On Toadying to Walter

Profit-makers are often without honor in their own country. You rarely make billions in this country without leaving a few headaches in your wake. The current flap over the reporting and criticism of Walter Annenberg’s art collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is a good instance.

You don’t have to read John Cooney’s splendid The Annenberg Dynasty (1983) to know that while Moses’s son Walter was a brilliant entrepreneur in perceiving how piddly little newspaper supplements on the fledgling medium of television could be coalesced and parlayed into TV Guide—one of the great magazine publishing successes of our century—he was also arguably the worst newspaper publisher of our city, if not our time.

I once told TV Guide editor Merrill Panitt that I thought his magazine was the most serious intellectual journal we had. It treated the pervasive new medium with the kind of seriousness its influence called for. And in spite of the fact that Walter not infrequently invoked his droit de seigneur to publish Reagonoid editorials in TV Guide, its overal record was splendid.

No so with the Inquirer. Under Annenberg’s stewardship from 1942 to 1969 it became a bitter joke among journalists and readers who took the newspaper function seriously. Did he have a spat with the president of the University of Pennsylvania? Penn stories diminished or appeared headless. Did he have a falling-out with the head of the 76ers? Basketball coverage waned. It was the most egregious sort of news management. And not all the eponymous billions he has dispensed in the interim have quite removed the bad taste his irresponsibility as editor/publisher left in the mouth of Philadelphia.

There were even paradoxical reactions to his benefactions. When the first class of Penn’s Annenberg School of Communications were ready to look for jobs in the second semester, they fell by my office (I was one of four faculty members in the new school) to commiserate about the contradictions of Walter’s having founded a graduate school to raise standards in the communications industry at the same time that he owned the worst big-city TV stattion and a newspaper they wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. What gives, they implored. I wasn’t really sure until I read the Cooney book 20 years later. But I had a hunch.

Penn faculty friends twitted me as the “bagman” for the new school. The three other faculty were full professors with tenure, I a new assistant professor without it. Faute de mieux, I become the errand boy between the school’s Blanchard Hall and Walter’s headquarters at 400 North Broad—and a kind of academic flack as I traveled the country, explaining the new school’s ambitions to the old-school veterans.

Most of the burnt-out managing editors who then ran journalism schools openly scorned me. They sneered that Hearst had tried to launder his money a generation before, but they had told him to go toot. Oddly, the new breed of communications professors-to-be would sidle up to me on the same missions and psst! “How many full professors do you need, and what are you paying?"

It seemed to me a watershed in our media education history: the old fighting journalists who held grudges along with their strong convictions; the new social scientists who were all too understanding of power. They turned Lord Acton inside out: Questioning the powerful enfeebles; confronting the powerful absolutely enfeebles totally.

And I remember being dumbstruck by the placard on Annenberg’s desk in his 13th floor eyrie to the effect that he would so live his life as to honor the member of his father. I never understood the myth of the Greek furies until that encounter.

And I recall an episode early in the school’s history when Penn president Gaylord Harnwell and the Annenberg School faculty gathered with Walter himself and his legal counsel for our first meeting. It happened that the day before, the Inquirer had quite substantially expanded its Sunday funnies. And just to pass time, I teased Walter about “raising standards” in his newspapers.

There was a stricken look on Harnwell’s face and an empty one on Annenberg’s, and an exceedingly awkward pause. Suddenly, Walter smiled at my joke. One of the disabilities of a terror-inducing publisher is that being teased by his inferiors is an entirely new experience.

So there’s the legacy of fear and contempt left in Philadelphia, and I’m sure that the California Eden that Annenberg has devised for his retirement in Sunnylands is tainted by such clouds of reminiscence, just as his office exuded the funereal air of the placard announcing his commitment to clearing his convict father’s reputation.

And so, after a considerable courting, Annenberg’s enviable private collection has been blessing the Art Museum. Hank Klibanoff wrote a fascinating profile for the Inquirer Sunday magazine (May 21), the leitmotif of which was the museum’s eagerness to land the collection for good eventually. Klibanoff possesses a good eye for pertinent detail, such as spying that the only book in the office of Metropolitan Museum of Art direct Philippe Montebello was the Cooney biography of Annenberg.

Predictably, the Inky subsequently ran a PMA trustee’s outraged letter about the insensitivity of the piece. Not so, sir. The Art Museum is hypersensitive about whether it will be ultimately blessed. Klibanoff’s was excellent reportage, not the least value of which was his making clear how deeply Walter loves his collection as he walked the reporter through Sunnylands. Frankly, it’s the first piece I’ve read about Annenberg that went beyond his ogre image to show how much a man of flesh and blood—and of high intelligence and exquisite taste—he is.

But a human being, with limitations. Which brings us to Ed Sozanski’s brilliant essay (Inquirer, May 28) on the tilt in Annenberg’s collection, pointing out that it avoids completely the raggedy, industrial side of Impressionism, concentrating solely on upper-class women engaged in leisure pursuits. Call it the Sunnylands syndrome, this skew to the lighthearted—a bias, by the way, that wealthy American collectors have been exemplifying for over a century since sweet maidenly Renoir maidens appealed to their ungritty muses.

I was formulating a note of praise to Sozanski while listening to Frank Ford’s radio talk show. A witty listener was bellyaching how mean-spirited Sozanski was in his essay. And Ford, without so much as apologizing for not having yet read Sozanski’s piece, added “and stupid” to the ignorant indictment, and thereupon embarked on a little tirade about who did Sozanski think he was mouthing off like that, and who give this guy credentials?

Now, I happen to attend many of the press openings that Sozanski attends, so I know how highly he is regarded by museum officials and media peers alike. So instead of writing Sozanski a valentine, I wrote Ford and told him I thought it was “stupid” (to use his word) to indict a critic about a piece he hadn’t read.

And now we have still another letter to the Inquirer (June 9) from Dean Hill Jr. of Villanova, bemoaning the Klibanoff and Sozanski pieces as “so unkind to Walter Annenberg, the man, that the Art Museum’s quest to make Philadelphia the collection’s ultimate home has been set back a good deal.”

Ho hum. Mr. Hill, the function of reporting and art criticism is not to stroke potential donors but to tell the truth as completely as conscientious reporters and critics can. Alas, that high a standard was rare in the bad old Annenberg days at the Inquirer, where the blackmailing reporter Harry Karafin epitomized the paper’s dishonesty.

For our city’s sake, I hope Annenberg displays the ultimate mitzvah (which is to treat even alleged enemies generously) and donates his great cache to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But as this flap illustrates, it is as important to the cultural vitality of Philadelphia that the Inquirer has been transformed into a great newspaper as it is that PMA fulfills its greatest fantasy. My few face-to-face contacts with Annenberg convince me that he’d much rather deal with someone with character equal to his own than to be flattered by self-serving flunkies. We’ll see.

from Welcomat, July 5, 1989

In Training: Canada

The run from Quebec to Montreal was full of talkers--Free Trade and such--and before I could say Rene Levesque, we were pulling into the gare from which I had been ungraciously expelled a fortnight before. Up the street, in the VIA building in Ville Marie Place, is a computerized tourist center. I punched up no fewer than 28 art shows I could have sought out, had I not been scheduled for the overnight train. So I settled for the McCord Museum of Canadian History, conveniently located in an old manse right across the street from McGill University. Good choice. The McCord is on a roll right now, due to a multi-million benefaction that will thrust it into the front ranks of world museums.

Little did I expect that a small drama would unfold on the Halifax train. Two young men got smashed to their gills in the bar car. The peak of their inebriation occurred at the train took a short cut across the top of Maine. The conductor seemed reluctant to follow through on his threat to expel them into the hands of the state police of Maine instead of through the more usual channel of the TCMP.

Finally, the two slobs dozed off, but not before I had asked the conductor to move me over to the Dayniter, a surcharge coach with a more sleepable ambience of reclining seats and dimmer lighting. He forgave me the $14 fee when I argued I didn't want to spend the night listening to those two cretins four-letter each other to sleep.



Next day, in New Brunswick, an ancient couple simulating Alzheimerism nicked my seat while I was having lunch as well as a leisurely read in the caboose of an observation car. The Roll of Honor issue of McLean's, in which a dozen Canucks are touted for raising the quality of life in Canada, featured a certain Douglas Cardinal, a Metis architect from Red Deer, Alberta, who has been given the plum commission of the 20th Century for Canada: the Museum of Civilization now under construction in Hull, Quebec, across the river from Ottawa.

That old couple in my seat (they had carefully piled all my gear on a single across the aisle) upgraded me yet another time on the Halifax run.

When the conductor perceived their mask of imperturbable uncomprehendingness, he pssted me to follow him to the sleeping cars, where he told me to make myself comfortable wherever I liked.

In Halifax, I opted for the Nova Scotian, a Canadian National hotel under refurbishment and with a splendid view of the harbor. I had read in the Halifax daily that Dave Broadfoot of the Royal Canadian Air Farce--CBC radio's weekly clone of the BBC's Goon Show--was appearing solo at Dalhousie University's Art Centre that very night. 

