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Let Me Tell You About Mattapoisett

June 30, 2008 5 Comments

I don’t live in Mattapoisett. It’s right over there. My older son attends school with children from Mattapoisett and one other town. I built a house in Mattapoisett once:

Mattapoisett is like Marion, where I live. It has a “village,” a rabbit warren of little streets down by the ocean that’s lovely to walk around in. Away from the water, across the main road in town, there’s more suburby looking areas. Exurban, really, as we’re pretty far away from any Metropolis. Officially we’re a suburb of New Bedford, I guess, but that’s like saying you’re a satellite without a planet. It’s all small around here.

Marion is considered more tony than Mattapoisett. It has a fancier yacht club, tennis club, golf course, stuff like that. But it’s much more fun to walk around Mattapoisett than it is in Marion. Marion is like an outdoor funeral parlor compared to Mattapoisett, and that’s saying something, as Mattapoisett is pretty sleepy. But you just take a pleasant walk on Mattapoisett’s shade-dappled streets, walk right down to the water, get an ice-cream with the ocean for a backdrop, or cross the street –without looking much– and get a pint at the Kinsale Inn, then sit for a blessed moment on their screened-in porch and watch the ocean and the promenaders go by. We did. Come with us.





I Love That ELO

June 29, 2008 2 Comments

There’s a kind of coarseness to making fun of things nowadays. I don’t mean that it’s all bathroom humor, although there’s plenty of that. I mean the humor is not sophisticated. To properly lampoon something, you have to first understand it — but you really have to have a little affection for the subject to mock it properly. The Internet, with its cut-and-paste immediacy, lends itself to instant parody, not much of it very good. If you visit the average blog where opinion is offered and comments are enabled, you’re almost immediately able to ken the Zeitgest there immediately and move on: Yes, I get it: You hate ______. A lot. But photoshopping a Hitler moustache onto milquetoast politicians isn’t a trenchant lampoon. It’s the visual equivalent of putting toilet paper in someone’s shrubs while they’re asleep. Not particularly brave, or funny.

Randy Newman has the cultivated talent to understand the subject intimately, and the twinkle in the eye that’s necessary to mock it properly. But I can see a little affection in there for it, too. That’s what makes it sublime.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

June 28, 2008 No Comments

That’s a Jamaican Ska band, the Skatalites. Ska is a kind of on-its-head Caribbean version of American fifties R&B, on drugs, and steroids. For some unexplained reason they’re playing in Glastonbury, which doesn’t fit the narrative one way or the other, especially since I’m not sure if it’s Glastonbury Connecticut, or the one in England where the skinheads like Ska music for another reason I don’t understand.

They’re performing a gloss on a Ukrainian composer’s idea of appropriate background music for a movie about an international team of saboteurs blowing something up in Greece, but the Greek guy in the movie isn’t Greek, I think, his real name is Ercolani and he’s from Phillie, and Ercolani is a Bolgnese name anyway, and the Greek song he sings, Yalo, Yalo, isn’t part of the score; besides, he used to hang around with Gidget and nobody that hangs around with Gidget is any kind of saboteur you’d care to hang out with –oh yes, the song the Skatalites are playing has words but nobody knows them, and for good reason…

Islands of Greece are green and beautiful,
Green and beautiful,
Where the olive trees grow
In the field below,
But high on the cliffs the guns are hidden there,
Guns are hidden there,
In a cavern of stone,
Guns of Navarone…

There’s like 142 more verses like that, only worse, or moreso, or something, and if you go to a Skatalites show and sing along people won’t think you’re cool because you know them, they’ll think you’re strange so shut up.

So, to sum up: Nothing is wrong with this picture. It’s exactly how I prefer the musical world to be organized.

