This Day In History: Tuesday October 5

A FEW HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE LAST 60 YEARS 

Here are some October 5 events that have occurred since since my youngest brother was born in October 1960

2011
American businessman Steve Jobs, a pioneer of the personal computer era who cofounded Apple and transformed it into one of the world's most successful companies, died at age 56. In fact, at this point in time Apple is #1 in revenue and has a market cap of 2.3 trillion dollars, which makes it the largest company in the world.

A Review of Walter Isaacson's Book on Steve Jobs

Tech Tuesday: Lessons for Leaders from Brent Schlender's Becoming Steve Jobs

1970
On this day PBS aired its first broadcast on American television. Notable programs included Sesame Street and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. If you've not seen the film with Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers, you should check it out. 

It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

1969
On this day in 1969 Monty Python's Flying Circus debuted on the BBC. That same year, astronauts on the moon took one small step for man while Monty Python took a giant leap for comedy.  

1962
The Bond Franchise Begins

Daniel Craig: A more serious Bond.

Hard to believe we're nearing 60 years of James Bond on the silver screen. I doubt that anyone could have imagined that the release of Dr. No on this day in 1962 would launch a nearly endless revenue stream for the Bond franchise. In addition to endless debates over who was the Best Bond, there are probably trivia games in which people identify the which actors played Bond in the various films, as well as who played the various villains and "Bond girls." Of course it all began with Sean Connery, who is still voted #1 by many Bond fans. 

It was probably no accident that No Time To Die, the latest Bond film, was released this past weekend, Daniel Craig reprising the role. That first chase scene in Casino Royale created a lot of enthusiasm for Craig as Bond. In recent interviews he's stated that he's hung up his spurs and is finished with the role. 

It's hard to imagine that the budget for Dr No was barely a million dollars. The budget for No Time To Die exceeded a quarter of a billion dollars. 

Here are a couple blog posts from a decade ago along these same lines. 

Daniel Craig, License To Kill

Devil May Care, a new Bond novel released on the 100th anniversary of Ian Fleming's birthday. (A review.)

LAST BUT NOT LEAST

1962
ON THIS DAY, the very same day as the release of Dr. No, The Beatles released their first single in the UK "Love Me Do" which reaches number seventeen on the British charts. When later released in the US in April 1964 it climbed to Number 1. 

Daniel Craig painting by the author. 18"x 24", latex, acrylic on panel.

Spielberg's The Terminal Pushes All the Right Buttons

This week I watched The Terminal again for the first time in perhaps 10 or 12 years. Funny thing is, although I remembered the story line I could not recall the reason our hapless hero Viktor Navorski came to the U.S. in the first place. Nor did I recall that this was a Steven Spielberg film, one of several that the masterful director has made with Tom Hanks.

The storyline is this. Viktor Navorski (Hanks) has flown into the United States from his homeland Krakozhia, a small country in Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, there has been a coup during his flight and the new regime has not yet been recognized by our State Department so that his temporary visa is rejected. On the other hand, he is not able to fly home because his return is similarly blocked. In short, he's stuck between a rock and a hard place. He has nowhere to go. 

Adding to his problems is Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci, The Devil Wears Prada) who refuses to bend any rules to help resolve Navorski's complicated tangled mess. A bureaucrat gatekeeper more concerned with appearances than realities. 

The film has all the elements of good entertainment. Conflict, comedy, characters with definite aims, all thrown into a series of stalemate situations. 

Hanks began his career with a number of humorous roles, and after films like Castaway, Apollo 13, Captain Philips, Saving Private Ryan, Sully and Philadelphia one could forget that he's pretty good as a comic. The film opens with Navorski being unable to communicate effectively with Dixon who is clearly clueless about the degree of their communication gap. Hanks plays it a little over-the-top, which is probably just the right touch, letting us know up front it's not a serious drama. 

Audiences may not realize how familiar Hanks is with the heavy accent he struggles to express himself with. In real life, Hanks' father-in-law is Bulgarian, and in one scene late in the film he's talking Bulgatian and not just babbling,

I remember wondering if this were based on a true story and was both surprised and not surprised to learn that an incident like this has happened in real life. The film was purportedly inspired by the story of an Iranian refugee who arrived at Charles De Gaulle Airport near Paris but was unable to gain entry to France after his papers were stolen. What's a fellow to do?

So Navorski makes the airport his home. (I was curious if the name Viktor Navorski was inspired by Bronko Nagurski, the football star, a name that always struck me a cool.)

I remember bringing my dad to JFK Airport when I was younger. What I remember most was being struck by how tall those international passenger jets were.  

For the film, Spielberg & company built an entire airport set, including all the restaurants in the food court. The Hudson Books would be recognizable to any frequent business flyer over the past 30 years.  I'm curious what they do with these massive sets after they're filmed? One would imagine they're recycled somehow. Any ideas?

