing my reason – or my check book.

God, Mammon and the art they wrought

The worst that can be said of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s “Faith and Fortune,” a sprawling survey of 500 years of European art, is that it is too big.

The best that can be said is that that is too bad. Everybody should see it.

“Everybody” in this case, refers to anybody who has never set foot in a museum before as well as those for whom the return of Giovanni Paolo Panini to the Wadsworth walls inspires a devotional pilgrimage. That’s because the pleasures of “Faith and Fortune” are multifarious. It is at once a magnificent primer on art before the modern age, and a sobering reminder of the diminishing role of sacred art, which has been supplanted by the ascendancy of the individual.

For that reason, a pithy sub-title for the exhibit might be “How fortune replaced faith as a manifestation of divine intervention.” Or perhaps, “How I got over my guilt over money and learned to love my dough.”

In the scope of 400 years, the individual has elbowed his way first into the artist canvas and, by the end of the 19^th century, conquered them. In the last gallery, filled with wall-to ceiling life-size portraits, the sitter needs little more than a single prop or icy stare to signify his own steely dominion — over his destiny and that of others.

The Wadsworth doesn’t explore this conquest, for obvious reasons. Instead, it sticks to it’s the art, a splendid assortment of paintings, sculptures and decorative objects, spanning centuries and countries for as rich an compendium of art works that one is likely to see in this state. All of them are drawn from the Wadsworth’s own collection, which should make them feel cheeky. Still, what is fascinating is how humility evolves into hubris. In the 15^th century, when Renaissance rediscovered antiquity and thus the power of the individual, sacred art made way for a new kind of art: genre paintings and landscapes, showing individual pleasures and naturalistic vistas. What’s intriguing is how artists convey the aristocracy in ways that aroughly mirror the way they treat sacred figures. Alessandro Allori’s “Portrait of a Noblewoman and her son,” presents the figures in their luxurious garments but their formalized faces reveal a humility and passivity that roughly mirrors the typical treatment of the Virgin Mary with the Baby Jesus. There are plenty of these in the exhibit, of course, but one of the most moving is the marvelous della Robbia Madonna and child with its blazing ivory white against a cerulean background. This is the type of ornament a middle-class Florentine would have in his home.

Fortunately, the exhibit is flush with eye-popping ornaments no ordinary person could conceivably own. There include pieces of porcelain so fine and delicate that they seem constructed out of some confectionary whim, as well as pieces of silver, including one garlanded silver centerpiece, animated with a center tier set piece of musicians playing as in a gazebo, that is worth the price of admission alone.

Viewers are first greeted with the indulgences of the 16^th and 17^th century – scientific knickknacks from the natural world. The Wadsworth has displayed precious curiosity cabinets, including one formidable ebony and ivory one, in which wealthy patricians would display everything from minerals, fossils, scientific instrument, to the jaws of enormous fish or skeletons of ghoulish sea creatures. These are the Renaissance equivalent of curio cabinets, except that instead of showcasing your fondness for, say Hummels, the Kunst-und Wunderkammer, as they were called, signified your degree of modernity, and therefore enlightenment.

There are so many of these stunning objects throughout the exhaustive exhibit that it’s tempting to wish curator Edward Zafran had relegated decorative objects to a separate room. But the further one goes into the rooms, the more canny the decision becomes. These objects, whether silver candlesticks or fancy new telescopes, not only were ostentatious; possession of these things begin to animate the canvases and the minds of the owners and artists. The Kunst-und Wunderkammer in particular sp

eak to the increasing primacy of empirical evidence, a tendency that begins in the 12^th century with Roger Bacon and continues with Francis Bacon in the 15^th.

The tension between these drives – the desire to know by rational, observable evidence and the inclination to know through faith are the warp and woof of the era. So, too, is the issue of wealth and how it reflects, or dilutes the its bearer’s faith. The Dutch, surprisingly, were among the worst to worry about the effects of too much wealth on burghers desperate for salvation. That may be because the Florentines spent so much of theirs on sacred art and the newly established Dutch Republic was Calvinist and dismissed religious art. But it may have been because the Dutch got so rich so fast.

