Down with Skool--up with Searle

I was rooting around The Telegraph looking for news on the body found at Sandringham, when I came upon the very sad news of the death of Ronald Searle last Friday. The utterly brilliant cartoonist and illustrator was 91.

Searle had a wicked sharp artistic style, evident in all of his works; his wit was as sharp as his pen. In the inimitable British phrase, the guy could take the piss out of anyone and anything. As a teenager I became acquainted with his cartoons in Punch, and also his illustrations in the books on Nigel Molesworth. Down with Skool! is a classic, and I own How to Be Topp.

In case you are unfamiliar with him, Molesworth is not a recommendation for any education system. Searle seriously took the piss out of British schools in this series and the one on St. Trinian’s, a perfect horror of a girls’ school.

His title designs for the 1970 film Scrooge are gorgeous—as I was reminded when TCM ran the movie last month. The title sequence outstrips the live action in both evocative power and artistry. (I won’t speak of the musical score.) If you come across it, run through the titles and forget the rest of it.

And then, about 15 years ago, I went to the Imperial War Museum and saw his drawings of life in Japanese POW camps, where he spent three years in his early 20s. He had to sneak his sketches, because the Japanese didn’t allow any sort of documentation of the camps, and because the British officers took offense at them.

The drawings are searing, as well they should be.

That he lived so many years after that experience is a testament to the lessons he learned there—that when all your friends die around you, also in their 20s, every day is a gift.

 

Or maybe it’s that he spent the last 40 years of his life in France. The Guardian has a reminiscence by fellow cartoonist Gerald Scarfe of the friendship he formed with Searle. The established artist was generous with his attention and encouragement of younger illustrators.

And it seems that Searle just loved champagne and cats.

Really--we're all poorer for his loss; but I celebrate the wit and whimsy he brought to us.

2011: The end is near

I can’t let 2011 get away without Dave Barry’s annual Year in Review. He has the knack of putting everything into perspective.

“Zombies on crack”, “rat mucus” and “hyperpartisan gasbaggery”. Yep—that pretty much sums it up.

And even though 2012 is a presidential election year and thus by definition starts out in the hole, I hope it’s a happy and healthy one for you.

11.11.11 In service

Living in the Valley they call Silicon, which is at some distance from any military installation, there’s nothing here except department and furniture store sales to remind one of Veterans Day. Without a big federal workforce, the traffic won’t even be lighter than usual.

But I’m still thinking of the men and women who do the dirty and dangerous and dreary jobs that encompass providing for the common defense. Those in the service.

I often wonder how it is they stick it out, because in general we (through our elected officials) underpay them, begrudge them healthcare, welsh on financial commitments wherever possible and pretend we know nothing about them at all.

Except today, when the pols will be waving flags and declaiming their undying gratitude And blah, blah, blah, because it’s a sound-bite photo-op. Tomorrow they’ll go back to fundraising and obfuscating and relishing their self-importance.

The rest of us—unless we know someone in the armed forces—probably won’t think much of it at all. Especially if we’re in urban areas and don’t see the uniforms.

But they’ll feel it in the small towns, where any loss is marked and remembered. For the day, let me give you the funeral procession of Specialist James M. Kiehl, of Comfort, Tex., who was KIA in Iraq in 2003, age 23.

Kiehl made the ultimate sacrifice, along with, well, untold hundreds of thousands over the years. And you should think of him and those others.

But also spare some thoughts for those who wore the uniform and bore arms in our behalf. It’s called “service” for a reason.

Christmas in October

Ugh—it’s 1744 on Halloween & I’ve just seen my first Christmas TV commercial.

No, not for a salad shooter, so not completely official. But it was a Chex Mix with red & green bits, & had that dingy-dongy “Carol of the Bells” music in the background.

Seriously, Netanyahu?

You don’t think this is going to come back to bite you in the butt? 1027 times?

Terrible beauty

Nine-eleven. Two numbers in sequence that have to be more instantly recognizable and carry more emotional weight than any other numerical combination in history.


That was the day where we saw the worst and the best of humanity.

I wasn’t going to write anything about the tenth anniversary of the attacks. I pretty much revisited the pain when the SEALs took down Bin Laden.

As it is, I can’t watch any of the glut of television programs dedicated to it that have been running for the past week. I can barely make it thru the radio pieces on NPR. This one in particular got to me.

