Jan. 23 BlogTalkRadio Interview Coming Up on "Last First Date"

I'll be interviewed on the BlogTalkRadio program "Last First Date" on Thursday, January 23 from 2-3 pm. I'll be speaking with host Sandy Weiner on the topic of "Role of Religion and Spirituality in Dating."

Weiner is a speaker and dating coach who helps people achieve their goals. She writes about her approach on her website

I walk my talk. As a woman actively dating after my divorce, I bring first-hand knowledge and wisdom about what it’s like to be over 40, dating in the 21st century. Like you, I am navigating through the sometimes confusing world of online dating. I am always learning new ways to talk to men and get different results. I share my extensive knowledge with my clients.

I am a woman of action. I kick butts, but always from a place of love. I want you to rise up to your highest self. Therefore, I don’t settle for the same old answers or excuses. I challenge you to push yourself to do things differently and attract the love you want. And, I bring my warmth and sense of humor to my coaching, because if you can’t laugh at life, you’re in big trouble! 

I'm looking forward to getting on to her program and digging in to issues of spirituality and dating, and how I got to where I am today (wherever that is).

Rolando Hinojosa's Valley, and Mine

I can read, say, Philip Roth or Chaim Potok novels about Newark and Brooklyn and enjoy the literary qualities and the cultural sense of Jewish life in the New York region. I can hear the people talking, sense the family dynamics. But in reading Klail City, one of the short novels in the Klail City Death Trip series by Texas writer and academic Rolando Hinojosa, I’m reading about something more visceral and evocative — the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where I grew up, in Mission. Even if, as Thomas Wolfe wrote, you can’t go home again, Hinojosa gets me close enough to feel the Gulf winds blowing across the fields.

Set in fictional Belken County, Klail City’s short, kaleidoscopic chapters recount the Hispanic experience in deep South Texas from the 1940s on, with historical glances even further back. Hinojosa grew up in Mercedes, Texas, about 25 miles east of my home town, Mission, both in Hidalgo County (I associate Mercedes with its annual Livestock Show and Rodeo, held every March for going on 75 years). Hinojosa describes a world that surrounded me every day but unfolded at a distance from mine. He writes

The number of Texas Anglos to be seen here is scant, but perhaps, understandably so. These fellow Texans of ours are out of place here; out of their element, so to speak. So to speak. The Belken County Texas Mexicans, on the other hand, are the majority, but this doesn’t mean they ignore the other population; they can ill afford to do so. For their part, the mexicano are usually ignored, although not always, true, and not forever either. (After all, what physical pain is there that lasts a hundred years?)

The geography hit me, with the Missouri-Pacific railroad tracks dividing towns into the Anglo and Mexican sides (I’ll use the terminology found in the book), with their own elementary schools. As in Mission in the 1960s, those schools’ pupils came together in junior high and high school, years of tensions and explorations.

Hinojosa carefully delineated the gradations of religion that are essential to Valley life. Catholics predominate, but Mexican Protestants are fully recognized as a culture of their own. Masses, revivals, Bibles, scriptural references weave in and out of the stories, as common as the carnal side of life seen through beer joints, pool halls, shotgun weddings of teenagers in the family way, the soldiers killed in Europe, the Pacific and Korea, war veterans gunned down by unrestrained and unpunished police, crooked politicians, curanderas (healers), the old men selling things on the street, seasonal migrations Up North. Hinojosa packs an enormous number of familiar touchpoints into the short book.

And I reflected on the names he summons from the depths of memory. Rafe Buenrostro, Bruno Cano, don Celso Villalon, Manuel Guzman, de Anda, Viola Barragan, Horacio Navarro, Maria Lara, Dorothea Cavazos, and the dead-accurate Anglo names like Liz Ann Moore, Lulu Gottlieb, high school librarian Miss Mary Jane McClarity, Choche Markham, the kind and good Tom Purdy of Michigan, and Sheriff Big Foot Parkinson. And, in an amazing bit of prophecy, Sofia Vergara — exactly like the actress. These just sample the roster of names. Many of them resonate with memories of friends and classmates and their parents, local characters from my version of the Valley. Dorothea, Maria, Elizabeth Ann, Horacio, Navarro — they’re all mental bursts of associations going back a half-century now.

