Can I Pass These Tests?

I am not, at this time, likely to be hired to teach elementary school in Texas. An exam that the Texas State Board of Education requires all teaching applicants to pass is included in Can You Pass These Tests?, a collection of “The Toughest Tests You’ll Never Have to Take, But Always Wanted to Try.” I suppose if I studied or simply took my time, which I’d be more likely to do if I was taking the test for real, I could do better, but right now I’d probably manage a D at best, assuming, as I wouldn’t, that I correctly calculated the percentage for a test with 32 questions. I got a third of them wrong. My skill in Math is such that I wouldn’t even use the word “skill” to describe my ability, but I missed one question requiring mathematical ability because I misread it. I knew Marcy “runs a quarter-mile track,” but neglected to notice that she does so “two and one-half times.” So, how many miles does she run in five days? I said one and one-fourth miles. Nope. The correct answer is three and one-eighth miles. Other questions I missed include the most important indicator of a child’s readiness for reading. “Maturational age” is the key, not “Chronological age” as I would have thought. Math was also my undoing in a question concerning the lines of symmetry in an “equilateral” triangle. The clue must be in the word “equilateral” which means “having all sides equal.” I should have figured out that such a triangle has three lines of symmetry, but the image of a triangle that I had in my mind had a shorter base with only the sides being equal. I’m a victim of preconceived ideas. Hmm.

I felt no embarrassment at not knowing that when a cold air mass is replaced by a mass of warm air, the result is a “Cirrus” and not a “Cumulus.” I’m not a graduate of a school for meteorologists, and who else would be expected to know such a thing? However, I blush a bit about my answer to a question about the most relevant information to include in a report citing “specific” examples of extreme weather conditions in the United States. Asshole that I am, the word I thought most important was “extreme,” hence my rapid selection of the multiple choice answer mentioning a “hurricane.” The word that should have grabbed my attention was “specific.” The correct answer was specific, referring to rainfall of 1.23 inches that fell in Unionville, Maryland.

I really should know that the Monroe Doctrine was intended to “prevent European expansion in Latin America,” but my faulty guess was that it was to “open the southwestern United States to settlement.” As for the activity that would be most helpful to develop a sixth grader’s individual response to art, I chose “Matching artists to their works,” when the Texas State Board of Education says it’s “Participating in a critique of various artworks.” Again, it’s the language in the question that will guide you to the correct answer. The word that gives away the answer is “individual.” Tricky stuff.

These questions were part of the “Elementary Comprehensive” section of the test. I did better on “Professional Development,” missing only three questions out of fourteen. Tying shoelaces is more likely to develop fine-motor skills than throwing a ball; educationally disadvantaged students lack “exposure to positive, varied experiences,” and are not encountering problems that are a function of “traumatic childhood incidents.”

Of course, the people who compiled the questions and approved the test are more likely bureaucrats with no classroom experience. Even if the test was created by teachers, that wouldn’t make it infallible. The answer to one question seems all wrong to me. The question concerns a school district whose students scored below average in mathematics than other school districts that took a standardized test. Which is the most appropriate short-term goal for the district?

Remember, it’s mathematics, not reading, in which the students fell short, but the correct answer, the “most appropriate short-term goal” for the district, is – according to the Texas State School Board – “Assess students’ strengths and weaknesses in reading.” George W. Bush, the 43rd president who famously asked, “Is our children learning?” was once governor of Texas, although that was long before W’s influence could be felt. Maybe the book in which the test is reproduced has a typo because in the answer section, their explanation makes no sense: “Since scores for reading skills were below average, assessing students’ strengths and weaknesses in reading is the most appropriate short-term goal. Weaknesses that are identified could then be addressed.” There was no mention of the students’ reading skills in the question, so from where are we to learn that their reading skills are below average as they claim? And if the students scored below average in Math, why doesn’t their mathematical abilities, or lack thereof, earn even a mention in the explanation of the answer?

