Category Archives: Arts & culture

Stupid alter ego Dan likes the cold rainy gray weather (when it’s gray he doesn’t have to put on sun screen), but rain just makes Mr. Crankypants even more cranky than usual. That means it’s time to tell wedding photographers about what they may and may not do during weddings.

Here are eight rules for wedding photographers to memorize:

1. Wear clothes that look respectable but do not stand out. Black is good. Blue-and-white checked shirts are not acceptable. Jeans are totally unacceptable. It doesn’t matter if you feel more comfortable wearing jeans, because this is not about your comfort — you’re getting paid to do this.

2. Once the ceremony starts, no flash photography. When you aim your flash directly at the minister’s eyes while crouching in front of the wedding couple, you will probably blind him or her — it’s not a good idea to blind the officiant, even momentarily. (Besides, if you were a real photographer, you’d have a camera that can take existing-light photos.)

3. No, you may not stand on pews. No one else is standing on pews. What makes you think you’re so special you can treat the church that way?

4. When the wedding couple are repeating their vows, you are not to stand up in the front pew to take their picture. If you do so, you will block the view of family and friends. They are there to see and participate fully in this religious ceremony, and religiously the ceremony requires their presence. But wedding ceremonies do not require your presence at all, so go to the back of the church, buddy. (Besides, if you were a real photographer, you’d have a good enough telephoto lens so you wouldn’t have to pop up in the front pew like a damned Jack-in-the-box.)

5. Just because that ill-behaved four-year-old is running up and down the aisle doesn’t mean that you may do so. Once the ceremony begins, the wedding photographer’s role is to be in the back of the church, and be entirely unobtrusive. The four-year-old’s parents don’t know enough to stop the little hellion from running in the aisles; as an alleged professional, you should know better.

6. Mr. Crankypants just made a new rule. If you take an intrusive close-up picture of someone in the congregation crying, that person is now allowed to smash your camera immediately after the ceremony.

7. Do not hum to yourself. No, not even under your breath.

8. The wedding photographer is not the center of the wedding. The wedding photographer is less important than the wedding couple. The wedding photographer is less important than the officiant. The wedding photographer is less important than anyone in the congregation (yes, even less important than that little four-year-old hellion). The wedding photographer is not essential to the wedding and is actually completely unimportant. The wedding photographer should therefore be just as unobtrusive as he/she is unimportant.

One last word: Since Mr. Crankypants is not a Universalist (unlike stupid alter ego Dan), he can assure you that there is a special place in hell reserved for wedding photographers who violate any of the above rules. Oh, the suffering you will undergo there will be far worse than the suffering that you have inflicted over the years on poor Mr. Crankypants, who will pray for you while you writhe eternally in hell’s stop bath of boiling acetic acid.

Voice from the past

Three decades ago, my older sister, Jean, and I had summer jobs at a day camp in Waltham, Massachusetts, called Green Acres Day Camp. When we started working there, Peter Bloom was one of the campers, and when he was older he became a counselor. Now Peter has assembled a collection of photographs of the day camp, on view in Arlington Center until the middle of next week [link to article about the exhibit].

I just spent an hour talking with Peter Bloom, listening to him tell me about what happened after the camp closed in 1986, and about all the former counselors he had managed to contact. But in the back of my mind I was thinking about how much I had learned from Grace Mitchell’s educational philosophy.

Grace Mitchell was the dynamic educator who founded Green Acres Day Camp. Mitchell believed in child-centered learning, where activities and learning situations emerged from the interests and questions of children. Her educational philosophy continues to influence both my sister Jean and me [link to how that educational philosophy has influenced Jean].

From an obituary I discovered on the Web site of Tufts University:

Grace L. Mitchell, a pioneering day care provider who embarked on her career to remain close to her young son, lawyer F. Lee Bailey, died Jan. 27 [2000] in her home in Delray Beach, Fla.

Dr. Mitchell has been recognized as one of the most influential education professionals in the country. She founded Green Acres Day School in her apartment in Waltham in 1933 in order to remain close to her son and continue her career in teaching. “When Lee was only 5 weeks old, I was already missing teaching,” she said in a story published in The Boston Globe on May 17, 1976. “I said OK, that’s it, I’ll start a nursery school….”

