Sendak’s Not-so-Wild Things

May 15, 2012 By Max Lindenman 5 Comments

Researching last week’s piece on tattooing revived somewhat my old interest in Polynesian culture. With no pig to stick or roast, I had to indulge my enthusiasm the virtual way — by watching a YouTube clip in which a mixed group of Maoris performs a war chant. The effect was suitably horrifying. The performers managed to sustain their fury till the end — a theatrical coup when you consider none of the chanters had much reason to be angry at anyone in the audience. In comparison, the Zulu war songs in the movie Zulu are more awesome, but it’s their harmonic complexity that inspires the awe and renders them, paradoxically, too beautiful to be altogether frightening. I daresay even I were cowering behind a sack of meal, the men of the hostile impi jabbing their aasegais at the place where my Adam’s apple would be if I raised my head, I wouldn’t be able to resist humming along.

But not even in the movies would Welsh soldiers interrupt a Maori chanting party by striking up a song of their own. To an English-speaker unfamiliar with Maori, the words sound an awful lot like ‘SHUTTHEFUCKUP,” and their delivery suggests that might not be so far from their actual meaning.

The memory of these bone-chilling imprecations returns to me as I search for the words to explain why I’ve never quite bought the late Maurice Sendak as a master of darkness. I read both In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are when I was three, as receptive and impressionable an age as the author could want. And neither of the damn books scared me for a second. The Wild Things might have had terrible teeth and claws, but in every other respect they were cute. As potential threats, they were about as convincing as Elmer Fudd. Mickey’s nudity did weird me out slightly, but it was clear it didn’t weird him out a bit. In escaping the Oliver Hardy clones, he never loses his smartassed grin for an instant.

It wasn’t until turning six that I found myself really shaken by anything in literature. The book was Great Expectations, from which my mother read me a chapter every night before bedtime. When Magwitch ordered Pip to bring him a file and some rations “or I’ll have your lungs and liver out,” my hands flew to my ears. I felt the terror of helplessness before something strong and pitiless. In fact, for many years, I misremembered Magwitch’s threat as “I’ll eat your lungs and liver,” which may explain why I’ve spent a good part of my life making my own lungs and liver completely indigestible.*

This was the effect the Maoris had on me. The chant was so fierce, and so deadly serious, that I was able to smother any association I had of grown men in loincloths with Robert Bly. Instead, I heard the crack of a war club against my own skull. Switching to a modern context, I saw myself meeting a Maori in a bar, getting ever so slightly wide, and flying face-first through a window to become an unprotesting receptacle for dozens of Maori fists and boots. Any author (or author-illustrator) who can achieve this effect with the tools at his disposal can mark a reader for life, and not necessarily in a bad way. Horror is nothing if not thrilling; well-remembered horror represents a renewable resource.

In the New Yorker’s “Postscript,” Adam Gopnik writes: “What [Sendak's] people seek is what we all seek: calm amid the storm of the world. They are studies in unostentatious courage—Max and Mickey don’t act out; they just carry on.” Resilience is an admirable quality, but it makes for dull reading unless some effort is made to dramatize the blips in it, those occasions where the hero or heroine is sure she’s going to lose, and goes slightly to pieces. It’s the moments when Bugs Bunny cries, “Yikes,” and when his ears sag in anticipation of doom, that make him a sympathetic — and relatively complex — character. Has anyone ever really given a tuppeny dam’ about the unflappable Road Runner?

Perrault and the Grimm brothers demonstrate just how possible this is when writing for very young readers. When we meet Cinderella, she’s been screwed royally by life, and experiences every one of her indignities to the fullest. If her fairy godmother offers her a better break than most of us can ever hope to get, it comes with all sorts of weird conditions, not unlike a credit card offer. In James and the Giant Peach, among other books, Roald Dahl employs the same pattern. Aunts Spiker and Sponge are so vile in their persons, and James Henry Trotter’s life with them so degraded, that hanging around with a bunch of giant, mutant insects seems like spring break in comparison. Beat that, anyone.