It seems I drive around in tears a lot these days. And I’m looking for some kind of solace.

SF Opera is premiering “Heart of a Soldier”, about Rick Rescorla, the head of security for Morgan Stanley. Through his prescience, preparedness and perseverance, all the staff in his charge escaped. The medium of opera is appropriate because Rescorla literally sang his charges down the stairs of the South Tower.

You can watch the History Channel docu on him here. Be prepared to cry.

But I also commend to you a video put together by the husband of one of my fellow sopranos in the old, pre-9/11 choir at Saint Anne’s in Reston.

Nine-eleven. That was the day all changed, changed utterly. I know I did.

The earth moved visibly

As follow-up to the Big One in the Washington-Richmond corridor, I give you some photos of the damage sustained during the earthquake.

Warning: photos may be disturbing.

Or not.

The earth moved

For my friends on the East Coast, especially D.C., skreeky feeling, isn’t it?

Doesn’t seem fair that you should get both hurricanes &earthquakes. But then you have all those Congressmorons overturning the laws of nature, so perhaps not surprising.

The native criminal class

As we celebrate the 235^th anniversary of driving the independence stake into the ground, with the issues of nearly ten years of two wars, the economy in a morass & a world to which we’re supposed to be the shining beacon of democratic hope, here’s what our national legislative branch is doing: squabbling about whether or not to pass bills that have no redeeming social value whatsoever.

I want to be positive—I do. With all our problems we are an amazing experiment in the belief that people of good will can in fact come together to create and live by reasonable laws, & thrive in the process. I come from the generation that really believed in that & it hurts me to feel the hollowness of that hope.

But I swear—every year our Congressmorons become more venal & petty than I’d thought humanly possible. Every year they bear out the truth of Mark Twain’s comment that they possess “…the smallest minds & the selfishest souls & the cowardliest hearts that God makes.”

I so want the nation to rise up & bury them in this message: grow the hell up. But they'd just find a way to misrepresent it.

O frabjous day!

The first of July carries a lot of significance. It’s the 144^th Canada Day—celebrating nationhood for our neighbors to the north. Hurrah for the Canadians, eh?

It’s also marks the 95^th anniversary of first day of the Somme—the monstrous battle that cost the attacking British 60,000 casualties before sundown. And it’s been 148 years since the battle of Gettysburg opened.

George Sand was born on 1^st July in 1804, which Frédéric Chopin probably appreciated a whole lot.

But what makes today—1 July 2011—absolutely the finest kind day of this or many another year is that my BFF’s tumor markers have been so good for so long that this is her final chemotherapy treatment.

This is marvelous—not only because she’s doing so well against the cancer, but because it means an end to the god-awful nausea she’s been suffering for more than six months.

Champagne glasses at the ready, people: this is the best possible reason to celebrate the day.

Gay girls in Damascus & elsewhere

It’s a wild, weird web out there; as if we didn’t already know.

As of this writing, two very high-profile web celebs, apparently viewed as spokeswomen for their constituency—lesbians—were, um, exposed as being men.

It seems that Gay Girl in Damascus is neither gay, female nor Syrian. He’s a middle-aged American man living in Edinburgh who thought that he’d be somehow more authentic if he gave himself the persona of Armina Araf for blogging purposes. He used the photograph of a friend for his dating site—without her knowledge—to enhance his credibility.

And Paula Brooks, editor of the lesbian news site LezGetReal, is in fact a 58-year-old construction worker retired from the Air Force. He used his wife’s name as nom de blog.

Both Tom MacMaster (AKA Gay Girl in Damascus) and Bill Graber (AKA Paula Brooks) have professed themselves shocked and chagrinned at the consternation that their fabrications have caused. Because they didn’t mean to deceive anyone, really. They just…enhanced their real personalities by creating online personas that were the antithesis of their sad, middle-aged white guy lives.

MacMaster’s hoax has had serious real-life repercussions, as when he let it be known that Armina was taken up in the Assad government’s repressive measures. Real people were risking real harm to themselves attempting to find out what had happened to Armina. MacMaster insists he meant no harm, though, so that’s alright.