Phil Ochs: Journalism set to music

Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune is a 97-minute documentary about the sweet-voiced folksinger who committed suicide in 1976. Ochs arrived in New York’s Greenwich Village in the early 1960s with the goal to become the world’s greatest songwriter, an ambition he realized was beyond him once he met the chipmunk-cheeked college dropout who changed his name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan. A vulnerable sort who wore his heart on his sleeve, Ochs idolized the more career savvy Dylan, but whatever Dylan thought of Ochs, he publicly dismissed him and his songs. “You’re no folksinger,” Dylan once told him, “you’re a journalist.” And so, in a sense, he was.

While Dylan abandoned the protest movement in favor of more introspective personal songs, Ochs continued to offer musical commentary on the world at large in songs such as “Love Me, I’m a Liberal, “ a satiric ditty that dared to question the sincerity of those on the political left who felt that they were above reproach. Ochs craved the kind of popular success that Dylan enjoyed, but never achieved it, remaining a cult performer with a niche audience. Among those interviewed to sing his praises are Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Peter Yarrow, Sean Penn, and Christopher Hitchens. Dylan is conspicuous by his absence. One of those interviewed calls Dylan a “prick,” and having read quite a few Dylan biographies, I would conclude that he often was. In 1974, Dylan did come through for Ochs when he agreed to perform at a benefit that Ochs organized for refugees from Chile where the government was ousted in a CIA led coup. Tickets were selling poorly and it looked as if the concert would cost more to stage than it could ever take in. Crossing paths with Dylan on the streets of New York, Ochs convinced his one time rival to appear. Dylan had just come off a successful tour with The Band and earlier that year had his first number one album with Planet Waves. He was riding the crest of a comeback that would see his next two albums, Blood on the Tracks and Desire, also hit number one. He would never be as “hot” again as he was in this period, and his appearance at the Friends of Chile concert ensured it would be a sellout.

The documentary doesn’t mention that Dylan’s 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue originated in conversations he had with Ochs, or that Ochs’ erratic behavior, due to a combination of depression and alcoholism, meant that Dylan did not invite him to participate, a severe blow that author Bob Spitz believes played a part in Ochs’ decision to hang himself as the revue traveled across the country. In Spitz’s account, Dylan’s guilt may have influenced his later embrace of Christianity.

Kenneth Bowser’s film is worth seeing, but I found it a little slight, especially when covering Ochs’ sad last days. I may not have been giving the film my full attention and missed any reference to “John Train,” the persona that the singer adopted after insisting that Phil Ochs had died. The CIA is mentioned as perpetuating the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile, but did they also help drive Ochs to an early grave? Did they mark him for elimination as they later did John Lennon? To make such an accusation may lead to the filmmaker being targeted, so we can excuse Mr. Bowser for his reluctance to dig a little deeper.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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William Burroughs the man remains hidden within A Man Within

William S. Burroughs was gay. His decision to marry a woman may have been an attempt to cover his homosexuality, deny it, or overcome it. A Man Within, Yony Leyser’s documentary about the writer who influenced both the Beat Generation and the punk movement, gives no clue to Burroughs’ motives, only that a marriage took place and a son resulted from the union. The marriage ended tragically when Burroughs, in imitation of William Tell, tried to shoot a glass off his wife’s head and failed. He shot her, fatally, but never faced criminal charges. Leyser’s film doesn’t explain how he managed that either. Maybe it’s because he was an American in Mexico, or perhaps it had to do with his being heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. Money talks, it’s true, but it also buys silence and inaction.