The Farce had mopped the floor last summer in Philly with the heavyweight funnymen of America (Art Buchwald, Dick Gregory, Mark Russell, Andy Rooney) at the Constitution Bicentennial Humor Summit.

I wanted to see Broadfoot solo.

"Canada," he began with mock solemn tones, "is the only country in the world" ... (portentiously grandiose pause) ... "that no other country is afraid of." (Canadians crack up en masse.) "They say," he continued brightly, "that Canada is like Australia." (Pause.) "That's ridiculous. Australia was founded by convicted felons. Canada was founded by crooks who haven't been caught yet." (More pandemonium.) So the Farce was no fluke, and Broadfoot has one leg up by himself, a most beguiling farceur indeed.

But curses on McKelvey's, reputedly the best fish restaurant in Halifax. I had called them to see whether, if I got there by 10 p.m., I could test their fishiness. So I left Broadfoot in the middle of his last routine (about a dementedly vicious hockey player) to hail a cab.

I arrived at 9:45 to be blithely told the cook went home early. Fishy excuse. A discredit to credentialed icthyphiles.

The rest of my passing-around was without such frustrations. Winnipeg became my entrepot--first up to Churchill on the Hudson Bay, where I chided the station agent as I was boarding the train that I hadn't been able to find any caribou meat anywhere.

"You want caribou meat?" he parried in tones that I expected would lead me at the last minute to a back alley black-market meat vendor. Wrong, suspicion breath. He repaired to the station fridge and came back and handed me a thick caribou steak from the 80 pounds he had dressed out from his kill the week before.

And when the rest of the passengers had finished their paid-for meals, the cook kindly threw it on his grill. I haven't tasted such delectable game in 20 years--whale meat in Finland was the last thing to touch my tongue with such gustatory enchantment.



The long haul to Prince Rupert was eased by the spectacular scenery of the Skeena River valley--slightly snowed-on going out, in the midst of howling blizzards on the way back.

The American promoter who started the Northern Pacific dreamed that his railway would make Rupert the Vancouver of the North Coast. Alas, he went down on the Titanic and P.R. was saved from such a booster's fate to be the luscious small town it is today.



Don't miss the Northern B.C. Museum, where a bright and bushy-tailed director named Elaine Moore will show you a carved bear she successfully kept from being sold out of the country and will doubtless also show you a photo of the argillite carving that she repatriates from Arizona this spring. 

Right now, she needs $3 million to finance her move into the Chatham Village Indian complex across the street. With her conviction and gift of gab, I have no doubt she will encounter some willing philanthropist in the very near future.



I made one final round trip east--to Toronto, to review the "Marsden Hartley in Nova Scotia" show at the Art Gallery of Ontario and to scare myself silly in the new Bat Cave at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Before hopping my Greyhound $59 el cheapo from Pembina, N.D., to Philly (with a $15 add-on from Winnipeg to Pembina), I spent the morning at the University of Winnipeg, getting a humongous carton out of the bookstore's trash pile to consolidate the handbags I had been collecting souvenirs in. And U.S. Customs even smiled on the $396 worth of Eskimo art I had popped for in Churchill. And the bank in Grafton, N.D., even took the Canadian currency I hadn't remembered to spend up North.

I got off the bus in Fargo. Had a fine time looking at the newly refurbished Fargo Theatre as well as the recycled Cass Gilbert train depot, which sports the vintage photos of Fargo, 1870-1900, by the legendary F.L. Haynes, the official photographer of both Yellowstone (the park) and Northern Pacific (the railroad). He's the only photographer who had his own Palace Car rolling-stock studio.



So it was a great month. A travel best buy. Just keep a few things in mind to minimize frustration: Book reservations ahead. During the winter you don't have to worry about sleeping accommodations. About 8 p.m., a steward works the aisles offering "night rates," which is to say half the standard rates, which run from $25 or so for upper bunks to $150 for your own private room.

And talk with the people. They're better than the scenery, and besides, they're available 24 hours a day.



Hazard at Large, from Welcomat: After Dark, April 13, 1988

Buffalo Bill, Media Mythmaker

There's Buffalo Bill the reality. And generations of scholars have gradually sifted through the documents to pin down who William F. Cody was and what he did. And then there's Buffalo Bill the legend, a much more elusive phenomenon--indeed a kind of Fun House mirror room, a never-ending generator of images including the ones Cody himself devised (unlike his "ancestors" Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson, whose images were mainly ghostwritten).

Cody was canny enough to see, maturing as he did simultaneously with the emergence of national mass media in America, that he could tailor perceptions of what he stood for and what he did as a show biz entrepreneur. The Buffalo Bill exhibition at the Oakland Museum testifies, in part, to his skill at that.

But inevitably, the larger significance of the Wild West according to Cody has attracted the attention of interpreters of the American scene. And they have been struck by the fact the Buffalo Bill was the first media celebrity in our history.

Of course, Buffalo Bill did owe his initial fame to others: Gen. Phil Sheridan, who introduced Cody to influential Eastern "dudes" come west for hunting parties, and Ned Buntline, who wrote the first stories glorifying Bill's exploits. Cody himself took it from there, however, performing his Wild West show before 50 million people in hundreds of cities around the world and appearing in scores of advertisements for rifles, cigars, hats and bourbon. It would have been nearly impossible for anyone living in turn-of-the-century America not to know about Buffalo Bill.

The late 19th century United States has lately been characterized as the original "developing nation," working out in its institutions what it means to be modern. And intuitively, perhaps, Cody seems to have grasped that in modernized societies, the media are the metabolism, the mechanism through which individuals learn what the collective agenda is or should be, unlike traditional societies where notions of the proper way to live are passed on within the family, the congregation or the tribe.

Cody had already taken his show on the road by the time historian Frederick Jackson Turner asked, in 1893, what would happen to the American character once the frontier disappeared, as the 1890 census showed it had. In simplest terms, Buffalo Bill's media mythmaking demonstrated how you could create a psychological frontier in popular entertainment that would act as the safety valve that the actual physical frontier had provided up til then.

Needless to say, Buffalo Bill didn't consciously set out to become a media celebrity to protect the mental health of the increasingly penned-up urban masses. Hindsight shows us now what was actually happening: the U.S. was becoming an industrial nation and the Spanish-American War announced as well our emergence as a world power. If you look carefully at the career of William F. Cody as a media entrepreneur, you can see how he was very shrewdly riding both those crests of change.

Cody had stumbled upon a sure-fire enterprise. He was doing for popular entertainment what Armour was doing for meat-packing--selling everything but the pig's whistle. With the skills of a Barnum, Cody kept an eye peeled for any and everything that would thrill those urban crowds whose humdrum lives in the newly boring routines of office and factory needed compensation for their own growing lack of wide open spaces.

It is not irrelevant that his first big job--the one that got him his nickname--had been killing buffalo to feed the crews building a section of the transcontinental railroad. And when he featured the Congress of Rough Riders in his Wild West show, he presented not only American cowboys and Indians but also Bedouin Arabs, South American gauchos, Russian cossacks and even amid Spanish-American war hysteria, Filipinos. "Rough Rider" has a classic ring, of course, and Cody and Teddy Roosevelt actually squabbled over credit for the term. But looking back now, it is clear how shrewdly Cody modified his Wild West entertainments to take into account new American geopolitical intentions. As Buffalo Bill had led in the pacification of the North American continent for industrial progress, so the implications were clear, the rest of the globe would soon be opened to the same civilizing forces. First the Plains Indians, then the (Third) World.

Even the occasional setbacks that Progress encountered were not too much for Cody to handle. Custer's Last Stand was a kind of 19th century mini-Vietnam, when some Indians bluntly refused to submit to White Manifest Destiny. Yet when Cody returned West to work for the Fifth Cavalry in eastern Wyoming shortly after Custer's defeat, he wore his glamorous black stage costume. So when he led an attack on some Cheyennes and the famous brave Yellow Hand was killed, Cody melodramatically collected the brave's scalp and held it aloft, exulting, "First scalp for Custer!"

Back on the eastern stage, he let the audience know that his black outfit was the very same one he'd been wearing in the act of avenging Custer. Any entertainer who could touch that nerve had Big Magic. In fact, Cody was pioneering the penchant for instant history that television would later perfect in the genre of the docu-drama.

Was there ever a main chance Buffalo Bill failed to mind? On a cover of The Rough Rider magazine, Cody shamelessly linked photos of himself and TR under the legend, "Men who have Led the Rough Riders of the World in Civic and Military Conquests." Anticipating Cecil B. DeMille, Cody was a stickler for historical accuracy, but the mythic dimensions of his messages were strictly a function of interplay between his audiences' psychological needs and his instincts as a showman.

Until the 1960s, when long-neglected red, black and brown voices in the American choir finally began to be heard, the special pleading of Cody's "entertainment" was scarcely noted. And not until Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) did we begin to have truly alternative versions of the Buffalo Bill heritage. True, Altman's Indians can do no wrong, just as the traditional White Man was never to blame. But we begin to get a more sophisticated version of both Buffalo Bill and his place in our national experience.

