An Eclectrick Centenial

Two guys are sitting in a bar. The first one says, "I'm a masochist. Beat me, please, I'm begging you!" The second one says, "No. I'm a sadist."

This is my 100th blog posting, a cause for celebration and much masturbation. Whoopie!!! When I set out on this journey back on June 7th with my first post, it was a work in progress. Certainly during the first 25 posts, it took a while for my format to develop. By now, I can write one of these in two to three hours, not counting research. If they're about my music videos, it can be even quicker. Curiously, current events and/or philosophy take the longest.

This post will be illustrated, for instance, with left-over phots from my vacation to Isla Mujeres. The sculpture park was incredible, and by using a visual between each paragraph, the blog becomes easier to swallow. Large chunks of verbiage don't work; you need something to comment on the action or re-enforce the factual content. This time, it's eye candy, but that goes a long way in today's world.

While I don't believe in 'art for art's sake', I do believe in 'art for the artist's sake'. It only makes sense for someone to start any creative process with the expectation of a reward, yet most of the time any financial reward is so removed from the initial moment that something else must be involved. That would be self-rsatisfaction, or an impulse to create. I certainly feel that; if I go too long without doing something artistic, I get restless. It will come out somewhere.

I was lucky enough to be part of the last generation of Americans who were able to receive an old-fashioned liberal education when that still meant something. You can still do it, but every advisor will be telling you that you are committing career suicide. I came of age right after the Vietnam War, when millions of young American men went to college, whether they really deserved to or wanted to, simply to avoid being drafted.

The results were a swelling of universities across the nation. They were willing to jam you into any program that might catch your fancy. I saw this with my brother, whose draft lottery number was high enough to make my father shell out tuition again and again despite my brother's drug abuse and mental problems. My ex brother-in-law, five years older, was actually good at the academic game, eventually getting a Ph.D. in English Literature. He wound up being a police officer after a couple of years of fruitless search for a suitable job.

By the time I came along, ten years after my brother-in-law, the academic world was starting to shrink. It was still the baby boom; by then drug culture had made a serious dent in the high school population. Plenty of 18 year olds were willing to drop out for a few years. I can honestly say that I managed to get through high school without ever once getting a career vocation counseling; they didn't exist, even for the best student at school. That would have been me.

When my father's job was relocated, I moved with my parents from the outskirts of Queens, New York, to York Pennsylvania. It was going from an urban environment to one not quite small town America. My education in Catholic school was light years ahead of the local kids; I could sleep walk through classes and ace everything, having seen it all before. The teachers thought that I was a genius. I wasn't, but it didn't hurt to be thought of that way.

It was also possible that a move away from the urban decay of the big city to a more rural environment might be good for my parents' relationship, my father in particular. It was the just the three of us, like becoming an only child when you were in your teens. Neither my brother nor sister had any ties to York, finding the place understandably boring. I had fun; starting a rock band, playing football, high school theatrics, trying to make films, dating girls. To this day, I am the only football letterman to ever be head librarian at that high school.

York was a funny place, though. There was a big secret, the worse racial riots of the entire 1960s, which is saying something, happening in 1969, covered up by the Nixon administration. They claimed it was to prevent Black Panther cells from Baltimore and Philadelphia, mere hours away, from invading the city. Too bad it was a riot by white Nation Guard troops. I always wondered why there were 25 square blocks of downtown without buildings. The entire story wouldn't be revealed until the year 2000. No wonder I read so much Lovecraft; the vibe was similar.

I was more-or-less forced to go to college against my will. I wanted to go, but I thought that a few years of manual labor would straighten out my head. I still think that for many young men that is a good idea. But it would have been considered a blot against the school's reputation to not have their top academic student proceed to higher education. With a little help from my parents, I was herded into Penn State for one abysmal semester.

It's not difficult to flunk out of college; it's just like falling off a log, only more fun. I did go back to school, but an art school, a three year technical school full of kids who weren't quite compatible with higher education. It was very affordable, enough that I could pay for it myself while living at home. The real struggle came from paying for the art material, which could easily spiral out of control. I found myself limiting what I would investigate due to funds.

Living at home was necessary; I was the youngest child and my parent's marriage had gone south. My sister, ten years older, had moved out when things were still good. My brother, five years older, was partly the cause and partly the result of my father's increasing erratic alcoholic behavior. Dear old Dad was from that generation that had grown up in the Great Depression, then went off to fight WWII. They had learned to repress all emotions - that is, until they got blackout drunk. Since my father would on occasion beat my mother, I stayed home and beat him in retaliation.