The tragedy was later cited as Burroughs’ inspiration to become a writer. Trauma and tragedy often light the spark of creativity. When life backs you into a corner, art is a way to fight your way out and exert some sense of control over your environment. Art gives power, or at least the illusion of power, to life’s helpless victims. As both a drug addict and a homosexual whose books include those titled Junky and Queer, Burroughs could qualify as a victim. He wasn’t a mainstream writer, although he was acknowledged by some who were, such as Norman Mailer who called Burroughs “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” Of course, Mailer was a bit of an ass who also praised Jack Henry Abbott, the convict who fatally stabbed a waiter after his release from prison which Mailer helped engineer. Having once stabbed his wife, though not fatally, Mailer was no stranger to sharp utensils himself. The fact that Burroughs and Abbott carried their acts of violence to such an extreme may be what inspired Mailer’s admiration.

Burroughs’ status as a “great writer” owes more to his subject matter than the quality of his prose. Phrases like “Steely Dan,” “Soft Machine,” and “Blade Runner” made their way into popular culture via rock bands and movies, but did Donald Fagen read Burroughs or merely a review of a book in which “Steely Dan” was mentioned? Patti Smith, who appears in the film, may have read Burroughs, but it was the subject matter, its emphasis on the dark side of life that appealed to her. The punk rockers who adopted Burroughs as their spiritual godfather almost certainly didn’t read his books because most can’t read. They are poseurs. Give them a well-written piece of prose by a writer who isn’t decadent and they wouldn’t know what to make of it. Their interest is in the decadence, not the art that it may have inspired. Decadence is also the real subject of A Man Within. Burroughs is simply the filmmaker’s tour guide.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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The Bad Seed: A good "bad" movie

The Bad Seed was one of the first movies aimed at an adult audience that I remember seeing and being impressed by before I reached adulthood myself. The 1956 drama about a heartless little girl who gets what she wants through murder frequently played on local television during the mid-‘60s when various early and late shows were ubiquitous around the dial. Rediscovering the film years later, I find that I still “like” it, but thanks to my sharper, more mature critical faculties, I am less impressed. The film was based on a stage play which itself was based on a book, and its Broadway origins are apparent under Mervyn LeRoy’s direction, but not in the way that typically hampers films adapted from the theater. The filmmaker’s most common mistake when transferring a play from stage to screen is to either “open it up,” an option that frequently dilutes the intimacy that makes a stage play effective, or to translate the work so faithfully that it fails to work as cinema. LeRoy avoids both mistakes, but makes another in directing his performers. He lets excellent players emote as if they’re still on stage, overemphasizing gestures and emotions to reach the audience in the balcony and at the back of the theater.

And some of those performers needed more guidance than they probably received. Patty McCormack as Rhoda conveys evil quite believably, as well as determination, but never conveys much of anything else, certainly not sincerity or even an attempt at it when hoodwinking the adults, all but one of whom too easily accepts that she’s a perfectly adorable little girl. She is nothing of the sort and anything adorable about her is so obviously contrived, so clearly meant for show, that the adults simply look stupid for accepting it.

Nancy Kelly as her mother, however, is quite convincing once she realizes her suspicions concerning this “bad seed” are warranted. She loses her composure effectively when, hearing the screams of the handyman whom Rhoda has casually set aflame, she prattles on incoherently, slams her hand on the table, portraying the woman’s mix of confusion, anger, and terror. She overdoes it a bit, and her performance is borderline annoying, but the blame probably belongs to LeRoy rather than Kelly.

Eileen Heckart, the great stage and film actress who was, like Kelly and McCormack, Oscar nominated for her work (and later won a golden guy for 1973's Butterflies are Free), does her best as the mother of a boy that Rhoda killed who has a drunken confrontation with Kelly, but her performance belongs on the stage, not the screen, and it suffers from a lack of restraint. Joan Croydon as the principal at Rhoda’s school, is as prim and proper as Margaret Hamilton in the Kansas prologue to The Wizard of Oz. She’s a caricature, not a character.

The only performance not hampered by LeRoy’s weak hand is Henry Jones whose leering custodian makes a perfect foil for Rhoda. He knows she’s not the sweet innocent that others believe her to be, but is genuinely shocked to discover she’s as evil as he teasingly tells her she is.

