Category Archives: The Zahl File

MOCKINGBIRD

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Paul Zahl, of this site's The Zahl File, is, as I've mentioned before, a preacher, but his most impressive contribution to the revival of humane religion in our time may have been fathering three sons who are also preachers — this is where Protestantism has a distinct advantage over Catholicism in keeping the clergy ranks full.

His sons are all contributors to the Mockingbird blog, which you should check out.  Mockingbird is a youth-oriented Christian organization based in New York and its blog is both serious and cheerful, with a cheeky attitude towards popular culture that you'll find refreshing, and probably surprising if all you know of Evangelical Christianity is that part of it which attracts the media's attention — the grim, self-righteous, judgmental and often spectacularly hypocritical part.

I myself have no use for institutionalized religion of any stripe, but I've never forgotten something Camille Paglia once said . . . roughly, “Evangelical Christians are the only group in America who are asking the right questions, it's just that they're coming up with all the wrong answers.”  That may be true as a general rule, but the right questions are still the right questions.

Incidentally, if you scroll down the main page of the Mockingbird blog, or click here, you'll find a very interesting piece by Paul Zahl about three extra-ecclesiastical religious artists — the Victorian novelist Mark Rutherford, George Harrison and Jack Kerouac.

A THOUSAND GUYS IN LOWELL

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There are 1000 guys in Lowell who know more about heaven than I do.

                                                                — Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac left an amazing portrait of America in the second half of the 20th century — paying attention to the everyday warp and woof of things and their mythic role in the unconscious epic of the nation.  To find anything comparable in the art of our time you have to look to the photographs of Walker Evans and William Eggleston, especially Eggleston.

Kerouac celebrated and eviscerated American places in long, impressionistic passages in his writing and in brief epithets tossed off in passing.  These epithets, taken together, have something of the quality of the Catalog Of the Ships in The Iliad.

Paul Zahl, a regular contributor here, discusses Kerouac's geographical epithets, about America and other places, with some choice examples:





A JACK KEROUAC GEOGRAPHICAL GLOSSARY

by Paul Zahl

 

Kerouac had a wonderful way with vivid adjectival phrases.

 

In his letters especially, and wherever he could write free of
stricture or zealous editor, he would use jammed-together phrases to
describe the places he visited, the people he met, and the phenomena he
observed.

 

I have made a little study of Kerouac's descriptive phrases for the
cities and towns, and even foreign countries, in which he spent time.


For example he described Morocco as the place where one could see “the
true glory of religion once and for all; in these humble, often
mean-to-animals people”.


If you have spent time in a Middle-Eastern country, this phrase
instantly connects.  How many people I know who have left their
inherited religion in the West and are impressed by exactly the phenomenon
Kerouac observes, right down to the flogging of the camels.

 

Here is a little 'Beat' geographical glossary, from the man who saw,
and wrote what he saw.

Oh, and some of them may offend you if you actually live in the place
he is describing.  When Kerouac refers to “rainytown Pittsburgh”, he
captures the essence of that particular city.  But Pittsburghers don't
see it this way at all!

 

So hold on to your hats.  And get ready to smile, and maybe wince a
little.


(All these phrases come from the letters of Jack Kerouac composed
between 1957 and 1969, which are collected in the 1999 Viking Press publication edited by Ann Charters.)

 
Rock n Roll Hooligan England

 

sick old Buddhaless Europe

 

California TOO MANY COPS AND TOO MANY LAWS and general killjoy culture

 

Total Police Control America

 

Doom Mexico

(Kerouac survived an earthquake in Mexico City, and was
also fascinated by the interest in death which he saw in the culture
there.)

 

“Orlando Florida”

(Kerouac complained that you could not buy On the
Road at any newsstand in Orlando, where he and his mother lived for two
fairly long periods, so that city for him would always be in quotes.)

 

nightmare New Orleans

thank God for Spain!  All living creatures are Don Quixote

 

San Francisco, that town of poetry and hate

 

unholy Frisco

 

Muckland Central Florida in Febiary (sic)

 

midtown New York sillies world

 

this New York world of telephones and appointments

 

peaceful Florida, winter Florida, Florida peace

 

Massachusetts boy-dreams of Harvard

 

the South where everybody is DEAD

And thinking globally . . .

 

so goes the Dostoyevskyan world


And from Visions of Gerard . . .


That hat, with its strange Dostoyevskyan slant, belongs to the West,
this side of this hairball, earth

 

the world, the uncooperative and unmannerly divisionists, the bloody
Godless forever

Home again . . .

 

overcommunicating America

 

You could probably write an essay on every pungent phrase that Kerouac
comes up with.  You may also be offended by his incautious descriptions.  Furthermore, they were mostly written down under the influence of
alcohol, by the author's own admission.

 

Yet they are evocative and at times (to me) inspired.  They are also
very funny.  After just a few days in London, thirty years before the rise of the
“soccer yob”, Kerouac spoke of “Rock n Roll Hooligan England”.  What prescient voice is this?

 
If this starter glossary re-connects you with Kerouac's
voice, the voice of a man Allen Ginsberg described as “heaven's recording angel',
and sends you back to his work, try writing down more of these phrases as they catch your eye.  As your Catalog grows you'll wonder, “Where did this man receive his wisdom?” and “Did
he not grow up right here in Nazareth, and do we not know his mother
and his brothers and his sisters?”



