Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
I just heard the sad news. Growing up I really didn’t know much about him, what he did or who he was, mostly getting my images of him from Saturday Night Live skits and other slapstic routines that made fun of his demeanor. The last few years I have take a pretty good dive into some of his books and am very glad I did. Thank you William for a life well lived.
If you grew up in the ’70s, you probably had a one-speed bike with a banana seat and a sissy bar. It might have been red, or purple, or dark green, maybe even orange. The seat may have had a speckle-pattern. At some point, you or the big kids on the block built a ramp, out of some old panelling or plywood. The high end was jacked up with rocks, or a cinderblock. Maybe more than one cinderblock. You and the other kids on the block took turns riding hard and fast at the ramp, and got airborne. Eventually, pretty quickly in fact, someone got hurt. A trip to the emergency room was not out of the question. Moms insisted the ramp come down — “are you kids crazy?”. But the components of the ramp would be dispersed, only to reemerge. The risk was part of the game. The moment of flight was worth it.
We did these things because of one man: Evel Knievel.
His life was a unique effusion of Jacksonian American culture. He dressed a lot like Elvis. He was saying: I, Evel Knievel, am also the King. Elvis was king of a larger world not of his own making: show biz, Vegas, rock’n’roll, contemporary male vocalists. But Evel Knievel made a kingdom no one else had ever thought of and ruled it by himself.
We all saw the TV documentaries, the bone-crushing bad landing in the Caesar’s Palace parking lot. I watched it on You Tube today, and I found I remembered it in minute detail: The too-hard, off-angle touchdown on the far ramp, the hands jerked off the handlebars, Evel going over the handlebars, the bouncing impact on the ground, apparently getting tangled up with the bike as he bounces and skids … .
But he did not give up. The fractures healed. The metal pins held him together. He got back on the motorcycle.
The Snake River rocket-flight debacle finished him off because it seemed silly, and the sense of grandeur was lost. I remember the rumors: Evel Knievel is going to jump the Grand Canyon! But then it turned out it was something called the Snake River. What is that? Then further strangeness, as the preparations were televised. It was not a motorcycle, but some kind of weird rocket thing … . What was he trying to do?
Gigantic ambition had met the reality that no motorcycle could leap such a chasm. There were limits. Some things are just beyond what you can do with a bike. Sad but true. The actual failure was an anticlimax. We all moved on then.
Rest in peace, sir. You cut your own path. You were one of a kind.
The speeches from Camelot were riveting, even on a small black and white screen, as Richard Burton recited them, sitting in a quiet spotlight beside Dick Cavett. Julie Andrews seemed made to show us what England and youth and the lusty month of May were all about. But holding his own with them was the darkly handsome Robert Goulet – born in Massachusetts but of French Canadian stock and apparently perfectly cast. Indeed, to many of us who never set foot in a Broadway theater, Robert Goulet remained Lancelot. The mere shadows of what these three must have been in person, they could still ground the stage of Ed Sullivan and the other great variety shows of the fifties and sixties. But if Burton’s quiet reading deepened the shadows on Cavett, Goulet’s voice filled the speakers on our old tv sets that were only capable of hinting at his power.
Forty years later, his voiceovers endear him to our grand children. And older, we laugh with him, as Goulet‘s loose humor enriched commercials for ESPN and Emerald Nuts. The romantic lead matured and he charmed with the quirky humor of his guest spot on Police Squad! and then Naked Gun with fellow Canadian Leslie Neilson. At 73, that great baritone has died, waiting on a lung transplant. But to many of my generation he remains the dashing and seductive knight, his eyes following Burton, betraying the complexity of admiration and the difficulty of restraint.
YouTube houses Goulet’s moving rendition of another of the great classics of the high water decade in musical theater -the “Soliloquy” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.
(And perhaps the juxtaposition of Porter Wagoner and Robert Goulet, of T. H. White and Dolly Parton, of Zucker and Hee Haw! might hint at the rich hybrids that grew from Albion’s seed planted on our shore.)
The old gospel songs seem right on occasions like this; here is Wagoner with the Willis Brothers doing I’ll Fly Away.
After eighty years, fifty of them on the Grand Ole Opry, Porter Wagoner has died. Tom Spaulding eulogizes: “He lived the life, sang about the life, and he went down swinging.” That life was full of hits; this year’s album, Wagonmaster is reviewed here. CMT notes that: “Porter Wagoner, the Thin Man from the West Plains, is a case of an artist often ahead of his time who has always appeared hopelessly behind the times.” And here’s Wagoner’s “Green, Green Grass of Home.”
For this (and so much else) I’m indebted to the husband I found in the days of Dripping Springs. He introduced me to the music of those tough old singers who perform – writing, singing, playing – until they die because they want to – and because they have to. Impelled by whatever lies in that hard stubborn core within, they have to be who they are – in Nudie suits, maybe, but always, really, themselves: authentic sounds and authentic words clothed in sequins and huge belt buckles.
A&L has collected the obituaries. In one of those B-movie coincidences, on Monday two of the great directors of mid-century angst died – Michelangelo Antonioni, 94, in Italy and Ingmar Bergman, 89, in Sweden. Iowahawk reposts his tribute to Bergman. Podhoretz complains of Bergman’s pretentiousness – arguing that 1982 was the end of that era. Well, maybe. Rewatching several of both these directors’ works in the last year or so has reminded me of what we were when we watched them in our separate youths, and how much my husband and I have developed different pleasures, perspectives, and values in the time since. But these movies are often beautiful in the slow and quiet ways they develop character, in the perspectives of their images, of the gestures that are telling. The piled up photographs as we see Marianne’s self emerge in Scenes from a Marriage or the panic as well as listlessness of L’Aventurra still move me, still seem human. If the people make silly choices, well, don’t we all. Why and how we make them is the subject of the films. We hadn’t seen Autumn Sonata before this year and if it, too, remains as bleak as ever about our failings in our relations as parents and as children, the tangles were bleakly understandable. As implied by this, what I liked best was character in these works and the allegorical seldom holds its own against human complexity. But Podhoretz complains of how they told their tales of angst and fear of the void; I think it is the void that we turned from as the century went on.
I’m not so sure that Podhoretz isn’t reflecting the fact that some time in the eighties we said to ourselves, snap out of it, suck it up, do something. Of course, it might have taken some of us a few more years. And it seems to me an obituary is a time for gratitude: I (and I suspect many others) owe many pleasant moments in the theater to these two directors. So, most of us have found a way out of that hole as the century continued, though how strong the ladders we found may prove is not something we know – will know. In the mid-nineteenth century Matthew Arnold described a darkling plain, but love, domesticity, faith, nation, work, duty helped; the ways out were similar a century later. These two directors have taken similar themes, but the difference in their expressions also help us appreciate two quite different sensibilities, cultures.
More importantly, perhaps, we’ll always have (and love) “Dover Beach” and I suspect we will always have some understanding of these two at their best.