I’ll see if I can find other books in the series to find out what else goes on with the characters simmering and stewing under the South Texas sun. My Klail City Death Trip is just hitting the road.

I, Gym-Rat Tribute

I'm a jaundiced consumer of marketing messages. Sales don't impress me, corporate incentive programs rarely catch my eye, and I save money when shopping by not buying anything--I can swing through Macy's or a mall and enjoy the shopping experience without actually buying stuff to clutter my life. But a marketing pitch that combines simplicity and cleverness can grab my attention. And even inspire a blog post.

So here I am, gazing with fevered curiosity at a program that I picked up at the Westport branch of the New York Spots Club yesterday. Do I have what it takes to "TRAIN LIKE A TRIBUTE-CAN YOU SURVIVE THE GAMES?" Today's the deadline! Order now at the low, low price of $105 for four one-hour sessions! Should I?

NYSC, employing nothing more advanced than a black-and-white printer, caught my eye with a deal for a fitness program geared to The Hunger Games. As fate would have it, I read the book about six weeks ago and greatly enjoyed it. Now, here's the NYSC rolling out a program, "limited to 12 members one for each district," mimicking the skills used to deadly effect in the book by survivor Katniss Everdeen.

To train like a tribute, the NYSC mixes traditional fitness-class moves with some Hunger Games specialties: You get archery (ka-zinggg!), tree climbing simulation, speed work, strength training, and high-intensity cardio with weight-lifting exercises. Given my age, I'd probably keel over before I reached tribute-level fitness level, but, still, I'm curious. If the sale continues past today, heck, I may do it. I could use some diversity in my workout routine, which mostly centers on hand weights with a focus of not overdoing anything that would result in a yanked muscle or tendon.

Thirty years ago, I would have laughed if anybody had suggested I sign up for a fitness class, let alone join a fancy-pants place like the NY Sports Club (fancy only in my imagination, given that my previous gym experience was limited to the weight room at the PE center of Mission High School). I disdained gyms in favor of relentless walking around New York and Brooklyn. If I wanted to push myself, I'd jog along Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, starting around the fabled Brooklyn House of Detention and plodding along to the intersection with fabled Flatbush Avenue. I'd stagger back home and collapse, waiting for any twinge in my knee to blossom in to a full-blown health crisis. It never did, but I never became a regular jogger.

My attitude changed once I moved to suburban Connecticut and eventually became a commuter in 1996, on the train daily from Westport to Grand Central Terminal, and then on to blue-chip accounting firm Price Waterhouse on Avenue of the Americas. Soon after I started this job,after a year of unemployment, I heard about the employee discount program for memberships at the NYSC. Somehow, the idea that I needed to take better care of myself as a new father penetrated my sometimes-thick skull, and I became a member.

Except for a four-year period between 2002 and 2006--when I dropped my membership due to post-divorce financial reasons, then joined the Jewish Community Center with its own fitness center in Stamford--I've been a member ever since.

I'm the most surprised person in the world at this evolution from sluggard to gym rat. In the early years I mixed treadmill workouts (timed to coincide with watching the soap opera Days of Our Lives on the big monitors at the club) with total-body conditioning classes. I mostly stick with weights now, with the occasional session on the elliptical walker (where I usually watch country-western or 80s/90s videos on the machine's monitor). Frankly, I'm in a rut. A few years ago I tried cardio kickboxing, and before that yoga, but breaking out of the typical routine takes effort. Separate from the club, I also took a 10-week krav maga class in Stamford in 2007, which was the most exhausting physical workout I've ever had.

Thus, the tribute program jolted me with the promise of something new, something fresh and engaging. Archery and tree-climbing: well, those are ways to break out of the routine. I just hope I don't break a bone -- after various aches and pains from overdoing workouts over the years, I'm very attuned to my limits.