In an essay, Sendak recalled one of his first serious efforts at fiction, which he illustrated — and co-wrote with an older sister — at the age of nine or thereabouts. Titled “The Inseparables,” its title characters were a brother and sister who, like Tony and Cesca Carmonte in the original Scarface, were madly in love with one another. As they do for Tony and Cesca, things go badly for the Sendaks’ pair; the brother crashes his car and ends up in the hospital, bandaged from head to toe. Rather than accept this brake to their passion, the two lovers leap from a window, crying, “WE ARE INSEPARABLE,” and go splat.

In Sendak’s account, the story delighted his family, who provided him with his very first lecture-circuit stop. If Mom, Dad or a well-meaning uncle thought to take him aside and explain gently that brother-sister hookups are considered seriously uncool, even in royal families, he never mentions it. Although Sendak did go on to take a melancholy tone in some books for older kids, I’d say the gifts that first revealed themselves in “The Inseparables” are the ones that drove him ahead of the pack. These boil down to a whimsicality that domesticates the perverse and bizarre, making them fun, as the saying goes, for the whole family. That ain’t hay, but anyone who wants to give me nightmares is going to have to try a little harder.

*It turns out my memory is both worse and better than I gave it credit for. According to the Project Gutenberg edition, Magwitch threatens to extract Pip’s heart and liver. However, he adds that they’ll be “roasted, and ate.”

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The Best Hippy-Dippy Catholic Movie Ever

April 23, 2012 By Max Lindenman 10 Comments
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A naked blonde lies staked to the ground, straddled by a man who means to insult her, in the Victorian sense of the word. Gulping back terror, she warns her assailant that if he goes through with his plan, she’ll make sure he goes to jail for the rest of his life. Even in her last, desperate bid to protect the integrity of her body, she speaks with perfect composure, sound jurisprudence, and even a hint of compassion. St. Agnes herself could have done no better.

Do I really need to remind everyone that this scene is from Billy Jack, the film where a discharged Green Beret employs fist, foot and finally bullet to protect a school full of hippies from reacionary townies? In a just world, I wouldn’t. Released in 1971 after production on a shoestring budget by auteur Tom Laughlin, who also stars in the title role, it remains the most profitable independent film of all time. It begat two sequels: Trial of Billy Jack and Billy Jack Goes to Washington. It retains a strong enough following to have earned a 62% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Just five years ago, Laughlin found it worthwhile to have the series released in a DVD box set, and to haul his aging frame on a circuit of local TV stations in the hope of promoting it. Where Billy Jack is concerned, please, do not seek the living among the dead.

The point here is not that Billy Jack has aged like Led Zeppelin IV or Sticky Fingers. The headbands and hip-huggers on the girls, not to mention the Stetson hats and overt racism of the yahoos, date it indelibly. But as cultural artifacts of Nixon’s first term go, it’s nowhere near so hokey as Daddy Dewdrop’s “Chick-a-Boom,” or even Melanie Safka’s “Brand-New Key.” No, I’d say Billy Jack compares best with Don McLean’s “American Pie” — a little whiny, a little long, but hard not to enjoy, especially after it’s taken a sabbatical of decent length. Catholics should pay it particular mind because it captures a moment in Church history that offers itself too easily to mockery.

The plot: Billy Jack, half-Native American, half-white, a Special Forces veteran who served in Vietnam and a hapkido expert, finds himself in a rapidly escalating pissing contest with a gang of Sunbelt squares. Not only does the gang, led by Chevy dealership owner Stuart Posner (Bert Freed), shoot innocent mustangs for fun, it harasses the students and faculty at the Freedom School run by Jean, Billy’s sweetheart (Delores Taylor, Laughlin’s wife). As tensions mount, Posner’s sulky, shifty son, Bernard (David Roya), murders one of the students and rapes Jean, driving Billy to take his revenge, to the audience’s satisfaction.

