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Ephemeral Isle

Sunday

1 February 2004

There comes a time of decision in every man’s life.  Mine is when the brake light on the car glares balefully at me, and a sound keeps yowling from under the bonnet like gnomes machining tools.  Since my wife made it abundantly clear to me that she has no intention to re-enact the chase scene from Bullit on the local hills, I took the hint and brought the Ephemramobile in for a service.

Now, our previous car was a Honda, which has a service centre within five minutes of us, but after we had Emma we decided that this was too convenient, so we bought a Chrysler PT Cruiser; partly because we liked its roomy interior, but mostly because all the Chrysler service centres in Seattle are scattered as far from civilisation as is humanly possible.  No more hopping in the cab and waiting at home until the work is done for us— far too uneventful.  Better to trek out to a service centre so far from home that you need a phrase book, a guide, and a sack of wampum to trade with the natives.

Just to keep things interesting, we try a different centre each time we bring in the car for work.  This time, I ended up in West Seattle.  This is a part of town that is divided from Seattle proper by a finger of the Sound and when you come over the West Seattle Bridge, you have the distinct impression that you are entering a different city entirely.  This was once a largely immigrant area, and still remains so in places, laced with harbour works, small steel mills, and car dealerships.  But, it’s still Seattle and I’d been there more than a few times, so I had no second thoughts about dropping the car off in this morning and wandering off in search of breakfast.

Ah, but I had not factored in the Szondy luck!  The service centre was smack in the middle of Dealership Land, the Mordor of West Seattle; a vast wasteland of showrooms, service centres, and car parks and as far from an eatery as you’re ever likely to encounter outside of certain stretches of Liverpool.  It was also bloody cold and with all the foresight of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, I’d gone out without my scarf or gloves.  It was like that time I was filling up the car with petrol in the middle of Nowhere North Dakota as the arctic wind blasted at my thin leather coat as if to scream “City Boy!” to all the world.

I trudged up the hill to California Street, which is one of those trolley neighbourhoods that mark the older parts of the city.  That was when I learned a valuable lesson about West Seattle.  There were pubs, Chinese restaurants, Mexican eateries (all closed), but no coffee houses.

Hang on, I thought.  This is Seattle.  This is the Jangled Nerves Capital of the world.  This is the place where if you asked for just coffee and not a double-shot venté dry cappuccino the manager would sidle off quietly call the police.  This is the place where, I am not making this up; they opened a Starbucks across the road from a Starbucks.  Where the Hell was the Caffeine, I wanted to know.

I was perplexed, but desperately in need of food and stimulants, so I turned up my collar and forged ahead past the bookshops, boutiques, and estate agents until, after a mile or so, an oasis appeared; a stray coffee house stuck among the other shops like a missionary station in the heart of the Congo.  It was one of those tiny independent affairs that hang on to retail districts like a remora, but it had caffeine.  Saved!

No.  As I came in the door, I found the entire front of the place was taken over by a party of John Kerry supporters.  I don’t mean crowded with them.  There were only six of them in all.  I also don’t mean that they were taking up the tables.  None of them were, in fact, sitting.  No, they were all standing about with a tiny pile of signs and flyers on one table that wouldn’t have been enough to paper the bottom of a constipated budgie’s cage.  They were milling about chatting and making it impossible for honest men to get to any of the other tables.

The humanity!  I swore that if this lot didn’t shift by the time I collected my cappuccino and egg sandwich, I’d make up for my protein deficiency by taking a bite out of the nearest one.  Lucky for them I managed to find a small settee stuck in a darkened alcove where I could munch my breakfast while thinking dark thoughts as I waited for the campaign winds to scattered them wherever they were bound for. Preferably a campaign wind carrying a gross of ping-pong paddles with it.

I’m now sitting at a window table that I claimed after the Kerry clan left— very slowly, I might add.  And I’m still waiting to learn the fate of my car and wondering if I have enough fare for the long cab ride home if I need it.

Now, this is not a small coffee shop.  There are a good nine tables where I’m sitting, yet six people managed to take up the entire space like a pack of drunken rugby fans in a second-class carriage.  I didn’t think that sort of spread was possible unless you were my daughter, who can stretch her eighteen-month old body to take over an entire king-size bed on her tidy todd.

I’m tempted to say that this episode has put me off John Kerry, but that’s silly.  For one thing, the Time Lords have forbade me from interfering in local politics.  For another thing, I hardly think that a lack of public etiquette on the part of half a dozen Kerry campaigners is an accurate reflection of his views on national defence.  Kerry is, however, in trouble re his coffee house policies.

No, I see this as an issue that should unite the body politic.  In America, coffee is a constitutional right just as the tea break is a hallowed British institution.  Look it up in the Bill of Rights, if you don’t believe me.  The Anglo-Saxon world has a great tradition of ensuring that every man, woman, and child can be totally jagged without let or hindrance. It seems to me that in this world where questions of war, family, social justice, campaign finances, vested interests, and ideology divide us, all political parties can unite behind a single, simple pledge.  Now is the time for politicians of every stripe to stand together and vow that even if politics descends to the level of riots and street battles, they will never take up every bloody table in a coffee house when I’m trying to get an egg sandwich and coffee.

And I don’t even like coffee!

Monday

2 February 2004

Ephemeral Isle Weather Update

The recent spate of intense cold and snow has all but paralysed the East Coast of the United States, but some brave commuters soldier on, such as this group photographed in Times Square, New York City.

In London, the heavy rains and subsequent flooding that have struck Britain in the past week have required some adjustments on the part of the populace.

Meanwhile, the United Nations has leapt into action and has sent a crack team of their finest bureaucrats to the French Riviera to assess the climate situation there.

Tuesday

3 February 2004

I was looking at James Lilek’s Bleat today, where he has a new section of his site up dedicated to Second World War civil defence manuals.  As usual, he does a very good job of finding the humour in the material while maintaining a strong empathy for times that created them.  One point that he makes that I find particularly interesting is that many of the patriotic exhortations that were so perfectly natural in the '40s would be fodder for hysterical denunciations of an imminent police state today.  I mean, how much would the burner under Ashcroft’s backside be turned up if posters were being distributed showing a fallen American soldier with the slogan “What did you do today for freedom?” emblazoned upon it?  It would be seen as some sort of signpost on the way to some Republican version of Orwell’s Oceania. 

Actually, that is exactly what some people have already done.  In the Pioneer Square district of Seattle an anti-war group slapped up posters all over the place.  They were mostly American propaganda posters from the Second World War that hae been altered with some fairly crude anti-war messages tacked on.  You know, the “Let’s all pull together! (To enrich our capitalist exploiters whom we blindly follow!).”  That sort of thing.  It’s not the most original approach.  In fact, I think that the posters were copied from a book of similar works published just before Gulf War II broke out.  I can see what they’re trying to say, but I find the execution to be a bit confusing.  Is this group saying that the War against Terror is a sham version of the Second World War?  That the Second World War was also a sham and that this one is just a replay; a sort of sham of a sham?  That if patriotic posters were being printed today they would have the same sort of simple patriotism of the old ones?  That such setniments were worthy of mockery?  That they don’t like the artwork?  That representational art is reactionary?  I don’t know.  Regardless of where you stand on the issues, these posters struck me as a perfect example of how you can get so caught up in your own position that you just cannot see the other side.  That’s the point where you start making what you think are crushing parodies of you’re opponent’s point of view that he’d regard as a fairly concise summation of his position, like this one:

“Korea… You’re next!” Not quite the crushing rejoinder imagined by the artist, I suspect. You want to invoke embarrassment or anger or at least indignation.  Not have your opponents stand up and shout, “That’s the spirit!”  Personally, I’m all in favour of winkling despots out of their spider-holes at every opportunity, and this poster seems less satirical than apt.

I suppose part of the problem is that this anti-war group was trying to co-opt the vocabulary of a past age that they really didn’t understand.  The anti-war crowd is much more a creature of 1968 than 1944.  They have trouble comprehending the sense of duty, of peril, and of urgency that was the daily condition of my father’s generation.  Many people in the West today regard themselves as being the centre of the universe.  I don’t mean in the sense that they are the pinnacles of Creation.  Just go to the beach on any summer’s day and you’ll be dissuaded of that opinion.  It’s more in the sense that the rest of the world is a great passive country that never moves unless it is pushed.  It is a place that does not stir of its own accord, but only reacts to something that the West does.  Left alone, it cannot possibly pose any sort of a menace, and any attacks from that quarter are more often than not deserved retribution.  They cannot imagine that something like radical Islam really poses any sort of a threat to their way of life.  At best, 9/11 was a tragedy like a bad earthquake.  At worst, the men who carried out that attack were driven to it by the West’s transgressions.  The idea that Osama bin Laden was motivated by a hatred of the West based less on what we did than who we are would not make sense to them.  In such a worldview, radical Islam is merely a cultural idiom, not a driving ideology.  Even if it weren't, war is never thrust upon us, but is always optional.  Indeed, it is an option that can always be declined even in the heat of battle. 

For my part, I cannot agree with such a philosophy.  I feel that it is one that is too complacent and trusts far too much to luck when it comes to the future.  It’s the sort of view that would tolerate the cesspool of tyrants that the Middle East has been for decades for the sake of stability and bets too much that bin Laden et al will refrain from setting off a nuke in London or New York.