Do I dare rise beyond the routine to become a Tribute, proudly representing District Westport in the Fairfield County Games? Stay tuned.

The Alt-Alt-History: Nelson Mandela and Lavrenti Beria

In retrospect, history is a series of what-ifs, branching out from key points from what did happen to the unknown possibilities of what never happened. Alternative history explores that. One of the great questions of recent decades—simple because it involves one man and his fate—was, “what would have happened if Nelson Mandela had survived his captivity?” His death in the early 1960s, during his confinement at the Robben Island prison, has intrigued historians. Had he survived, the consensus view is that he would have been released in the early 1970s as a goodwill gesture, after renouncing violence. Most likely, he would have survived after his release as a minor figure, respected but mostly forgotten, visited primarily by foreign college students and displaced by a new generation of activists.

Other more radical views assign a greater role to Mandela in freedom. Students of missed opportunities wonder that the easing of the Cold War through the 1950s and early 1960s might have led the South African government to release Mandela or not even imprison him, once the country was not seen as a pawn caught between the USSR and the United States. In this highly speculative scenario, productive negotiations between Soviet premier and former secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria and U.S. President Richard Nixon de-escalated tensions at flash points worldwide, especially South Africa, Viet Nam and Cuba. Nixon, known as a hardline Cold Warrior while Vice President, nevertheless saw potential in a working relationship with Beria, the sinister NKVD chief who nonetheless embraced policies of economic and (within limits) political reform immediately after Joseph Stalin’s death in March 1953. As President, Nixon engaged Beria in negotiations following their famous “rumpus-room debate” in Moscow in 1959, where they spent hours playing billiards in a mock-up of a typical U.S. basement-level entertainment center.

Showing realpolitik at its highest global level, Nixon and Beria worked out understandings that supported a withdrawal of Soviet forces from much of Eastern Europe (East Germany a notable exception) and economic reforms and legalization of opposition parties, coupled with U.S. agreement to not reflexively oppose national liberation movements as harbingers of communist rule. The tectonic shifts in global politics simultaneously removed Soviet financing of South African communist movements and U.S. support for apartheid policies as a bulwark against communism. Suddenly without support on both sides due to Nixon and Beria (who wanted to put finances into rebuilding the USSR), the South African government and the African National Congress would have found a rapprochement mirroring U.S.-Soviet relations. In the turn of phrase popularized by The New Yorker's diplomatic correspondent, John F. Kennedy, "Trust but verify."

In this line of reasoning, Mandela would have been released from prison to assume a place as an influential statesman, perhaps even president, of a post-apartheid South Africa. Would Mandela have been able to dampen the potential for violence and take the first steps toward building a multiracial society? Would the country have stood as a role model for other African nations emerging from colonial rule? Mandela might have joined Richard Nixon and Lavrenti Beria among the leaders who reshaped the 1960s following the decisive end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, we will never know what history had in store for Nelson Mandela.

The analyses of the passing of Nelson Mandela reflected on his life’s accomplishments refracted through views of his politics, economics, militancy, place in the great game of the Cold War, whether he was an anti-semite or a philo-semite, and role in moving South Africa beyond apartheid. I don’t have anything original to say about any of this. What does strike me about Mandela is the sheer improbability that lived long enough to leave prison after 27 years AND immediately resumed political life.

Twenty-seven years; in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Dr. Alexandre Manette spent a mere 18 years as a prisoner in the Bastille. Mandela entered prison in his early 40s and left in his early 70s. For a U.S. frame of reference, imagine Richard Nixon retiring after his loss in the election of 1960, then returning to win the presidency against Bill Clinton in 1992; that's a long time.

The path of one man over a great stretch of time reminds me of alt-history, a form of fiction I like that takes a change in history, often a minor event, and traces the impact of it. Prison, release and a return to life, in Dickens’ phrase, sounds far more unlikely than the alternative I sketched above. But that’s how Mandela bent history to his purposes, refusing to submit, remaining alive and leaving his own mark on the world.