Some of the humor is subtle. Navorski is unable to leave the airport, but in one scene he's in the Borders Book Store reading Dr. Seuss' Oh the Places You'll Go.

Right from the opening scene there's that unusual attention to detail in the camera angles, titles and method of conveying information. It's part of the Spielberg DNA.  

One of the features of the story is how many character storylines are developed. Each is well defined, each has more to his or her story than what we see initially. Like Hanks, each has a personal quest.

Another feature of the film which I either hadn't picked up on before or forgot was this notion of waiting. Everyone is waiting for something. I think of the Kinks' "So tired, tired of waiting..." Patience is a virtue, and waiting is the test that tries our patience more than anything.

The romance elements bring another layer into the film. Catherine Zeta-Jones is a stewardess who flies all over the world, and at first she doesn't realize that Hanks actually "lives" at the airport. You know how it is when you run into people you know at airports. If you travel a lot it happens and they are always on their way to somewhere else. And yes, it is another kind of waiting that Hanks must do, ever waiting to see her again.

There were some mixed reviews of the film on imdb.com. Because it was Spielberg and Hanks, one reviewer said, "I've come to expect more." Well, it worked for me. Even Graham Greene wrote some novels that called "entertainments." Not everything has to strive to change the world. If you haven't see it, it's fun.

Flashback Friday: Remembering Private Ryan

SIX YEARS AGO TODAY

They say the book of Job is the oldest book in the Bible. Whatever your take on this piece of literature, whether divinely inspired or one man's remarkable effort to make sense of the universe, this book about the sufferings of Job is an incredible achievement.

The first chapter sets it up. Picture a theater with a lower stage and an upper stage. Job, his family and friends live in the lower stage. Theater goers see that God resides in the upper stage, but Job is unaware of what is going on there, a transaction between God and Satan. 

The story moves to the lower stage and we see Job smitten, but he remains faithful to God.

The next scene is back at the upper stage and we see Satan asking for permission to cause yet more suffering. Satan says, in essence, to God, "Job loves you because everything is going his way. God, you turn off the faucet of blessing and you will see Job turn his back on you because the core of this man is like all men. People are fair weather friends. People are basically selfish."

Once again even greater tragedy and suffering befall this man, with the result that he is destitute, covered with sores, sitting on a dung heap. All this occurs at the very beginning of this remarkable story. In literary lingo it would be called the setup.

There is a sense in which Steven Spielberg's potent war drama Saving Private Ryan becomes art by becoming metaphorical in the arc of its storyline. My poem Private Ryan will have no meaning without seeing the film or having a basic understanding of the story, so I will attempt to briefly summarize.

SPOILER ALERT

The context for the film is D-Day, the Normandy beachhead, and its aftermath. Tom Hanks is Captain John Miller, a soldier who leads his platoon into the bloodbath chaos that is war. Rated R for "intense prolonged realistically graphic sequences of war violence" is an understatement. One difference between the realistically graphic landing and real life is that in twenty minutes the film version of the Normandy landing was completed. 

Meanwhile back in Washington another scene is taking place. It is learned that a mother with four sons in the service has lost three of her boys. The fourth is somewhere in France. After the beachhead has been secured, and long before the war is over, Capt. John H. Miller is handed a new mission. He must find Private James Francis Ryan and bring him home. Like the story of Job, this is the setup. The rest of the film is about the challenges of completing the mission.

It's a costly mission, and in the end Capt. Miller is forced to sacrifice his life to save the young private. He knew what he had to do, and he did it, but he also wanted Private Ryan to understand the importance of his actions. His last words to Pvt. James F. Ryan were these: "Earn this."
 

Private Ryan

He understood the burden for
He carried it all his life.
A man had died to save him,
And for what?
He was nothing but a man.

One day he returned to France
To thank the man who died;
He wept, wept deep and deeper still,
His family by his side.
“Did I live a life that was worthy
Of what you did for me?”

As the wind swept through the gravestones,
No voice was ever heard;
The universe was silent…
It never said a word
And the bones where Ryan knelt that day
Were silent ‘neath the sod.

But Ryan knew what happened
On the day his life was spared.
A man had given his life for him
And he knew to make it count
He’d have to sacrifice his own,
Give back the same amount.

e. 
July 2012

Dan Hansen's Dream Nightmare

This morning I was thinking how often I write "I find it interesting that...." I half thought it might be interesting to roll up a batch of my favorite blog entries and assemble them into a book of observations called, "I Find It Interesting."

This morning I saw the following dream that my friend Dan posted on Facebook and thought it so rich in detail and cognitive meddling that it seemed deserving of a wider audience. I myself used to keep a dream diary when I was growing up, from seventh grade till I went to college. Even though I broke off from the practice, I still occasionally recorded these nocturnal diversions and twenty years ago placed a few of them on my original website at ennyman.com.