[Editor's Note: “Overcommunicating America” — we live there now, all right.  And even a man who could write, decades ago, “California TOO MANY COPS AND TOO MANY LAWS and general killjoy culture” might be surprised at the way The Wellness State has calcified into his most extreme vision of the place.  Jack apparently never visited my hometown, Las Vegas, but he would have nailed it, too, I imagine, in a way that would make me wince . . . and laugh.  Paul Zahl just moved away from a suburb of Washington, D. C., where Kerouac and Gregory Corso once dropped in unannounced on the poet Randall Jarrell and found him “hobnobbing in Chevy Chase”, a world center of hobnobbing.  Kerouac will find you wherever you are, America — you can run but you can't hide from heaven's recording angel.]

The map above is from one of Kerouac's diaries.  The portraits are by Tom Palumbo.  You can find more of Paul's articles in The Zahl File here.

CHRISTMAS WITH KEROUAC: THE NAZARETH PRINCIPLE

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                                                                  [Jack Kerouac, photograph with annotations by Allen Ginsberg]

I pulled into Nazareth, I was feelin' 'bout half past dead.


                                     — Robbie Robertson


Paul Zahl and his wife Mary recently moved from Maryland to Florida. 
On the road with a friend, hauling his belongings south, Paul had a
rendezvous with the Ghost of Christmas Past:


Our son Simeon says that faith is summed up in something he calls the
“Nazareth principle”.  This refers to the question in the New Testament
where someone scoffs at Jesus the carpenter by asking, “Can anything
good come out of Nazareth?”


The idea was that Nazareth was a city, in the region of Galilee, which
was known for its “mixed-blood” and therefore suspect practice of
Judaism.  Because the carpenter/prophet came from Nazareth, didn't that
disqualify him from being the real thing?


Yet as Simeon says, in life — time after time — the best things come
from the unlikeliest places.  And this “Nazareth principle” extends to
the fact that out of trouble and wounds, disappointments and closed
doors, come often the actual breakthroughs of personal life.



 

I just saw this “Nazareth principle” up close and personal on a visit
to the town of Rocky Mount, North Carolina.  A friend of mine and I
were driving a rental truck from Washington, D.C. to Orlando, Florida
and I decided to try to find and see a place I dearly love, in my
heart.  This is the house where Jack Kerouac used to come at Christmas
during the mid-1950s in the midst of his wild ride of a life.  Whether
Kerouac was in Manhattan, San Francisco, or Mexico City, he always
hitchhiked his way back home for Christmas.  And home for Kerouac was
wherever his mother, “Memere”, was.

 

Because Kerouac's sister, Caroline, and her husband Paul, and their
little boy Paul were living in Rocky Mount for a period of years, home
for Christmas meant there.




This was Kerouac's most intense Buddhist phase, which also meant a 24/7
dialogue with Christianity, his inherited religion.  The weeks in Rocky
Mount are described in great detail in his notes on religion, which
were published posthumously as Some of the Dharma.  Kerouac would
meditate almost every night in Twin Pine Grove behind his sister's
house, and write down every single word and vision that occurred to him.


He also composed his book Visions of Gerard at the kitchen table in Rocky Mount.

 

So I wanted to see where these great words came to him, to “heav'n's
recording angel” — Allen Ginsberg's phrase for his friend Jack Kerouac.  [Below, a very young Allen Ginsberg:]

But I had no address.

 

What I did have was a photograph of the house, taken by a local
journalist and published on her blog.  I also knew that the house was
in a section of Rocky Mount about three miles outside of town which
used to be called Big Easonburg Woods but is now called West Mount.  This
is all that my friend Michael McDowell and I had to go on — the name
for the neighborhood and a photograph of a tiny frame house painted
blue-gray with purple shutters.

 

So we pulled our Budget truck off Route 95 and made our way to a long
road called West Mount Drive, then just started driving and looking.  There
were a lot of big trucks and no one had any patience with our little
moving van with its caution lights flashing.  We drove about a mile and
saw several houses that might have been the one.  And then . . .


                                                    [Photo © Marion Blackburn]


I saw it!  The handicapped ramp and the colors exactly as in the photograph.

 

At the corner of Cameron Street and West Mount Drive sits the house in
which God spoke to Jack Kerouac.  Or at least that is how I see it. 
The jungled grove of pine trees is right behind the house, there is a
gas station just yards away (in Kerouac's day this was a “cracker”
country store as he described it), and a few small brick bungalows sit
on a dead-end road behind the home.  They each have a satellite dish
and each one looks as if it were built in the mid-1960s.

 

I didn't dare to knock on the door — the house is obviously lived in,
with children's toys scattered in the small backyard — but asked about
it at the gas station.  The man at the desk had never heard of
Kerouac.  Yet this was definitely the house.  I had read about it on
another Kerouac blog, in which the fan had found himself unwelcome when
he looked inside.  But the pictures all matched.


                    [Photo © Daniel Barth]

 

We parked our truck, I walked around, meditated for five minutes — it
was about 100 degrees — and envisaged our man walking around with his
poncho and his dog between two a.m. and five a.m. on those cold
December and January nights in 1956.  That the genius, like the Son of
Man, had “no place to lay his head” except for this tiny little spot in
the “back of beyond”, is simply an astonishing fact of human existence
and history.