A work like “Allegory of Worldly Riches,” 1600 captivates with its shimmering pieces of gold, silver goblets and ledger books – until one looks in the corner to see the wealthy owner selling his soul to some amphibious-looking devils. Lots of allegories of the fall of man animate Italian painting, but a Dutch master like Gerard Dou can make the point with such subtlety and sobriety in “Still Life with Ourglass (1647) a small horizontal work of an inkwell sitting on an artist drawing, while a the cinnamon grains from the auburn hourglass sift unremittingly in the corner. Art will stay, says Dou, and writing. But what of the rest of us?

By the 17^th century, not only Luther, but Calvin and others had begun to drain the authority of the Catholic Church, but Rome fought back, with vigorous artistic commissions that insisted on the duality of Jesus’ nature, focusing increasingly on his humanity. The Baroque art it engendered blazed through central Europe with an immediacy, grittiness and ferocious humanity. Leading the charge was Michelangelo da Caravagggio, an artist whose insistence on the earthy, crude, dirty, but ultimately divine spirit of man ushered in a new definition of beauty that continues to resonate today.

The Caravaggio the Wadsworth has here is one of the best, and to get an idea of how revolutionary it is, compare Caravaggio’s “Saint Francis,” (1595) to Francisco Ribalta’s “The Ecstacy of St. Francis: The Vision of the Musical Angel” (1620-25) nearby.

Ribalta’s saint is overstuffed and feathery; his ecstasy is crowded and frothy. Caravaggio’s is spare, bleak and and transcendent. His Saint Francis is all alone and we do not see what he sees; only the Angel, whose arms support the swooning Francis and whose gaze, so rich with compassion and patience, is as close to divinity as an artist could reasonably capture. This is a saint who is ordinary, and yet extraordinary, whose sees visions while we see only inky blankness.

Caravaggio was a murderer and a blackguard, but he painted like an angel. The Fra Angelico “Head of an Angel” on display is beautiful and exotic, but removed. Caravaggio bridged the gap between the sacred and secular, and his influence continued to dominate Europe for centuries. Francisco de Zurbaran’s “Saint Serapion,” in which the martyred saint is shown hanging by his wrists in a Christ-like pose, could not have been possible without Caravaggio. The treatment of the saint’s flopped head, his gnarled hands and the play of light and dark on his creamy linen robe, all suggests Caravaggio.

So, too, with the Dutch painter Michael Sweerts, who appropriates the dynamic interplay between light and dark, the inherent beauty in an ordinary boy, a reductive simplicity of composition- all of that is found on his canvases. So emotive and crepuscular is the Flemish painter’s “The Burial of the Dead,” part of his Seven Acts of Mercy series, that one would swear it was a Caravaggio. But the landscape is too articulated and the faces just slightly too obscure. It remains one of the most haunting works in the collection.

The convenience of dividing up these 400 paintings as Zafran has done allows visitors to pick and choose. Those are interested in Italian Renaissance art are able to make a bee-line to the lucidly painted, gruesome narrative of “The Feast of Herod,” by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Or the balletic grace of Lelio Orsi’s “Noli me Tangere,” whose weird colors and dramatic posing recall El Greco. Dutch masters, porcelain and still life is given its own gallery. For the English landscape enthusiasts, there is a swirling Turner seascape and a small but evocative John Constable. There is even a weird Joseph, Wright of Darby that seems right out of Fuesseli. And there is plenty of breathless, feathery confections of French art, largely from the rococo period that encouraged frivolity, lightheartedness and pleasure.

Increasingly, the spiritual is less literal and more suggestive. We’re aware that Louis Leopold Boilly’s “The Mockery,” a coy seduction scene, is as much titillating as it is cautionary. Neoclassicism replaces the mystic with the mythic, but, in the end, the point is very much the same. It is, all of it, gorgeous art work. Whether divinity is its object or humanity is, the beauty and power to move remain poignantly similar.

c. Republican-American