Mom was Irish Catholic and devout, so a divorce was out of the question. While she had worked outside of the house and was very thrifty with money, I believe that she thought that she couldn't and shouldn't survive on her own. She took her marriage vows seriously, even if they were a death sentence. It was my job to make sure that she was safe from my father's worse moments. They were infrequent, but I dealt with it, violence for violence. It was effective. Plus, the old man was starting to break down physically from years of too much booze and not enough food.

It wasn't like all I did was beat my father; I had him arrested a number of times and personally signed commitment papers on at least three separate occasions so that he would dry out in a hospital. By this time, I was also doing roadie work, concert security and bouncing at bars, so handling confrontational behavior was becoming second nature. In direct contrast, there was also art school as well as various jazz fusion bands on the side. There was a very active artistic life happening at the same time, as well as constant reading and discussions with a great group of friends.

After graduation, I actually managed to make a living off my design work, not exactly flush but doing better than most. The problem was that I had no notion of the business end, in particular the tax situation. Trying to be a small businessman in 1980 with no clue quickly landed me in trouble with the IRS. That greatly reduced my enthusiasm for freelance work, along with some truly mind boggling tales I could tell about having to collect money through intimidation. I was 23; my Mom could figure it out on her own. I was heading south.

York did teach me a few valuable lessons. It was the kind of place where, if you wanted real entertainment, you had to provide it yourself. Combined with art school, I learned how to invent the wheel on a daily basis. Nobody was an expert on anything, so you might as well do it yourself. But Three Mile Island, a scant 12 miles from my parents' house, and the ensuing evacuation made it seem like a good time to move elsewhere.

With both my brother and sister in the Research Triangle, I had a destination that I liked.  Moving to North Carolina was a good idea. I worked hard in the brutal southern summers for nearly a decade growing roses, got married to a wonderful lady, had a child, and went back to college when I was in my 30s. We thrived over time, and my daughter did as well. While I may huff and puff about leaving the state or even the country every once in a while, chances are we'll be here for the rest of our days together.

When I left college and became a video producer thirty years ago, it was just starting the process of changing from analog to digital. Make no mistake, analog required a serious skill set; just to do a video dissolve required hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment and a couple of highly trained engineers, not to mention the pre-planning. Digital, on the other hand, could be done completely seat-of-the-pants, as long as the computer was stable and the hard drives didn't crash. We take a lot for granted nowadays, but for the first fifteen to twenty years, computers melted frequently, the data on them disappearing forever.

I jumped on the digital bandwagon, and for a time I was hot shit. When equipment prices started to skyrocket, right before disk capacity exploded while hard drive costs plummeted, I entered state government. Over fifteen years ago, I was the first guy in the state to push DVD technology when they were still using horrible VHS. Ten years ago, I was fighting with IT for band width to put videos on the web. Again, in such a short time we forget how much technological change has dominated the landscape.

Today, we live in a modern world controlled by telephonic tyranny. The cell phone has gone from a convenience to a device that dominates everything including our finances, our job, and our sex life. God knows how much it spies on us, yet we keep feeding it data. How many more breaches of public trust do we need from Facebook to realize the threat that such entities pose today? Without our phones, most people wouldn't know how to function today.

Hitting sixty, I faced what I knew would eventually happen - crashing against the technological wall. One too many sets of new programs to learn, one too many new paradigms, one too many leaps into the future. Combine that with having gone through the work cycle too many times; suddenly I don't want to keep up any more. I became exactly like the guys I replaced a quarter century earlier.

No skin off my nose; I'm lucky enough to have a pension and health care, better off than most. Time for young Turks to come along and make their marks. Off to a new chapter in my life, and I'm actually in good enough shape to enjoy it. I'm still married to the same woman and my daughter is flying high on the West Coast. If I'm complaining, I should be slapped in the face.

This blog was part of the process, a place to ramble on about the topics that have stuck with me from my youth, plus a few surprises. Learning to write on a semi-deadline, making sure that I say what I want to express clearly, avoiding the trap of thinking every thought must be contained in either 140 or 280 characters. Work was involved, hundreds of hours dedicated to something without a penny of reward and a few limited audience. This is by my choice; my wife still can't understand why I don't get paid to do this.

The next hundred posts will be better, I promise. There are already a lot of topics lined up; I'm nowhere near running out of things to write about. While I've mostly avoided current events no matter how provoked, if things really get crazy, all bets are off. Seems to me that a titanic explosion is about to occur around Washington DC.

So here's to the future, with new topics and more adventures. Retirement is just like college; it's whatever you make of it. I don't plan on sitting on my ass watching the world go round. I also don't plan on manning the barricades and leading the revolution. Just a good seat on the bleachers, where you can clearly see all the action, is good enough for me.