Spotting the Catholic dimension in all this might require watching with a copy of Henri J.M. Nouwen’s Wounded Healer on the lap. In Wounded Healer, published a year after Billy Jack’s release, Nouwen outlines the challenges of ministering to what seemed then a new personality type. Nuclear Man has “lost all naive faith in the possibilities of technology” in favor of a morbid awareness that scientific progress could mean human extinction. He’s also abandoned any hope of immortality, either through reproduction or resurrection. Trapped in “the prison of his mortality,” and of his immediate sensory experiences, he tries to free himself — either through mysticism or through revolutionary politics.

For Nouwen, the dialectic of revolutionary and mystic resolves itself in Jesus. In Billy Jack, it attempts to resolve itself in Billy Jack. On the mystical side, Billy studies with a Native American shaman, and in one scene, participates in a ritual where he “becomes brother” to a rattlesnake by permitting it to bite him. He tries his hand at counseling the kids. In the film’s most famous scene, he explains to Bernard, who is acting as town bully: “When Jean and the kids at the school tell me I’m supposed to control my violent temper, and be passive and non-violent like they are, I try. I really try.” But after listing all the atrocities Bernard’s committed that day, Billy concludes, “I…JUST…GO..BESERK,” and karate-chops Bernard and his flunkies all over the screen.

As a prototype of the leader Nouwen had in mind for his day’s youth — a compassionate contemplative who was also a man of action — Billy’s a work in progress. But a work in progress sometimes counts as progress. In the series, Billy Jack follows The Born Losers, where Billy defends a college girl from a biker gang. By 1967, when Born Losers hit theaters, low-budget biker movies were an established genre. With titles like The Wild Angels, The Violent Angels and The Glory Stompers, they featured Nuclear Man living out the nihilism of his Nuclear Manhood to the fullest. As Joan Didion writes, “There is always that ‘perverse’ sequence in which the bikers batter at some psychic sound barrier…break on through to the other side and find, once there, ‘nothing to say.’” By creating Billy Jack to thrash them, Laughlin was at least trying — well ahead of the general culture, and in a way that partly foreshadowed Nouwen — to impose some meaning on the mishegoss.

If Laughlin never quite made Billy into Nouwen’s beau ideal of a culture warrior, he certainly placed him in a setting conducive to the transformation. It’s from the details of place and character that the film most obviously draws its Catholic flavor. Jean’s Freedom School, where Nuclear-type teen runaways work on a ranch while learning to express themselves through the arts, is basically an intentional community — perhaps not so different from the Catholic Worker farms. One senior instructor, a dry, intense man by the name of O.K. Corrales (Allan Myerson), might as well have FORMER JESUIT SCHOLASTIC stamped on his forehead. When pursued by what looks like every trooper in Arizona’s Department of Public Safety, Billy holes up in a mission-style church, its cross proudly on display.

But the proof is in Jean herself. She has the swift, purposeful walk, the modest gaze and deferential delivery of someone who spent the first 12 years of her life in the care of nuns. Jean may lack Dorothy Day’s fine bones, but with her face windburned and scrubbed fresh as an angel’s, she could have based her look on a snapshot of the youthful Day she saw on her copy of The Long Loneliness. She hesitates to report Bernard’s attack, fearing that Billy will kill him and force the closure of the school. If she’s guilty of consequentialism here (and I’ll let my better-informed readers tell me whether she is or not), she at least displays an impulse toward Cross-bearing. Finally, Jean acts as Billy’s conscience, perusading him to give himself up peacefully, in what we are meant to recognize as a Christlike act.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should state for the record that my old parish had its resident Jean-like figure, a woman whose studied placidity never failed to drive me beserk. But I won’t stand to see these signs of Catholicism dismissed as figments of my imagination. Laughlin, who attended Marquette, planned for a time to produce a film on Fr. William DuBay. DuBay, a priest who served in Los Angeles at the time of the Watts riots, demanded his archbishop be removed for inaction on civil rights, and urged priests to unionize. In fact, Laughlin first announced his interest in DuBay in 1965, just before he would have began production on Born Losers. Billy Jack, in effect, replaced William DuBay as Laughlin’s hero for our times.