That couldn’t be farther from the view of the people who drew those posters that were pressed into anti-war service.  By 1942, the Allies were all too painfully aware of how dangerous a place the world was and what the price of not paying attention to it could be.  You couldn’t close your eyes to a Hitler.  You couldn’t make jokes about Mussolini and hope he’d go away.  The Co-Prosperity Sphere wasn’t just about talking points.  Sooner or later, you’d take off the rose-coloured glasses and find yourself staring at a bayonet. 

That is really what those posters were born from.  They came from a people were not naïve patriots waging a “popular” war.  They were free people who found themselves besieged by barbarians in a fight for survival of civilisation itself.  There was no opting out of that, unless you had a taste for gas chambers.  The posters that came from those times weren’t meant to whip people into a frenzy or gull them into mindless conformity, they were meant to remind people of the stakes and encourage them on to victory; a victory to which there was no alternative except slavery. 

“Keep it under your hat” and “Loose lips” weren’t slogans to crush dissent.  The man listening wasn’t a 40’s Ashcroft or Blair.  It was a very real enemy who meant to kill and destroy.  These were not posters meant to quiet  sheep; they were weapons to arm  lions.  They had to, because they had no choice.  The idea that these posters were for a people who were silly or naive or whatever couldn't be further from the truth.   Granted, there is a school that finds wonderful irony in taking old adverts and putting a new, disparaging spin on them, but 9/11 took a lot of irony out of the world and trying to use posters from the war to claim that the War on Terror is about filling the coffers of the rich or for oil or some sort of neocon wet-dream of empire falls rather flat, because the anti-war crowd has picked a rather poor canvas.  There is a saying in film making that you should never remind the audience of a better film than the one their watching.  You don't put a clip of the Maltese Falcon in Minority Report, because people will realise that there's better stuff out there.  So it is with the Pioneer Square posters.   They may have modern slogans to convince you that we're in an imperialist war that will become Vietnam any day, but it's kind of hard to get any traction when you're laying it on artwork that reminds everyone that this war is a lot like the other one. 

Now, the war we face today isn’t a replay of the Second World War.  It’s a different enemy and a different time, but we are at war.  Certainly our enemies think so.   It is a war in which we can argue about ultimate goals, and means, and if you wish to argue that attacking Syria is pointless, or that we shouldn’t piss off France, or that we should rely more on law enforcement, and that’s great.  Let’s sit down and hash it out.  (Please not about whether or not invading Iraq was justified.  That campaign is over and is as senseless to debate as Crecy.)  But it is not an optional war that we can stroll away from or palm off with apologies to men with fire in their eyes who want to see us dead.  That’s the message that I came away with from the Pioneer Square posters.  You can take the old posters and slap new slogans on them, but the times that created them still shine through with something that resonates with our times.  You can raise a CND banner on a warship, but it remains a warship. 

Wednesday

4 February 2004

I was watching The Man Who Never Was yesterday; or rather, I was watching bits of it in between chasing my daughter around the house until I finally gave up and popped in a DVD of Shrek for her.   The book was a favourite of mine as a young man and I’d not seen the film version until much later, that later being 20 years ago, but I always enjoy catching it again on the cable, because it is one of that genre of British war films that simply could not be made today.

For those of you who aren’t history buffs or who have been deprived of exposure to a decent Boy’s Own adventure library, The Man Who Never Was is one of those true stories that would be rejected as utter nonsense if it was presented as a work of fiction.  It is the story of Major William Martin of the Royal Marines and how he helped in diverting vital German forces away from Sicily just before the Allied invasion.  Granted, that is quite an achievement for one man.  It’s an even greater achievement when you consider that Major Martin never existed.

Major Martin was the creation of Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu of British Naval Intelligence, who devised a scheme to allow a briefcase full of fake documents pointing to a simultaneous invasion of Sardinia and Greece to fall into enemy hands.  The plan was that the Germans would find the briefcase washed ashore in Spain, take them for genuine, and move their chaps out of Sicily to cover their bets.  Okay, not that remarkable an idea.  That is, until you learn that the briefcase in question was handcuffed to a dead Royal Marine officer to give it the right air of authenticity.  Clever, but when you think about it, it’s one thing to say, “Let’s get a body, strap a briefcase to it, and drop it in the sea,” but it’s another thing to get your hands on one— at least, not in a way that won’t have people avoiding you in the canteen.  “Hey, Ed!  C’mere!  THUD!”

The story of how they found a body of the right age that had died in a way that looked like drowning, how they made up an identity for him, assembled all the little details such as the contents of his pockets, the cards in his wallet, and even how they set up fake club memberships and bank accounts just in case anyone checked up on him is fascinating.   A lot of it involved details that you don’t think about until you’re actually confronted by them.  For example, Royal Navy officers wear tailored uniforms.  How do you fit a corpse for a uniform?  Answer: you make him a Royal Marine officer.  They get their togs off the rack. 

And it all actually worked.  The German’s swallowed the bait and greatly weakened their forces in Sicily, allowing the Allies to take it with much less cost in lives.  And Major Martin lies in a grave in Spain, his real identity unknown until fairly recently.

The book was one of those now-it-can-be-told works that were so common after the war and had a minor burp in the '70s when the thirty years rule expired on a lot of classified material was released.  If you haven’t read it, you really should.  It’s a real page-turner.  I’ll see if I can’t find a copy for the shop.

The film version was made in 1956 with Clifton Webb as a rather prissy Montagu and Stephen Boyd as a fictitious German spy, who was written into the plot to give some suspense to the latter part of the film.  Aside from that and a sub plot involving an American girl mourning her dead flyboy boyfriend, the film version is quite faithful to the book.  The real Montagu even got a bit part that involved a considerable jump in rank to Air Marshall.

If nothing else, the film version is one of those pictures that could never be made today.  Back in the '50s and even into the '60s, movies about the war were as common as pimply coming of age films are today.  It was a time when you had a perfect mixture of circumstances that allowed you to make visually impressive, even spectacular films on a relatively low budget.  You want to make a film about the Battle of the River Plate?  No problem.  If you can get the Royal Navy to co-operate you’ll have ships, planes, props, uniforms, and extras that are all right in the period because those ships, planes, props, uniforms, and extras were at the Battle of the River Plate.  You try to do a film like that today and just the establishing shots would need enough matte shots and CGI to make the money men reach for the bromo. 

The other thing that has changed is attitudes.  People were different back then, or, at least, filmmakers saw people differently.  Directors particularly.  There isn’t much interest in the sort of characters that were all too common during the war.  It was a time when Britain could still boast an authentic officer class that had no problem about making itself visible.  It was a time when men came forward out of a sense of sheer decency to do what had to be done.  It was a time when there was that strange mixture of professional soldiers and professional soldiers for the duration mixed together.  Films like The Man Who Never Was, Cockleshell Heroes, Battle of the River Plate, Sink the Bismarck, and others were able to convey the seriousness, humour, gravitas, and urgency that are so alien to the Bridget Jones media types that make movies today.  In a cinematic world that is split between the insane, frenetic action of “throw money at the screen blockbuster” school, and the “my feeling for my girlfriend are conflicted by my love of popular music” school at the other end there is little room for mythic dramas, large and small, about the likes of Dunkirk or the Battle of Britain.  Probably the closest thing we have today is The Lord of the Rings— and that was written in the shadow of the war.

I think the best example I have on hand of this sense is a scene in The Man Who Never Was where Montagu and his assistant are dressing Major Martin for his mission.  Putting socks on a corpse is no barrel of laughs, and the scene conveys this rather nicely, but it does more.  There is hardly any dialogue.  You see the white glazed bricks of the mortuary, the two men in naval uniforms and rubber gloves handling the clothes and personal items to put in the pockets, but you never see the body or what the men are doing to it.  They pass short, to the point sentences that are necessary to the job in hand, but nothing more.  Meanwhile, you can hear the sounds of an air raid beginning and then growing in the background.  There are sirens, engines, the deep thrum of propellers, the crump of bombs, the clangour of ambulance bells, and the sudden scream of woman in the street, but the men take no notice until there is the whistle and whump of a bomb landing close by.  They have a job to do and unless something endangers that job they can’t afford to pay it any mind.  It isn’t that these men have no feelings, nor that they are the sons of some race of Myrmidons.  They are men with a job that has to be done, no matter how unpleasant or distasteful, because the lives of their countrymen depend on it.  Men like that exist today.  They do there jobs in fire houses, hospitals, and on the streets of Iraq and Afghanistan, but they are treated like a separate race rather than exemplars of a facet of national character, which is a shame.  Sometimes you need a bit more Spitfire and a bit less Dude, Where’s my Car.

Thursday

5 February 2004

Pushing the Envelope a Tad Too Far Department

After the unfortunate reaction that followed in the wake of Janet Jackson's exposed breast on national television, the 2005 Superbowl half-time show committee was taking no chances this year.

Friday

6 February 2004

davidszondy.com has finally been listed on Google!  I suppose that this makes today our official Grand Opening.  Everyone help yourself to a cyber-balloon and virtual hot dog.

"Why, No Sir.  What Makes You Think That?" Department

Despite their protests to the contrary, the board suspected that Alice and Frank had been using controlled substances.

Saturday

7 February 2004

Time to Cut Him Off Department

Hey, Murray, look at this!  I got mermaids floatin' 'round my glass.  Pre'y L'il mermaids floatin' 'round my glass like bubbles.  I nevah seen anythin' like it. Cute l'il mermaids.   What you mean you can't see 'em?  They're right there, see?  See?  What the...?  Oh, my God!  They're crawling up my arms!  They're turnin' into bugs!  Pink ones with the heads of Jacque Chirac!  Murray!  Help me!

