tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-98736362026-06-16T05:50:51.129-07:00You're a Great AmericanWritten by Mark MacNamara. Originally: "Dialog With Stone," a traveler's digression begun in 2004, with entries From Africa, Europe and North America. Now: an occasional ramble-jam through the countryside of American culture, high and low, real and imagined.auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.comBlogger506125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-64896568524371330952023-11-17T08:15:00.000-08:002023-11-17T08:15:17.206-08:00unloading and disappearing A locator.  The end of 2023. Drought in the westies, parched streams, iron earth. The woman still planting, demanding the ground respond...  The collie still panting, still chasing long balls.  Otherwise, "no news" as we say, circling up at the beginning of rock steady boxing class, if nothings happened since last we gathered, two days ago. Or in this context, the last 2 auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-28414840504026773662022-05-16T09:48:00.001-07:002022-05-16T09:48:56.200-07:00Four years later,  Another beginning but how long this time?  We're running out of scene changes.  Same old but the dog is new.  Rorschach-colored, Holsteinish. 90 percet border collie. 10 percent crowd funded.  Chuck a ball into deep space, sometimes he'll catch it, otherwise, on the bounce and a then a long high jump, land, look around, as if to say, "did you see that? auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-29708880898310584592018-03-10T20:09:00.001-08:002018-03-29T20:22:51.257-07:00Once more we're down to last things. It's been a while.  But the metaphors are always notable...  Last visit to this museum or that restaurant or the other park.  The one we haven't been to in ages.  Or dozens of other places.  Or people not to be seen again.  Most likely. The odds are highly unlikely.  Last things and so discard, the game is ending.  The auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-40677367878581232572017-10-25T14:35:00.000-07:002018-03-29T20:25:47.899-07:00 An obituary Eloise Hardt, a long-time, largely television actress, died on June 25th.  She may have been 99, although there is some question as to her date of birth.  She is known for her work on The Dennis O'Keefe Show (1959); as well as performances in Incubus (1966); and Save the Tiger (1973).  She also won praise for her performance as the debauched but ever sympathetic auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-9982735884256263702017-02-08T12:52:00.000-08:002018-03-10T20:11:56.518-08:00 Next It was the last time we would see each other.  But which of us was more aware of that and what did that mean? I hadn't seen her in years.  Hadn't talked to her in a year.  I found her in the lunch room, in 'the facility'.  The dying facility as she once called it. She was sitting at a table with another woman.  I had hoped to meet her in some other less abrupt auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-6174827601880067372016-12-15T10:54:00.002-08:002016-12-15T10:54:57.232-08:00 auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-30483601214640330512016-11-15T10:23:00.003-08:002018-03-10T20:12:11.946-08:00 For the right wing media, the bloody chum is already in the water.  Not least for Marc Levin and then Michael Savage, who on Monday declared his "bromance" over with Trump.  His argument: Too many kind remarks to Obama.  Already too much ambiguity about how "alt.right" Trump will be.  Savage is the fellow, a little toy poodle of a man, who has licked and yapped at Trump for auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-81880987760975427092016-11-10T13:15:00.000-08:002018-03-10T20:17:51.376-08:00A note in a bottle thrown overboard...   To record the moment that seems of such extraordinary importance just now. But maybe I have it all wrong.  Could it be nothing? — just a trompe l'oeil, a trump l'oeil, merely a software bug. A note for Claire and Finn, at least.  And others unknown or born: I am struck dead by the definition and weight of this moment in American history. &auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-91740382460488149222016-11-09T13:03:00.000-08:002018-03-10T20:13:13.594-08:00Julia Whitty, the environmental writer for Mother Jones Magazine, was recently interviewed once more about the catastrophe caused by the destruction of Deepwater Horizon, the BP oil rig that exploded in April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. The hook for the interview was the new film, which apparently gives short shrift to the ecological damage caused by the explosion. Whitty noted that among the auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-87546285675828397812016-01-26T23:04:00.000-08:002018-03-10T20:14:08.638-08:00 Vilmos Zsigmond's Last Film (This is the eulogy offered during a memorial service for Vilmos Zsigmond on January 23rd, 2016 in "Little Chapel by the Sea" in Pacific Grove, California. Vilmos was 85 when he died shortly before midnight on January 1st, 2016) I met him 22 years ago through my wife, Barbara, who is one of Susan’s six sisters. (Susan was Vilmos' second wife) &auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-78051009009054570942016-01-02T21:52:00.000-08:002016-02-01T00:17:07.115-08:00The mortician from Paul's arrived with his assistant.  They were from Oak Grove; they were in their late 20s;  he in black sweater; she in a black pants suit; two from Charles Adams, with strange accents: she said nothing, he prefaced everything with "your dear most loved one".  "We are going to move your dear most loved one to the van, always with the most respect."  "We are auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-59955268418164134822016-01-01T23:34:00.000-08:002016-02-01T00:17:34.619-08:00I sat next to his bed, just the two of us.  His wife had gone to rest in another room.  It was coming up on 11:30 p.m. (January 1).  I'd found a copy of Heaven's Gate in among his vast collection of films, put it my laptop and was intent upon getting to the scene with the homesteaders waltzing on rollerskates.  