 

I don't know if you've ever had the chance to read Visions of Gerard,
but it is sublime.  It tells the story of the death of Jack's older
brother at age nine, in Lowell, Massachusetts — a kind of saint, this child.  And
the author gives his tale and his interpretation of the tale absolutely
everything he has.  It is a masterpiece that I recommend to everyone,
especially if religion interests you.  On one page Jack is a
Samsara-diagnosing Buddhist; on another, a Crown of Thorns Christian, of
piercing conscience and intention.  And he wrote the inspired little
book at the kitchen table of this house on West Mount Drive at the
corner of Cameron Street.

 

Later that night, Michael and I stopped at the house of friends in the
Low Country of South Carolina.  It was and is one of that region's most
beautiful and soulful plantations, an ante-bellum house of exquisite
taste and proportions.  We had a wonderful time, with lovely,
thoughtful people.



 

But I myself was still in Rocky Mount!  How could it be that “God”/A
Higher Power/Karma/The Father of All could have set up a world in which
one of His finest and most gifted spirits would have no settled home
save this tiny refuge, covered now,
and even then, with the dust of passing trailers and trucks and “Dukes
of Hazard” Corvettes.  Yet that's the way it really is.  And there is
something to this affinity with a Man of Sorrows that struck me on
Monday afternoon, and definitely struck Kerouac even back then as he
wrote his notes in the Carolina dawn, which mirrors the facts of
suffering life.

 

Nowhere could the Nazareth principle be more concrete than in Rocky
Mount, North Carolina, off Wesleyan Boulevard on that long industrial road which
cuts through Big Easonburg Woods.

Jack Kerouac rests far from Rocky Mount, in Lowell, Massachusetts, where his grave (above) is also a place of pilgrimage, but you just know that his restless spirit is still on the road — that we're likely to encounter it anywhere, from Bodh Gaya to Nazareth to West Mount Drive.

[Note:  Fans of Paul Zahl's contributions to this site can now find all his articles (and one about him) at The Zahl File, in the category list to the left.]

WAY OUT

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A second report from a recent cultural pilgrimage to New York by Paul
Zahl:


They were all broadcast at nine-thirty, Friday nights on CBS, starting
in March of 1961, right before The Twilight Zone.


I'm referring to the insanely scary episodes of Roald Dahl's
short-lived television series entitled Way Out.

[That's Dahl above, about six years before he did Way Out.]


Do you remember them?


They were grisly, brief, almost always with surprising and shocking
endings, and made a huge impression on watchers of any age.


When I compare the impact of Way Out to The Outer Limits, which was
great, and The Twilight Zone, which was greater . . .


. . . Way Out wins the race.


There was not one single element of humor, except that of the henpecked
or cuckolded, and therefore vengeful, husband — a frequent theme.


The music, by Robert Cobert — who would later do Dark Shadows, Kolchak the Night Stalker, and all the Dan Curtis productions of the
1970s — was extremely eerie.


And Dick Smith, who went on to become a Hollywood legend, did the
Gothic makeup jobs.

 

But the thing is, you can't see them!  They're impossible to see.
They've never been officially released to DVD or video, although four,
and four only, are unofficially available in very poor video versions. 
The reason they haven't been released involves some complicated rights
issues — but David Susskind, who produced the series, gave copies of
the shows to The Museum of Broadcasting in New York City, now known as
the Paley Media Center, on West 52nd Street.


It is only there that these shocking little segments of early Sixties
television can be viewed.

 

They can be viewed, however.



 

Last Thursday, after seeing Our Town at the Barrow Street Theatre the
night before, I went up to midtown and staked out a scholar's console
in the Library of the Paley Center.


I was able to watch four episodes of Way Out, all of which I had seen
in 1961, with a child's (haunted) eyes; and none of which I had seen
again since those unsettling Friday nights in Georgetown, D.C.


The one I was most interested in seeing was the scariest, at least
then, and is called “Soft Focus”.

 

“Soft Focus” is 29 minutes of Barry Morse playing a photographer who
has invented a retouching agent for his portraits of people, which has
the side effect of retouching their actual faces.  Thus a little boy
loses an ugly birthmark which “Dr. Pell” has erased in the lab.  Then,
too, an actress whose face has been scarred is able to be beautiful
again with the help of Dr. Pell.  Dr. Pell's wife, however, Louise, is
involved with her husband's young assistant.  Louise doesn't know that
her husband knows what is going on.

 

He begins to 'touch up' a photograph of her.  She starts to age.  (He
touches up his own photograph, too, to make himself look younger.) When she
begins to look about 50 or so — and she looks awful — her boyfriend
jilts her.  Enraged and abandoned, she enters her husband's studio and
right in front of his eyes, pours the whole bottle of solution on his
portrait.  He screams, and in the climax, which no one who saw it in
1961 ever forgot, he turns towards his gloating wife, and towards the
camera, with half his face wiped away, a perfect blank.


Dick Smith accomplished the effect perfectly.  Barry Morse just stares
at you, the left side of his face a smooth nothing of putty.



 

“Soft Focus” was written by Phil Riesman, Jr., a prolific TV writer who
specialized in history-based shows but wrote three episodes of Way
Out.  The basic idea of Reisman's script for “Soft Focus”, the
unrelenting evil of the villain's vengeance, and of his philandering
wife's vengeance in return, is completely uncompromised.  The
television mise-en-scène is perfect, mostly closeups, with two long
shots, one to show that Dr. Pell knows about his wife's infidelity; and
the last shot of the show, viewing the screaming, flailing, helpless
victim of his own wrath in shadow, shadow, shadow.