Monday

9 February 2004

Jimism

Many people come up to me these days and ask me how it is possible to survive in these times of growing political correctness.  How can we be sure that we are cleaving to the proper line of political orthodoxy?  How can we be certain that we are giving no offence to any group no matter how small or obscure?  What is the proper course of action?  Until recently, my way of handling these questions was to leap over a hedge and hide in the bushes until dark, but that has been cutting into my schedule of late, so I’ve decided to break my silence and pass on these words of wisdom.

The question of political correctness, also known as  “PC”, or “ΨΦ” as it is known to Melissa Spong for no readily apparent reason, is one of those tricky little things that resembles my attempts to mend a tyre; simple in theory, but not so easy in practice.  In the PC world, you try not to offend people by avoiding those words, actions, ideas, or thoughts that might be construed by anyone as discriminatory, hostile, offensive, or non-inclusive.  But how do you manage it without offending someone else in the process?

This was the question that my friend Jim and I posed to ourselves one sunny afternoon; partly out of altruistic concern, but mainly because we didn’t have anything better to do.  We felt that for political correctness to really work, it had to be consistent. It had to have an organising principle that would allow you to decide what to say, do, think, and believe in any situation without all that comes from trying to accommodate one group without offending another in the process.  At first, we thought that the best way to manage this was to stake ourselves solidly in one political camp.  We could, for example plunk ourselves down in the left wing of the political spectrum, but that, of course, would mean offending the right wing.  After all, you can’t hold to the philosophy of a vegan animal rights group without offending carnivore fur trappers.  You can’t be in favour of tax hikes without going against those who favour tax breaks.  You can’t be an anti-globalist without offending globalist.

Fine, I hear you say (and don’t think I can’t!).  So long as your ideas are the right ones, you can feel free to offend those who believe in the wrong ones.  After all, if you’re worried about not offending animal rights activists you don’t worry about offending vivisectionists.  If you wish to defer to the feelings of atheists, then fundamentalists get short shrift.  Simple.  Well, Jim and I tried that, but we soon discovered that orthodoxy and heresy don’t come all in a bag.  It’s all very well and good to not worry about offending those who are beyond the pale, but how the devil do you deal with people who are not completely beyond it.  I mean, it is one thing to offend a male capitalist, but what if it’s a female capitalist?  Do you defer to the female or damn the capitalist?  Which trumps what?  If you see someone denouncing someone else for smoking do you rush to his aid if the smoker is a lesbian or to hers?  What about an anti-Muslim anti-Imperialist?  There are just too many permutations. 

This got to be too much of a headache for Jim and me, so we tried to refine our approach by seeking narrower and narrower political orthodoxy that would cast more and more dodgy groups out of the magic circle where we could offend them.  We figured that if we couldn’t avoid offending everyone, we would simply expand the number of people whom we could legitimately offend.  We shifted from liberal to social democrat to socialist to Marxist to Communist to Trotskyite to Neo-Trotskyite to Para-Neo-Trotskyite to Revisionist-Para-Neo-Trotskyite to Neo-Revisionist-Para-Neo-Trotskyite, but by that point we threw ourselves out of our own group.

Okay, so we couldn’t avoid the problem by narrowing the circle, we figured we’d broaden it.  We would find some common denominator that would encompass all groups until all would be included and none offended.  It wasn’t easy.  There didn’t seem much common ground between religious fanatics and agnostics, Jingoists and one-worlders, warmongers and militant pacifists, paper and plastic.  We kept chucking out one distinction after another in search of the magic unifier, but each time it meant that someone got left out.  Soon we were in the rarefied world of metaphysics.   We reached the point of denying the existence of the material universe, but that didn’t work, because it offended those who believed in a physical universe.  We even rejected reality, but that offended those who accepted it.  We even discarded having any ideas, but that went against those who had them.  We believed in nothing, but offended those who believed in something.  Worse, if we somehow did manage not to offend everyone, we offended those people who believed in offending other people. 

We seemed to be at a dead end.  How could we be politically correct in any proper sense that was universally inclusive? No matter how far we spread our net, something we believed in offended someone. 

Then we hit on it.  Jimism; named after Jim, because he called bags on it first.   Jimism is the ultimate in PC philosophy.  It guarantees utter diversity with no offence to anyone.  The central premise of Jimism is blindingly simple.  Whenever anyone tells you anything, you believe it.  I don’t mean you pretend to believe it, or that you accommodate the other person’s views for the moment, I mean that you fervently and with your entire being believe it.  Then, when someone tells you something different, no matter how casually, you believe that.

The simplicity of the whole idea stunned us.  It was possible to become a perfect intellectual and emotional chameleon.  You could now mingle with Conservative or Labour, Democrat or Republican, Radical Islamist or Raving Monster Looney Party without any qualm of excluding anyone, because you couldn’t.  You became a fervent convert to anything anyone told you no matter how asinine or trivial. 

Jim and I quickly spread the word of our new philosophy.  We set up a local chapter of Jimism and made an incredible number of converts within a few short weeks.  I think that one of the keys to its early success was that the meetings tended to be very short.   Debates never lasted past the first minute, all motions put forward were passed immediately and unanimously, and all calls for fund raisings were met with enthusiastic response.  Soon our emblem of a jellyfish with the motto “What do you guys think?” was hung on banners all across the country.  Within six months our rolls swelled beyond the dreams of pyramid schemes.  Inside a year, Jimism was poised to take over the world.

But we had forgotten one basic flaw of Jimism.  The average life-span of a conversion was only thirty minutes; enough time for a convert to meet a friend and say, “I’ve just converted to Jimism.”  The friend then asks what Jimism is, the convert explains, the friend says, “That’s stupid,” and the convert says, “You know, you’re right,” and goodbye, convert. 

Yes, Jimism could have dominated the world as the ultimate in PC philosophy, but at the last minute someone told them to knock it off.

Tuesday

10 February 2004

Helms Deep Update

As the terrible host of Saruman descended on Helms Deep to destroy the last stronghold of the men of Rohan, Aragorn began to have doubts about the forces that the Elves had sent them.

Wednesday

11 February 2004

It’s very strange trying to belt out these columns on a daily basis.  It’s something that I’ve never really done before.  Monthly, weekly: those I’ve done. But setting up a daily goal of getting out a column or feature is a novelty.  I hadn’t planned anything like that when the site started.  I’d just wanted to play with some designs and put up some things that interested and amused me.  It was really more of an exercise to keep my HTML skills sharp and to occupy my mind during those times when Emma made it impossible to work on my scripts.  Now it’s become this huge, growing thing with multiple sections, an online shop, and this column; all of which require daily attention. 

Of all of the parts of the site, Ephemeral Isle is the hardest to keep up.  As I said, I’m not used to belting out over a thousand words a day or cobbling up a photo feature against an evening deadline.  In fact, I am probably one of the slowest writers in the business when I haven't got a deadline.  It takes me about a year to put out a script.  I have one about the human shields that went to Iraq before the invasion last year that I started in January of 2003 and still haven’t got past the outline stage.   Books and articles are a process of long, unwilling growling and glaring as I delete page after page simply because it’s too awful to bear looking at.  Okay, I know that some of you are probably thinking the same thing about today’s column, but like the man said, I suffered for my art and now it’s your turn.

The strange thing about this is that at the moment it’s very much a self-discipline thing.  It took so long to get this site listed on Google that it’s the best-kept secret since Keeanu Reeves’s acting talent.  If you’ve been checking the hit counter (and if you have, then you really need to get a life), you know that in it’s entire existence this site has had less than 500 hits.  Not good, especially when you consider that 99.9% percent of those hits are me doing site maintenance.  The other 0.89% are the odd spider crawling by.  That leaves an estimated total public readership of maybe two.  And there is no indication that anyone has actually looked at Ephemeral Isle.  It’s a bit like being a deejay with a three AM time slot spewing music into the ether for no good purpose.  It is very likely that I’m writing this just for myself.  And heaven knows, I am a very appreciative audience.

So, why am I doing this?  Faith, I suppose.  It can’t be too long before people start to discover the site.  I’ve been distributing enough cards around town and country advertising it, submitted to all the search engines large and small, and I’ve even appended the web address to my e-mail signature.  Sooner or later the ball is going to start rolling and people will start clicking in, if only so that they can send me abusive e-mail about how much they hate the site and me personally.  If I can manage that, then my work is done.  In the meantime, these columns are something of an exercise to help me establish a routine and to polish my style.  God knows, it’s as rough as hell.  It’s like a mixture of James Lileks, Peter Simple, P.G. Wodehouse, and some unpublished smart-ass.

Part of the problem that I’m having at the moment with my writing is that my reading list is so damn peculiar.  On the one hand, I’m reading a lot of stuff for the James Bond section of the site and for recreation I’m reading Spalding Gray’s books for the all-too morbid reason that I want to get through them just in case the worst happens regarding his disappearance last month.  I also do most of my reading when everyone else is asleep, so I’m lying on the settee at one AM with the better part of a bottle of chardonnay inside me and this huge copy of James Bond: the Legacy propped up on my knees.  It’s a fascinating work, but it’s also ridiculously large.  If you screwed legs to it you could use it as a coffee table.  After a while, I get physically tired from holding it and swap over to Gray’s Monster in a Box, which is a transcript of his monologue about all his trouble with finishing his novel.  So, I get this weird juxtaposition in my head of an account of the iconic representation of masculinity, sophistication, and self-assured identity on the one hand, and the flat-out revelations of a self-confessed New England psychological basket case who is as far from James Bond as you can get without running smack into Woody Allen.