…”Children learn more about emotions by experiencing them in a day care setting than they ever could from a textbook,” she said, and described the sound of children running and playing as “good noise” and a positive indication of the health of any day care center.

She owned and operated Green Acres Day School until 1987, when it became the Green Acres Foundation. In 1993, Dr. Mitchell established the Green Acres/Grace Mitchell Endowment at Eliot-Pearson, funding professional development for early childhood educators. Dr. Mitchell earned a bachelor’s degree at Tufts when she was in her mid-40s, a master’s degree at Harvard University when she was 55, and a doctorate at Antioch College when she was 70.

She was the author of The Day Care Book, based on visits to centers across the country at a time when there was not much nationally organized information about them. She served on the governing board of the National Association for the Education of Young Children from 1974 to 1978.

Her message to children, and to the adults who care for them, was always, “I am, I can.” She challenged adults to live up to their highest potential and stretch their awareness. She said, “Life is a process of becoming. My greatest satisfaction is the joy of having been a part in helping other people grow.”

Here’s to you, Grace Mitchell — you certainly helped me grow.

Marketing that doesn’t work

[Sound of telephone ringing. Sound of fork hitting plate.]

[Me muttering:] “Who the #$%@! is calling me on the landline? I put that number on the do not call registry. Normal people use cell phones…. Hello?”

[Scratchy recording of a man’s voice:] “Hi, this is Chris Gabrieli, Democrat for Massachusetts Governor, and my campaign to get results– ”

[Sound of phone being slammed down.]

When the telephone rings in the middle of dinnertime, and I pick up the phone, and I hear a recorded voice of a political candidate, I will be less likely to vote for him or her. Not more likely, but less likely.

On the other hand, when the telephone rang last week, and it was a young woman from the Religious Coalition for Freedom to Marry (RCFM), and she immediately identified herself by name, and politely asked to speak with me, and then told me that RCFM supports Tony Cabral in his re-election bid for state legislature based on his principled stands on marriage equality in Massachusetts, I listened carefully. She knew that I was interested in marriage rights issue. She knew I would be interested in hearing about Cabral’s voting record in the state legislature. I am now more likely to vote for Tony Cabral than I was before.

I am increasingly intolerant of scatter-shot advertising and marketing. If you haven’t done your research, if you don’t know what I am likely to respond to, your marketing is more likely to annoy me than anything else. Nor am I the only one who feels this way. Do I need to add that those of you who are involved in marketing your local congregation might want to take note of this social phenomenon?

Which day?

When I worked at the lumberyard, the shipper was a fellow named Robin:– nice guy, quiet, did his job, drank milk for his ulcer. He and I usually wound up taking our coffee breaks at the same time. When spring came, we’d sit in the coffee shack, sip our drinks (black coffee for me, coffee and a carton of milk for Robin), and talk about places to go on vacation. For some reason, we were both fascinated with Labrador, and we’d idly talk about what it would be like to take the mail boat up the coast north from Newfoundland. Of course, neither one of us wound up going to Labrador that year, or ever.

Robin went away for vacation in the middle of the summer, came back two weeks later, sat down quietly in the coffee shack to join me for coffee break. He stirred his coffee, smiled a little, and said in a low voice, “Worst day of the year.” “What?” I said. “First day back from vacation,” said Robin, “worst day of the year.

Now I have a job I love. Unlike when I was working in the lumberyard, I don’t spend nine-tenths of the day waiting for five o’clock to roll around so I can punch out and go home. These days, I actually look forward to work, and one of my biggest problems is that I like my job so much I work far too many hours.

I walk into the church office this morning, my first day back from vacation, say “Hello, good to see you!” to Claudette, our church administrator, and Claudette says, “Hi, how are you?” “Worst day of the year,” I say, and when I say it I’m grinning, but it really is the worst day of the year, even these days with a job I love.

I can give you lots of deep philosophical reasons why it is the worst day of the year, drawing on analyses of late capitalism and the meaning of labor, or sociological reasons telling how family and work have been separated. You don’t need to hear those reasons, because you know it’s true for you, too.