LeRoy may or may not be to blame for the preposterous finale. In the play, Rhoda’s mother gives her child a potentially fatal dose of sleeping pills just before placing a gun barrel to her head. The mother dies, but the child is saved to kill again. In the morally stultifying climate of 1956 Hollywood, Warner Bros. and the other major studios had to accommodate the censors who refused to approve a film in which a murderer does not pay for her crimes. Therefore, LeRoy tacked on an unbelievable climax in which nasty little Rhoda is blasted into eternity by a lightning bolt. Such a violent end for a little girl, even one as evil as Rhoda, was as disturbing to the movie industry’s mother hens as letting her off scot-free, so LeRoy made yet another foolish decision. Acknowledging the story’s theatrical roots, he brings the cast out to take their bows, then has a smiling Kelly administer a spanking to a laughing McCormack. “Anything for a howl,” sneered an unimpressed Bosley Crowther in The New York Times.

In modern times, The Bad Seed plays very much like camp. It’s entertaining, but it fails to be anything but a horror flick rather than the complex depiction of evil that I suspect its makers intended. The scene in the hospital toward the end in which Paul Fix (yes, that Paul Fix, who seems to have played either a doctor or a sheriff in every western ever made) asks the doctor if his daughter - the mother of the demon child - muttered anything while unconscious, plays like a sketch on Saturday Night Live mocking just such a cliched Hollywood moment. The doctor offers Fix a cigarette, and as they puff away the doctor’s pompous manner of speaking is matched by his equally pompous pronouncement that the “bad seed” theory is “pretty specious. . .”

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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David Bowie, Gunslinger

Gunslinger’s Revenge is an Italian western released in 1998, a good thirty years after the genre was made fashionable by director Sergio Leone whose epics, 1968's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and 1969's Once Upon a Time in the West, are now widely regarded as classics after being reviled by most critics at the time of their release. Leone’s films starred Clint Eastwood for whom they resulted in big-screen stardom. Gunslinger’s Revenge stars David Bowie.

David Bowie! In an Italian western?

In the mid-70s, when he was still known as the gender-bending, self-professed bisexual queen of “glitter rock,” Bowie was reportedly being courted for an Italian western which the Star tabloid suggested would make Tom Mix spin in his grave. Back then, only a western starring Elton John, whose image was even more gay than Bowie’s, or a remake of Patton with Liberace in George C. Scott’s role, would have been more preposterous. Bowie butched up in the ‘80s, however, got married, and began to distance himself from the sexually ambivalent image he had projected in his early days. By the ‘90s, hell, he was almost macho.

The star of Gunslinger’s Revenge is actually Harvey Keitel who plays Johnny Lowen, the fastest gun in the West, who returns home in the hope of making amends with his son, a doctor married to an Indian maiden. Their half-breed son narrates the story in which Bowie is Jack Sikora, a notorious killer eager for a showdown with Lowen. Since it’s Lowen’s reputation Sikora wants to acquire, he needs an audience to witness the duel, so he passes up several opportunities to kill his prey. In an example of an actor’s off-screen persona influencing his character, Bowie’s outlaw has the kind of entourage typical of a media-savvy celebrity. They include a female photographer who dresses in all black and captures Sikora’s dramatic entrances and nasty behavior on film.

Gunslinger’s Revenge, directed by Giovanni Veronesi, isn’t too concerned with historical accuracy. In addition to the dominatrix-style garb worn by the girl shutterbug and the interest in celebrity that was probably not quite as pronounced in the old West as it became in the media-saturated 20th century, Keitel identifies the Bowie character as a psychopath, a diagnosis that wouldn’t have been likely until the emergence of Sigmund Freud, who probably introduced the term to the public. Another bow to modern times occurs when Bowie’s photographer kidnaps the schoolmarm, a nasty old woman whose greeting of “hello” sounds accusatory, so Bowie can snatch Keitel’s grandson to use as bait to lure him into a showdown. Sitting behind the teacher’s desk, he explains to the class that their teacher has a sore throat. “I’m your substitute teacher,” he says, but back when a school was a one room in a small cabin, I doubt there was such a thing as a substitute teacher.