The sort of transition — from social activism to Marx-flavored liberation theology, from a world-friendly Christianity to outright syncretism — is the kind of thing that gives 1960s-style Catholicism a bad name. It’s what critics have in mind when they condemn a style of Catholicism as hippy-dippy. When the CDF released its report on the LCWR, those are the memories that got stirred, and which stirred up passions in turn. I suppose I’m submitting Billy Jack for inspection to get people measuring the water in the glass differently. Billy and Jean might not have been solid, Mass-going Catholics, but they had enough of the Church left in them to hold down the body count. If the counterculture infected Catholicism, so too did Catholicism affect the counterculture. Otherwise the decade, like Evelyn Waugh, could have been a hell of a lot worse.

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Narcissus Without Echo

March 28, 2012 By Max Lindenman 8 Comments

If I find myself spending this summer shirtless and posing for photographs, I’ll have Justice Antonin Scalia — no relation to my editor, although I’ve told friends otherwise — to thank. Yesterday, while counsel were delivering their oral arguments for and against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Scalia asked, “Why not mandate health club membership?”

That got me thinking. I remain a member in good standing of L.A. Fitness. Every month, the club withdraws $30 from my checking account. Yet I haven’t stepped foot inside the place since fall of ’10. Like all those insured Americans who never manage to get sick or hurt, and who never need Viagra or Wellbutrin or extensive dental work, I’m paying into the system and seeing no benefit. Rather than let my monthly fee cover some non-payer’s time on the racquetball court or the eliptical machine, I decided, yesterday evening, to get my money’s worth.

Oh, all right — there’s another reason. Remember the woman I alluded to in my essay on the transformative power of grief? Well, we had a rematch, which ended even worse than the first. Not that I’m planning some male version of the revenge diet. In any circumstances, revenge is vulgar; in these, it’s unwarranted and worse, impossible. The woman was young. How young? Young enough to have mistaken me, briefly, for Lord Byron. Young enough that I carry the blame for my own undoing. Young enough, finally, that no matter how many reverse curls I end up doing, she’ll still look perky, to a Kim Cattral-ish degree, when I’m figuring out Charon’s tip.

What the situation demands is a simple self-respect transfusion. Treating my body to a restoration campaign, such as cities devote to their historic buildings, should do the trick. I’m not naturally imposing; indeed, that’s what makes these transformations seem so magical. In my late 30s, I plumped my neck to 18 inches and shrank my waist to 29. Remembering myself at 13, with the spare tire that earned me the nickname “sausage,” and glasses thick enough to fry ants through, I would think, “Only in America.”

But it ain’t morning in America. I turned 40 this past January — that makes it halftime, at best. When I grew my beard, I noticed the right side and the chin were shot through with gray — grizzled, by God! Every day since then, I’ve checked the mirror, expecting to find I’ve sprouted a gut, lost inches in height to osteoperosis, or that my pectoral muscles have begun softening into breasts.

But, somehow, last week, when I surrendered to the first stirrings of the workout bug, neither pushups, nor parallel bar dips, nor stomach crunches nor neck bridges caused me to dissolve into a puddle of senescence. In fact, after only a few days, I noticed a subtle improvement in my physique: angles and bulges emerging where once only lines and empty space had been. In his last years, the Duke of Marlborough was fond of pointing to Kneller’s portrait of his youthful self and telling visitors, “Now that was a man!” For those of us who aren’t Dorian Gray, that’s about as good a deal as can be hoped for. It was the hope of securing an image I might carry in my head on the slow slide to the grave that made Justice Scalia, for once, sound sage.

For those who live on Mars, L.A. Fitness is a nice, middle-of-the-road kind of gym — neither chi-chi nor ghetto, dominated neither by fanatics nor laggards. A democratic spirit governs the place: tottering seniors and boisterous frat rats, club owners and airport baggage handlers, all share space politely like leopards and kids. This is particularly true at night, I’ve noticed, which is when I followed my vision to the outlet on Scottsdale and McDowell. When I arrived, at about 10:30, the scanner wouldn’t beep when I scanned the bar code on the tab I wear on my keychain. The pantherlike young man behind the desk took it from me, tried scanning it himself, then handed it back with a frown.