 

There is no moral or religious significance  to “Soft Focus”, nor to
any of the Way Out teleplays — and I am interested in finding such
significance when I can.  “Soft Focus” is a completely shattering use
of the small screen to horrify and make an indelible impression on the
viewer, again of any age.

 

Take the time to visit the Paley Media Center on the north side of
52nd Street between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue.  There's much else to
see.


I was told by the very nice keeper of the consoles that no one ever
asks for these Way Out episodes except one peculiar gentleman who
comes twice a year and asks to see them all.


She doesn't know his name but seems to remember the face.  This is
really true.

 

I wonder if  his name is Pell.  I wonder if his face is even more
memorable than she says.


[Editor's Note:  There was a bit of humor in the series, provided by
Dahl's on-camera introductions, in the first of which he said, “The
story we are about to see is
not for children, nor young lovers, nor people with queasy stomachs. It
is for wicked old women.”

OUR TOWN

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David Cromer's Off-Broadway production of Our Town, at the Barrow Street Theatre in Manhattan, has been getting lots of press attention and some extraordinary reviews.  Frank Rich in The New York Times devoted a very insightful column to it, relating the play and this production to the profound crisis of spirit currently afflicting the nation.

mardecortesbaja is happy to offer this equally insightful report on the production by Paul Zahl, who was lucky enough to see it last week.  Cromer's staging ends with a startling coup de theatre which Paul discusses in his report and which you might not want to know about if you're planning to see the show, so I've segregated that passage on a separate linked page.

If you weren't planning to see the show, and if you're within striking distance of New York City, I think Paul's report, and Rich's thoughts, might get you to reconsider:


                                                                                   [Image©Scott Prior]

PILGRIMAGE

by Paul Zahl

Wednesday afternoon I took the Vamoose bus from Bethesda, Maryland to the Port
Authority in Manhattan and arrived basically in time to take the subway down to
Christopher Street for the 7:30 performance of Our Town at the Barrow Street Theatre.  It was a pilgrimage for me, because I am
influenced just now by the wisdom of Thornton Wilder (below) and had heard a
lot about this particular production.



 

Charles Isherwood had written in The New York Times of a “. . . surprise Mr.
Cromer springs — a beautiful feat of stagecraft
that transmits the essence of Wilder's philosophy with an overwhelming
sensory immediacy.”


Terry Teachout had written in The Wall Street Journal, “I don't use
the word 'genius' casually, but Mr. Cromer may fill the bill.”


Moreover, Tappan Wilder, Thornton Wilder's literary executor who is a
friend here in the Washington area, had blessed the production.  'Tappy' has seen almost every
production there is or ever shall be.



 

So . . . a brief stop by a West Village video store that specializes in
movies like From Hell It Came and The Black Sleep (which has the
only discussion of the difference between Presbyterianism and
Anglicanism to occur in a 1950s “B” horror movie — no kidding) and then
straight into the theater.

 

I don't want to talk about the initial staging — in which the actors are
set within the audience, in and through the side and transverse aisles,
and at one point are even asked to read lines of the play.  I had seen
this before.

 

But I would like to reflect on the meaning of the play, as a pilgrimage
to me, which the staging finally makes possible.  Act One of Our Town
is full of the gossip and interplay of the people of Grovers Corners,
New Hampshire.  It presents two families, the Webbs and the Gibbses, as
they are in mid-career, going about their business with what we today
call “decency”, love for one's immediate family, and some elements of
Christian sympathy.   The “theme song” of the play is established in Wilder's use of
the hymn, “Blest be the tie that binds/Our hearts in Christian love”.
There is also a tragic character, Mr. Stimson, the defeated alcoholic
choirmaster of the First Congregational Church.

Director David Cromer ups the emotion of Act One by universalizing
the characters through their everyday 2009 casual clothing and by
getting the actors to show their inward lives through concentrated
facial expressions and some intense action in pantomime.  Thus Mrs.
Webb and Mrs. Gibbs reveal their inner drives through stylized, driven work in their kitchens.

You know you're being gotten to when young George Gibbs breaks down as the result of his
father's oblique and rather mild scolding of his son for neglecting his
chores at home, at the expense of his mother.  George goes completely to
pieces with remorse, and it is so like an adolescent boy!  What I am
trying to say is that Act One goes for the inward life of the
characters and is not content with the outward words and situations. 
There is no sense of our being in the year 1910.  We are rather in
2009, with every family's unhappiness and missed opportunities in the
field of love.


                                                                                                 [Image©James Estrin for the NYT]

 
The text of Act Two goes a big step further as the
inwardness of Emily and George's wedding is brought out in their
tortured recriminations with their parents in the church.  It's Wilder
writ large.  This is to say that Emily's entrance into the church is
her “inner” entrance, and George and his mother , perfectly portrayed
by Lori Myers, act out his resistance with no mediation between thought
and act.  This is absolutely wrenching — the unhappiness and also the
initial nobility of every marriage that has ever taken place.  The
blistering Stage Manager, played by Scott Parkinson, 'preaches' here a
little, and that is correct, as he is now playing the Minister.  Again,
everyone is in street clothes of the year 2009 so there is nothing
local or 'contextual' to draw the audience away from the universal
situation.  If I had any criticism at all of the direction, I would
lodge it only and solely at the conclusion of Act Two, where Mrs.
Soames' comments about happiness are underscored a little too much.