It is worth pointing out as well that, as Buffalo Bill rides into Kevin Roche's handsome concrete corral, a UCLA history professor is getting rave reviews for a new book that shows "How Myth and Memory Affect U.S. Diplomacy" as Business Week reports it.

Delving into the murky underside of the nation's foreign affairs in The American Style of Foreign Policy, Robert Dallek finds obscure, non-rational impulses that compel the U.S. to act out on the global stage basic unresolved tensions within the national character--hidden motives that spring from a struggle deep within the American psyche.

He contends that the reality of a tightly organized, conformist social order in 20th century America conflicts with the memory and myth of an unfettered, self-reliant, rural society that once was. He theorizes that Americans are unwilling to forgo the material benefits for which they have sacrificed much of their frontier freedom. Thus, he says, they symbolically project into their relations with other nations a kind of nostalgic model of what they would like to be.

Just so. The Wild West shows were the hot media events of the years 1883-1913 because they coped with such contradictions between belief and fact, and Buffalo Bill became a media celebrity because he knew how to satisfy those audience needs.

Later on, the movies would take up the myth-making process--William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and a host of Saturday matinee gunslingers--and radio domesticated singing cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Given the expectations gap between the promissory notes of the American Dream and what most of us have most of the time, the media and the myths will go on dazzling us. But William F. Cody was the first to sense the gap and have the moxie to help us deal with it.

The Jack Benny Guide to Flying

Nothing much lifts the heart of the cheapskate traveler so much as rumors of cheap airfares. And the volatility surrounding the emergence of the Common Market is now beginning to crack the most expensive nut of all--travel by air within Europe.

The France Pass gives you seven days of travel within a month for a measly $279 on interior French air routes--mostly Air Inter, but also Air France to a lesser degree. I have traveled for Orly to Corsica several times on this pass, and except for the outrageous cab fares you get stuck with in Calvi and Bastia, it's a steal.

A bit of advice for pre-seniles like myself: If you're 62 or older, you qualify for half-fare, off-peak, on French railroads, when you buy a four-trip or annual pass at any rail station. Between Paris and Lyons, for example, it makes little sense to fly, once you add on time and costs getting to and from both airports.

But the France Pass was just a harbinger of things cheaper to come. Now there is the Euro Flyer Pass offered by Air France (including Air Inter), CSA (Czech) and Sabena (Belgian). On the latter two airlines, you must get to Europe by one of the three carriers--i.e., buy a ticket to Paris, Brussels or Prague. Air France allows you to get to Paris on any scheduled airline.

The pass then entitles you to buy a minimum of three $120 flight coupons--maximum of nine--to spin off to the other airports served by these airlines. You must choose one such destination before your trip begins; the others can be ad libbed as you're moved to move.

What interests me most at the moment is CSA, where I can fly, for example, from Prague to Bucharest, Riga, Sofia or Moscow. Air France beckons with Ankara, Salonika and St. Petersburg. Sabena could be your open sesame to Istanbul, Porto or Budapest. Warning: Look for the one-plane itinerary; transfers involve an extra $120 per change. (Of course, some of those destinations could still be saving, even with two tickets.)

Northwest and KLM have an analogous deal worth exploring, depending on your destinations. It involves a minimum of three $100 tickets and a maximum of whatever you like.

Start your dreaming the way I did: Call Sabena (800-955-2000) and ask for their scheduled booklet, so you can start winnowing out the through flights. Because Antwerp is the European City of Culture this year, they'll lay on your more than you want to know about Brussels and its peers--Ghent, Antwerp and Bruges. (But don't burn up one of your tickets going by air to Antwerp; take the train.)

You should also contact Rail Europe for the proliferating passes within European countries and regions like Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russian, Spain, Portugal--in short, fly in, train around, and fly out--and among European blocs like Scandinavia and Benelux.

As an old Eurailer, I've given up the complete pass (15 days, a month, two months) as too conducive to cardiac arrest from over-traveling. Take the kind that gives you so many days of travel within a longer period--or, if you're traveling with some one else, the cheapest of all: two-fers.

And keep an eye on the piffle that comes with your frequent flier monthly statements. For more than a year I've been goosing my USAir Visa card to accumulate the 60,000 miles you need to get a round trip to Europe. Suddenly last month, the airline offered a fire sale on round trips via Lufthansa, KLM or Sabena for 30,000 frequent flier miles each--at the lowest of the low seasons, October through April.

I've already cashed in one for KLM, which will take me in late winter to Oslo, whence I'll Eurail around on a Scanrail pass to see how my metabolism works when the Celsius dips. My favorite fantasy is to drop in, from the vantage point of Helsinki, on the two Baltic capitals of Riga and Talinn.

I'm also going to cash in a Sabena, which could take me to Casablanca! Or maybe Barcelona. Maybe I'll finally get to look at Santiago de Compostela, which is celebrating a thousand years of pilgrimages this year. I can do that by flying into Lisbon and training up through Porto and Vigo.

Half the fun is fantasizing which godforsaken part of the world to flee to. Incidentally, USAir's part of the bargain is to deliver you to JFK, from which you begin your journey. So if I happen to be visiting granddaughter Sonia in St. Paul, or my buddy Jake in San Francisco--well, you're entitled to go and return from the U.S. port of choice.

If you have a lot of time on your hands (and even more patience), you should try AIRHITCH (2790 Broadway, Suite 100, New York 10025, 212-864-2000). What you do is send them a five-day window of opportunity and a check for $169 (more from Chicago, even more from San Francisco) with three preferred destinations.

Since I was going to Grenoble to pick up luggage, I checked Paris, Lyon and Geneva in that order. About two weeks before my preferred flight day, Airhitch called, offering me Milan on the Monday before. I declined, because that would have plopped me into France when the August vacation tidal wave was rolling in. I opted for one into Amsterdam the day after the tidal wave.

But that's only the beginning. I arrived in Newark International a few hours ahead of scheduled departure. Then I learned that you're boarded (if they board you, there's no iron-clad guarantee) in the order you've bought your hitch. Ha! It turned out I was the last one to buy, hence almost not to board.

No joke, because that awarded me the lousiest, most claustrophobic seat on their Martinair 767: center seat in the last aisle. Help. I sweet-talked a stewardess into letting me sit, after we were airborne, in one of the seats next to the emergency exits.

My next-door seatee was a Hasidic rabbi-to-be who was going to his sister's wedding in Amsterdam. He was a peripatetic young man, with school time in Japan and France. So he made the lovely new 767 (they have electronic maps showing you where the plane is, now high, how long--wow!) even nicer.

So be warned. Airhitch can have its hitches. It cost me almost $100 more to take the train from Amsterdam to Paris to Grenoble, not to forget ten more hours. I grew antsy about getting back and took Continental, for which I now have their Pass One frequent flyer ticking (slowly) towards an Asian trip.

You might also look into Republic Air, which appears to be a cover name for two charter companies trying to break in to the scheduled airline business. I could have flown JFK to Charles DeGaulle for $149 after June 18. That's cheaper than most bucket shops, but with less waggle on dates.

The two cheapest ways to get around, of course, are to take an around-the-world fare (my last one cost me less than $2,000 and took me to New Zealand, New Caledonia, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, New Delhi) or to become and air courier.

To get into the courier orbit, begin with Mark I. Field's The Courier Air Travel Handbook, Thunderbird Press, $7.95) and join the International Association of Air Travel Couriers (8 S. J Street, Box 1349, Lake Worth FL 33460, 407-582-8320), for which a $35 annual fee entitles you to bi-monthly bulletins, monthly courier newsletters plus postcard announcements of last-minute bargains.

Finally, tour packages like Grand Circle Travel, Saga Holidays and the AARP Travel Experience are more and more beginning to give you substantial kickbacks (up to $1,000) for arranging your own flights to overseas cruises or land tours. They also offer cut-rate add-on fares to their U.S. land packages.

But be canny. On a tour of the National Parks I'm taking in May, it would have cost me $450 by Grand Circle Travel to buy my air to Rapid City, S.D., and back from Denver. It's much cheaper to buy Senior Coupons. As it is, Northwest has kindly given me extra time to use my last two Senior Coupons which expired in April (you only get a year to use them). It never hurts to ask--nicely.

Flash: Conde Nast Traveler for May includes a most useful gloss on bargain fares for air, rail and rental car. It's especially good on the new airlines within Europe that are breaking the old monopoly national airline gouging. Outfits like TAT, Air UK. And the two best bonded bucket shops in London--Hamilton Travel and Holidaymaker.

Hazard at Large, Welcomat.

Whee, the People

"Elpoep eht ew" (El poop, et tu?) read half of the spritzy red, white and blue banners how disgracing our one-way streets. It was We the People's contribution to the Political Humor Symposium held a couple of weeks back--that way, participants could giggle all the way to the Warwick and the Academy of Music.

When I asked a WTP functionary at the humor lunch why they goofed, she said it was to save money by not having grommets along both sides of the flags. Thread that in your next grommet and see if it salutes. This reply at a luscious lunch about half full of munchers.

