stumbling virtue

Gold Rush

 

The Golden Spike Ceremony, where the western railroad met the eastern line. No Chinese workers were allowed in the commemorative photo.

It's impossible to underestimate the way railroads changed the world. For thousands of years people had traveled the same way--by foot, on an animal, in a cart pulled by an animal and on the water. Transportation in 1800 A.D. was little different than transportation in 800 B.C. But when railroads and trains began to cross the lands of the world, everything changed--people and goods could be transported more quickly and in larger quantities than they had before. Routes that had been considered too long or impractical were now viable. People could get to each other more quickly, communication sped up with mail trains, and new material became available. Countries where cities were separated by vast swaths of empty land were now connected. As trains became more common, prices dropped, and people who had never been able to afford to travel before, even for day long holidays, suddenly could. Trains changed time; before them, if you were traveling to visit someone you would only be able to estimate how long it would take you to get there, with your speed depending on your horses, the weather, the condition of the roads during that season. Trains, though, ran on schedules. They left at specific times and arrived at exact times. Just as factories were getting people used to working by the clock rather than the sun, trains were speeding up lives and businesses. It was now possible to plan in a way like never before.

All of the above has been written many times before, and written much better than I have. But I never stop marvelling when I think about it. Imagine what it would have been like to have been born in the early 1800s and live into the 1880s or '90s. The world at the end of your life would have been barely recognizable from the one of your childhood. I like to think about these kinds of things.

This is a lengthy introduction to a very short book (and this will be an extremely short write up. Really. I swear this time). Richard Rayner's The Associates is not about the inventors of the locomotive, or the people who built the transcontinental railroad, or the people who rode it. It is about the group of four California businessmen who made the deals to have it built, making themselves millionaires in the process. With the exception of Leland Stanford (as in founder of the university), these men--Mark Hopkins, Charlie Crocker, and Collis Huntington--are rarely spoken of today, but you could make an argument for their being amongst the most important figures in 19th century American history (and surely some clever person would be able to argue that they are not). At the very least, you can say that Huntington has been sadly underrated as one of the supreme Robber Barons of the Gilded Age.

Kill the Messenger

Got the cast list for "Henry V" (or "Henry V Minutes" as my slashing edit of Shakespeare's script is known) today. I didn't get the part I wanted. What a surprise. Sigh. I got my second choice, which was a rather distant second choice. I am on Team France. Yes, the losers.

Bomb Scare

 

The LA Times building was bombed on October 2, 1910.

Today's news always claims to be the most important news ever. Witness how many events claim to be the trial of the century or the crime of the century (usually both). But it only takes the passing of a decade or a generation for something new to claim the title, leaving people to compare the latest horror to a past one: which is worse, a brutal cold-blooded killing of one prostitute or the brutal cold-blooded murder of a wife? A homegrown bomber that kills 1000 or a foreign invader that kills 2000? People who kill for fun or people who kill for money?

In 1910, with the century barely underway, the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building, which killed 21 employees of the newspaper, was called the crime of the century. It's not remembered that way, though, if it is remembered at all. Why it has fallen into the forgotten corners of history is made clear in Howard Blum's book American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, Movie-Making, and the Crime of the Century.

Honor

 

Okay, gentlemen, let's settle this.

If you feel that you've been insulted, how would you react? I'm guessing that you would not issue a formal challenge for one-on-one combat with the intention of fighting to the death.

Yes, I mean a good old-fashioned duel. The kind that used to be fought over the tiniest slighting insult to a man (or his wife, daughter, or lover). Seconds, walking ten paces and turning and firing. Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. That kind of thing.

For most of us, that's all we know about duels, what we've seen in movies, or briefly in a history book. It's been a long time since duels were considered a part of a gentlemen's personal code of honor (and you have to dig pretty deep in general to find gentlemen these days anyway), so we feel no connection to them.

James Landale, however, has a very personal connection to a duel, the last duel fought in Scotland in which a man was killed. After long hearing bits and pieces of the story from his family, he decided to find out what really happened. The result is his book, The Last Duel, which not only explains what happened on that long ago day between David Landale and George Morgan, but also gives a fascinating history of duelling.

The Art of Crime

  

Who's that?

If you've ever been to the Louvre, you've probably seen the way crowds gravitate to the Mona Lisa. This is no surprise--for many people, it's probably one of the few pieces of art they can recognize. They may not understand why it's so famous, but they know it's famous and they should see it. So the Louvre and the Mona Lisa become part of the checklist of European tourism--London = Buckingham Palace! Rome = The Coliseum! Athens = The Parthenon!--that people feel they must mark off so when they've returned from Paris and friends say, "Oh, well, of course you saw the Mona Lisa," they can say, "Yes, of course." 

But while they may have seen it, they may not have really looked at it, if that makes any sense. After all, the painting is in a boxy glass case, is under guard, and is railed off from the mass of people that swarm around it. With all that going on, it's easy for even the best-intentioned tourist to decide that a quick glance is enough to be able to answer that, "Oh, well, of course you saw the Mona Lisa" question. That's what happened to me.

Things weren't always this way, though--the Mona Lisa wasn't always the object of such affection; indeed, there were plenty of times when no one was looking at it, times where it received so little attention that when it disappeared one August morning in 1911, its absence wasn't noted for more than a day.

R.A. Scotti tells how this happened and how the famous picture was returned in Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa. It's an interesting story, but the telling leaves something to be desired.