 

Now for Act Three, the famous Act Three, the Tibetan book of the dead. 
I never liked this act, speaking personally, because it seemed too
bleak, as if there were no real or warm heaven.  (Note that William
Cameron Menzies, director of the later Invaders from Mars, designed
the canvass of the dead in the Hollywood version of Our Town, with
William Holden and Martha Scott.   It is the high point of that film,
the dead standing, not sitting, on an autumn hillside.  The hillside
looks like the one Menzies designed for Invaders, and that's an
organic connection in the history of film.)

 

In any event, I was now beginning to anticipate a “surprise”, about
which all the reviewers had written.  I assumed that it would probably
have to do with George's grieving gesture at the end of the Act, which
has been staged in many different ways since the play's first
performance in 1938.  Was George going to assume a crucified position
as Alec Guinness did at the end of the original Broadway production of The Cocktail Party, which my mother saw and has never forgotten?  Or
might Emily come back from the dead, as she did in the filmed version
of the play — a change that Thornton Wilder himself approved?  What
was going to happen?

[Click here to find out what does happen in Cromer's production — those of you who might see it and don't want to be forewarned of the surprise are advised to skip this section and just read Paul's conclusion below.]

 
I have sometimes said in talks and sermons that psychology explains
everything, and psychology explains nothing.  Our Town embodies this
view of life, that the inwardness of the characters explains
everything, that the outwardness of life escapes everyone, and that we
are all actually waiting for a time when, to quote the title of an
early 'compressed play' by Wilder, The Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead. 
“And tell me about your identity then, Mrs. Smith,” the Stage Manager says in Act Three.

 

The Barrow Street Theater production of Our Town, performed in the
late Winter and Spring of 2009, is a religious masterpiece.  I wish I
could preach this message.  I have tried to do it, and failed almost
completely.  I am trying to do so still.  It is a theme that can never
be exhausted.

Paul Zahl is a preacher and theologian, and dedicates the above essay to Mary McLean Cappleman.

OUR TOWN COUP DE THEATRE

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                                     [Image©James Estrin for the NYT]

I noticed first that the dead characters were all facing different
direction in the space.  They weren't lined up in rows, but were at
angles with one another.  I noticed too that when the stars were
mentioned — and here Wilder sounds like Spinoza, whom he loved, and
Thomas Carlyle, whom he does not mention — the characters all looked
up as one at the sky.  All of them are sitting there looking for
something.  The play states this, and the director has gotten all of
the dead characters to stare in front of them, slightly up, with faces
of intense, determined concentration.  They are not resigned nor are
they really at peace.  They are looking forward.  They never deviate
from this, except when they look up, as one.

 

Then Emily takes her famous fantasy journey back to the morning of her
16th birthday.  (Here I begin to cry even as I write this.)  And then
the surprise happened.  I wasn't ready for it, I wasn't looking for it,
I wasn't expecting it.  I didn't even realize it was happening — until
I smelled something.  Bacon and eggs!  A curtain in the back of the
theater opened, revealing the morning of Emily's birthday, but this
time… the characters were in period dress, the kitchen was decorated
and fitted exactly as a kitchen would have been in 1910, and the snow
was falling outside the kitchen window and the sun was rising, with its
beautiful rays penetrating and lighting up the scene.  This time, no
exaggerated gestures, no 'inwardness' at all — just a family breakfast
on a beautiful winter's morning, with real bacon and eggs being cooked,
and Mrs. Webb looking as if she had stepped out of an old family
photograph.  What is going on here is the physical beauty and
historical specifics of a day in the life, a concrete day in the life
— and the characters are completely lost in it.  No inwardness, no
'feeling', no reflectedness; and yet all the unnoticed loveliness of a
Spring morning in Chevy Chase, or on Macomb Street with Brutus the dog
and an overnight seventh-grade blood brother.

 

Thus when Emily gave her famous speech — 'Goodbye, Grovers Corners' — she
did not turn to the audience, nor even to the poignant, vivid, colorful
scene before her (hitherto, all the actors had been in grays and browns
and blacks, all muted and blending into each other.) Rather, Emily
turned inward and bowed her head and turned away from the audience, and
grieved for what she never saw.  And then the Stage Manager bade us
good night, and the lights went out.  Fade to black.

 

What I take this all to be about is exactly what Charles Isherwood said
in his review for the Times — “… a feat of stagecraft that transmits
the essence of Wilder's philosophy with an overwhelming sensory
immediacy.”  It's not just the bacon and eggs — it is the alienation
of human existence.  We neither see what's happening on the surface nor
do we see what's happening below the surface.  The characters in the
breakfast scene at the end of the play are completely unaware of the
beauty and actual lyricism which exists all around them.  The
characters in Act Two are aware of the emotions underlying everything,
but not of any “God's-eye” cutaway that is required for the meaning of
those events to be understood.  The characters in Act Three  are
looking forward — there is a little teleology here and I was reminded
of John Steinbeck's 'loss of teleology' in his mid-career — but to
what?  They are certainly not looking backward.  The dead have, to use
Kerouac's phrase, 'retired from Samsara'.  They don't 'like it' —
Wilder's line — when the living come to call on them on their windy
hill.  They are definitely not looking backward.  And they are so far
from the particularities of the winter light of a 16th birthday, and
the 'odorama' of the memory, that Emily can barely express her loss, so
absorbing and consuming it is.

Back to the main body of Paul Zahl's report on David Cromer's production of Our Town (scroll down for the conclusion).