Mr. Laurel & Mr. Hardy

I worry about Stan and Ollie. Are they too genteel for the new Millennium?  Do they move at too slow a pace for the attention-deficit-disordered generations of today? Are they just too damned nice and decent to exist in our world today? I fear the answer to all the above is a resounding 'yes'.

Too bad; if you are not familiar with Laurel and Hardy films, especially the brilliant early work at the Hal Roach studio, then there is a big gap in your heart. They were unique, the only major silent comedy stars to actually become bigger when sound came along. Technically they were never signed as a team, at least during their heyday. Hal Roach can take credit for combining the two but he always had them signed to separate contracts, thus ensuring they couldn't bargain together to raise their price.

At the Nestor household, the release of the movie 'Stan & Ollie', starring Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly as the duo, is a big fucking event. You could guarantee that we'd be seeing it ASAP. Sure enough, on a brisk Saturday afternoon, the two of us made our way to the cineplex. When it started, I got teary eyed. By the end, I was bawling like a baby.

It was a superb movie, with at least as much historical accuracy as 'Bohemian Rhapsody', another one we saw and enjoyed this winter. There were slight fudging of facts, but nothing too distorting, all done to re-enforce the emotional payoff at the end of the story. Coogan and Reilly were exceptional; at no time in the movie was I aware of them in the role. They slipped invisibly into the parts. In fact, my wife asked about the 'Robin Hood' footage, a plot point that I won't spoil. I had to tell her that it was a fantasy recreation of something Stan wrote but they never actually performed in front of a camera.

The best thing about 'Stan & Ollie' is that it didn't sugar coat the pair. These were flawed men. By showing them at the height of their popularity first, flirting with the girls, placing bets, lining up parties, you see them as real people, with appetites. Then cutting to sixteen years later, you can't help but notice than Ollie has gained about a hundred pounds. It's also clear that they both went through some bad marriages and that Stan and a problem with alcohol.

That's not the point; instead, as my wife declared as we were leaving, it's a love story. Only this time, it's between two men, completely platonic. There's scene near the end, when Hardy falls ill, and Laurel goes to comfort him in his hotel room. By the end of the scene, the two are under the covers together, just like in one of their shorts. There's nothing sexual about it, miraculously. It was there that my tears started falling.

The best thing that I can say about the movie, and I absolutely loved it, is that it is exactly in the style and sensibility of a Laurel and Hardy film. There is conflict, there are wives and promoters, but the film doesn't try to be modern. No fart jokes, no blows to the nads. The boys know that they are getting ripped off but are too gentlemanly to mention it most of the time.

Stan Laurel was rather ineffectual as a business manager. They really weren't an official team until 1939, with 'Block Heads'. Hardy was pressured into appearing with old silent star Harry Langdon in 'Zenobia', but it's clear that he is trying hard not to make it a new paring. The last eight films they did after leaving Roach, between 1941 and 1945 for Fox and MGM, are terrible. Let's not even mention the 1951 French film 'Atoll K', otherwise known as 'Utopia', which is nearly unwatchable.

'Stan & Ollie' catches the team at the sunset of their lives, when, faced with the end of their partnership, they suddenly realize what they had. It would be useful to go back to the beginning, when Stan Laurel came over to America on the same boat as Charlie Chaplin. It took a few more years, but he too wound up in Hollywood. One of the many Chaplin imitators, which included Harold Lloyd and Charlies brother Sydney, Stan banged around with little success. Roach kept him around as a gag man, bit part player, and occasional director.

Oliver Hardy wasn't even a comedian, instead a supporting player. Because of his size, he was more apt to be playing the heavy, for obvious reasons. Blessed with a wonderful singing voice, he did everything in entertainment at least once but didn't get the kind of repetitive training on stage that Laurel, whose father was also in vaudeville, had. Ollie was as likely to be doing carpentry as be in front of the camera at the studio.

Exactly when the duo were considered a team is unclear; they started appearing in films together as early as 1921 but did not assume their personas until around 1927. Hal Roach always took the credit, but most people think it was Leo McCarey, then starting out on the Roach lot as a director, who saw the potential in the two. Since McCarey also worked with W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, as well as winning multiple Oscars, I suspect it was him. Roach, while undoubtedly talented, could be a handful, as when he went into business with Mussolini during the 1930s.

By 1926, the two were being put into shorts together constantly by McCarey, but not quite assuming their screen personalities. Silent comedy was a fast and loose genre, often slapped together from a few gags, only needing to be twenty minutes long. Laurel's mind was an encyclopedia of material, so he worked with both the writers and directors. Babe Hardy would show up unprepared, but it was his timing that made all the difference in the world.