Sigh. Did I just sound mean and cranky? I have said it again and again--I know how hard it is to write something and I feel terrible when I think a writer does a bad job. And I'm not saying this is a bad book--it's actually quite informative, and at barely more than two hundred pages, it's hardly a serious investment of time. But if you dive in, just make sure you have your overheated prose cringe armor on.

Imaginary Friends

The One Act festival opened this week, and the production of the play I wrote for it is remarkably good. I think the cast (which includes one of the best actors in the company) is better than the material. People seem to like it so far, which is nice to hear. This reviewer person said it was her favorite of the group. Now all we need are more reviewers to say that kind of thing.

Meanwhile, the revival of the play that died opens this week. It is going rockily, at least my part is; the rewrite of the script did me no favors. Sigh.

Lives of the Party

 

The Bright Young People having fun, 18th c. style.

(Warning: This is a remarkably scatterwitted and disorganized piece of writing.)

If you watch any movie from the late '20s and into the '30s, especially the Pre-Code ones, you'll see women of all social classes drinking, smoking, out on their own, working and partying with abandon (well, less so once the Depression hit, but they still tried). They have short hair and wear short dresses, if that--a favorite trick of the Pre-Code movies was to come up with any reason for young women to be changing their clothes. It's not hard to become an expert on Jazz Age lingerie.

But when I--or if you--look at these scenes in movies from 1928, or 1931, think about what these women, or more likely their mothers or older sisters, were doing and wearing ten years before. No one outside of some crazy artistic community would have cut her hair short. Ankle-length dresses were in fashion. A young woman who drank herself into a stupor at a party would have been shunned by society, not celebrated as the height of fun and fashion. For adults, say anyone who was born before 1905, it must have seemed like the world had gone wild, abandoning all the rules they were taught about polite society and decent behavior.

In the 1920s in Britain, the newspapers named the leaders of this new licentious behavior "the Bright Young People." Although they were a relatively small group, mostly made up of children of wealthy (and sometimes not so wealthy) peers, clever Oxford graduate, and a selection from the bohemian/artsy fringes, their exploits loomed large over the decade. The gossip columns, which had once included politely reported accounts of tea at Lady Upright's London flat and hunting parties, now described drunken theme parties--the White Party, the Bath and Bottle Party, the Mozart Party, the Impersonation Party--that ended at dawn; members of this set who could report from the scene became writers prized by the middle-class newspapers. Novels satirizing the Bright Young People launched the career of Evelyn Waugh and photos of their escapades provided Cecil Beaton with entree to Hollywood.

D.J. Taylor's appropriately named "Bright Young People" is a study of the leading clique of 1920s young Britain. Many parties are described, as well as much bad behavior. While Taylor does explore things like the reasons for this explosion of desperate hilarity, the main message of the book (at least to me) was that every generation has a group of young people who do crazy things that make the older generation shake their heads in disapproval. What makes the 1920s stand out, though, is the standard they established for the other groups of young fun-seekers that followed.

Reject

 

Liar. Liar. Liar.

And now, what has made me so miserable this week (don't get confused now, this is a different miserable from that miserable)? Well, it's been two years since I lost my beautiful dog Marigold, and I finally decided it was time to get another one. After all, many dogs need homes, and I can give a dog a nice home.

So I started looking at adoption sites and found one that looked just right for me. Moreover, I seemed to be just right for him--he'd been dropped off at the city shelter with a broken leg and broken jaw and had been through a lot. The rescue group had taken care of him medically, and although his leg is healed, he still hops around on three legs, but that's fine with me. Since he loves people and thrives on a lot of attention, the rescue group wanted to place him with someone who was able to be around him a lot. Enter me, who works at home and happens to enjoy giving dogs a lot of attention (let's be honest, it's not like I have anything or anyone else in my life). They arranged for me to visit the dog in his foster home and it was love at first sight. Everything seemed to be working out fine, until the rescue group started reviewing my application.

One Hundred Pages

 

Class picture.

I often worry that I am getting stupider as I get older. When I was a kid, I used to be able to sit down and read through a two or three hundred page book in an afternoon. Now, though, I often find myself struggling to make it through twenty or thirty pages as my mind wanders off to a million places. You could argue that I read more complicated books now and I have more things on my mind. You could say that. Or you could say that I'm not very clever.

Or you could say that sometimes a book is just not that interesting. Well, to me at least.

Once More Unto the Breach

 

Let's go to Agincourt!

I just finished doing an edit of "Henry V" for a September production. I cut it realllly far down; we'll probably end up adding things back in. I mostly cut things to highlight the theme "being king is hard." I read a lot of criticism of the play that focused on the idea that Henry isn't a great character--he just triumphs over and over. So I trimmed a lot to highlight the moments when he has to do unpleasant things, as in execute friends, for both major and minor offenses, and when he is shown in his own words or those of others to be a rather lonely figure. I also (and this may not go over well with others) cut a lot of the comic bits, mostly because they slowed things down and, to be honest, I don't think this is Shakespeare's best comic work. Anyway, we'll see how it goes. I can't wait to see which part I get. Probably Messenger #4.

Meanwhile, the show that died in May is being revived for the end of July, in a new posh theater. Things are looking good for that, so far. We actually have a stage manager, crew, and people who are doing marketing. Woo hoo. Professional and fancy, all of a sudden.