He once told me his favorite film was The Deer Hunter, auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-76259463199269547612015-12-31T18:00:00.000-08:002016-01-05T20:58:15.167-08:00All bundled up in the wheelchair he looked like the father in Five Easy Pieces (his closest friend László Kovács shot that film). In the middle of the afternoon, we rolled him from one house to the other, up past the swimming pool, down the old driveway to the cabin with its fabulous view of the coast stretching south from Pfeiffer Pt. Someone put on his head the baseball cap he always wore on auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-80869887510619804042015-12-31T09:58:00.001-08:002016-01-04T17:37:35.520-08:00Today, out of nowhere, 12 vultures appeared high up in the branches of two California Pines. The trees stand next to a balcony where we go at night to watch the universe expand. The gigantic birds, in their cowboy long coats, barely moved, but you could see the eye of one, blinking as though electronically.  Another vulture extended his wing for a moment, like a big man looking to auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-66268976942622505122015-12-28T10:08:00.000-08:002016-01-04T17:36:53.427-08:00We stand around his bed, working out the details of his extraction from the hospital.  He has finally decided that he's had enough.  Last night he tore the catheter out of his neck that enables a connection to the dialysis machine, which he's been a slave to for more than a month, three days a week, three or four hours at a clip, and always as though the prey of an ambivalent and inept&auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-39167349729695481712015-12-05T00:25:00.003-08:002015-12-31T09:59:30.915-08:00The great cinematographer is down to his last shots.  The lighting is no longer an issue.  The angle is not important.  No one cares what this will look like; only he can see what's going on.  He's the director now, and suddenly, from deep in his hospital bed, he reaches out through the hallucination, with his right arm — bruised to black, bristling with blood lines — with hisauihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-19856219324466650272015-11-10T16:46:00.000-08:002016-01-03T12:04:03.076-08:00How unsettling is the face of the movie star long gone!  The worse if on a black and white poster. Let's say a woman in her prime. I'm thinking of Ava Gardner or Jean Moreau.  A woman with an edge.And isn't it remarkable how a certain photograph enables a great beauty to spit in the eye of death, and in the same moment capture the equivalent of a longing for the years before a great war.auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-20177985702755455172015-09-04T16:26:00.001-07:002016-01-03T17:49:33.343-08:00The lighter is dimming.  The man who loved light is less and less loved by light in return.  He's gotten tangled up, like a dolphin in nets, tangled up in those tubes and wires, and all the paraphernalia that goes with living at man's end.  Meanwhile, the doctors won't say.  They're afraid to predict an outcome; afraid of being sued.  Afraid that when people find outauihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-20679945799560241482015-08-16T22:24:00.000-07:002016-01-04T17:35:00.501-08:00"Is there any better coastal view than from Pfeiffer Pt.? asked the local Gatsby, a wannabe Gatsby. But then he shook his head. "But this is the problem; it's being discovered."You see that road to the beach down there. Well it's now filled with people making their way to Peiffer Beach. So many are dark skinned. They seem to be more South Asian lately, from places like Fremont and Concord.  auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-21683368625962923132015-05-25T21:47:00.002-07:002015-07-06T15:33:35.912-07:00Where the airdale used to lay next to the fireplace, now a fine cigar box with its ashes.  Next to the bed where the husband used to sleep, a bill on the nightstand for July's hospice care.  And where the wife used to stand in the kitchen now stands a different woman, in the same skirt, making the same rice pilaff, still making all the ends meet, whispering to herself that this auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-66842599740608857942015-05-17T20:28:00.003-07:002015-05-25T21:17:27.685-07:00Weeks ago, on the day the governor announced the water cuts, we went for a walk in Golden Gate Park. Twenty-five percent for San Francisco; well, that won't be so bad for us.  We said.  But then think of all the lawn people, the golfers, the corpses, the car washers, the little kid bodies at the public pools. It was early evening; the wind subsided. Quiet set in. As we walked along, itauihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-87050833348370178782015-02-21T19:29:00.000-08:002015-05-17T19:31:10.000-07:00She's gone now.  It's been 8 years, or 9.  The truth is, I don't remember exactly.  I remember hearing the news.  I remember the airplane and the drive and confronting the Russian madame. I remember using some very foul language, in an effort to unnerve that little scene they had going; the Master's teachings; the whole communal conceit.  Well, not a conceit; it was a auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-33696291941578645132014-11-02T16:59:00.000-08:002014-11-03T17:09:36.019-08:00I've told you about Carbo; he's an angry man.  Always has been, and will be. There's nothing he enjoys more than needling people, than undoing them in some way.  His father was a college soccer referee, a little bitty guy and famous for giving out red cards at the beginning of games.  Normally, a referee would give a warning and then if that wasn't heeded, a yellow card, and if auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-70175883867441444842014-10-23T13:56:00.000-07:002014-10-23T14:01:10.910-07:00 “It’s the ‘fake life’, she began.  “That’s what I call it now.  Don’t you think that’s a good book title?  I know it sounds a little down and maybe too simple. But don't you think?  It’s the ‘friend’ who calls to talk to you for five minutes, but there’s no conversation.  They tell you all about their lives, and it’s usually about one problem in particular.  auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9873636.post-67064231853595688742014-09-27T22:26:00.000-07:002014-09-27T22:26:24.199-07:00Often, there is a metaphor to capture the essence of calamity.  For the attack on 9/11 and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed, the metaphor is the 'falling man': that anonymous business man falling from the North Tower at 9:41 a.m. on that September morning, stopped in a remarkable photograph by Richard Drew. And stopped also by Don DeLillo in his novel, Falling Man&auihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04845198376159487054noreply@blogger.com0