This is very confusing.  Sometimes I start running a monologue in my head.  I’m quite conscious of it, and often it will take on the voice and style of some writer or speaker that is much on my mind at the moment.  That isn’t so bad if I’ve got Chesterton or Olivier chattering away in my skull about whatever I’m thinking of, but over the past few days I’ve been slipping between the smooth prose of Ian Fleming and the neurotic stream of consciousness of Spalding Gray.  It is a strange mixture of very masculine narrative marked by vivid sensations and a paranoid fixation on minutiae laced with massive self-doubt.  It’s such a strange voice that I’m seriously considering using it for a play, or at least doing a fairy tale or other story as a Spalding Gray monologue. 

So there I was yesterday, pushing Emma in her stroller along Westlake with this monologue unwinding in my head, “I had never walked along this part of Westlake before, though I’d driven it hundreds of times.  I couldn’t help but be struck by the sheer glass walls of the condominiums stretching like glass cliffs up the hillside.  Why hadn’t I noticed them before?  Were they trying to tell me something?”   And so on until it started to get on my nerves.  Maybe part of the reason why I kept on like that was because Emma had slept through almost our entire walk and I actually had time to do some real thinking rather than just reacting, which seems to be my standard mode nowadays.

Westlake is the road that runs along the south side of Lake Union in Seattle.  It has one of those waterfronts that I truly love.  It’s like Portsmouth or Grimsby.  It isn’t a tamed lagoon surrounded by promenades and hotels, but a working waterfront with shipyards, marinas, fishing terminals, seaplane piers, and all the other stuff that makes the lake and canal alive and interesting— not like the historic piers in the city centre that have gone from being warehouses to tiresome collections of gift shops and restaurants.  Fun to visit, but unpleasant to be around for more than a couple of hours.

Where we walked had recently had its dirt carparks replaced with shiny new tarmac and concrete pavements thanks to a new sewage system being installed by the city.  That’s no small thing when you’re pushing a stroller.  We walked past the houseboats nestled down by the shore, the dive shop, the yacht dealers with hulls ranging from twelve-foot dinghies to diesel yachts so vast that you can day dream about them as happily as you could about becoming King of the Moon— and with as little likelihood.  We browsed through a little shop that sold navigation charts and nautical books. Against all odds, I found a copy of Swallows and Amazons, which I snapped up immediately for Emma’s library.  I long ago vowed that Emma’s major literary influence was not going to be the insipid swill that passes for children’s literature these days, so I’ve been working hard to stock her shelves with Carroll, Barrie, Tolkien, and even the odd Buchan and Hope thrown in for good measure.  Swallows and Amazons would go a long way toward counteracting the cumulative sludge of too many Disney Channel TV movies.

Another nice thing about Westlake is that not all boats are in the water.  Many dealers and shipyards place their hulls on shore where you can get a decent look at them.  It was thanks to this that I came face to face with my old boat.

For about six years I owned a thirty-foot Columbia 24 cutter that I lived on in Polynesia; sailing when I could and scratching together maintenance when I couldn’t.  I’d bought it with the firm intention of fixing it up and sailing it back to England, but the gap between the dosh I’d need for the voyage and the money I could scrape together in economic armpits like Honolulu was so great that I couldn’t even get the ends to wave at one another.  Far from expanding her capabilities, I was lucky if I could keep the electrics running.  So, I sold the old girl and moved to Seattle.  Now here I was, seeing her again on the shores of Lake Union.

Well, not exactly.  At first, it looked remarkably like her with a new coat of paint in a different livery, but a second glance showed that this was a different craft.  For one thing, she was equipped with an inboard prop as original gear.  Mine didn’t have one and I had to install a motor myself in one of the most hyperventilating operations of my life, because I had to do it while at anchor, which it the craziest place to start cutting holes in the hull.  I seriously expected to do a Titanic then and there.  Anyway, this boat had a prop and shaft that had clearly been there since ’64.  Also, she was a sloop, not a cutter, and had neither railings nor bowsprit, which mine had.   Still, she had the lines of the old girl; that same full keel and over-built glass fibre construction that begged for blue water passages.  For a while I wandered around her in the chill winter air and pondered the regrets of a dream that started, but never went anywhere.  But in the stroller was my current money hole, and I figured that the trade-off had been very much in my favour.

It would have been a nice little moment if Fleming and Gray weren’t at my shoulder spinning it into a monologue that was half cosmopolitan travelogue and half New York off Broadway theatre.   That tends to be distracting.

Thursday

12 February 2004

Well, You Never Will Believe Department

"I am Elrond.  Welcome to Rivendell.  And do have a cookie.  We bake them ourselves, you know."

Friday

13 February 2004

Hello and welcome to another Friday the Thirteenth.  Yes, its Tridecaphobia Day here on Ephemeral Isle!  That means “fear of the number thirteen”; not, of course, to be confused with triskaidekaphobia, which is “fear of a baker’s dozen.”  I won’t even mention paraskevidekatriaphobia.   We’re covering that next week.  Don’t forget to mark your calendar. Have you done that?  Excellent.

Why do so many people regard Friday the Thirteenth as unlucky?  Why is my phone bill so high?  The origins of this superstition are lost in the mists of time, but careful study of arcane sources known only to a few scholars, plus a heap of newspaper fillers found wedged between the crossword and the cryptogram have shed some light on the mystery.  Many people believe that Friday the Thirteenth goes back to the Last Supper, when Judas Iscariot made it thirteen at table.  I am assuming that they weren’t counting the waiters.  Some assert that it this was unlucky because it was an odd number.  Others because most dining sets only come with twelve chairs and Peter had to sit on an ottoman.  Then there are those who attribute it to Jesus having asked for separate checks.  Still others attribute the origins of Friday the Thirteenth with a series of cheap slasher films that proved to be a very unlucky for anyone who wasted their money on them.

Whatever its origins, Friday the Thirteenth has had considerable impact on our society, our customs, our way of life, and on the quality of Saran Wrap— especially that new coloured variety which you buy because it looks festive, but just never seems right once you put it ‘round a plate of leftovers.  Give me the good old transparent kind, I say.  What was good enough in my father’s day is good enough for me.  We didn’t hold with that namby pampy tinted plastic wrap in those days.  No, sir…  Sorry. I seem to have strayed from my point.

Sailors have always regarded Friday as being an unlucky day.  Of course, they regarded every other day as being unlucky, but more in a losing at lotto kind of way rather than an anvil falling out of the crow’s nest kind of way.  To combat this, the Royal Navy commissioned HMS Friday.  Her keel was laid on a Friday, she was launched on a Friday, and she was commanded by a man named Friday.  Ironically, she sank when she immediately banged into HMS Weekend. Her crew saved themselves by dragging themselves onto the deck of HMS Monday looking very much the worse for wear. 

Another example of Friday the Thirteenth’s pernicious effect is Joe Friday, a character portrayed by Jack Webb, whose wooden performance in the ‘'60s revival of Dragnet set back television police dramas in a way that would not be equalled until the rash of buttocks on NYPD Blue some years later. This is in sharp contrast to His Girl Friday, which was such a delightfully breezy Howard Hawks comedy with such marvellous energy between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell that nobody noticed what disgraceful shoes Ralph Bellamy was wearing.

Many people believe that skyscrapers omitted having a thirteenth floor because it was considered unlucky.  This is not the case.  In fact, the lack of a thirteenth floor was due to the heavy involvement of the Mafia in the construction industry.  Contractors would be induced by heavy bribes to set the thirteenth floor off to one side under a tarp so it could be smuggled across state lines and assembled with other stolen thirteenth floors into a new building.  Half of Las Vegas was built this way.

Now that we have established the true history of Friday the Thirteenth, what can you, the average citizen, do to protect yourself?  First, you need to know whether or not today is truly going to be unlucky.  My indication of an unlucky day is when I receive an invite to a family reunion.  Other telltale signs are:

• Black cats
• Ladders
• Broken mirrors
• Black cats breaking mirrors by dropping them off ladders

Once you have determined that today is truly going to be unlucky, take precautions.   Rest, vitamins, and plenty of liquids should help, but you can also do the following:

• Carry the sacred amulet of Solomon al Ra with you at all times.  This can be a bit tricky, as the amulet weighs in at four tons, but you can’t be too careful.
• Never eat anything that could be an anagram of “Connecticut.”
• If you see two ravens together, run into the nearest men’s shop, buy eight pairs of argyle socks, and accuse the salesman of being Jack Davenport in a false moustache.
• Smear your entire body with low fat cottage cheese and never explain why without a note from your priest, rabbi, or cable repairman.
• Shave your hamster and teach him to recite the table of contents from the repair manual for a ’67 Volkswagen Beetle.
• At lunchtime, reply to every comment with “Well, if you feel that way about it…”

As for me, I intend to spend today the way I do every Friday the Thirteenth: hiding under the covers with an old copy of Biggles Flies South until it all goes away.  Okay, that’s the way I handle every crisis, but I say, go with what works.