EASTER SUNDAY AGAIN

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                                                                                              [William Gedney]

What with one thing or another I'm sure many of us never made it to church this past Easter.  My own personal feeling about attending church is exactly that of Madea, a recurring character in the films of Tyler Perry, who says she'll go to church when they put in a smoking section.  Madea and I, both smokers, are not holding our breath — what's left of it.

Some of us may be wondering what we missed by failing to attend church on Easter, but we need wonder no longer.  Click here to listen to an actual sermon preached by my friend PZ this past Easter at a church in the Washington, D. C. area.  It's the real deal — no pussyfooting around.  He speaks of the Resurrection as a literal, historical event, and he speaks of Heaven as a real place.

It's not for the faint of heart.

But listen to the ideas behind the images, listen to the psychology of it.  It's not as crazy as it seems — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that its very craziness is invested with some serious counter-intuitive wisdom.


                                                                                                      [William Gedney]

Consider the Heaven that Dr. Z speaks of, where we will meet those who hurt and wounded us in this life, but meet them transfigured by Grace into the people we wanted and needed them to be.  Consider the very notion of Heaven, which must by definition be wholly transcendent and eternal — which must be outside of time . . . must be indeed a rebuke to time, a negation of time.  In short, if we're going to Heaven, we're already there . . . always have been, always will be.  Heaven, destroyer of time, cannot be a future eventuality.

Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is at hand” — not “coming soon to a theater near you”, but here . . . as close as your outstretched fingers.  He said, “The kingdom of God is within you.”  All of Buddhism is a meditation on this idea.  Eastern spiritual traditions have always been more eloquent on this aspect of Jesus's teaching than Western institutionalized Christianity.

There have been some exceptions to this rule in the Western Christian tradition.  Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”  Isn't “Heaven” just a way of imagining life backwards — making sense of it retrospectively while we're in the midst of its chaotic nonsense?


                                                                         [William Gedney]

The peroration of Dr. Z's Easter sermon is borrowed from Bob Dylan:

The cards are no good that you're holding,
Unless they're from another world.

All questions of theology aside, this is a difficult proposition to refute from actual life experience . . . yours, mine, anybody's.

JERRY LEWIS, FRANK TASHLIN AND GOD (OH, MY!)

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Religiosity in 20th-Century art has been a problematic subject for mainstream intellectual critics, unless it could be given a negative twist, treated as a form of neurosis — Hitchcock's “Catholic guilt” being a prime example.  This leaves many aspects of many artists' work unexamined. 

mardecortesbaja welcomes ventures into problematic subjects and therefore presents without further ado a post about explicit religiosity in the films of Jerry Lewis, written by my friend and fellow film buff P. F. M. Zahl:

Jerry Lewis is often accused of sentimentality, of embarrassing sentimentality, in relation to the films he made in his classic period.

The sentimentality is in massive evidence within The Family Jewels (1965), in which a poor little rich girl who has been orphaned is required to choose her new 'father' from among her eccentric uncles.  Lewis plays them all, or over-plays them all.  Yet I defy you to not wipe away a tear at the conclusion of the movie, when the nature of her chosen 'father's' sacrificial love comes out.  I defy you not to be moved.  Even after you have winced through two hours of hammering slapstick.
 
The God question in Lewis is even more fraught than the question of his sentimentality.  I'm not sure that even the French can handle this one.


 
I am thinking of two of the main Jerry Lewis movies that were written and directed by Frank Tashlin.  Tashlin, or “Tash”, as Lewis called him, taught his more famous student 'everything I ever learned' about movie-making, and then Jerry took it from there.  But to much contemporary sensibility — today, that is — the God factor in two films, The Disorderly Orderly (above, 1964) and The Geisha Boy (1958) is just too hot to handle.  And I am not even going to mention Who's Minding the Store? (1963), with its “We're Sorry” denouement written touchingly on the placards that all the lead characters wear as they plead for Jerry to forgive them.  Nor will I mention Rock a Bye Baby (1958), with its soaring Grace on the part of the devastatingly unselfish TV repairman (Lewis) who brings up someone else's baby triplets alone.
 
In The Disorderly Orderly Jerry prays fervently for an old girlfriend, who did once spurn him and continues to spurn him, when she is brought into the emergency room after an almost successful attempt at suicide.  Then when she recovers, Jerry prays again — and overdoes it a little — to God, thanking God for answering his prayer.  He then proceeds to basically redeem this selfish but also hurt woman, winning her affection in a most 'Christian' manner, if I could put it that way.  Every time I show The Disorderly Orderly to a group, the whole place dissolves at the end.  And that's almost 50 years after it was made.
 
To be noted is Frank Tashlin's religion, which he by no means wore on his sleeve and would probably never have referred to.  But we also know that “Tash” wrote and directed a short animated film for the Lutheran Church in 1949 entitled The Way of Peace, which is as explicit a Christian warning concerning nuclear war as ever was filmed during that era in Hollywood.  This religious short subject had disappeared, and I had the privilege two years ago of bringing it back to the surface from the ELCA (i.e., Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) archives.  I believe it can now be YouTubed.  In any case, The Way of Peace is an important clue to Frank Tashlin's religious views.  [Editor's note:  I've written about The Way Of Peace previously, here.]