Leaving aside the basically pathetic idea of 40- and 50-something men developing elaborate anything-but-me “lives” to present to the world in a format where they’re unlikely to actually, you know, meet anyone—it is, after all, only an extension of claiming the house you have for sale has 1500sf (which would be counting the garage, patio and front porch) or that you’re a 38-year-old stockbroker who keeps in shape by running marathons (when you’re 46, unemployed and can barely waddle to the doughnut shop)—I find it interesting that they have to go to the utter extremes of fakery to support their net-cred. 

Did they think it would be easier to establish bona fides by representing themselves to be experts in lifestyles, issues and geographies completely alien to them, rather than pretending to be chess masters or breeders of thoroughbreds or organic chemists working on genetically engineered radishes? They couldn't just say they collect Bordeaux futures? They had to be experts on the lesbian lifestyle?


No, faking chess mastery, horse sense or agronomy would take some sort of, you know, knowledge. But apparently pretending to be a person of a different gender, with a different sexual orientation, in a different continent--well, anyone can do that convincingly. 

They’re astonished that their deceit blew up on them. I’m astonished that they thought completely fabrication was their only road to authenticity.

Well, as Jean Giraudoux said: Sincerity is everything; once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

Cringeworthy, no matter how you look at it

I’m not sure, but I think this may count as child abuse.

Alternatively, if you’re the parent of kid or kids in their teen years, it might just be payback.

Frankly, I’m thinking that Dale Price has more time on his hands than is perhaps good for him.

Coffee calling

It was a big weekend for the caffeinated crowd.

First, there was the World Barista Championship, held in Bogotá, Colombia.

It’s not entirely clear to me what the criteria are for determining the top barista—technique, choice of coffee, output? Or exactly what the process is for getting to the competition. But Alejandro Mendez of El Salvador went home with the nifty espresso machine, so, mazel tov, Alejandro.

Meanwhile, back in the US, the Coffee Fest Latte Art Championship was going on in San Diego. You can get more info by listening to the California Report interview & watching the videos that demonstrate some of the results.

Now, I don’t know from the blueberry and tamarind crap they were talking about at the Barista Championship, but I do rather like the latte art. Watching the baristas doing their thing is fascinating, too. Looks like magic to me.

The first time I came across latte art was at the coffee bar in Harrods Food Hall. I used to go there about once every six weeks or so on a Saturday. The coffee bar is elevated over one of the gigantic rooms; you have a view of a lot of humanity buying everything from meat pies to fine chocolates. It’s overpriced, as is everything at Harrods, but actually not bad value when you factor in the people watching and breath-catching elements.

And their lattes come complete with art demonstrated at the San Diego show; I used to get a heart, which always made me smile.

To appreciate latte art, you have to have it in a wide cup, sitting down. Slurping from a paper container on your way to the soccer match just doesn’t cut it.

You knew the job was dangerous when you took it

The E. coli outbreak in Europe is serious business—a food-borne illness that so far has struck down 1150 people and killed more than 15. And apparently the spinning wheel of blame has stopped with the pointer aimed at cucumbers from Spain.

Spaniards, however, are having none of it. They’re demanding to know what makes their agriculture methods culpable when who knows what those vegetables picked up in transit between Spain and Northern Europe.

Now what I find really intriguing is the image of the Andalucian minister of agriculture defiantly eating a cucumber to demonstrate her confidence in the complete healthfulness of the veg. (I’m not even going to touch the Freudian possibilities in this image.)

This is so reminiscent of the 1990 photo of Tory agriculture minister John Gummer cheerfully chowing down on a British beef hamburger to prove that the whole Mad Cow thing was just a load of old cobbers.

You’ll notice, however, that Gummer got his four-year-old daughter into the act: he’s holding a burger for her to eat because her hands are too small to grasp it on her own. Both give the appearance that there’s nothing they’d rather eat than these sandwiches, because there’s nothing—absolutely nothing, I say—questionable, much less lethal, about British beef, so everyone should tuck in.

What I always wondered was how many armed guards it took to keep Gummer’s wife from ripping that burger out of her daughter’s hand and ramming it up her husband’s nose, all the while screaming imprecations at him for putting the girl at risk for a bloody photo op? Because there’s no mother in the universe who would put her child in harm’s way for the sake of a political statement.

The Spanish minister, of course, is only risking her own health, and it’s her job to do whatever she can to promote the image of Spanish agriculture, which has taken a severe beating in the wake of the E. coli outbreak. But I’m wondering if she’s feeling any little twinges in her tummy.