Mandela’s alt-alt-history, as I think of it, leads me to think about other crinkles in time. I’ve read big ideas of alt-history, typically wars going in new directions: the South winning the Civil War, the Germans winning World War II (as in Robert Harris’ novel Fatherland) and the three volume series starting with Without Warning by John Birmingham, after a mysterious energy wave wipes out most of North America just before the 2003 Iraq War started).

One great what-if involved the change of leadership in the USSR following the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953. Long ailing, Stalin was preparing a pogrom against Russian Jews when he had a stroke that went untreated, with the doctors supposedly held off by his secret police chief and vice premier, Lavrenti Beria. As Stalin lay dying in his country hours, Beria was alternately obsequious and jubilant, and historians have speculated that he might have given Stalin more than a gentle shove into the next world. In any case, Beria immediately grabbed the spotlight among surviving leaders and positioned himself to become the premier. The plans for the pogrom immediately ended, as did Stalin’s plans to execute his remaining inner circle. According to Wikipedia, Beria had big ambitions:

Based on Beria's own statements, other leaders suspected that in the wake of the uprising, he might be willing to trade the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War for massive aid from the United States, as had been received in World War II. The cost of the war still weighed heavily on the Soviet economy. Beria craved the vast financial resources that another (more sustained) relationship with the United States could provide. He had already argued for "de-Bolshevization" of Soviet foreign policy (though he still favored traditional terror methods as necessary to control domestic power). For example, Beria gave Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania serious prospects of national autonomy, possibly similarly to other Soviet satellite states in Europe.

Those plans never reached fruition. The worst among  Soviet leaders all drowning in blood, the rapist and torturer Beria and his security forces were rightly feared by Nikita Khrushchev, Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgi Malenkov and others.

On 26 June 1953, Beria was arrested and held in an undisclosed location near Moscow. Accounts of Beria's fall vary considerably. By the most likely account, Khrushchev prepared an elaborate ambush, convening a meeting of the Presidium on 26 June, where he suddenly launched a scathing attack on Beria, accusing him of being a traitor and spy in the pay of British intelligence. Beria was taken completely by surprise. He asked, "What's going on, Nikita Sergeyevich? Why are you picking fleas in my trousers?" Molotov and others quickly spoke against Beria one after the other, followed by a motion by Khrushchev for his instant dismissal. When Beria finally realized what was happening and plaintively appealed to Malenkov to speak for him, his old friend and crony silently hung his head and refused to meet his gaze. Malenkov pressed a button on his desk as the pre-arranged signal to Marshal Georgy Zhukov and a group of armed officers in a nearby room. They burst in and arrested Beria.

Beria had plenty of time to reflect on the fruits of his past deeds and onrushing fate before his December 1953 trial. He was tried and convicted with other leaders of what was then called the MVD (previously the NKVD, later the KGB, now the FSB). He enjoyed the same degree of consideration and mercy he showed others:

Beria and all the other defendants were sentenced to death. When the death sentence was passed, Beria pleaded on his knees for mercy before collapsing to the floor and wailing and crying energetically, but to no avail: the other six defendants were executed by firing squad on 23 December 1953, the same day as the trial, while Beria was fatally shot through the forehead by General Batitsky after the latter stuffed a rag into Beria's mouth to silence his bawling. The body of Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was subsequently cremated and buried around Moscow's forest.

If the alt-alt-history had played out, would Beria have been a sort of proto-Mikhail Gorbachev, or more so, ditching the rigidity and suspicions of Stalinism for some more tolerant approach? Would he have worked through and eased the pent-up anger that, in the late 1980s, unleashed revolutions that swept Eastern Europe? Would he have used the Red Army to suppress rebellions, as happened in 1953 in East Germany, 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia? Or would the internal contradictions of communism have led to the same dead end other Soviet leaders failed to fix, because they were unfixable? Would he have been more coolly rational and informed than Khrushchev and focused on the USSR’s post-war rebuilding rather than endless global intrigues in support of communism? Nobody knows what the alt-history had in store for Lavrenti Beria.