Walking in the big city

Today’s New York Times carries a story about one reporter’s six-day walking trip around Staten Island. In the story, “A Journey around Staten Island Gives a Glimpse of the City’s Wild Side,” Andy Newman reports on walking through landscapes and meeting people you wouldn’t quite expect to find in New York City:

Heading west, Richmond Terrace becomes the main street of several working class neighborhoods before petering out as a winding, rural-industrial lane. At its very end stands a lone country house with a barn and a chicken coop and a yard that merged into the marshy shore of the Kill Van Kull.

The door was answered by Tara Alleyne, a city employee and inhabitant of what was once a soap-factory town called Port Ivory. “I’m the only resident of Port Ivory,” she said proudly. “I’m on Mapquest.”

Newman even brings a tent and manages to find a few places to camp out a couple of nights. Those of us who love walking in the city and the suburbs can only hope for more such hikers, and more good writing about their adventures.

Heaven or hell?

The writer Eileen Chang (also known as Zhang Ailing, birth name Zhang Ying) was born in Shanghai, and emigrated to the United States in 1955. At some point after she left China, she wrote an essay to explain Chinese religion to English-speaking foreigners. David Pollard translated portions of this essay in his book The Chinese Essay (New York: Columbia University, 2000) under the English title “The Religion of the Chinese.” I offer the following excerpts from Pollard’s somehwat clumsy translation:

The Chinese have a Taoist heaven and a Buddhist hell. On death all souls go to hell to receive judgement, so in contrast to the Christian subterranean fiery pits, where only bad people go to suffer for their sins, our underworld is a comparatively well ventilated place. By rights ‘The Shades’ ought to be in everlasting twilight, but sometimes they are like a perfectly normal city, the focus of interest for tourists being the eighteen levels of dungeons. When living souls escape through an aperture and drift down to hell, it is quite routine for deceased relatives and friends whom they meet there to take them around sight-seeing.

…

Actually the Chinese heaven is superfluous. Hell is good enough for most people. Provided their conduct is not too bad, they can look forward to a limitless succession of similar lives, in which they work out predestiny and unknowingly sow the seeds of future relationships, conclude old feuds and incur new enmities — cause and effect are woven closely together, like a mat made of thin bamboo strips; you get dizzy trying to pick out the pattern.

…

…the greatest obstacle to Chinese people being converted to Christianity is rather that the life to come that it depicts does not appeal to Chinese tastes. We can leave aside the old-style Christian heaven, where there is perpetual playing of golden harps and singing to the glory of God. The more progressive view of the earth as a kind of moral gymnasium where we limber up in order to go on to display our prowess in a nebulous other world, is also unacceptable to the self-satisfied and conservative Chinese, who regard human life as the center of the universe. As for the saying that a human life is but an ephemeral bubble in the tidal flow of the Great Self, such a promise of eternal life without individuality is not very meaningful either. Christianity gives us very little comfort, so our native folklore can still stand up to the high-pressure proselytizing of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity, though it has not counter-attacked, though is hasn’t the support of big capital, has no propaganda literature, no splendid peaceful sets, not even a bible — for since almost nobody understands the Buddhist sutras, it is as if they do not exist.

Actually, Chang’s description of the Chinese hell does sound better than the perpetual playing of golden harps.

Stupid morning conversations

The cat woke us up, looking for her breakfast. “Yow,” she said.

“OK, Mina, we hear you,” I said. I sat on the edge of the bed trying to wake up enough to go downstairs. Carol muttered something unintelligible. Neither of us is a morning person.

“So, Mina,” I said to the cat. “Who was the leader of the Chinese Communist Party?”

“Mao,” said Mina.

Carol actually laughed at this, an indication that she was not yet fully awake.

“Well, Mina,” I said, “when would you like to be fed?”

“Now,” said Mina.

Carol did not laugh this time. I pushed my luck anyway.

“Hey Mina,” I said, “as you follow the stock market, which benchmark average do you prefer?”

“Dow,” said Mina.