Memorial Day 2011

On this Memorial Day I’m remembering the victims of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Given the capture last week of Ratko Mladic, commander of Bosnian Serb forces during that time, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Croats, Bosnians, Kosovans, Slovenes and others whom Mladic and his crowd tortured, raped and murdered in their quest to build a greater Serbia.

Not a particular surprise: Mladic has denied any role in the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995, according to his son. And, also unsurprisingly, supporters of Mladic rioted in Belgrade Sunday, outraged at his apprehension and also proclaiming he did nothing criminal.

Were there no other reason to remember the victims of the late 20^th Century Balkan wars, these grotesque denials would make it obligatory. Do a Google Image search on Srebrenica and look at the results, if you have the stomach. This is just one.

Then there’s the siege of Sarajevo. And Kosovo. And all the others.

General Michael Rose led the UN forces there and I well recall seeing his face the day he turned over his command. He looked ill, pain emanating from his eyes—like like he’d just got back from Hell and wasn’t convinced it wasn’t coming with him. The UN “peacekeeping” mission there was nearly useless in the face of political restrictions and Serbian willingness to violate any convention of warfare.

I own Fighting for Peace, Rose’s account of that mission; but I haven’t had the strength to pick it up and read it. I know it’s going to be hard for even me to get through.

(Ditto General Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil. Dallaire’s mission in Rwanda in the 90s was remarkably like that of Rose’s. But Rwanda is another post.)

As you go about your Monday holiday, thinking about the official start of summer, painting the garage or perhaps even decorating the grave of a loved one, have a care for those whose lives were ended or ruined by the Serb wars. And hope for justice yet.

Missing Liane

After 20 years at the helm of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, Liane Hansen is hanging up the microphone. Today is her last show.

I don’t know what I’m going to do—she’s become an integral part of my Sunday mornings, the way Susan Stamberg was before her. She’s broken plenty of big stories on her show, but what has endeared her to me is her unalloyed interest in the stories and people she has covered. That is a reflection of her character, her talent and her professionalism.

Here’s an NPR olio of Hansen’s work—listen to one or two of the early stories and then to the most recent. You can hear how she’s matured in the timbre of her voice. She sounds like a beautiful cello—warm and with a dynamic range that’s really impressive.

Her replacement, Audie Cornish, has been a stand-in for Hansen in the past year. Whenever Cornish was on the air I couldn’t wait for Hansen to return. I’ll have to get used to her; and in the spirit of Hansen’s willingness to delve into new things, I’ll give it my best shot.

But Liane—I miss you already.

Another criminal

One of the biggest war criminals of the second half of the 20^th Century has been caught—after only 16 years of hiding out in his native Serbia. Ratko Mladic has been arrested by Serb forces & is being held pending extradition to the UN tribunal at The Hague, where his political master, Radovan Karadzic, is currently defending charges of crimes against humanity.

Mladic, a Bosnian Serb, is evidently in very poor health & is probably looking forward to the medical care he’ll get while awaiting trial—care he wouldn’t have had access to in his village hideout.

Mladic was the commander of Serb forces that invaded Bosnia in the 90s following the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Working with Karadzic he crafted & executed a policy that brought us the term “ethnic cleansing”; their goal was to eradicate any non-Serbs in territory the Serbs deemed Serbian. Kind of like a south Slav version of lebensraum. The massacre at Srebrenica was only the largest & most appalling of their crimes.

It was a policy that the entire nation carried out with vigor & relish. In many quarters both Mladic & Karadzic are still considered Serbian heroes, unfairly & falsely vilified by a world that doesn’t understand the rightful place of Serbs & their destiny as a people.

That attitude partly explains why it’s taken so bloody long to take Mladic into custody; the Serbian government didn’t really put a whole lot of effort into the search. Like the Pakistanis being shocked—shocked, I say—to discover Osama Bin Laden living in their midst for years & years, I have no doubt that the Serbs & their government have been well aware of the criminals among them & were just disinclined to grab them up.

It’s only because they want to join the EU, & failing to turn over Mladic is an insurmountable barrier to that goal, that they’ve suddenly discovered where he’s been.

In many ways, the Serbs are like the Germans of 1944-45: they don’t believe they or their government did anything wrong in their quest to subsume formerly Yugoslavian territory into their idea of empire. They’re not at all sorry they went to war; they’re sorry they weren’t successful & they’re sullen that there’ve been some negative consequences.