Only 100 Phillies signed up for the $65 package of two days of schmoozing with the likes of Art Buchwald, Dick Gregory, Andy Rooney, Mark Russell and lesser but no less levitating luminaries such as the CBC's Royal Canadian Air Farce and the John Cleese-hating editor of Britain's Private Eye satire mag. You can't blame that dismal turnout on WTP's press honcho Sam Rogers; it's terminal Philly dumbness that so few availed themselves of such a once-in-a-lifetime caper.

Nonetheless, it's not us, the populace, who are responsible for WTP's dumb press relations. For two days, WTP's press flack assured me I could interview the biggies in an "interview room" at the Academy. I escorted the Air Farce from the Warwick, fritzing all the way. (As a reared Detroiter who nurtured his muse on CKLW Windsor, I bragged that "spiritually" I was a Canadian. They giggled.)

Arrived at the Academy, I split, following the flack while they found their dressing rooms. Except that the flack couldn't find the interview room. Ahem. So I began schmoozing again with the Farceurs.

Not so fast and furious, ahem'd honcho Rogers. Still ahemming full speed ahead, he strong-armed me off the stage and, indeed, out of the Academy. "You can interview biggies after they perform." Right. Interview Gregory, miss Buchwald on stage.

The conference itself was absolutely superb. For me, a high point was Draper Hill, editorial cartoonist for the Detroit News. He did a slide lecture on the history of caricature that would have met the standards of a Harvard grad seminar (not surprising when you learn he's written the standard bio of British caricaturist Gilray). Jerry Robinson's filiopietistic history of the American comix was less exalted, though his cartoonists and writers-based exhibition on editorial cartoons at the Art Alliance was the best sidebar to the symposium.

The neatest thing for the non-humorous like me was watching the stars glitter at each other. For example, someone dared everyone to come up with a good gag on the Waldheim-Pope encounter. Silence, except for the whirling of not-so-lame brains. "Got it!" exulted Mark Russell. "The Pope hears Kurt's confession and the penance is--six months in Miami Beach."

Talking to Russell later in the Warwick lobby, I learned that he had suffered terminal brain damage, like me, from the Jesuits. To Buchwald, sitting next to him, I teased, "See, you don't have to be Jewish to be a joker. Russell's Catholic." "Anti-Catholic," Buchwald Art-fully replied, with a joke gestation period of two nanoseconds.

The symposium was replete with much saving gracefulness, like Dick Gregory chiding the ofay audience at the Academy for giving blacks February, the lousiest, shortest month of the year, for Black History.

From Welcomat: After Dark, July 15, 1987

Mexi Deco and a Meeting of Minds

Anglophone news junkies visiting Mexico City gravitate to the lively English language daily dubbed simply The News. Its erratic pricing (depending on the size of bill you give the news vendor and the toniness of the shop) reflects the Neo-Liberal capitalism displacing several economically phlegmatic decades of subsidized socialism.

It's kind of a mini-Herald Trib, relying for the most part on norteamericano (viz. U.S.) wire services and features syndicates but deploying a savvy cadre of local reporters and columnists as well--such as Allen Carter and O. Bitter Dictum, whose liveliness belies the pun of his pseudonym.

Carter caught my eye when he started touting a Mexican Art Deco exhibition at the Institute for Mexican-North American Cultural Relations. I flew up from Oaxaca for two days so I could catch the show and ogle the Winter Forum at the National Autonomous University, where the likes of Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were deliberately loud on the state of Mexico and the world.

My dumb Irish luck was running when I got off the over-stuffed bus which ferries students around the campus. A handsome 50ish man was fiddling with his gas cap lock when I needed directions to the auditorium where the conference was. He turned out to be architect Alfonso Ramirez Ponce.

I asked him which U.S. architects he fancied. "Wright," he replied without missing a beat. "He's the one who expressed your uniqueness as a country." With an increase in passion, he continued: "You sold him out to those Europeans [meaning the high risers Mies and Corbu] and set a very bad example for us in Latin America."

Then Ramirez Ponce whipped out a clutch of new color prints. "This is my latest job--a planification centre in a poor barrio." It was dazzling. I teased, "How do you expect couples to practice birth control if you arouse them with such beauty?" He guffawed amiably.

"Have you seen any Wright?" he asked.

"Yes, the synagogue outside Philadelphia," (Beth Shalom). I told him how I took my students over there to relish a masterpiece in their own backyard and to set them up for a term paper on architecture, based on the assumption that if ou perceive style in an object as concrete as architecture, you could follow it in the more abstract verbal art of poetry.

I thought Ramirez Ponce was undergoing a seizure. He threw open the trunk of his car and started handing me photocopies of his latest columns on poetry in the national newspaper Excelsior. He drew my attention to a quotation from Ruskin--poetry and architecture are the arts which keep us from forgetting our humanity. Wow. What a meeting of minds in a parking lot.

He laid his home phone and fax numbers on me, offering to escort me around the city on an architectural grand tour. Alas, Montezuma struck at the Holiday Inn/Aeropuerto, the result of my quaffing two (unwashed!) glasses of freshly-squozed orange juice at a university lunch kiosk.

On the way back from the conference, I finally got an on-site ogle of the great Juan O'Gorman mosaic murals on the Central Library (1952). You always fear that an over-postcarded building will disappoint you in reality. Not the Biblioteca Central.

Inside is even more interesting. The upper tier of windows in the main reading room is a bank of asymmetrically-colored marble sliced so thin that they're translucent. And the custodians who restack the books push around ingeniously-designed slanted carts.

It was a lovely early spring day on campus, and the students were grappling, two by two's, when they weren't running the watery gauntlets of the sprinklers keeping the quad green during the dry season. A graffito on the wall of the Administration Building puzzled me: a sequence of great dates--1810 (Hidalgo declares independence from Spain), 1857 (Juarez starts the great reform of separating Church from state), 1910 (Madero breaks away from the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz), and then numbers I couldn't make out.

Later I found an administrator who explained that those last figures were "19??", expressing the hoped-for perennial nature of the Mexican Revolution.

The next morning, Lomatilled to the hilt, I started out to find the Mexi Deco show on Hamburg Street in the Pink Zone (so-called because of its hippie antecedents), hoping for propriety's sake they had a lot of easily accessible toilets there.

All the streets are named after European cities--a puzzle until someone explained that's how they cleared the grid of a superabundance of Saints' names as well as rejected leaders--Prague Street was the old Calle Porfirio Diaz.

The Metro is a marvel: utterly graffiti-less and spanking clean, frequent and cheap (400 pesos, or 13 cents!). The Institute (which basically teaches English to the locals) is in a fine 19th-Century stately house, with a lovely patio garnished with plants and sculptures.

The exhibition was actually in two parts--one a theatrical costumes display from the '20s, '30s, and '40s, backed up by splendid archive photos of the great music-hall starlets of the era; the other the Art Deco show that caught my eye.

The best photos were by 44-year-old, recently-deceased Max Clemente, a close friend of Allen Carter. If the rest of his ouevre are as good as the dozen or so on display, they deserve book publication--maybe Aperture or Chronicle Books.

Mexi Deco (mainly banks, apartments, theaters, commercial houses) is of a very high standard--in a style that's too often too blatantly stupid to conquer refined sensibilities. The interior of the commercial building on the corner of Le Havre and Insurgentes is of Chrysler Building class.

I took a hike in the Zona, looking for more Deco epiphanies. Rosenstock's Restaurant (the maitre d' let me take a look before opening hours) and the apartments on Tokyo Street are worth a gander. Remember this: The exotica that the Wandering Westerners stumbled upon in the 1920s--King Tut's Tomb and Mayan and Aztec archaeological finds--gave Deco its post-Beaux Arts flavors.

Reprinted from Welcomat: Hazard at Large/After Dark March 4, 1992

Huck's Hannibal: One Hundred Years On

What would Mark Twain make of all the hoopla (from May to November) in Hannibal, Missouri honoring the sesquicentennial of his birth (November 30, 1835) and the American centennial of his most famous book, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"? (It appeared in Britain in 1884, to comply with British copyright law.)

The answer, of course, depends on whether the aspiring squire called Samuel Langhorne Clemens or the demotic tale teller dubbed Mark Twain (after the minimum depth of water it was safe to navigate in the Mississippi) was doing the reacting.

The Twain side of his character would have thrilled to the news coming into the Hannibal "Courier Post" (oldest continuously published paper in Missouri, circulation 12,200) that the Beach Boys would star at the Labor Day finale (for a cool $75,000). The celebration has been a success mainly due to the largest audiences ever assembled in Hannibal (by two rock groups, first Air Supply followed by an even more successful Survivor) and by the blandishments of two popular trumpet players, Al Hirt and Doc Severinsen.

He would be amused by the 23 (count them!) different commemorative items being hawked at the Frog Pond, the open air tent on Main Street (plain old Second Street in Twain's less hyped time), where the festival's logo, a simpering green frog announces to one and all the theme, "Hannibal's Hoppin'".