“She did not say ‘Dow,'” said Carol. “Cats don’t say ‘Dow.'” With that, Carol got up and went downstairs to feed the cat.

Al Gore vs. Bender

If you’re a fan of the Futurama TV show, you’ll know that Bender is mouthy robot given to saying things like “Comedy’s a dead art form. Now tragedy…heh heh heh, that’s funny.”

Now Bender the robot takes on Al Gore in a short cartoon, “A Terrifying Message from Al Gore,” featuring dialogue like this:

Al Gore: If we don’t do something, our planet will become a deadly smog ball that will choke out all life.

Bender: Good! More beer for the robots!

How can you resist? See it now: Link.

The Case of the Amazing Attorney

The Hero has to wend his way through the snares and traps of untruthful witnesses, past clients who would throw him to the Wolves, and find the path that leads to Truth and Justice. With him is the Heroine, always calm and capable, ready to do battle beside the Hero at a moment’s notice. They are accompanied by the Sidekick, never as brave as the Hero but competent and completely honest. Cornered by the bear-like Adversary, the Hero triumphs at the last minute, finding truth and saving the Beautiful Maiden from disgrace and death.

It sounds like something Joseph Campbell might have written, but of course it’s only a description of the typical Perry Mason novel. Erle Stanley Gardner wrote 85 books featuring the amazing attorney, his saucy secretary Della Street, and the dogged detective Paul Drake. The books are potboilers so devoid of literary merit that they are unlikely to ever be assigned in a high school English class. Yet millions of copies have been sold, starting with the first book in 1933 and continuing to the present day.

Two days ago, I went down to the Harvard Book Store to browse through their used book section in the basement, and I found a paperback copy of The Case of the Crooked Candle first published in 1944. At the cash register, the young woman checking me out looked like the typical bookish person who works at the Harvard Book Store. But she didn’t comment on the Daniel Pinkwater young adult novel I purchased, nor did she notice that I had the classic two-volume Sources of Indian Tradition, nor did she say anything about The Cornel West Reader.

When she got to The Case of the Crooked Candle, she looked me in the eye and smiled. “Perry Mason!” she said delightedly. “They say that they’re going to put out the entire television series on DVD!”

“You mean the original one, in black and white?” I asked.

“Yes!” she said. “I hope they do put it out on DVD, I’m going to buy it and watch them. I love Perry Mason!”

The literary snobs may turn up their noses at Perry Mason, but book store employees don’t give John Updike that many exclamation points. The literary snobs relish stories of grim truth and reality that reflect the sordid life that they believe we all live. Little do they know that most of us live partway inside the Realm of the Collective Unconscious, where they take part in the eons-old battle against Evil, and against Untruth.

I have tried reading Updike’s novels, but find them inexpressibly dreary. Indeed, I have mostly given up on reading fiction. Why should I read something someone has made up? — I’d rather read about things that really have happened. Maybe that’s why I continue to read Perry Mason novels:– they’re fiction, but Perry Mason is also the Hero, the Jungian figure who stalks through the Collective Unconscious righting wrongs and saving the day. That’s about as true as you can get.

As for The Case of the Crooked Candle, suffice it to say that the murder takes place on a yacht that is moored in shallow water. The crooked candle lead Perry Mason to unravel the true solution to the murder. And at the end of the book, after Mason reveals the solution to Della Street, Paul Drake, and his clients Roger and Carol Burbank, the phone in his office rings….

Mason nodded to Della. She picked up the receiver, listened a moment, then placed her hand over the mouthpiece.

“Chief, there’s a blonde woman out there with a black eye who says she has to see you at once. Gertie [the receptionist] says she’s terribly upset and she’s afraid she’ll have hysterics if…”

“Show her into the law library,” Mason said. “I’ll talk with her there. While I’m doing that, you can get a check from Mr. Burbank payable to Adelaide Kingman for one hundred thousand bucks. You’ll excuse me, I know. An hysterical blonde with a black eye would seem to be an emergency case, at least an interesting one — The Case of the Black Eyed Blonde.”

So the Hero ends one adventure, and immediately sets out on the next one….