St. Valentine's Day

Saturday

14 February 2004

Happy St. Valentine's Day from Pringles, the St. Valentine's Day hedgehog!  Hope you found your Valentine baskets under the tree and have fun at the sweet hearts hunt.  Now, let's all go have some Valentine punch!

Monday

16 February 2004

All Hail Millard Fillmore!

In honour of President's Day and in accordance with Ephemeral Isle's policy of doing whatever we can to strengthen the transatlantic alliance, we present this stirring portrait of Millard Fillmore, 13th president of the United States of America and notable in American history for having the first bathtub installed in the White House.  One wonders how the fortunes of the special relationship and the Atlantic Charter would have fared if FDR had been without  the means to offer Churchill a quick wash in between planning the liberation of Europe.  Let us all give President Fillmore a scrub of gratitude for doing so much for the cause of improving the cleanliness of the executive branch. 

Tuesday

17 February 2004

In my younger days, a quiet afternoon would find me in the pub behind a pint of Guinness, but middle age and fatherhood have made me forgo the public house for the coffee house and the Guinness for a cappuccino.  But I still find it relaxing to sink into an easy chair at my favourite local caffeine distribution station and peruse free papers while Emma kips in her stroller.

Anyway, I was nursing a cappuccino and being thankful that there is one coffee drink that my system can tolerate, when I picked up the latest issue of one of the local alternative weekly and damn near leapt over the pack of my chair like a surprised Buster Keaton.  I generally am able to steel myself against what I’m likely to find on the cover, but the fright mask of a woman in a purple wig and way too much make up next to the title “Meet Seattle’s Sex Bombs” was right up there with backing naked into a steam radiator.  Could have been worse, though.  There were two alternative covers: a pink horror with a half-naked blonde pretty man that would have done credit to some of the more fevered variety of gay porn magazines, and a green one with a ferret, which I do not even want to think about even in the abstract.

I’m not a big one for the weeklies, but since my wife and I work in the theatre I pick them up occasionally for the reviews.  In fact, it was from an alt weekly that I received my favourite review that stated that, “Mr. Szondy’s performance was the one bright spot in an otherwise dismal evening,” so I suppose I owe them something.

There are, of course, several species of weeklies.  There are the news weeklies, the computer weeklies, the real estate weeklies, the employment weeklies, and the community weeklies, but when one mentions the “weeklies” in many major American cities one means the alternative weeklies; those bastions of lefty, trendy, envelope-pushing journalism meant to man the barricades against The Man.  Also to let you know where the next big indie music festival will be (check ticketmaster for details).

In Seattle we have two flavours of weeklies.  There is the Seattle Weekly, which is edited with the view that if you keep your eyes covered and your fingers in your ears you can still believe that it’s 1968 and that the Revolution will be here any day now.  It’s the sort of paper that runs an article about a walking tour written by a very respectable-looking OAP with a soft-left leaning who can’t understand why the police won’t harass him.  The other is the Stranger, which is dedicated to vitriolic theatre reviews, advice columns for the aspiring sexual pervert, and columns dripping with sarcasm so leaden that I have no idea what their point is or even if they do themselves.

They are terribly predictable.  You didn’t need to even glance at the headlines to know that John Kerry is looked on with suspicion as a bit of a right-winger and that the articles about Dean and Kucinich have the sort of lost-cause optimism that the world hasn’t seen since Culloden.   You also know that the paper’s reaction to the Janet Jackson’s Superbowl hoohah has a “what’s the fuss about?” tone which will be undercut by the writer’s insistence on referring to breasts as “fun bags.”  The last, however, is not surprising in a paper with a 56 page section dedicated to adverts for live music and clubs specialising in “bondage rooms.”  Not to mention a Personals section with a “???” listing. The Spectator this is not.

What I love about the weeklies is that they are the ‘'60s Playboy of the 21^st century.  No, not the centrefolds, you fool.  They may be “edgy,” but they’re not stupid.  I’m talking about the gap between the image they project of their readership and the reality.  In the ‘'60s, Playboy used to run an feature called “What Kind of Man Reads Playboy?” which depicted the average Playboy reader as a hip, young with-it chap with the looks of Sean Connery, the bank account of Onassis, the trendiness of David Hemmings, and the tastes of Ian Fleming.  Never mind that he really had the looks of Morey Amsterdam, the bank account of yours truly, the trendiness of Harold Wilson, and the tastes of Benny Hill.  The weeklies have a similar attribute.  The columns and articles try to portray the average reader as a hard-bodied, completely secure, politically savvy twentysomething with an taste for opaque, cynical humour; who has never been a child, but sprang like Athena from the brow of Zeus a fully-grown urban sophisticate with the sexual appetite of Caligula and possesses a social life that’s like something out of an Ann Rice novel.   That may be, but I can’t help noticing that for publications geared toward sexually liberated supermen, they run a lot of articles on how to meet people; give over a great deal of their advertising space to escort services, sex chat lines, single bars of the meat market variety, “fitness” centres, personals adverts with lots and lots of people in their 50’s and 60’s; and more than a few blurbs for therapists, counsellors, and suicide hotlines. 

Thomas Crown?  Meet Woody Allen.

Image © 2004 Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics

We present for your pleasure the largest diamond ever: the 10 billion trillion trillion carat BPM 37093.  It was going to be called BPM 37092, but that was rejected as a bit gauche.

Outstripping the Star of Africa’s measly 530 carats, BPM 37093 was formed when a white dwarf star collapsed and crystallised its carbon core into a girl’s best friend.  "You would need a jeweller’s loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond," said Travis Metcalf, who led the team that discovered it.  Jeweller’s loupes the size of the Sun are available at all reputable jewellery supply shops. 

Dubbed “Lucy” by the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (who have listened to way too many Beatle albums), it is currently on exhibit at Cartier’s Centarus branch located 50 light years from Earth. 

In an exclusive update, Ephemeral Isle has confirmed that the cosmic diamond will be up for auction at Sotheby’s as soon as a suitable 2500-mile wide setting can be found.

Thursday

19 February 2004

One Day in the Congo Department

Screw symbiosis!  This little bugger's lunch!

Friday

20 February 2004

Yesterday was moment that every parent dreads: The Day That Time Forgot.  If you have children, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  It’s the day when you have that sudden rush to the casualty ward and every second afterward is sucked down a black hole of boredom heavily laced with anxiety and confusion.

We were all down with the flu the day before.  Around our house, that counts as a mixed blessing.  True, we are all sick as parrots and competing with one another for who was going to be the centre of attention, but at least we knew that we would be spared the dreadful cycle of round robin illness as the virus jumped from one to the other and back again in a never-ending circuit.  My wife was hit worst and was out like the proverbial light.  Emma was a cascade of snot.  And since I was the least affected, I was running errands most of the day.  It would have been a typical sick day, acting as a sleeping policeman in the middle of out week, except for Emma’s asthma.  Normally, her attacks are little more than the occasional mild wheezing that can be put right with a quick use of her puffer, but hit her with a viral infection and it can set off an attack that makes her breathing sound like G. K Chesterton running the London Marathon. 

That’s what the day before yesterday became.  Just as I was about to start supper, Emma was wheezing and crackling in a way that you really do not want to hear from an 18-month old.  So, out came the puffer.  Of course, a toddler can’t use a normal inhaler, so we had to hook it into her adapter.  That’s a tube with a facemask at one end; kind of like a kid-friendly version of the rat cage they slapped on Winston Smith’s face in 1984.  It was an indicator of how bad Emma was feeling when her normally co-operative manner degenerated into something along the lines of trying to shove a soda siphon up a racoon’s rectum.  We knew the drill, so it we didn’t bother with calling the doctor, passing Go, or collecting £200.  We grabbed Emma’s crash bag, bundled into the car and made straight for Children’s Hospital.

What followed was 28 hours that I will never get back, and I don’t want them.  First, there was checking into the casualty ward.  This isn’t easy on the best of nights, as it involves all sorts of waiting, insurance information, moving cars, waiting, keeping Emma from spreading and/or contracting new illnesses with the other kids in the room, and waiting.  This was not, however, one of the best of nights.  My wife and I were ill, a new virus had hit town, the hospital was full up, and they were expecting a helicopter ambulance to land outside the door any second.  On the plus side, Children’s is geared to kids, so the décor is more cheerful, the staff know how to handle a cranky little girl, and even the casualty wards have televisions and toys to keep the parents from stepping outside to ask for a scalpel and advice on wrist slashing.  Once Emma was poked, prodded, stethoscoped, and had a nebuliser strapped to her face to feed her medicine-laced oxygen, the fun could begin— or be pummelled whimpering into the ground, depending on your point of view.  The plan was to give her treatments at hourly intervals and see how she responded.  Our job was to fret and do our best to comfort an increasingly unhappy little girl.  Emma’s job was to grow increasingly unhappy and alarmed at the procession of people in masks and odd gowns, who insisted on poking, prodding, peering, injecting, and inflicting other indignities upon her person.  Around midnight, I went off in search of food, which is a bit of an adventure in a medical complex after the cafeteria has closed.  It’s like getting off the train in a French town on a summer holiday.  You’re convinced that everyone packed up and quietly stole away during the night as you hunt for vending machines.  I give Children’s 50% success rating.  On the plus side, unlike other hospitals, their vending machines are stocked with the understanding that you are going to have people using them who have not had any supper and do not want to dine on potato crisps.  On the minus side, the ATMs only give out $20 bills and the change machines give out only quarters, and after I bought our sandwiches and coffee I ended up bursting the lining of my trouser pocket. 