He'd have cracked up at the way the politicians almost wiped the whole shindig out in April. The new mayor Richard Cerretti unseated the incumbent John Lyng over the issue of spending $175,000 of city money to finance the festivities. Cerretti won the battle but lost the war--when the City Council overruled him--and appointed Lyng chairman of the Sesquicentennial Commission to boot.

Southwest Bell and Anheuser Busch, those two benign monopolies of talking and guzzling, put up the bulk of the corporate cash--and Mark Twain fans have done the rest by visiting and spending. Sales tax receipts and gas tax figures are up 25% over 1984 for the month of May, and things approached gridlock over the Fourth of July weekend. Once sceptical businessmen are beginning to kick in their fair share, and it appears that the Sesqui will be a fiscal as well as a metaphysical success.

Mr. Clemens (to use Justin Kaplan's telling disjunction in the best biography of the author) would be pleased by other aspects of the celebration. Hannibal/Lagrange College (a 550 studnet Southern Baptist-related four-year college, recently escalated from junior college status) fielded a really impressive week-long writer's conference in June. Fifty-five full-time and twenty part-time students followed a series of international calibre lectures (Duke's Louis Budd and Cambridge, Mass.'s Justin Kaplan, to cite the superstars) leavened by how to do it workshops for aspiring writers. The Sesqui kicked in $7,000 of the $12,000 budget, practically guaranteeing that the College will make an annual affair under the aura of Mark Twain local genius.

And the local public library has taken the bequest of a heavy reading doctor who died last year to set up a Mark Twain Book Fund. The most significant single esthetic happening was the appearance of Barry Moser's brilliant new illustrations for the University of California's Centennial Edition of "Huck Finn" ($24.95, with foreword by no less a Twainophile than Berkeley's Henry Nash Smith). The Hannibal Arts Council mounted a Hannibal as History exhibit which is going to rest permanently in the new Missouri Territory Restaurant (a recycled 1901 Empire Post Office). And the Sesqui displayed the original Moser prints (as well as one $1,000 set of the prints from Moser's Pennyroyal Press in Northampton, Massachusetts). So the intellectual side was classy enough to make even Twain's fussy wife Livy satisfied.

There is the kitschy side--I noted a produce company, a motel, a dinette, a book store, an antique store, a hotel (derelict) named after the writer. But there is no big boom in Twain reading as far as I could determine. He is still more commodity than culture in his home town. On the other hand, the Mark Twain Museum (and Boyhood home) gives a very intellectually credible ten-minute slide lecture orienting visitors; and it has ingeniously saved the crumbling floors of the old (1830-40) house by slicing a side of it off and building new viewing peekaboo galleries for the 140,000 who come even in non-Sesqui years. Amazingly, to beleaguered cultural accountants, the Museum lives off its visitors donations ($160,000 last year, with a $90,000 annual budget).

The town itself (population 18,800) is rather grungy. One can see where Mark Twain came up with his aphorism, "The trouble with American architecture is that it has Queen Anne fronts and Mary Ann behinds." The town is chock-a-block with such harmless architectural duplicity. But the Marion County Court House is a glory in that genre of provincial Beaux Arts, and at Eleventh and Broadway there are two late nineteenth century churches facing each other (the First Christian and the Pentecostal Church) that would warm the cockles of Henry Hobson Richardson, the great innovator in rusticated Romanesque.

Taking a new way back to the Greyhound station, I stumbled on so-called "Millionaire's Row", a plethora of HighVic frame houses that are a joy just to remember. Cathing a Yuppie lawyer nooning at #301, I asked him how much a fine house like his cost, less sweat equity. "$25,000," he gaily replied. "Nine rooms, and a whole hell of a lot of work." So there are monetary compensations for living three hours North of St. Louis, and twenty miles South of Quincy, Illinois. The living is easy. I relished the easy humor at the Donut Shoppe on Mark Twain Avenue at 5:30 a.m. The men teasing the 44-year-old waitress could have been Huck's Pap and Nigger Jim. The local newspaper is as full of the tensions over economic development as the Big City papers. And the morning news on clear channel KHMO (5,000 watts daytime; 1,000 directional after sunset) talked of high suicide rates among Missouri farmers.

Hal Halbrook will end the festivities on the author's birthday in November with "Mark Twain Tonight". Arguably that piece on national TV has done more to widen American appreciation of a much revered but rarely read author (he's a seventh grade required unit in the Hannibal schools! this misanthrope who is palmed off as a boy's writer). So. Win some, lose some. I even ran into a businessman waiting for Nick to open his barber shop on Broadway grousing, "I'll be damned glad when it's all over. The traffic is disgusting. People all over the place."

He believed that Cannon Dam, which was just opened an hour's drive to the west, is really what Hannibal needs. The dam is making, you guessed it, Mark Twain Lake, for those who would rather float themselves in the sun than read about Huck and Nigger Jim doing it on a raft down the ambiguous Mississippi. They figure 150,000 new tourists a year will pass through Hannibal on their way west, lighting out for the territory of a new mad-made lake. Twain would understand, even if Mr. Clemens tsk-tsked himself all the way to the two banks in Hartford, CN.

Retooling Our Schools

“School is an unnatural act,” argues Derek Davis (Welcomat, 11/21/90, p. 20). Of course it is. But so are vaccination, contraception, pasteurization, and chemotherapy. The problem, Sirs, is not in our schools that we are underlings, but rather that we have lazily and complacently let them become a patsy for consumer industrialism.

Please note: we teach out teenagers to drive in high school, but we don’t teach them how to eat healthfully, or procreate responsibly, or nurture each other. Do you those priorities have anything to do with General Motors? The depoliticization of our education has been one of the cruelist and most devastating fallouts from McCarthyism. During the Cold War, every teacher who wanted to show students how racism, sexism, and classism were eroding our egalitarian heritage of maximum autonomy for everyone was dismissed (sometimes literally) as a Commie or Nigger Lover, GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out.

Take the issue of Standard English, a puzzle I grappled with for thirty years. Being a latitudinarian by nature, I welcomed Black English as a tasty diversion from the bland emptinesses of Suburban English. (“Between you and I, I think this new English teacher Hazard is a nut case. Why he was playing Stan Kenton’s “This is An Orchestra” to his tenth grade English class the other day. Now what on God’s Green Earth has that noise got to do with tenth grade English?”) What is had to do was Stan’s explaining that an orchestra was like a democracy—everyone agreed on a tempo and key so that everyone could improvise when it was his turn.

But a full professor of English whose twin kids were in the class was outraged at the waste. His eye was on his twins’ SATs not their comprehension of egalitarianism. And his scholarly contribution was compiling a dictionary of agricultural terms. (Actually I was collaterally trying to persuade these East Lansing privileged that the state of our agriculture was more important than the State of Culture: teach people to husband the earth, and eat well and moderately, and their own creative juices would flow. But not vice versa. I believe even more looking back over forty years of Culture Vulturing that we have put the Cart of Art before the Horse of small c culture.

Take English. Ever since the emergence of middling classes with diverse dialects in England during the eighteenth century, we have been beating blue collars over their bowed heads with their crummy idiolects. Propriety not empowerment was our goal. If a body had grit, he’d say stuff it and go right on talking blue. If a body hadn’t grit, he’d kowtow, cowed. Eventually the anthropologists and linguists came along and explained that each dialect had its own value and that the imposition of external standards was a form of cultural fascism, stupid intimidation at the very best. But even the William Labovs of this universe missed the real point: we should be inducing students to have greater control over even their idiolects to empower them further. Rappy bop doesn’t automatically lead to empowerment. My guess is that at the moment it’s disempowering—and not just black talk: the slurvian idiolects of white teenagers keep them from growing up, i.e., getting autonomous.

The ideal English curriculum, say, for the Philadelphia Public Schools would not be an Arnoldian exorcising the dumb buggers by giving them the best that’s been thought and said in their language. They need Max Weiner not William Shakespeare. Teach them to read credit card English, the language of rental agreements, the skillful scams of advertising English. Teach them to psych out political malarkey in TV bytes, the self-demeaning nastiness of slasher films. Derek’s impatience with the institutionalized foolishness of run of the mill curriculum has triggered an equally untenable fantasy: a legion of Noble Savages castrated by six hours of daily school. I fully agree with him that the only true purpose of schooling should be to unleash the learning energy locked up in every kid’s heart.

The trouble with his theory of liberation is that the true school of the American kid today is the shopping mall. If you want to see attention to the curriculum, if you want to see perfect attendance, try the Franklin Mall any school day after “school” has been let out (or before: mall hooky is a big elective with today’s teenagers.) Our children haven’t stopped learning. Hell no. They sop up the shit of consumer paganism, our unofficial national religion, every day and in every way. Rock stars and rock jocks are the “substitute” teachers. The apples they bring to the electronic desks of these louts are their listening time and their indiscretionary income.

It is a sign of our fatuousness that we force kids to go to school for rote learning in slums when they could be helped to organize Healing Parties in their neighborhoods: Don’t give them a “Tempest”; give them a T-square and a hammer and show them how to repair a gutted row house. Show them how to plant flowers. Show kids having kids how to feed their children well and how to hug them. The SAT-saturated curriculum is an abomination, and it explains how we got so messed up: For generations, our schools have been skewed to the privileged, even the ones purportedly serving the underprivileged. Cramming for the SATs is as stupid as “improving” working class English by ridding it of solecisms. We should study to become wiser and happier humans.