“This thing must be ancient,” he said. “Stop by on your way out. I’ll get you a new one.”

An ancient tab for an ancient patron made a horrible kind of sense. But damned if stepping past the desk into the main workout room didn’t rejuvenate me. Clean and brilliantly lit, the place is nothing if not peppy — top-dollar industrial design experts have seen to that. Apparently, subtlety doesn’t figure into the skill set of a top-dollar industrial design expert. Over the PA system, the Ready Set was singing — cross my heart:

Hey, hey we’ll be young forever
Tonight will last forever ’til our bodies drop

Having exhausted my pecs, delts and tris earlier that day with the pushups and the dips, I decided to work on my biceps: concentration curls, preacher curls, standing curly-bar curls and hammer curls. With a horror of confronting my newfound weakness, I decided to keep the weight low and the reps high. To my delight, I discovered my optimal weight had decreased by only about 25%. It’s true after all — muscles do have memories. My form was good. I felt, as they say, the burn. In front of me, lying on a bench, was a 20-something guy dressed sweats and a polo, pressing 40-lb dumbbells. With a pleasure that kicked the endorphin rush up toward delirium, I noticed he had — if I may borrow an indelicacy from Chuck Palahniuk — bitch tits.

All my life, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with young and attractive people. When I was young — but not awfully attractive — I used to resent the golden ones who were the complete package. I preferred to hang around older, geeky types who never judged me, and who made me look good in comparison. Grief Girl was the same way; that was my in with her. She’s an exotic beauty who grew up in a place that scorned anything exotic. Finding her was like finding an out-of-the-way, unpretentious restaurant where the food is amazing, and because the clientele is small, where the servers learn your name the first time around and remember it forever. She was happy to find an appreciative regular patron, who — because I offered up praise so freely — did the equivalent of writing her up for Zagat’s.

That’s the problem with best-kept secrets — they never stay secret for very long. Barely a month into my second go-around with Grief Girl, she found her way into her own version of the Cool Kids: men her own age who doted on her and competed for her attention; women who stepped aside respectfully when she claimed her place at the table. “I think,” she told me one day, in that schoolmarm manner she affects whenever she’s steeling herself to piss somebody off, “I need to spend more time with my own age-mates.” And that was the beginning of the end.

I used to work biceps and laterals on the same days. The concentric motions, or eccentric motions, or whatever they call what your muscles do when you work them with weight attached, are complementary. After finishing the last of the hammer curls, I went over to the pulldown machine and began banging out reps. I’m not saying most gym rats are pussies; but if you happen to be a pussy, as I am, being a gym rat is probably your best entree into he-man culture. Doing a set of wide-grip pulldowns requires next to no small-motor coordination; neither is there any danger involved. Let the machine do what it does, and you’ll feel tough; do it regularly enough for long enough, and you’ll look it, too.

I wish I was a real tough guy. Every time I’ve tried, I’ve managed to get hurt. I must say in my defense that I’ve never gotten into it with anyone less than a third bigger than me. Once, when I was cycling home from my friend Byron’s house, a bunch of jockish-looking guys yelled something as they passed me in their car. Catching up with them at the stop light, I threw them a hard look, and the guy in the front passenger seat said, “Meet us in the Circle K parking lot, bitch.” I rode across the street to the Circle K; they were already out of their car, waiting. I had barely gotten off my bike when I went down in a flurry of punches.

But then something strange happened. Lying flat on my back on the asphalt, I did what would have come naturally to anyone who cycles 30 miles per day: I kicked. Hard. I felt a couple of cracks as my foot landed against something that felt like a knee or a face. When I opened my eyes, I saw the heavies forming a defensive perimeter around the car. The group pencilneck was telling me, “It’s over, okay? Forget about it.”

As they drove off, I stood up and assessed the damage. I was bleeding a little from the mouth, but no teeth were missing. My eyes weren’t very swollen. I got back on my bike and cycled home in good time. It was a beautiful evening.