After Emma was finally admitted to hospital and given a room, you would think that we’d get a chance to rest a bit.  After all, this is not the Dark Ages.  This is a modern hospital with private rooms for the patients, rocking chairs, and sofas that convert into beds for the parents.  Nope.  You also have to factor in that you have two parents trying to convince themselves that their baby is not sliding into respiratory collapse, a toddler who cannot sleep, and doctors and nurses trooping in every few minutes for another treatment.  Emma was getting so fed up with the latter than the very appearance of a stethoscope was enough to make her plead “owie.”

Somewhere around five AM, I needed serious caffeine and a break, so I drove to the local supermarket in University Village.  This being Seattle, it has an all-night espresso bar inside, which is scene to a steady parade of bleary-eyed dads sporting hospital pass badges.  I grabbed a couple of bagels, an entertainment magazine for my wife and a Popular Mechanics for myself, and a triple-shot latte and to Hell with what it was going to do to my colon. 

The long watch continued through the day with only break being my going home for a couple of ours to take care of some business and bring back some burgers for parental sustenance.  Then Emma’s grandma showed up in the mid-afternoon, giving my wife and I a chance to grab some more caffeine in the cafeteria.  By now, the coffee was giving me no jolts, but more like what happens to a car with a severe knock and a stuck idler.   My guts were in a perpetual roil, my leg wouldn’t stop shaking, I had a taste in my mouth like burnt tobacco and too much Guinness that I couldn’t get rid of, and I was certain that I had jammed a circuit in my brain so that I would never sleep again.  I’d have been alarmed, but it was all so familiar.  I’d been through exactly the same thing on the day of Emma’s birth, my wife’s gall bladder operation, and every hospital visit we’ve had since.  It was my body’s sadistic way of reminding me that I wasn’t 22 anymore and I couldn’t shrug off a 48-hour session with a pot of tea and five-minute’s kip on a bench.  Meanwhile, my wife was in a state of near collapse, her voice was so low and raspy that she had to identify herself to her own mother on the phone, and was literally on the verge of passing out.  And to cap it all off, Emma was fed up.  I mean fed up in the way that only a toddler can be.  She did not like hospital.  She knew exactly what it was, she knew exactly what was going on, and she wanted no part of it.  She wanted to go home, she was letting us know in no uncertain terms, and no amount of Shrek on the DVD would change her mind. 

That is where the unfathomable part of modern medicine came in.  Around six PM, one of doctors came in, said that Emma could be discharged, gave us instructions on how to treat her at home, said that she’d give us a prescription, and we’d be free to go.  Two hours later, we still had no prescription and no sign out papers.

Now, when I say two hours later, let us consider what this is in parent time.  With Emma increasingly approaching terminal meltdown, two hours translates into approximately a geological epoch.  I began to wonder what had suddenly happened to the bed shortage.  Didn’t they want the room now that Emma was ready to go home?  We stuck our heads out the door.  Nobody coming.  We asked at the desk.  We were told “ten minutes,” which stretched to half an hour.  We even propped the door open so that everyone on the floor could share in Emma’s opinion of the delay.  Still nothing.  My wife was so fed up that she said we should just leave.  We very nearly did that, but the nurse got flustered and said we had papers to sign.  I had the vision of a force field in front of the door that would prevent exiting unless you waved a carbon of the signed form like the vial of Galadrial.   In the end, we just said screw it.  I loaded up Emma’s bags in the car, took her down in a bundle of blankets, and left my wife and her mother to sign the alleged papers while Emma and I went home. 

When I put Emma down, she was still ill, but happier than she’d been at any time in the past day.  I think for the first time in her life, she was happy to be home.  Heaven knows I was.  My wife arrived about an hour later and we had a relatively quiet evening, aside from some projectile vomiting, with the only fuss out of Emma being the usual one that announced she was ready for bed and we all retired for nine hours of total unconsciousness. 

That’s what I love about family life: the serenity.

Saturday

21 February 2004

Only a Matter of Time Department

Inspired by the controversial gay weddings performed recently in San Francisco, California, Arthur Periwinkle decided to take his love for his Power Mac G5 to the next level.

Sunday

22 February 2004

Our Manifesto

Loonies of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but your sinuses!

Monday

23 February 2004

Ever since I heard the news of Spalding Gray’s disappearance I’ve been trying to get through as much of his work as possible.  I know it sounds morbid, but I wanted to read his books and watch his videos while there is still the chance that he’s still alive on some sort of hitchhiking odyssey rather than the regrettable alternative. 

I don’t know whether I’m doing this because of the great respect that I have for the man’s work, or simply because it seems like the proper thing to do.  It’s a bit like when I was at university and the BBC started their radio adaptation of Lord of the Rings and I figured that I’d best start reading the book before the radio caught up with me.  Or maybe it’s because it’s another excuse to browse around the second-hand bookshops and some of the more arcane parts of amazon.com.   Maybe I’m not being so much morbid as ghoulish.  Or maybe I want to simply read his books while I can still think of Gray in the present tense.

If you’ve never encountered Spalding Gray, he is basically what is called a monologist.  Back in the 1970s, he was credited with reviving the monologue as a legitimate theatrical form.  I don’t know whether this was a conscious artistic choice of Gray’s or a natural outgrowth of his personality.  He is one of Creation’s natural self-confessors; a shy man who is awkward in company, but given the sort of shielding that a stage provides, he’ll open up and spill his soul on the table like a jar of pickled wieners.  This was made obvious the first time he did a theatre arts class and the teacher proposed one of those turgid theatrical games that involves relating a personal anecdote off the top of your head, and then when you can’t go any further you jam on a word like a jazz musician until you can think of something.  When it was Gray’s turn he got up and talked for the full time without so much as a hesitation and afterwards the teacher asked him who’d prepared his monologue. 

Gray is also a man who admits that he has no capacity for fiction.  He is incapable of making things up, which is strange for someone who makes his living on stage.  Everything he talks about on stage are apparently true stories that he has simply edited for dramatic effect and to avoid getting his lights punched out by an irate acquaintance. 

With his personality, it was only natural for Gray to drift toward the monologue.  Indeed, it was much more comfortable for him that being a straight actor, because he has such difficulty getting into character that he seems to cover three times as much territory in preparation of any actor this side of Dustin Hoffman.  He never claims to have been comfortable in a role and often talks in his monologues about all the images that he has to dredge up so that he can relate to the words that he’s speaking.  This can lead to episodes such as the one he talks about in Swimming to Cambodia where he blew 67 takes trying to get out one line only to have to re-dub it again when he got back to New York because of the crickets picked up on the soundtrack. 

I knew Spalding Gray largely through his later works; especially his video monologues Swimming to Cambodia (which I’ve only recently seen), Monster in a Box, and Gray’s Anatomy.  And his books, with the exception of his one novel Impossible Vacation, are all transcripts of his monologues.  His body of work, including his novel, add up to one very long, darkly humorous autobiography.  He’s a bit like Samuel Pepys, only instead of keeping his diary in a book, which could be read by later generations, Gray keeps his on stage where he tells an audience about his life extemporaneously.  Indeed, he does it to such an extent that in recent years he began to wonder if he kept on living just to provide material for his monologues.  He also has a strange mixture of the funny and the tragic in his work that is very different from others.  When he talks about the disasters that befell him when he bought a house that was literally about to collapse under its own weight, he isn’t an everyman struggling against the often humorous misfortunes that life throws at us, he is more of a man on the verge of hysteria being beset by a situation that is a metaphor for the tragedy of existence that is amusing simply because it is too insane to believe. 

One of the things that you notice when you read his monologues in book form is that you are missing Spalding Gray’s voice and demeanour, which is a central part of what he is trying to say.  Without those inflections, those arched eyebrows, those imitations of the people he is talking about, and even the yells and screams that he does in reaction to what is happening around him, you lose a good deal of the story.  It’s like listening to Beethoven without the woodwinds.  This is very obvious in Swimming to Cambodia.  I was reading the paperback version of it while waiting for the video to wend its way to me through the post and I noticed that there was a big difference between what you saw on the page and what you got from his performance.  When he related the incident at Phuket, the famous 007 beach in Thailand, where was taking a day off from filming The Killing Fields.  He and a friend swam out into the sea where these huge waves were crashing in.  Gray stayed close to shore trying to find a “perfect moment” and his friend was swimming farther and farther out.  When you read on the printed page about how Gray lost sight of his friend and started to panic and rushed up to the rest of the party for help, you can get some idea of what he was going through, but when you hear him tell it for himself, you get the full-blown spectacle of a middle-aged man on the verge of out and out hysteria only to be told by his friends, “Don’t worry.  He’s from South Africa.”   That last line is impossible to translate on to the page without losing that sense of the bizarre not-helpingness. 

As I read some of his earlier works, such as Sex and Death Up to the Age of 14 I couldn’t help but notice how much Gray has grown as a writer and performer.  His earlier works often lacked a strong narrative form and tended to ramble.  They also had an unpleasant flavour to them as though he was trying to purge himself of some unpleasant humour that was plaguing his psychic anatomy.  He was also prone to certain theatrical airs that seemed to be a holdover from his days of experimental theatre.  He would still use these in later days, but they tended to be much more under control and used to solid effect rather than just having that avant garde dropped out of nowhere quality that so much experimental theatre suffers from.