I’m glad they’ve finally caught the bastard & that he’ll be in the dock in The Hague. Too often it’s only the little fish that are brought to justice. Mladic is a whacking great shark, even if his teeth are rotting & he’s utterly unrepentant, & he should be brought to justice, regardless of the delay.

Un-raptured

Something occurred to me over the weekend that 200 million people weren’t subsumed into heaven (at least that I know about): Harold Camping has twice predicted the end of days based on his mathematical calculations. And he’s two for two.

But he was trained and practiced as a civil engineer for many years. Shouldn’t someone be rechecking his jobs to make sure he didn’t miscalculate any compressive tension estimates on bridges or buildings? Or shouldn’t we at least be told what construction projects he worked on so we can avoid them?

Rapture wrap-up

Well, it’s looking bad for the Rapture predicted for today. I mean—only 0830 PDT and that’s not quite ten hours from local H-Hour, as specified by the now universally ridiculed Harold Camping. But I’m combing the media and not finding that New Zealand has been knocked off its pins by the earthquake that was to have triggered the global Judgment Day.

You may be thinking, “Harold, ju got some essplainin’ to doo,” around this time. But he’s gone through this before (1994) and like all the best practitioners of the art of propaganda (political, religious, commercial, whatever) he didn’t miss a beat, didn’t apologize, didn’t justify; just moved on to the next prediction. That was scheduling the Rapture for 21 May 2011 at 1800. So stay tuned for his next prophesy.

And he found an audience. A small serious one as well as the vast legions of scoffers and even entrepreneurs (e.g., the service that, for a pre-paid fee—will care for pets left behind when their humans were sucked up to Heaven). God bless America.

Dunno what the believers are going to do when 1801 passes them by and they find themselves in much the same condition as they were at 1759. But the ridiculers and the simply dumbfounded will be partying all weekend.

So come Monday, I think employers should be a little understanding when their staff comes to work in somewhat bedraggled condition—either from overindulgence or disappointment.

But on a similar note, all the Bay Area public radio stations—from KQED down to the ones that have about 52 watts of broadcast power out of Oakland or Campbell—have ended their concurrent spring fundraising drives. So it’s feeling a lot more like heaven on this part of the earth.

Rapture rap

This may have escaped your notice—it certainly did mine—but it seems that the End of Times begins tomorrow at 1800 in whatever time zone you’re in. Apparently it’s a rolling doom.

According to Harold Camping, a civil engineer who started a broadcast ministry and thus is eminently qualified to pontificate on matters theological and moral, 21 May 2011 is Der Tag. Those who are saved (not entirely sure of the definition, but it seems limited to Camping’s followers and presumably some other categories of mostly evangelical Christians) will be sucked up into heaven. Everyone else will—well, again I’m not clear on the specifics, but obviously the good times will no longer roll.

The world won’t end, though—that’ll happen six months hence, on 21 October.

Look—I’m not making this stuff up, I’m just reporting it.

Of course, predicting the end-of-the-world/second-coming is a bit of a cottage industry. So far the predictors have, well, got it wrong. Every time. Time after time.

And this includes Camping. He last predicted that Judgment Day would occur in 1994. Evidently his direct pipeline to the Almighty was clogged with some sewage, but he swears he’s got it right this time.

I’m a bit confused as to the 1800 timestamp, though. I mean—God is eternal, right? What does a particular hour matter to him/her? Days, years—those are human structures; arbitrary ones, when it comes down to it. Could God be arbitrary?

And why the staggered implementation? We’re not talking about introducing a new app—first iPhone, then Droid, then Blackberry. Why not instantaneous for all the world?

And how come the Kiwis get to be the vanguard? We in California have to wait something like 17 hours after it starts in New Zealand. Maybe God’s taking the godliest first? From 2300 tonight we have to stand around and…well, I don’t know what we’re supposed to do…while pretty much the rest of the world gets the best seats in the heavenly stadium?

There don’t seem to be any guidelines as to what the non-enraptured are supposed to do. No mention of rending of clothes or gnashing of teeth. Naturally there are plans for parties—a lot of folks ready to celebrate regardless whether it’s the end of the world or a really, really big egg in the face for Camping.

Well—I think it’s at least worth a glass of bubbly.