Screw the grading systems of the world. You can play the SAT racket and still become wiser and happier, but it ain’t easy. It reminds me of the cadre of flunkers the old Emir of Oman used to have: they could never speak. When the new Commonwealth Union-educated Emir abolished such feudal frippery, the old speechless ones discovered they had forgotten how to speak. (It reminded me of some graduate students in English I had studied with.)

Our Culture is Number One curriculum encourages such supineness. It diverts attention from the real agenda: the pervasive and permanent empowerment of the financially and psychologically impoverished. (It’s not a blacks versus whites issue: I’d rather grow up poor knowing Duke Ellington’s work than rich listening to Lawrence Welk. Poverty of the spirit is worse than poverty of the pocket: and the true disgrace of our schools is that administrators and teachers alike get used to aiding and abetting endemic intellectual poverty.) Throwing money at the schools hasn’t improved them because their assumptions are too status quo. Making our schools work will step on a lot of complacently tender toes. But not making them work will give all of us frostbitten toes eventually. Schooling is unnatural. Bad schooling is denaturing.

If I thought young people could become autonomous on their own, corrupted as they are by the unofficial, out-of-school curriculum of Pop Pap, I’d go along with Derek in abolishing the school. It’s not because they’re unnatural that the schools suck. It’s because they have failed to keep to the mandate of Horace Mann to prepare the next generation for full and equal participation in running the show. That has been a sad and stupid failure. But the mess isn’t set in concrete. And by now even (especially?) their business community now sees that they ignore the common schools at their own peril.

Don’t close the schools. Open them up to the real world. If that means a serious redistribution of wealth and privilege, let’s redistribute. What profiteth a country with a hundred thousand decamillionaires if you can’t risk going out to the Seven Eleven to get a quart of milk? If we can send several hundred thousand troops to a far corner of the earth to protect our oil supply, surely we can stop being stupid in the way we’ve used the schools to guarantee a supply of docile workers and consumers. We lack only the political will to make our schools meaningful.

We need a Max effort, a renewal that shows our children how to be freer than we were so that their children can be freer still. Free of foolish Cultural harassment. Free of pension protecting time servers on the faculty. Free of Happy Consumer agitprop. Free to talk back to teachers and administrators when they stand in the way of legitimate growth. Free to quit school for an apprenticeship if desired without being hassled by a truant officer. To retool our schools, de-fool them.

Signatures

Flying, too, is personal
(forget that control panel maze)
Taxiing--dashing, steady, or discreet
Or P.A. to passengers:
Drawl, space-talky, clipped midwest
Revving up, too, idiosyncratically,
Like a surgeon, steady,
or more revolutionary,
trying to blow up an engine
for safety's sake.
Then, suddenly, taking off--
Climbing manically,
fleeing earth's dirtiness--
or barely lumbering free
like an under-winged bird.
And banking to blind signals
delicately, as in kissing new,
or masterfully, dashing,
building to a climax surely.
And landing, of course,
landing
Easing slowly to safety
or holding back,
the longer the lovelier
given the right runway
and proper timing.
Oh, and also,
crashing
erasing still
another hand at the controls.

Gehry's Dead End

Frank Gehry's cavorting is the Dead End of the Modernism that got fully up to speed with Marcel Duchamp's urinal signed R.Mutt. Modernism is a secular religion that the likes of Walt Whitman began by asserting that the Poet was to be the New Priest, and Leaves of Grass a Newer Testament.

(I taught and love old Walt, but the older I get the fewer of his poems move me enough to proselytize him.)

And just as nineteenth century Biblical scholars applied rational tests to the Old Scriptures, so modern critics must blow the aesthetic whistle when they judge an artist (including architects) to be off-side. How proud Gehry and the other Starchitects must feel designing museums and high risers for the Dubai oiligarchs, while Indian and Filipino migrants do the dirty work for peon wages, living in despicable hovels.

Cameron Sinclair's Architecture for Humanity's "bible", "Design Like You Give a Damn!" is civilized alternative to being hacks for the luxury industry of globalization.

Czechoslovakia in August: Schweik & the Russian Bear

The cliches of our half-solicitous, half-envious friends about the riskiness of going, the excitement of being where the action is, was far from the reality of coexisting with the Russians from Cierna to Tisou to Bratislava. Not that my wife and I felt none of the factitious anxiety which Raymond Williams has suggested Western media whipped up with their foolishly "friendly" coverage of the Czechs' mini-cold war; it was hard to suppress a very real shiver at the sight of a Tommy gun-manned watchtower on the border between West Germany and Czechoslovakia.

But our first contact with Czech officialdom a few minutes later was hardly geopolitical: the Banlon-frocked moneychangers aboard our train could have been, from the pert looks of them, any second-generation American Slavs at any Midwestern state university near Cleveland or Pittsburgh. (But their flattered cross-talk to each other when they realized we wanted to know where in Prague to find more poets like Miroslav Holub and more films like Closely Watched Trains would be hard to imagine among their American contemporaries.)

Our being there "at the historic moment" was mostly chance. After a year of teaching Americans in England, we had qualified for a National Union of Students tour. We reluctantly abstained from Greece to punish the colonels, and long before Dubcek's heroic fortnight, had signed on for Czechoslovakia with thirteen British university students or recent graduates and another American. Not that we were uninterested in what was going on there.

Our political awakening had dated approximately from F. O. Matthiessen's suicide over another Eastern European Socialist crisis in the 1950s, and we were eager to see for ourselves "what communism was like." We wanted to believe that socialism could renew itself, that its overbureaucratized ugliness could wither away under the scorn and joy of Czech cartoonists, film makers, writers. Long depressed by the playpen atmosphere of American television, we wanted to believe that we had read about the revolutionary role Czech TV had played in the post-January examination of the national conscience.

So, as the crisis mounted in the fortnight before our departure, we anxiously scanned the dispatches from Prague over morning coffee, gauging whether it would be chicken to back out at the last moment. I cite these feelings at length because I think they illustrate how misleading most of the attitudes inherited from the cold war turn out to be when people--even those who make some special effort to be broadminded--risk their first visit behind (note, not simply "the other side of") the iron curtain. And these (ex post facto) uncredible assumptions which we brought to our visit (four days in Prague, three in Bratislava, six in the cities and villages of Eastern Slovakia from Poprad to Kosice) may help to explain the paradoxical exhilaration and depression we brought back from our possibly too bookish tour.

The first, and ultimately only essential, truth to record about the gray socialism that Czech intellectuals are revolting against is that it is indeed revolting. Even to one whose eyes were weaned on the squalor of Midwestern American motorscapes, today's Czechoslovak vistas must be seen to be discredited. Reading Mencken's "Libido of the Ugly" in a copy of Writers in Revolt that our American undergraduate was carrying, we concluded that his archetypal patch of desolation along the 25 miles of railroad track between Greensburgh and Pittsburgh would look almost Edenic by comparison with the bomb-site drabness all over Czechoslovakia.

This is the more ironic because Mencken makes the point that the Central European immigrants inhabiting those steel mill towns had made a mighty poor bargain when they traded their quaint Slovakian villages for the infernal river valleys of the coal and steel magnates. It's not just the prevailing torn-up atmosphere--sewer and cable lines "temporarily" dug up, and left behind wooden protective fences which looked as through they had weathered more than one winter; half-erected ski jumps in tourist-development areas, with the missing steel beams complacently rusting away in a crazy heap. And it's not only the run-down quality of public services: clogged bathrooms in trains, bulbless light fixtures (under-illumination is a national vice, especially in museums), unrunning hot water in huge dormitory complexes. Beyond all this, it is the excruciating quality of recent building that is so discouraging.

We walked with a recent British civil engineering graduate through two so-called construction sites in the high-prestige tourist area of Stary Smokovec. It didn't require his professional comment to make us understand that in front of the local post office we were watching the slowest bricklayer in the history of mortar. An amateur could also see that the rubbly bricks he was so meticulously laying one on another were no inducement to speed. That was one Czech structure that would never beat the considerable snows of the High Tatry mountains this coming winter. And down the road, two other workers were hacking phlegmatically at great boulders, chipping them down to size for insertion in a wooden wall form. They might beat the winter, if it was very late. I suspect that this is the kind of disarray that prompted Czechoslovak Life to editorialize in its August issue:

The complete abolition of small-scale private enterprise, which exists to a greater or lesser degree in most of the other Socialist countries, is one of the reasons why local services are at such a low level in Czechoslovakia. To encourage a return to skilled crafts like carpentry and plumbing, national committees last year issued over 20,000 permits to private craftsmen. A law establishing the conditions under which individuals may set up shop will probably be passed before the end of the year. It is envisaged that permission will be granted not only to individuals and members of their families but to groups of individuals working in related crafts. Equipment could be owned or borrowed, and proprietors may also be given the right to train one apprentice.