I think my favourite of his monologues is Monster in a Box, which talks about all the incredible difficulties that he had in writing his one novel Impossible Vacation.  In that monologue, as he does in all his monologues, he was sitting at a table, but on it was this incredibly large binder which stood all of two feet tall and must have had in it something on the order of 5000 pages.  I could never for the life of me figure out where they found such a binder, never mind how they managed to stuff so many pages into it.  But there it would sit on the table where Gray would be referencing it and talking about all his difficulties in writing this novel or, more to the point, all the difficulties he had in not writing it.  And during the course of the monologue you got to know something about the novel itself, which was a largely autobiographical work dealing with his relationship with his mother and her suicide. 

I was rather intrigued with reading the novel itself and seeing how Gray fared when writing fiction, even fiction of an autobiographical nature.  So, last week I started reading Impossible Vacation and I was surprised to learn that this one was a slog.  His previous books were ones that I could zip through at speed.  Granted, they were transcripts of monologues and were subsequently shorter, but they also had a quality to them that kept you turning the pages until you were caught unawares at the end.  But here I was reading this thing for close to five days and had only got up to page 67.  And it felt as if I’d been reading it much longer.  Now, that isn’t to say that it was a badly written novel.  It was actually a very well written work.  It was simply what I would call over polished.  It was clear that Gray had been working very, very hard on this novel and had sweated blood over every vowel and semicolon until he’d got it as close to right or as least painful as he could manage it. 

Okay, I thought.  Not every piece of literature has to be accessible.  But something else struck me.  For all the events in the story, there wasn’t a lot happening.  Even though there was passage of time, characters coming and going, but not a lot happening dramatically.  There also wasn’t much of any dialogue and except for the narrator everyone in the book was a bit two-dimensional, as if they were meant to stand in for something else.  Then I realised that while Gray was writing this book Gray must have been going through one of his philosophical flirtations and that this was a book written by an existentialist, or at least an existentialist at that moment and it was going nowhere.  Nothing is going to happen.  It’s going to be a long discourse about the now without conflict or resolution.  Things would just happen, then other things would happen, and then the story would stop.  Not end.  Stop.  At that point I decided that life was too damn short and I Impossible Vacation became the only Spalding Gray book that I abandoned.

Right now I am reading his Morning, Noon and Night, which deals with Gray’s confrontation with the realties and fantasies of fatherhood.  Before his disappearance, Gray was working on a new monologue that dealt with his accident in Ireland and his subsequent recovery.  It was probably the most difficult piece he had ever done, because the accident and the damage that it caused to his brain had robbed him of his sense of humour.  Where he could see the lightness in the dark, now all he could see was the darkness and it had left him bitter.  The monologue reflected this to a certain extent, and its roughness was apparent in its poor reception during some early performances, though his friends and family believed that the process of working on it was helping to recover some of his old personality.  That is one of the things that make his disappearance so tragic.

One of the most disturbing aspects of Spalding Gray’s disappearance is that for a man who has spent so much time revealing so much of his life and his psyche it is very sad that the final chapter of this story may end up unknown.  It may be the story of a man who one day walked out the door and never came back.  Let us hope that Spalding Gray is found safe and well.  Perhaps he is working on a monologue somewhere to explain what was going through his mind that January night.  That for the performance that was Gray’s life to simply cease without resolution is unsatisfying in everyway.

Tuesday

24 February 2004

Is London the new Amazon?

A piranha fish was found in the Thames last week.  Well, not exactly in it.  More like over and slightly to the left.  That’s because this one wasn’t so much caught as dropped from the sky when a rather alarmed seagull, not accustomed to being snapped at by its lunch, dumped the offending creature on the deck of a Thames Water Authority vessel. 

For those of you are not up on your British ichthyology, the Thames has never been notable for having huge shoals of carnivorous fish with razor-sharp teeth prowling about its waters waiting to catch the odd cow unawares and strip it to the bone in less than a minute— at least, not during the tourist season.

The official story is that the piranha got into the river due to a disgruntled pet owner flushing it down the toilet, though it is also possible that the fish was separated from a tour group.  Others attribute it to the effects of global warming inducing piranhas to migrate 5000 miles across the Atlantic.  But there are those at the Institute for Jumping to Conclusions Based on No Firm Evidence who believe that this is merely one symptom of the Amazon River cleverly moving itself into the Thames Valley.

Granted, one piranha does not a tropical river basin make, but there have been other telltale signs.  Rubber tree plantations have begun sprouting up in Regents Park.  Sloths have been seen hanging from the rafters in Westminster Abbey.  Leopards are prowling in the vicinity of Marble Arch.  Head-hunters are queuing at the London Eye.  Anacondas have been found hiding in loft extensions.   There are rumours afoot that this year’s Boat Race will be run in dugout canoes.  And Sting has a new album out. 

Then there is the fact that the Thames seems to have grown to a length of over 1700 miles with a water-basin of 2.3 million square miles and is discharging four times as much fresh water as the Congo, though this is not so apparent to the casual observer because of the lush vegetation that has sprouted along the Embankment forming a complex ecosystem in its elaborate canopies that are home to over 6000 indigenous species. 

Quite frankly, between the yellow fever, the army ants that have decimated Hampstead Heath, and the rising incident of violent crimes involving blowgun darts dipped in curare, the whole place is taking on the air of something out of a Graham Greene novel.  Questions were raised in parliament, but these went unanswered because the howler monkeys drowned them out. 

When asked for comment, the Home Secretary said, “AARRGGHH!” as he was being sucked down into a mangrove swamp. 

Traffic in Central London is reported to have come to a complete standstill with vehicles motionless as jungle creepers entangle themselves about their inert coachwork.  So, no change there.

Next:  Have the Great Plains been sighted working at a W. H. Smith’s in Dunbar?

Wednesday

25 February 2004

Have you seen the Boobahs?  If you haven’t, then count yourself among the blessed.  If you have seen them, and if you’re a parent of a child under the age of five you have, then you understand when I say that I have stared into the Pit.

Boobahs are characters from a new children’s television programme.  Now, I watch a lot of children’s television due to the fact that my daughter isn’t much interested in Humphrey Bogart films and my wife has strong views about letting her sit through Die Hard now that her cognitive abilities have begun to develop.  I don’t know why.  Die Hard always struck me as being very educational.  It not only can teach very young children how to take on a small army of terrorists barefooted, it also provides sound lessons as to why ‘'80s clothing was so abysmal.  But then, having passed through the Dark Night of the ‘70s, one must make allowances.  If you have seen as much children’s fare on the box as I have, you begin to notice that there is a decided creepiness about most of it.  It wasn’t always like this.  The Magic Roundabout and the Clangers were often daft, but in a whimsical sort of way, while TISWAS was so gloriously subversive that Chris Tarrant made Spike Milligan look like a Bob Hope clone.  Modern children’s television, on the other hand, seems to be produced by people who have seen some weird sexual subtext in what they do and are trying their damnedest to avoid noticing it on the air.  It’s a bit like when I was at Hertford College’s 400^th anniversary ball.  It was a black-tie affair that I naturally attended in a tweed jacket and corduroy trousers, so I was sticking out like a sore thumb the moment I walked in the door.  I ended up seated at table across from some dignitary from Saxony and his wife, a striking woman in a black gown with a cleavage that was as wide as a prairie and as hard to avoid noticing as being hit by a chunk of the Mir space station.  I can’t recall what the meal was like.  I think it was beef Wellington, but it could have been egg and chips, as I was in one of those horrible circles where you’re talking to a woman, accidentally catch sight of a her breasts, and as you steer your gaze away you find your eyeballs veering back again of their own accord.  I imagine many people involved in Children’s television must go through something analogous, or it may have something to do with the fish.

At any rate, Boobah is a show that doesn’t project creepiness.  It beams out unadulterated alarm.  From the moment it starts with a spinning ball of light flying across the skies spitting sparks like a burning golf ball, I thought we were in for trouble.  When we were introduced to the Boobahs themselves as they nestled in their fuzzy soup ladles, I knew it for certain.  Describing Boobahs isn’t easy.  You need someone like Hieronymus Bosch to do it justice, but as he’s dead at the moment you’ll have to take it from me that your average Boohbah looks like an androgynous stress ball with tiny arms and legs and a head that reacts like a turtle’s.  They also have eyes which flick from side to side for no readily apparent reason, and eyebrows that light up in a way that eyebrows really shouldn’t.  They live in a weird place which is all balls of light, spirals, and strange swirly patterns that resembles nothing so much as a nightclub out of a Farscape episode or the setting for a toddler rave.  In this place, the Boobahs dance and fly about manically like a dance troupe on a sugar high using a propulsion system that sounds as if it is based on controlled farts.  Furthermore, somebody keeps yelling.  I think my wife said it best when she described it as being like a bad acid trip.

