You know how in family obituaries they sometimes single someone out as a “special aunt,” or “special cousin” or “special nephew”? I had that kind of special relationship with a dog one time, a dog I dogsat down to her very last day. It is this feeling of wanting to remember Nala dog that has me telling dog tales today.
I could imagine generations of soccer players moving into this apartment with a coffeemaker, a fondue pot, a meat thermometer, what have you, then moving out and leaving it all behind. Since the landlord never inspected the place, there was no need for anyone to ever leave with anything that they did not want to take with them.
Having retired and returned to civilian life, what did Bo Gritz try to teach or communicate to us? Unlike, say, John McCain, he never modeled reconciliation with former enemies. He did not go to Vietnam after 1995 with veteran groups for humanitarian purposes. He did not preach against violence, or for peacefulness, responsibility, or inclusion. Mostly, he seemed interested in anti-social things: radical individualism, extreme autonomy, distrust of people, and the assumption of his own power, by violence if necessary.
Harold Compton tries, in the expansive sense of the words time and history, to focus himself on the present. Because that word history, he says, can overwhelm you.But his job is one rooted in the past. Of his people. And not of his people. Of the Jesuits, too.
Many recent documentaries about comic entertainers show the alienation, sadness, and self-perceived failure in the lives of people we think of as “funny” and investigate connections among hardship, talent, and drive. While “Being Eddie” is interesting, and Murphy is good in it, if somewhat restrained, it has little such complexity.
The new initiative aspires to acquire an FM frequency one day, and these volunteers who banded together to save community radio in St. Louis are a smart, tough, resourceful crowd. I expect to report their further success one fine day.
Though their lives wound up linked, these three men could not have been more different. Perry Smith was as poor as used-up dirt. Truman Capote sparkled like diamonds and partied with stars: Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra…. Philip Seymour Hoffman landed in the shy middle, living off his talent as simply as one can in New York. What they shared was a sensitivity too raw to hide, and pain that sent them running.
It seems like St. Louis would like to bury this heart-wrenching failure beneath time. However, fortunately and unfortunately, it is hard to be metabolized. For fifty years, no developer could truly swallow the land left vacant after Pruitt-Igoe was demolished.
Finding a museum dedicated entirely to Churchill, in Fulton, Missouri, two hours west of St. Louis, seems as odd as it would be to find a Charles de Gaulle museum in Brooklyn (the one in lower Alabama), just north of Rome (in Alabama’s Conecuh National Forest).
When a single model of progress is treated as universal, difference is easily mistaken for failure. Lives that do not align with that model are read as backward, compromised, or insufficiently conscious. Yet liberation loses its meaning if it cannot account for unequal conditions, uneven timelines, and conflicting needs.