Laurel may have constructed the joke, but Hardy got two more laughs out of it. As a team, Laurel & Hardy perfected the comedic 'Rule of Three', which states that you can get three laughs from one gag. The situation would be set up, usually by Laurel trying to get Hardy to perform some foolish task. Hardy would look into the camera, breaking the fourth wall, letting you know that he thought it wasn't a good idea, then agree anyway.

The event would occur and disaster strikes, usually to Hardy's dignity. That would be the second laugh. Then, as the dust settled, there would be Hardy, looking at the camera from within a pile of rubble, disgust on his face. Three laughs, but only one was in the script. They did it all the time, and it worked like a charm.

There was really only one gag in all their movies; Both Laurel and Hardy were idiots, but Hardy always thought he was the smarter of the two. The joy was in sitting back and waiting for the calamity to occur. It always did, and it almost always happened to Hardy.

It's too bad that seeing the silent shorts of Laurel & Hardy is so difficult today. Virtually all the sound material is easily available. but the silent are faster paced, relying completely on visual gags. The duo are younger, Hardy more agile, better at the physical aspects of the humor. Watching these silent, you see the personalities emerge, a symbiotic relationship.

That any silent films still exist is a miracle. The movie studios  did all they could between the 1930s to the 1950s to destroy their own legacy, believing that the silent were in competition with the newer product. It took two men, William K. Everson and Robert Youngson, to start the first preservation efforts in the late 1950s. Everson, an Englishman who emigrated to America in 1950, was an avid collector of silent, eventually amassing and thus saving over 4,000 films. He produced television specials and taught university-level film classes, among the first to do both.

It was his groundbreaking books, full of gorgeous illustrations, that brought silent films back into public consciousness during the 1960s. As a story to illustrate how difficult it could be for Everson, he wrote an article in 1959 critical of the remake of 'Ben Hur', which, having won around ten Oscars, was being called the greatest film ever made. Everson noted that all the crucial scenes, including the chariot race, were in the original silent version. In the article, he stated that he owned a copy of the silent and was willing to screen it for anyone interested at his Manhattan apartment. MGM, the studio that owned the rights to both versions, had the FBI chase him instead for copyright violations. He had to furtively move his mammoth collection to keep it safe.

Robert Youngson was a producer of short subjects, mostly newsreels, the way people were given current events before the invention of the 6 o'clock news on television. When he was let go because of the downsizing of the studios, he turned to his equally formidable collection of silent films, mostly comedy shorts, and started making compilations. While not the first to do it, he played the films at the correct speed, treating them with respect. They proved to be wildly popular, both as first run features and later on television.

A year or two ago, they finally got around to restoring one of Youngson's compilation, 'When Comedy Was King'. I had fond memories of seeing this as a child, so I bought it. Some of the shorts featured only exist in this compilation, the originals now dissolved. After Chaplin and Keaton, it ends the only way it could, with a complete showing of Laurel & Hardy's 'Big Business'. This classic silent, where the boys are selling Christmas trees door to door, ending in both the catastrophic destruction of their Model T and an entire bungalow, is a perfect comedy short, hilarious from first frame until the last. Nothing could possibly top it.

Strangely, when sound technology required that the action in their shorts be slowed down to capture audio, Laurel & Hardy's popularity exploded when all other silent stars faded. Not verbal comics, they still managed to deliver their lines to hilarious effect. The Roach Studio survived on their fortune, along with the Our Gang comedies. Laurel was eventually able to fight his way to Associate Producer status, thus ensuring a little more money. Hardy, alimony and gambling debts piling up, was one of the biggest stars in the world yet living hand-to-mouth.

After the glory days were done, the two had to go on the road to make a living. Stan was a recovering alcoholic with diabetes. Hardy was morbidly obese. They still packed the houses every night, especially in Europe, where television hadn't destroyed vaudeville. That's where the new film 'Stan & Ollie' comes in, compressing true things that happened on both the 1947 and 1953 tours into one narrative. It is a wonderfully gentle and emotional film about a friendship that becomes platonic love. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Another film that we saw over Christmas was 'The Favorite'. Spoiler alert; disguised as a period English drama, it's really about a lesbian bottom learning how to be a lesbian top, complete with some pretty squeamish moments. Not terrible, but certainly not worthy of ten Oscar nominations.

The biopic of Laurel & Hardy, IMHO an infinitely finer film, didn't receive a single nomination. Like I said in the opening, in our new millennium, I worry about Stan and Ollie. Perhaps the world is not nice enough for two such gentle souls.