Here's Dan's unusually distinctive dream:

My powerchair had a loner control box recently installed due to a malfunction of the old one. Kaleb Anderson had emotionally blackmailed me into going to some sort of social entanglement that was "for my benefit." Of course I knew what that meant. It was backhanded Kabe-speak for "I want you there to make myself look better as I yammer on in agreeable platitudes to exotic cultivated women you'll never talk to." I knew this was going to be a sticky tar pit and I might not get out alive. But as always, just to shut him up for 5 minutes was worth risking ego death.

We exit the accessible taxi cab and entered some sort of cultural center. It was a cross between The Louvre with brown ochre carpeting and a shopping mall for David Bowie fans wearing comfortable sweaters. There were no stairs in this place, which I'm sure made everyone sparkle with diversity awareness. However instead of stairs it was an MC Escher maze-work of very steep ramps. Supposedly all these various intriguing events were taking place, of which I saw no signs of. Yet that was never really the point was it? What there was ample supply of were groups of bundled subcultures mingling within one another. They all seemed to communicate in a subdued officially uncodified syntax of auto-positive. This was coupled with steely exclusiveness in their eyes.... as if they had daddy's car keys and no-one was going to take them away. What terrified me the most were the numerous disabled people there with that same unspoken exclusiveness in their gaze. It was unclear if I were behind enemy lines or I was the enemy in friendly territory.

Immediately Kabe disappeared. (I knew exactly what he was up to.) This both relieved me in not having to witness his industrial motor-mouthed machinations, but it also provided that all too familiar hopelessness of being stranded like Tom Hanks in 'Caste Away'. I had no choice but to figure out the ramps of treachery to escape the unsettling eye gaze maze. So I tried going down a steep ramp on my own. This resulted in my wheels skid-sliding down the carpet uncontrollably, ending with my control box smashed and damaged on a hand rail. I was trying to ask for help but I wasn't able to describe the help I needed because the damn control box that had been replaced earlier had buttons and settings written in French.

Just when I thought the horror could not be out-climaxed I noticed my catheter bag flopped out on the floor. It was the size of a giant parachute laying flat and limp oozing urine all over the cultural center. People began screaming and fleeing in terror, some were frozen like petrified deer, others were angry at me like I was a terrorist who just murdered their chances of sex that night. I was getting yelled at and I snapped back, "Fine, I'll be your effing Villain!" At that point I had a nervous breakdown. My control box started shape-shifting into various console game controllers and 80's toys such as "Simon Says". I yelled out, "Can you see that?? It's CHANGING! Do you think I'm crazy?" I heard a couple female voices say, "I see it." Mostly I heard men yelling out, "Yeah, he's crazy." That's when I blacked out from system overload.

When I came to I was surrounded by lab coats and mental health specialists trying to "normalize me" Clockwork Orange style.

The End.

* * * *
I found it especially interesting how Dan wrote the title of the Tom Hanks film as Caste Away, instead of the actual Castaway. People with disabilities are treated as a separate caste in our society, and in many cultures are indeed castaways.

Thank you, Dan, for granting permission to share this dream story with a wider audience. 

Air

Swiss Miss

In the fall of 1970 I was introduced to the music of the Incredible String Band, unaware that they had been introduced to U.S. audiences by virtue of their appearance at Woodstock the year before. The simple character of their songs expressed a joyful celebration of life and seemed to express that awe-attitude with which children first see the world, unfettered by social games and pre-conceived expectations.

Every now and then this song from their album Wee Tam returns to me in its entirety.

Air

Breathing, all creatures are

Brighter then than brightest star

You are by far

You come right inside of me

Close as you can be

You kiss my blood and the blood kiss me

It's a wonder how the air we breathe goes right inside of us, not simply into our lungs, but all the way into our very beings. The wonderful, incredible way in which oxygen is carried by the blood stream and its tributaries and capillaries to nourish and cleanse every cell in our bodies is a wonder of creation.

Breathing is something we usually take for granted. But until our last breath, it’s the ongoing miracle that sustains us.

At the end of a busy day we can sometimes collapse in our beds so weary and spent we have no energy left for anything, even reading. Yet we go on breathing, replenishing our cells, sustaining our bodies with vital air.

I am reminded of the instructions Tom Hanks gave himself in the film Castaway. “Just keep breathing.”

And I am likewise reminded of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, a book whose opening chapter was initiated by visits to a sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps while his wife was suffering from lung issues. The thin air at high altitudes was likely more accessible to lungs whose passages have been swollen or constricted by asthma or tuberculosis. In other words, breathing is something most of us take for granted, but many can not.

Air is something real that we all believe in yet seldom see. That, I find, is a fascinating concept.

Whatever else you're doing today, please keep breathing