(Stop! Once Again It’s) Hammer Time

June 27, 2008 2 Comments

[Editor’s Note: Originally offered a coupla years ago. Still rings true]
{Author’s Note: The kid’s pushing thirteen, and blessedly, my lawnmower, right now. There is no editor}

My older boy is ten. He’s infinitely interesting, and not just to his parents. Like many of his peers, the best description of his personality is born old. That is to say: he’s preternaturally sophisticated, and is endlessly interested in adult things, without ever losing that joie de vivre that we all envy the young. It’s interesting to field questions from him now, and try to figure out what’s happening just below the surface of the inquiry. There are no easy questions anymore. And sometimes I wonder if he asks me things just to see if I’ll run out of answers. And the time for making stuff up is over. The world’s not that mysterious to him any more.

We have him help out with the family business a little. Once a week he empties out the various vacuum cleaners, sweeps the floor, bundles the trash, and totes that bale a bit. He gets paid, and tracks this payment on a spreadsheet to determine how much he’s earned. And he cashes it in when he wants something bad enough. It’s a testament to how much times have changed, that often as not it’s software he wants. Sheesh.

He really isn’t interested in what I do. He’s dutiful, and a joy for his company, but he’s not handy. Strangely enough, I’m not really handy either, and have worked my whole life to counterfeit other’s easy ability with tools. In boatbuilding, they use an expression: His mallet don’t ring. What they refer to, is when a man would caulk a wooden boat, he would strike a metal iron with a wooden mallet to set a string in the seam that seals the planks from leaking. A good caulker could gently rock and strike the iron to set the seaming cord almost effortlessly, and the mallet would “ring” as he struck it. It’s like watching someone play a stringed instrument well. For the rest of us, it’s like trying to shove a snake up a drainpipe.

His mallet don’t ring. It’s not pejorative. It’s an assessment. It means effort is required to accomplish the same thing that comes easily to others. It has a tone of awe, sometimes, to acknowledge greatness, born greatness: His mallet rings.

My boy’s mallet don’t ring. But he soldiers on next to his father, and counterfeits ability with effort. Someday he will find the thing that makes his mallet ring. But I shall be prouder of him for the effort he puts in on the things that must be done, than whatever he accomplishes doing what he’d care to do. An Olympic Gold Medal is nothing compared to a Silver Star, after all.

Across The Street And Three Centuries (Again)

June 26, 2008 No Comments

If you cross the street from Abigail Adams, you can look back at the First Parish Church she adorns from the sylvan vantage point of the old burial ground. It has the calm of a spot of extreme age, well tended. There are no hard edges remaining, even on the hardest of original edges displayed there.

These were austere and uncompromising men and women that were buried here. Life was not a bowl of cherries for anybody three hundred years ago, as the mute evidence of the numerous tiny nameless markers at the foot of the parent’s graves testify. No man should bury his children, it is said. I suspect it was said recently.

The various inscriptions about the denizens here are very chaste in their praise. It was enough, apparently, to commemorate their importance to the town and the country, to single them out for mention. There are two bronze plaques from the 1920s which list the names of the local inhabitants that participated in the Revolutionary War, flanked by another listing those first hardy souls that founded the city.

The founder’s plaque has but a few names: Hancock, Adams, Quincy, Hoar. They are the ancestors of the men of those names we learn of in the history books. Hoar was a doctor, and the third president of Harvard University. The boneyard itself was set aside in 1640.

Henry Adams was born in 1583. It is useful to put that in perspective. William Shakespeare baptized his first daughter in 1583. Michelangelo was still painting the back wall of the Sistine Chapel just forty years before that. Andrea Palladio, that most influential of architects, whose Four Books Of Architecture that church was most surely based upon, was still alive in1580. When I first began working in the 1970s, I worked with people whose experience went back to before the Depression. Henry Adams and his neighbors rubbed elbows with the Middle Ages.

The inscription on the lovely gate leading into the burying ground reads: “The Mortal Shall Put On Immortality.”

Certainly that. There’s also a kind of fame, made indistinct by the passage of time, which fertilizes the grass here. We are watching the proceedings from the stands, mostly. These are the men and women who strode into the arena, and slew the beasts.

Whatever rest they’ve gotten, they earned.

Month: June 2008

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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