 
But it is The Geisha Boy where Jerry and God connect at the most length.  Jerry stars as The Great Wooley, a magician on tour with the USO in occupied Japan.  He charms a little boy whose parents are both dead and who has not smiled or laughed for five years.  Jerry and little Mitsuo connect, and Mitsuo tells Jerry that he is the answer to his prayers.  Jerry is moved, comments, and tells Suzanne Pleshette.  Jerry then goes to Korea and performs for the GI's, taking time, in a sustained and extremely pointed scene, to pray before an altar — a sort of makeshift battlefield altar — for the little boy back in Japan.  Prayer is referred to again, and finally The Great Wooley adopts the boy, takes him (together with his Japanese aunt, whom he marries) back to America, and all three become a happy family magic act.  It is not actually all that maudlin.
 
As someone who believes in prayer, and who sure believes in reconciliation between previously estranged people, I find The Geisha Boy moving and also full of love.  Plus, the Technicolor palette is out of sight, from the first shot to the last.

I would even go so far as to 'pair' The Geisha Boy with Kurosawa's Ikiru because they relate to the exact same period in the history of Japan, and in The Geisha Boy the little boy's last name is Watanabe; and as we all know, the hero of Ikiru  is named Watanabe.  In fact, the 'son' character in Ikiru is named Mitsuo Watanabe and the 'son' character in The Geisha Boy is named Mitsuo Watanabl.  You can't convince me that Taslin hadn't seen Ikiru, especially when you hear Kurosawa report that it took them two full weeks to come up with the unusual 'Watanabe' name for the hero of that great classic of world cinema.
 
Jerry Lewis and God.  Jerry Lewis and Frank Tashlin and God.  Or maybe it was just the Fifties and early Sixties.  But watch for God to appear within the Lewis canon.  I  also think He's still there, in the telethons.  I see God pop up in the telethons all the time.  I also know that Lewis, right in the heart of his heyday, treasured above all awards, above all European honors and medals, an award he received from the State of Israel.  If you don't think God is friends with Jerry Lewis, then look again.  Oh, and note the Buddhist tie-in, too, within The Geisha Boy, in the thumping importance given to the character of Harry the Hare.  I don't think that's a coincidence either.



mardecortesbaja would just like to add that it's common, but hardly quite responsible, intellectually speaking, to admire Tashlin and Lewis for their radical dislocations of cinematic convention and their radical critiques of American society and to ignore the spiritual values (or the spiritual sentimentality, if you prefer) which also informs their work.  You have ask, was the spiritual dimension an embarrassing aberration in that work, or one of the key sources of its radical attitudes?  See my post on The Way Of Peace for further thoughts on this subject, especially as it relates to Tashlin.

OVER THE BARRICADES: AN INAUGURATION EXCLUSIVE!

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Our Washington correspondent, Dr. P. F. “Maleva” Zahl, was on the Mall in Washington yesterday with his wife and some friends to witness the Inauguration of the 44th President of the United States.  The good doctor is my oldest friend — we met in seventh grade, in Washington, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, and had many adventures in the very places shown on television yesterday, so he was in my thoughts as I watched the inauguration coverage.  He was kind enough to send this special report of the day:

O HAPPY (LONG) DAY

by Paul Zahl

 
Mary and I and our friends from Philadelphia left our house in the
near suburbs of Washington very early, taking the Inauguration shuttle
down Connecticut Avenue.

The crowds were not too bad as we walked from Farragut Square over to the Mall entrance nearest the Washington Monument.

[Correspondent Zahl stands on the left, next to his wife Mary with friends.]

It was extremely cold and everyone was bundled up.  The
cold never let up; and in the place where we stood for most of the
morning, at the top of hill by the Monument, the wind was unendingly
sharp.

Starting around 9:30 the crowd began to build. By 11 the space was absolutely packed.


 
Most of the baby-boomers present, like ourselves, were white; but
the overwhelming majority of the crowd were young, between 20 and 30. 
Where we were, the people were 90% under 30.  African-Americans were a
large but not majority proportion, although our friends with tickets
much nearer the Capital said the crowd there was 70% African-American. 
Very interesting it was to us that when Rick Warren recited the Lord's
Prayer, the African-Americans around us said it with him, but the
younger white people mostly did not.  I wasn't quite sure what I should
do at that moment.
 
We liked Pastor Warren's prayer as a whole, but he seemed to be
'imposing' the Lord's Prayer at the end.  We liked the name of Jesus
the way he did it, and there were no 'murmurs' anywhere near us that we
could hear.


 
When the cold became simply unbearable by the Monument — and we
all had at least five layers on, plus hand warmers — we moved down to
a jumbo-tron screen for President Obama's Inaugural Address.  He had
the complete attention of the thousands on every side of us.  Not one
word avoided being heard.  Mary and I were struck especially by his
listing of virtues such as courage and tolerance and compassion under
the positive adjective “old”.  He appealed to history, and even
primeval history.  We are not people who mind God-talk, so his
invocation of God's Grace seemed to us sincere and helpful.
 
Mary and I are religious people, and would be on the 'traditional
Christian' side of much (but not all) that is discussed today.  But we
also felt that Barack Obama more truly reflected the Christian
heart-ideas and experience which mean the world to us, than the other
side.  That may sound like a 'no-brainer', but for us it was not.  We
might normally have voted for a Republican given the degree to which
our own lives have been affected, and shattered in truth, by the
culture wars of recent times.  We have felt no more warmth from the Left,
religiously at least, than the secular world feels from the Right. 
Nevertheless, we could not vote for someone whose foreign policy
involves a “doctrine” of pre-emption . . . and no talking
with our enemies, and so forth.