Gunslinger’s Revenge moves at a brisk pace with a running time of only 87 minutes. It’s well-done and enjoyable, certainly worthy of the theatrical release it was denied in the United States.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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William Shatner at Playhouse Square, Cleveland, Ohio

The guy in a Cleveland Indians jacket standing a foot or so away from the curb on Playhouse Square seemed like he might have tickets to Saturday evening's events, so my companion shouted out to him from our car. "Do you have tickets?" He sure did. "What for?" The answer we wanted to hear was also the one we expected. "Shatner!"

William Shatner's one man show came to Cleveland, Ohio and I considered getting some cheap tickets, the 10 dollar back row leftovers that are usually available at the last minute. When that was not an option, I considered spending as much as $30. "I've got two tickets for the tenth row," the man said. "You can have them for 100 bucks." That was too much, and when we talked him down to 80, he had a deal. There's only one Captain Kirk, after all, at least to those of us who grew up on the original Star Trek that aired on NBC from 1966-69, and there wasn't anything else to do, anyway.

For two hours, Shatner strode across the State Theater’s stage, reminiscing about his most unusual career. A Shakespearean trained stage actor, he got his first break as an understudy for Christopher Plummer in a production of Henry V staged in their native Canada. Plenty of stage work followed, and also film roles in The Brothers Karamazov and Judgment at Nuremberg, but it was in television that he flourished. Among dozens of guest shots, at least one would become a classic: "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," the Twilight Zone episode in which Shatner's nervous passenger spots a gremlin on the wing of an airplane. He didn't achieve stardom until Star Trek, a series that struggled through its three season run, but became a cult phenomenon in the next decade, inspiring a series of big-screen movies beginning in 1979, and, later, several successful spin-offs.

But that was still in the future. After Star Trek's cancellation in 1969, Shatner admits he was broke, owing as much to the end of those Desilu paychecks as to a divorce. He was living in a camper and doing dinner theater for the money. He remembered watching the moon landing on a four-inch black and white TV set while lying outside, his eyes taking in the stars above when not glued to the TV. One of Shatner's most memorable stories relate to this rather dismal period. One day, there was a knock on the door of his camper. "Are you Captain Kirk," the little boy in the doorway asked. "Yes, I am," a game Shatner replied. "Is this your spaceship?" the boy inquired. Shatner invited the kid in, showed him the shower where he "beamed up," and the dials on the stove he used to guide his spacecraft.

Even the most charitable fan would have to agree that if not for Star Trek, this very talented actor might not have had much of a career to build a one man show around. Before Star Trek: The Motion Picture revived his career, Shatner was most frequently cast in TV movies (Go Ask Alice being among the better ones) and kept busy in guest shots of popular shows like Columbo and Hawaii Five-O. In 1975, he bombed in a series of his own called Barbary Coast, while the best he was offered for the big screen was grade Z shit like 1977's Kingdom of the Spiders.

Captain Kirk cast a long shadow, but thanks to David E. Kelley, creator of The Practice and its spinoff, Boston Legal, Shatner may be as well-known for his role as Denny Crane, the pompous attorney for which he won an Emmy. The mere mention of the name brought the loudest cheers of the night, so Shatner may not go to his grave, as he admits he once feared he might, known only as Captain Kirk.