But the oddest reaction, to one indoctrinated by Western capitalist dependence on creature comforts, is the paradoxical spiritual exhilaration amidst all this physical ugliness. And this is not necessarily a matter of cerebral high-mindedness. On an electric tram one day in the mountains, I struck up a conversation with a steel worker from Brno returning from a holiday with his wife and 11-year-old son. He was carving traditional designs on a walking stick he had cut in the forest, as a summer souvenir for his son. The postcard stands and shops are flooded with crude parodies of this craft, slickly shellacked kitsch, a Czech equivalent of African airport art.

But the man from Brno, with whom we carried on in German a clumsy but satisfying conversation on politics and industry, on his grown children and on his second family, showed us how, in a train jouncing down a mountainside, he carved this stick, ingeniously using the knots in the pine to make variations on the traditional patterns.

Enchanted by his skill, I asked where one could buy such a present for my son back home (unaware then that he was making it for his own). You can't buy this kind, he told me, you have to make them yourself. You don't sell them, but you can give them away. Generosity feeds benignly on itself, and a boy in Brno now wears my wristwatch. On the bus to Presov, a very ordinary lady was wearing her Sunday-best apron--another brilliant everyday improvisation on traditional themes, the commonest black shiny cotton transfigured by what one is reduced to calling "modern" juxtapositions of green, beige and brown.

The state-run crafts shops attempt to market these everyday arts, but only in Kosice, the least metropolitan of the big cities, did we find materials that even approached in quality the do-it-yourself crafts of the Slovaks. Surely the collections of such materials gathered in the Eastern Slovakian Museum at Kosice are among the most splendid anywhere in the world. It is perhaps significant, too, that the exhibition of Russian useful arts (mostly ceramics and textiles) at the Eastern Slovakian Gallery in Kosice was as vigorous and true as the exposition of Socialist Realism next to the statue of Jan Hus in Prague was complacently tawdry.

The Czech (and especially Slovak) capacity to hang onto traits in their culture which protect a human scale in the midst of grandiose bureaucratic failure is a precious legacy they bring into the 20th century. It is part of their Schweikmanship, a tactic learned at infinite cost over centuries of brutal interventionism--Tartars, "benevolent" medieval German economic developers, anti-Hussite mercenaries in search of vacated estates, Bohemian book-burning Jesuits, Hapsburg anti-nationalist overlords, Nazis and now the Russians.

It behooves the Russian occupiers to read The Good Soldier Schweik. It should give them second thoughts about the costs of Russifying Czech Communists. Our Prague guide, who had given up teaching history to be a grandmotherly baby sitter, proudly told us, a week before the Russian occupation, how the city hall architects conned the Nazi authorities our of dismantling the fine Mikolas Ales mosaics in the entranceway to the old Town Hall: They claimed the whole tower would come tumbling down if the occupiers tried to expunge the fighting words worked into the design.

Perhaps the most useful historical tradition the Czechs take very seriously is not forgiving those who have the best of intentions for "helping" them. Peter Cheloicky, the 16th-century Bohemian proto-anarchist whom Tolstoy praised for his prescience, had some savage observations to make in The Net of Faith (1521) on another vanguard elite: "It is thus as regards the poverty of the monks: If it were true poverty it would be blessed, but their poverty is insatiable and endures no want; therefore has it only the name of poverty ... And if a poor monk obtains such abundance for his dinner table that he disdains beef and delicious peas with fat bacon, but wags his tail when he sees game, birds, or other delicacies that are better than peas, then he has got himself a good livelihood by his begging; and he and his companions the other monks have made a better business out of begging than some squire who has a plough and two fields, or even a large farm."

The night after the mendacious Russian leaders had made their ritual visit there, we were taken to the Slavin memorial high above Bratislava by two young architecture students who wanted to show us the best view of their city. They amused us with anti-Russian jokes and stories (and hearty but unsynchronized laughter, because each story was filtered through a babel of Slovak, French, German and English). They pointed to the flaring red exhausts of the petrol refinery, along the Danube and groused bitterly that the Russians sent them crude oil and they sent it back, refined, free. They noted bitterly that the American Army had no comparable monument in Pilsen, and openly wished that they hadn't stopped there.

Perhaps it is unfair, even to the Russian occupiers. Americans lost no 20 million in the war against the commonly hated German. But the Russians had better face the utter disillusion of the Czechs with Stalinist rigidity. The students we talked with simply don't accept agitprop ideologies. They regaled themselves with puns on how the Czech pronunciation of democracy comes out sounding "crazy." And they openly mocked tipsy workers at a Danube cafe who were trying to bait us with workers'-solidarity slogans. The overflowing Sunday churches in Slovakia, with worshipers standing outside the doors in the rain, were offering prayers, we were told, for the success of Dubcek.

That is a reality of character which not many Czech quislings will have the courage to buck. Russia's bad conscience about the pressure for liberalization at home has sucked it over the brink in Czechoslovakia. Judging from what we saw of Czech disenchantment with failing slogans and their joy in the new feeling of freedom, the Russians are going to regret this precipitate step. Their cure may well cause them more pain than the infection they wanted to stop. For the Czechs are not melodramatic Hungarians, ready to assault a tank with upraised hands. If I were a Russian occupier, I'd watch my fuel lines. There's more than one way for a Schweik to sweet-talk a Russian bear into wishing he had never left home.

Reprinted from THE NATION, September 9, 1968

Is the English Major Dying Out?

At the Modern Language Association annual convention held over Christmas in Philadelphia in 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education published the sad story of a young adjunct college English teacher who couldn’t afford the $400 it would have taken him to attend MLA and interview for a full time job. (Chronicle 12/20/09.)

Earlier, MLA published a report on the dizzying drop in tenure track jobs at that same convention. As a Ph.D. who never even had to interview for any academic job, I feel I can talk objectively about the crisis. Especially, since I walked happily away from twenty years as a full professor with tenure.

I spent thirty years in the classroom (1952-82) teaching seventh and eighth grade (1952-53) and tenth and twelfth grade (1953-55) at East Lansing High, a year (1955-56) in New York on a Ford Foundation grant as Radio TV Editor of Scholastic Teacher when three professors from Trenton State asked me to join them as assistant professor (1956-57), after hearing me speak at the 4C’S Convention on “Liberace and the Future of Cultural Criticism”. The next year I got my Ph.D. and a Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Penn (1957-59) to create a new course on “The Mass Society” in the Department of American Civilization.

That led to an appointment 1959-60 at the new Annenberg School as assistant professor of media history. The sociologist David Riesman then recommended me as the first director and associate professor at the new Institute of American Studies at the East West Center of the University of Hawaii. Erwin Steinberg of Carnegie-Mellon then recommended my appointment as full professor and English Department chairman at Arcadia University, where I taught for twenty years with one year off to teach media as Andreini Fellow for a former Annenberg student at Santa Rosa Community College (1975-76) and the next year off to celebrate reaching 50, with a three month exploration of the art and architecture of the Mediterranean littoral.

I had been awarded a Fulbright to the University of Algiers to follow up my expansion of the English rubric to include African Literature in English. This was withdrawn at the last moment, presumably for political reasons. (My Number 2 in Hawaii had been a CIA agent for 10 years before he was appointed to watch me and the foreign students!)

In 1982, after my 86 year old mother died in Detroit, I decided to abandon Academe for a second career as a cultural reporter in California. I give this CV, not to brag, but to establish how much different it was for young Ph.D’s in that era than it it is now. What wrecked their prospects? In my opinion, the emergence of star professors pocketing $100,000 and more as the workaday assignments increasingly went to “adjunct” (a fancy professorial synonym for peon) without tenure or health benefits.

That's a disgrace that will forever shame the Humanists who let it happen, indeed planned it. I believed (as I wrote monthly for several years in The English Journal) that the English curriculum had to include the newer media of radio, film, and television to be functional in the Twentieth Century: Identify excellence in the newer media and encourage our best students to cultivate a creative career in those fields. To show what I meant, I organized media events for several years in the 50’s and 60’s at those MLA & NCTE conventions.

One year I reran a Robert Lowell play on the Vietnamese war as well as a splendid new film on Theodore Roethke by David Meyer. Both were received enthusiastically. So when David asked me to seek MLA member support for a film on Marianne Moore (she had already given him a green light), I wrote to Mike Shugrue, then Number 2 to John Fischer, editor of PMLA, he replied quickly: Our members have had a bad year on the stock market so we can’t help. Alas, Ms. Moore died the next year.

When Harvard’s “Daedalus” magazine fielded a conference in the Poconos on what humanists must do vis a vis the newer media, all but a very, very few pretended that sneering at mass culture was the way to go! Indeed the conference ended with the poet Randall Jarrell waggling his beard and index finger at me when I finished my paper and cried, “You’re the man of the future, Mr. Hazard, and I’m glad I’m not going to be there.” And he wasn’t. Sadly, he committed suicide a few months later. I say sadly because I had relished teaching his poems! To be explicit about it, the humanist have been guilty of a massive and absolutely critical trahison des clercs.