What the Hell is going on here?  Ephemeral Isle has looked into the matter and can now report that Boobah is nothing less than a harbinger of an impending alien invasion by strangely coloured dancing brillo pads.  Zumbah, Jumbah and the rest are clearly an advance scout party sent to Earth to pave the way for the main assault force.  And as they flit about the world in their glowing war sphere, we can see that they are making contact with their agents scattered on five continents disguised as toddlers.  And a nefarious lot these are, too.  In one segment, a load of children were pushing a gaily coloured box  toward a swirling rainbow spiral.  The box is huge and obviously very heavy if it requires half a dozen children to move it.  They place it on the spiral and watch happily as the spiral swirls and shoots a jet of light upwards that causes the box to rise, shimmer, and disintegrate into a formless blob before vanishing entirely.  I can only assume that the toddlers are disposing of a body.   No doubt of some other columnist who got too close to the truth.  And then there’s a bit where another rainbow spiral appears out of nowhere in a park and on it a child appears who carries out all sorts of meaningless movements.  What else could this be except a test platform for cyborg killbots?  I won’t even mention the mind control experiments being conducted by these fiends on Mr. Man, Grandmama, and Mrs. Lady involving hammocks, easy chairs, and wheel barrows. 

As terrifying as the prospect of a looming Boohbah invasion may be, at least we can take solace in the fact that all of this at long last explains the Teletubbies.  I sat for years mystified by those strange creatures with the rubber-treaded feet and televisions in their tummies.  They were odd enough, but what was truly baffling was the environment where they lived.  Where were they?  Was the Sun with the baby face a drug-induced hallucination?  What was that strange techno dome that they lived in?  And what were those electronic panels inside it?  What about the access doors that were obviously too small for the Teletubbies to enter?  Who built Noo Noo?  What was the secret of the giant pinwheel transmission tower?  Who sent in the stuffed sheep and the flying carousel?  And who was giving the orders over those subterranean Tannoys?  I scoured the Internet for answers and lay awake in my confusion, but at last I have it.  The Teletubbies are a secret project by the British government to develop a genetically engineered counterforce to the Boohbahs and Teletubbyland is their main training facility.  Somehow the Ministry of Defence  has got hold of Boohbah technology and has reverse engineered it enough to use it in a race against time to build countermeasures before the main Boohbah fleet arrives. 

How do I know this?  Farts.  Both Boohbahs and Teletubbies fart to a ridiculous degree.   Every show starts with farting and continues with one episode of breaking wind after another.  Granted, the Boohbahs are much more advanced in their farting technology, but Britain’s fondness for baked beans will tell in the end. 

So remember, that if you do encounter the Boohbahs, you are staring the enemy in the face.  And if you find yourself becoming annoyed by Dipsy’s interminable fixation on his hat, remember that it’s all part of the larger picture to preserve Britain and the supremacy of man on Earth.

27 February 2004

Toiling in the Fields of Gags Department

Here at Ephemeral Isle we never sleep.  We also never bathe, brush our teeth, eat properly, or get invited to parties, but that's as may be.  Our humour mills blaze night and day as we refine the ore of witticism in the crucible of insight until it pours forth as the molten steel of satire into the mould of parody forming the ingot of laughter.   We create jokes the old fashion way; by putting them on an anvil and beating them with a big hammer.  Every jape, every bon mot, every simile is forged in the white heat of imagination until it is suitable for the exacting standards that only heavy industrial kidding about can produce.  Granted, our production methods are rather sweaty and generate huge quantities of deep-seated anger and resentment as waste  products, but if we have to lay waste an entire continent to make you laugh, we're willing to pay that price.

Ephemeral Isle: Where humour is no laughing matter.

Saturday

28 February 2004

It’s 12:30 AM and I haven’t a glimmer of a column, so I’m going to fall back on the cheapest of writer’s tricks to explain why: I’m going to write about my day.  I wish that I could say that this lack of column material was due to writer’s block, or to computer crashes, or to my having spent the day at a really good beach party.  I can’t even say that it was due to some entertaining series of mishaps that might add up to a remarkable tale of everyday adventure that would provide amusing insights into our times.  Nope.  The simple fact is that I haven’t had a chance to sit down at the computer long enough to check my e-mail, much less try to string together words into some sort of a coherent pattern, which is a pity because I had a really sweet topic that I was keen to tuck into.  But it was the sort that needs careful polishing if the jokes aren’t going to go flying off in all directions like a half-assembled car brake and that means quiet, which I lacked in abundance.

Normally if I know that I can’t get to the keyboard I have back up plans to let me at least get the thing down in one form or another.  I always carry a moleskine notebook with me to write in if I have to cool my heels away from home and I bought a pocket digital recorder to dictate into while driving.  Unfortunately, both of those methods assume that I’m going to at least get a chance to pick up a pen or switch on the recorder, which was not the case today.    My wife had to go to work early today and I was left with Emma.   Normally this is no problem, because she’s a most tractable girl in the morning and I can usually bank on getting time to at least sort through the news and make some notes, if not bang out an actual column, but my wife going in early meant that she’d be coming back early to pick us up so that I’d have the car to run errands, and so I had a chance to do little more than the packages that needed mailing together and then getting Emma dressed.  After dropping my wife off at work again, Emma and I did the morning post office run and grabbed a foul but edible breakfast at the Jack in a Box. Daddy got an egg on a bun and Emma got the hash browns.  I’d planned to go to the play area at the shopping centre where she could play while I watched her with my notebook in my lap, but it started to rain, so we headed back to the house.  Nice peaceful time at home with Emma playing in her toy box while Daddy makes some notes or even sneaks off to type a quick paragraph.  Not a chance.  This was one of those days when Emma decided that Daddy could not be anywhere except in plain view and that the most fascinating thing in the world was whatever Daddy had in his hands at that moment.  I got tired of trying to coax back my pen from her, so I gave up in favour of an extended play day.  By mid-afternoon, she was getting that contrary cranky look that meant that naptime was not far away, but she fought off sleep like she was trying to win a bet.  So, back in the car for another drive.  I had my recorder sitting on the passenger seat with every intention of dictating today’s column, but I learned that dictation is nigh impossible when traffic takes on the characteristics of a city hosting a convention of Italian taxi cab drivers.   Furthermore, Emma had about as much intention of going to sleep as Mel Gibson had of putting an eccentric dance number into The Passion. 

It was almost time to pick up my wife, so we made for the preschool that she helps manage and we visited a bit until she was ready to go; then a quick trip to the supermarket and home. 

Things started to look up at that point.  Emma was calm all through supper and afterwards I ran some things up to the theatre for my wife.  I was more than happy to help, because the theatre is near an excellent bookshop where I could have a long browse and work on my column in peace.  In the Daddy world this is known as wild optimism.  I’d got as far as the Bs in the literature section when my mobile rang.  Emma had been having a non-stop fit since I’d left.

So, back home.  The moment that I walked in, Emma calmed down and the sniffles disappeared as soon as I picked her up.  I noticed, however, that my wife was talking to someone.  Oh, good I thought.  Her parents have dropped by.  I can make polite excuses and write the column while they keep Mama and Emma company. 

Boy did I guess wrong.  It turned out to be our friends J. and T., who we’d not seen in weeks because of our insanely busy schedules.  J. had volunteered to help out with a reading of my script for The Reluctant Dragon, which my wife is directing this summer in parks in the Puget Sound area.  The reading had been on Monday and when J. failed to appear we put it down to the sort of last minute emergencies that happen in the theatre.  It turned out, however, that she had thought the reading was tonight and finding the theatre set up not for a reading of The Reluctant Dragon, but a production of Blasted, she and her husband T. came around for an impromptu visit.  It was a fun time chatting with them, but afterwards my wife had some banking to do, so I watched Emma while she sequestered herself in the bedroom with the laptop. 

At this point, I could see the metaphorical sands slipping away in the cliché hourglass and I knew that watching A Bug’s Life with Emma, while bonding, was not getting the column written.  It especially wasn’t getting written when it was after ten and Emma was so tired that she was having minor and not so minor hissy fits every five minutes.  I pointed out to her, quite reasonably I thought, that I was the man who was going to determine her pocket money, the chores said money was contingent upon, and the fact that I hate cleaning the toilet.  This made no impression on her and she whacked me with a Pringles can. 

When A Bug’s Life ended. I decided that it was no more Mr. Nice Guy.  I put in a Baby Mozart DVD, placed her favourite pillow on the floor by her head and waited for nature to take its course.  Inside of twenty minutes she was out like a light.  I tucked her in with Bunny the disgustingly dirty stuffed animal, my wife went to bed, and I sat down at the computer to write this; a totally off the cuff piece that has taken me until 2 AM to complete.  In fact, it has taken me until so late to do this that Zen has started his maintenance scans, and that is a time of night I do not want to see unless I’m lost in a really great book, enjoying a good cigar, or doing something that I am going to bitterly regret in the morning. 

If this seems like the ramblings of an extremely tired man who has not had a chance to relax in 16 hours and hasn’t had the energy to proofread any of this, then you are ever so right.

Sunday

29 February 2004

Flags of All Nations Department

Hello, fellow vexillophiles.  Yes, it's time once again to to dip into the bottomless well of flag lore.  Today:  The European Union flag.  Adopted by the EU parliament  in 1985 to the howls of anger of Eurosceptics and blank indifference by most everyone else, the circle of twelve gold stars against a blue field was meant to symbolise the then twelve members of the union.

An flattering effect of the flag was that when it was used as a backdrop for press conferences, it would often result in photos that showed the EU official in question with a halo about his head.  This was especially popular with Neil Kinnock. 

However, with over a dozen new members set to join the EU in  this and following years, the circle of twelve stars has been felt to be obsolete and demeaning in the way it excludes the newcomers from the symbolism.  Therefore, this new flag is being adopted, which symbolises either victory of the federalist ideal, or "up yours" to the Tories and Americans. 

It should make future press conferences rather interesting.

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