But Kirk and Crane probably take a backseat to the even more intriguing character known as William Shatner. Following Star Trek's cancellation, the man was becoming a bit of a joke, owing as much to several bad toupees, a general air of pomposity (comparing T.J. Hooker, his TV cop, to Hamlet), and the "singing" career highlighted by side-splitting versions of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" and the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Everyone seemed to be in on the joke except him, but then, in a classic example of reinvention, Shatner embraced his image as a pretentious boob and emerged triumphant. The "singing" career was revived thanks to Ben Folds who produced Shatner's Has Been album, and now, of course, there's this highly entertaining one man show. Shatner closed the show by encouraging the audience to say "yes," as he has done so many times in his life. His life and career demonstrate the advantages of taking risks.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Intimate Reading: The Journals of John Cheever

When The Journals of John Cheever were published by Knopf in the fall of 1991, I had been keeping my own journal for a little less than two years, starting it in January 1990 as an assignment in a college English course. It became a habit that I continued after the course concluded, and in time it grew into an essential part of my daily life. As someone once said, the unexamined life is not worth living. Of course, the life examined in detail may amount to a life lacking anything to examine except for one’s own thoughts, but so be it. When Cheever’s journals appeared, I checked them out of the local public library and continually renewed them for a year until another patron’s request meant I had to give them up.

What is the attraction of reading a journal?

Is it because a journal or diary is generally thought to be private, writing hidden from eyes other than those of the author and, therefore, appealing because to read them is to discover secrets, to come in closer contact with another’s soul than is possible in a work of fiction?

I don’t know, but Cheever’s fiction - all those acclaimed short stories and well-regarded novels - interest me less than these journals. In re-reading reviews of the book from when it first appeared, it’s interesting how shallow some critics can be. The book is not worth reading, some claimed, and should not have been published. Why? Well, by golly, it’s depressing. A similar charge was made against Kenneth Tynan’s diaries when they were published a decade after Cheever’s journal reached the shelves. What kind of lives do such people lead that they want only sunshine and smiles, and are repelled by cloudy skies and frowns? Life is life. It is what it is, and how dreary the lives must be of those who seek only laughter.

Cheever’s journals are no more “depressing” than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is racist. Just as Mark Twain depicted racism in his novel, Cheever describes his despair, his anxieties, and disappointments in his journals. It’s a downer, for sure, but like anything deemed “depressing,” such as a Leonard Cohen ballad, it has about it a healing quality. As C. S. Lewis was quoted as saying in Shadowlands, “We read to know we’re not alone.”

Maybe those who can’t appreciate Cheever’s frequently grim accounts of life have never been alone, or felt alone, and have never felt sad, or, if they have, flee from that feeling, suppressing it because they fear the vulnerability that usually results. How many people tell others to cheer up, look at the bright side, or in some way recommend masking or avoiding the grief, tears, and depression that are the natural and completely sane reaction to tragedy? After 9/11, some callers to radio talk shows complained about the round-the-clock television coverage of the tragedy’s aftermath - the search for survivors and the sight of the rubble that had once been the World Trade Center. They did not want to face it, and complained that sporting events had been cancelled because a basketball game might cheer them up. As the Bible says, “The mind of the wise is in the house of mourning. The mind of fools is in the house of pleasure.”

The wise mind is likely to respond positively to Cheever’s journals. The mostly downbeat content is only part of their allure. It’s the writing - Cheever’s gift for making sentences - that the reader will treasure. That those sentences describe an often sad and sometimes bitter life is, I suppose, beside the point, or maybe it isn’t. I don’t know, but The Journals of John Cheever is one of a handful of books I return to again and again.

From 1966: “I cut the grass, hoping to improve my spirits, but then I hit the bottle with such vehemence that nothing is gained, much is lost, and this morning I feel sick. I read a biography of Dylan Thomas thinking that I am like Dylan, alcoholic, hopelessly married to a destructive woman, etc. The resemblance stops with alcohol.”

It’s not always despairing.

Also from 1966: “Someone had written something in the fresh snow. Who could it have been - the milkman, a boy, some stranger? And what would he have written - an obscenity, a calumny? What the stranger had written was ‘Hello World!’”

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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