We also see in Barack Obama something
that our little Episcopal Church culture wars never produced, neither
from the Left nor from the Right: a statesman, who listens without condescension, i.e.,
with felt interest and even sympathy, to those with whom he disagrees. 
If only our own context professionally, which is a denomination of
Christians in 21st Century America, had produced a person like this man
seems to us to be.  If only that, we would not be, with many, many of
our old friends and colleagues, in a broken, split, and bitter
aftermath.

 
I am glad, therefore, to be living and working in Washington this
year.  It meant that we could witness these things with our own eyes. 
It means, too, that we can aspire to the statesmanship and grace which
live only a few miles away from us down Connecticut Avenue. 
 
P.S. The one truly uncomfortable moment of the Day had nothing to
do with the Main Event.  The crowd control as people began to leave the
Mall was awful!  No one had any idea of where to go and what exits were
not blocked.  So you had at least 100,000 people jammed together all
trying to move out but with no idea where they could go.  For a moment
or two it could have been a soccer-stadium disaster.  But then people
just started to climb over the barricades.  Which felt exactly right.

EIGHT MORE RANDOM FACTS

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Responding
to my post EIGHT USELESS FACTS, Paul Zahl writes to say that he's not
actively blogging at the moment but that if he were he'd offer the
following eight random facts about himself, plus one bonus fact:



Here are the eight facts:



     1. I spent an afternoon once with Jacques Cousteau.



     2. My wife and I got caught in the middle of a
gun fight between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants in
Bethlehem. In fact, Mary was able to duck just in time as an off-course
bullet went right over her head.



     3. Ten days ago I spent the night in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.



     4. I asked John F. Kennedy for his autograph
when I lived around the corner from his house, and he gave it to me.



     5. As a child in New York City, I lived across
the street from Marilyn Monroe when she was married to Arthur Miller,
and my Mother would point them out to me on walks when I was in my
stroller.



     6. I produced a movie about blue-collar Protestants in a small town in Northern Ireland.



     7. I acted in two movies that were directed by Lloyd Fonvielle.



     8. My favorite movie of all time is Matinee, directed by Joe Dante.



     9. Optional extra fact:  I presented
Stevie Wonder with his doctoral hood when he became a Doctor of Music
at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.



The films directed by Lloyd Fonvielle he mentions were 8mm efforts done when we were in high school — The Journal Of Jonathan Harker, in which Zahl portrayed Count Dracula, interpreting him as a crazed Presbyterian, and The Fruit At the Bottom Of the Bowl, an unauthorized adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story in which Zahl portrayed a debonair murder victim.



Zahl was not an easy actor to work with.  He had his own version
of “The Method”, which involved shutting himself in a closet between
takes and singing In Darkness Let Me Dwell. 
I did not feel that this technique aided him in his interpretation of
his roles and our quarrels on the set were legendary.  We never
worked together again, though the two films we did make have since
become celebrated as lost cult classics.



[Meanwhile, Tony D'Ambra of films noir has posted his eight random
facts here, and Amy Crehore of Little Hokum Rag has posted hers here.]

OLD FRIEND FROM FAR AWAY

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Above is a picture of Paul Zahl, the dean of a prominent
Episcopalian divinity school.  He's my oldest friend.  We met
when we were 12 years-old and he introduced me to Famous Monsters Of Filmland
— and the rest is history.  We were both somewhat nerdy bookworms
who shared a (for me anyway) life-changing realization — that we could
apply our intellectual powers to the stuff we really loved, like movies
and monster movies in particular . . . that we could take them
seriously.  That gave me, among other things, a vocation in life
— filmmaking — as well as a source of never-ending intellectual
joy.  It meant, for example, reversing the dynamic, that I could
find as much fun in Shakespeare as I did in The Bride Of Frankenstein —
that I didn't have to make the sort of value judgments between forms
that official high culture uses to diminish the prestige (and disguise
the power) of the popular arts and to turn the classics into dust.

Paul and I quickly discovered another classmate, Bill Bowman, who
shared our love of horror films, and like so many other children of Famous Monsters
in our generation we immediately started making our own versions of the
classics in 8mm, and these little epics survive as testaments to our
passion.




Paul and I
hadn't seen each other for more than two decades but when he showed up
for a visit last weekend we started jabbering away at each other with
all the excitement we shared as teenagers — talking about The Searchers, The Bride
(as we always called the mother of all Universal horror films), Blake, Dylan and theology in a continuum of appreciation that
crackled with the action of genuine intellectual adventure.



The eclectic
craziness of Las Vegas helps encourage this way of thinking about
things, in which disparate visions illuminate and deepen each
other.  We sat on the terrace of Mon Ami Gabi at the edge of a
recreation of Paris, within sight of a recreation of ancient Rome and
an evocation of Lake Como and discussed the plastic eloquence of John
Ford, the precise relationship of incarnation and atonement in the
Gospels, the sly wisdom of Bob Dylan and the best images in The Creature From the Black Lagoon . . . as though all in the same breath.



It was the sort
of thing we had given each other permission to do in our youth and I
realized again what a blessing that permission truly was.



Paul brought with him a gift — the February 1963 issue of Famous Monsters, the legendary double issue on The Bride Of Frankenstein
with the stunning cover by Basil Gogos.  When we saw this cover
for the first time at a newsstand, when we were 13 years-old, our pulses quickened.  Looking at
it now, my blood still runs high.  It's just cool.  Always
was, always will be.