Take a historical perspective: We didn’t start teaching American Lit until the late twenties.And those mostly at the state universities where ignoring student proclivities was fiscal suicide. The preceding half century English professors had struggled for permission to teach contemporary English literature. For centuries to be humanistically educated was to know Latin and Greek. Now I went to an old fashioned high school (actually a Roman Catholic seminary!) where I loved studying both Latin and Greek.

But before I chose a second career as a cultural reporter (It too will add up to thirty years in 2012!), I had started to internationalize my contemporary literature courses. It began with my including black Americans and white Appalachians. Then I included Canadian and Caribbean Lit in English—at a splendid seminar with Michael Harper, Seamus Heaney, and the so-called Jamaican Thomas Jefferson.

When I taught summers in London I stretched it to include African Lit in English, especially after doing my homework in Senegal at the First Negro Arts Festival in 1964 and the Commonwealth Education Conference in Nigeria in 1966.

Finally we included Oceania, from which the Australian Robert Frost, A.D. Hope gave a powerful reading. Am Lit plus Commonwealth Lit, I argued, amounts to International English Literature. Post McLuhan, with media whenever possible. That rubric guides my exploratory readings to this very day.

Wake up, MLA. It’s never too late to learn! Look what happened to our literary ancestors in Greek and Latin who tried to Atlas their way in the humanities. There are only a few of them professionally extant, like Mary Beard of TLS, keeping a sharp eye on crucial sectors of the past. And they are indispensable, but only a crucial part of our strategy of humanizing the masses. Our first responsibility is identifying the best being thought in our generation, and seeing that our contemporaries have adequate access to those complex enough emerging realities.

Miracles

Water, water everywhere,
But only Lourdes is holy.
In Kenmore Square
25,000 plastic flasks
Monthly reach the Boston faithful
($4 donation suggested)
The bishops concurred:
(Recession mailings are down)
The human miracle
Was Bernadette’s apparitions:
Psychosomatic Holiness.
In Africa today
The daily miracle:
Clean water beats dysentery.
No plastic flasks
Just clean cups
Outsmarting centuries of evil
God smiles contentedly
Proud that His greatest gift
Human Reason, once again
Outfoxes the sleepless devil.
Jesus, in his human phase,
Prays the filthy rich
Will multiply wells
Before droughts prevail,
Smothering daily miracles.

Design: Bauhaus, FROG

Semantic inflation is a widespread vice in American higher education: In the 1960s, development officers waved their magic state-legislature wands and suddenly Teachers Colleges became State U's.

Last year, when the unpronounceable pupa of the Philadelphia Colleges of the Arts suddenly took sweetly euphonious butterfly wings as the University of the Arts, I silently smirked at the onomastic hustle.

Wrong, overgeneralizer-breath. For if the international conference Design 88 is a fair indication of what's going on on South Broad Street, then hooray for the U of the A.

I've been subjecting myself to the ideological abuse of international design conferences since I represented the Annenberg School of Communication in 1958, and Design 88 has been eclipsed in my mind only by Osaka 83, where I found to my dismayed delight that the Japanese design establishment is motivated by the blue-collar idealism of the Bauhaus.

One of the saddest stories of good ideas pre-empted for mediocre ends is how the Bauhaus refugees who strove to bring the best design to the masses diminished themselves into minions of the Fortune 500.

Well, 44-year-old keynote speaker Hartmut Esslinger, bless him, still believes in the old Teutonic verities, delightfully seasoned for joy by a wanderjahr in the Milanese region of design funk.

He spoke with wit and passion of frog design, the Triadically-based firm that began in the Federal Republic of Germany but now has functioning footholds in Silicon Valley and Tokyo, thus leavening the always potential lumpishness of the Big Three of contemporary design--Europe, the United States and Japan.

He chided his host country for reneging on its ideals, predicting fiscal disasters from our bad habit of letting the hunger for growth each and every quarter force us to "balance" the always hot Christmas quarter by cutting back on R and D in January. And he shamed the U.S. as well for paying designers the worst and taking the cheap maneuver of hiring house designers instead of autonomous free agents like FROGdesign.

"Form follows emotion" is his update of the Bauhaus bromide, a formula brilliantly embodied in the colorful roller skates the firm donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. You can judge for yourself about the firm's ecumenical brilliance through December 3rd at UOA's Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Broad and Pine.

ID magazine publisher Randolph McAusland ended the first day of the conference where all significant change must begin: in the consumer's consciousness. He praised the Wall Street Journal for stepping up its coverage of design and for institutionalizing its "Form & Function" feature every two weeks or so.

We are so tied apart in tiny loops of almost hermetically sealed audiences that McAusland, having made a pitch for including design education in the elementary grades, was astonished to learn that Richard Saul Wurman, the Louis Kahn protege, has published an entire curriculum on the architecture of Philadelphia for elementary school children.

And fresh from a visit to the Munich Museum for Folk Culture, which has just opened an exhibition on a new prize for design in the European Community, I was puzzled that not one of the frequent-flyer headline speakers had so much as heard of the prize!

But the truly thrilling thing about Esslinger's practical idealism is that it has survived all the piffle and palaver that corrupt the Bauhaus idealism of good design for everyone--not just those upper-middles who can afford, say $500 for Robert Venturi's screwy new cuckoo clock, one of the tidal wave of status-conferring objects I bunch under the rubric of the Higher Goofy.

Postmodern ideologues don't just muddy the water of discourse with hemline haha objects. Jean Nouvel, who has in his right mind designed the wholly credible new Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, is responsible (and I use that term as a Savonarola) for the most disgraceful, misleading, meretricious exhibition I have ever seen in my life: "The Fifties," at the Centre Pompidou.

I started thinking about design in the 1950s--indeed, started to be a conscientious consumer then as well. So there is more than intellectual anger in my reaction to his jumbo sale of an exhibition. There is personal affront as well.

The first thing to greet my astonished eye was an Eames chair jammed upside down in a Bertioa womb chair, thereby destroying the aesthetic pleasure inherent in each classic. Those two icons just happened to be the first two investments in good furniture my bride and I made as young marrieds (a Nakashima end table was the next).

The moral of the stupid juxtaposition was to deconstruct both objects. The whole show was just such a jumble. And the level of documentation can be inferred from the fact that the press photo on a Las Vegas strip--which Venturi enjoined us to learn from--was identified as California.

We are asked to revere Louis Kahn's Richards Medical Center with no quibble about the fact that it doesn't properly exhaust the toxic gases from research. And the major slide show--Paris Match covers punctuating nostalgic takes of Elvis and others--operates on the fallacious assumption that a Miles Davis soundtrack compensates for intellectual emptiness.

All those mesmerized kids in their teens and 20s were lapping it up, as if they were really seeing the '50s. I was relieved to see that much of the French design community was outraged enough by this nonsense that the press kit included a formal (and totally unconvincing) reply to their cri de coeur.

The Pompidou has partly redeemed itself from the "Fifties" travesty by co-sponsoring, with the Ecole des Beaux Arts, a luminous gloss on Alvar Aalto (viewable until December 19th). The Pompidou covers the transition from his beginnings in the Finnish nationalist style (sort of frozen Jugenstil, if you know what I mean) to his conversion to the International Style around 1930.

There is an intro to his sanitarium, where he focused his theory that funcationalism must first of all take into account the psychological needs of putative users. Notice the gentle shape of the examination table. His goal was to use light and soft materials like wood to help the healing process.

At the Ecole itself, it was a kick to be allowed to sit in one of his chairs, to give it the buns test--something the Swan Gallery, surprisingly, let me do on the Frank Gehry cardboard chair in its window. It felt great--until they told me the Higher Goofy price--$1,200 without arms, $1,400 with. Hell, I needed a chair--any chair--just to absorb that cultural piracy.

Before Gehry stopped selling them abruptly after they became runaway best sellers at $200, he was in a Bauhaus track--good design for everyone. Then he Knoll-Internationaled it up.

I can hear architects and designers saying, "Who the hell does Hazard think he is, telling us how to price our designs?" The answer lies in another exhibition in Paris, at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs (through January 29th) on "Les Annees UAM, 1929-1958"--UAM standing for the Union of Modern Artists. If you can't swing a trip, get the catalogue.

It is refreshing to see these painters, sculptors, affichistes, jewelry makers, designers and architects fine-tune their idealistic visions when depression and war would give them every reason to cut corners.

I wish every chair designer would, for example, metabolize one of the aphorisms on the wall: The only, proposition a chair should make is repose. Take that, Gerrit Rietvald, whose bun-numbing centennial we'll be celebrating next year at the Dayton Institute of Art.

Good design has come on bad days, I believe, because the design community jettisoned its Bauhaus heritage of serving the entire culture for the megabucks of the upper-middle discretionaries. As America two-tiers itself further between a Nobel laureating thin-crust top and a metastasizing underclass bottom, it will take more and more character for a designer to take the road less traveled.

Esslinger will have none of them. And besides, he's teaching the Germans to smile. There's a miracle!

"Hazard-at-Large" from Welcomat: After Dark, November 30, 1989