Unfortunately, the next time I tried to be a tough guy, which was in a bar called Murphy’s, I got knocked unconscious. I woke up the next day on my friend Rick’s bathroom floor feeling nauseous, with double vision and my jaw swollen like a canteloupe. I retired that day with one moral victory to my credit.

After I’d squeezed out my last pulldown, I walked back to the free weights area and began bent-over rows. Despite the name, this is one of the most he-mannish exercises around. As you contract your lat muscles to pull a dumbbell from the floor to your chest, you are throwing a punch in reverse. You are building exactly the kind of explosive force that can make someone piss or spit blood, if you hit him right. I happen, oddly enough, to be very good at these — I must work out my lats somehow in the course of a normal day without realizing it. After every set, I bumped up the weight five pounds; on my last two or three reps, I was grunting like a tusked boar, which made me feel good.

Grief Girl was a regular valkyrie. A crack shot. A hiker. During our last week, she went skiing for the first time and took a black diamond without incident. During that same week, she began dropping a name. A guy’s name. Her voice rose to a squeal whenever she did. The name, she gave me to understand, belonged to a French guy who, as she put it, “used to get into all kinds of street fights for some right-wing political group, but quit because he thinks it’s stupid now.”

I don’t know whether they ever ended up getting together. But this internal drama of mine needs a villain; if I sat down and thought for a week, I doubt I could invent one more perfect than this clown. I’m almost sure I’ll never meet this person, and I know, deep down, that I could do bent-over rows from now until doomsday without making myself able to splinter his jaw. But I can make myself look as though I could. In my straitened circumstances, that will have to do.

These are not good Catholic thoughts. Sister Joan Chittester thinks we should celebrate the march of time and the pile-up of years. Fr. Jim Martin thinks we should quit judging other people, including ourselves, by appearance. My good friend Joanne McPortland once compared me to Rose of Lima because I wrote admiringly of how the Church encourages believers to renounce physical vanity. But this is an emotional emergency that admits of no solution except that I get cut. Besides, I can’t shake the fear that, deep down, the thing that led me into the Church that champions the underdog is my own sense of being a wallflower and a weenie.

I’d hate for that to be true — it’d make me into a cliche. (Not that being a middle-aged guy who’s searching for Tyler Durden makes me an American original.) No, better to follow my muse, to sculpt myself, to wear wife-beaters and shirts that show off my guns, and then see what compassion is left in me. It’s easier to be compassionate when you’ve got no self-contempt to displace. The Adam Goldberg character from Dazed and Confused wanted to be a labor lawyer but secretly despised working people. He was also a haunted, miserable wretch until he decked the town bully. Did repairing his self-image re-affirm his vocation to help the common man? I honestly can’t remember, but in my fanfic version, it did.

I finished my rows and re-racked my dumbbells like a good citizen. In the locker room, I checked myself out in the mirror. My muscles looked less corrupt than incipient. I saw — or, like Tweety Bird, thought I saw — the beginnings of cuts in my shoulders and chest. My triceps were beginning to resolve themselves into neat triangles. My lats were nascent wings. Of course, that could have been the euphoria that comes from finishing a workout, or a trick of the lighting, designed by those experts to flatter the subject into coming back for more. But there are times when a man simply has to believe the best about himself.

The pantherlike young man at the desk fussed around, looking for a new tab to replace my ancient one. He was truly pantherlike — dark, sleek and composed. He would not have looked out of place curb-stomping an Algerian or, more to the point, sharing a hot tub with Grief Girl at Gstaad. Finding a working tab somewhere in his vast stack of drawers, he handed it to me. “Here you go, sir,” he said.

Sir. Not bro; sir.

Well, hell with it. It’s Lent, after all. No better time for a reminder that you’ve got to bear the Cross to win the Crown. I don’t know what the Supreme Court will decide about the Affordable Care Act, but I hope the government doesn’t start forcing everyone to join a health club. I couldn’t stand to live in a world where everyone was hard.

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