Fortunately, we do know that the alt-alt history did indeed come true for Nelson Mandela, who emerged to life and left a world made better for his improbable survival and leadership.

Before Lena Dunham (Girls), There Was Lena Nyman (Yellow)

The slow-building surge of publicity for the third season of HBO's Girls is beginning, with ads, cast profiles and soon, no doubt, magazine covers. Lena Dunham knows how to capture an audience. I find Girls' characters sometimes tedious, but the series is compulsively watchable -- and I can identify with some of their concerns? After all, I spent my 20s in Brooklyn, fresh out of college and scraping for work and romance as a creative type, back in the Jurassic Age.

While I'm waiting for the new season, I'm wondering about the significance of the show. The NY Times can scarcely go a day without mentioning it in some context. So daring, so of the era it is.

But how controversial and pathbreaking is Lena Dunham compared to another Lena -- Lena Nyman, who starred as "Lena" in the 1967 Swedish movie I Am Curious (Yellow), which was banned from being imported into the U.S. for being obscene. I remember reading about the obscenity case as a kid and I was always, well, curious about the film. The movie posters with the pouty, direct gaze of Nynam said nothing about the content, other than it featured a pouty Swedish actress.

Time passes. Courts rule the movie is not obscene and it becomes a huge art-house hit in the U.S. Forty-four years after the movie squirms its way into the U.S., rocking the moviegoing public with its boldly uncompromising Euro-New Wave style, I finally get my sweaty, trembling paws on a copy of what must be a sizzling piece of cinema -- at the Westport, CT, Public Library. There's the history of American morality in one movie, from banned in the U.S. to a safe little nook at the library (I expect Deep Throat will show up one of these tolerant days).

And that brings me to Lena and Lena. For all the hats thrown into the air in celebration of what Lena D. does with Girls, Lena N. paved the way for her on the sexual front in the 1960s (albeit in black and white). Topless meditation? Check. Sex in her father's apartment? Check. Public copulation? And she did it all without a lot of distracting, skanky tattoos. The two Lenas even bear a physical resemblance, in the bare sense. They're not beauties, fleshier than the scrawny model types, but they're ready to make the most of what they've got and put themselves out for their art. Both are fearless in front of the camera.

The degrees of different in the limits of sexual expression between late 1960s and now are instructive. Yellow has full-frontal nudity, which Girls hasn't yet leaped into yet. That must be a taboo Dunham can't quite break. Yellow has also more roughly physical sex, enough to trouble the sensitivities of modern viewers, although Girls has its share of uncomfortable couplings. The men of Yellow and Girls show lots similarities -- sneaking around and keeping their relationship secrets, working on their careers, wheeling and dealing emotionally.

The two works differ most sharply, tonally, in the ferociously political world of Yellow versus the withdrawal from politics in Girls. The first part of Yellow, to the point of tedium, involves Nyman interviewing Swedes, like an investigative reporter, about income inequality in Sweden, class issues, even their thoughts on vacationing in Francisco Franco's Spain. She's quite the fearless interviewer, going right into the labor union headquarter to pepper leaders with her questions. How much is real, how much is scripted?

That's part of the film's charming mix of fact and fiction; it even includes interviews with Martin Luther King Jr., (interviewed by director Vilgot Sjöman on civil disobedience during a trip of his to Sweden), a backyard interview with Olof Palme, who later became the Swedish prime minister, and a presentation by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Nyman and her friends protest against the Vietnam War, the Swedish military and other issues. The film is a time capsule of its era.

And Girls? I've seen every episode and I can't recall anything political, unless you want to say the personal is political. The ailing economy looms over the characters, Wall Street financiers are loathed yet longed-for, real estate prices are in the background (how can marginally employed characters live anywhere?), but my impressions is that Dunham and friends live in a time warp slightly distant from the realities that surround them. That's OK with me, I'm not looking for political lectures, but the contrast is stark.

For all the differences, I'll always link Yellow and Girls. They get people talking and stirred up, they reflected distinct visions, I was sorry to learn than Nyman died in 2011 at the age of 66. A meeting between the two Lenas, pathbreakers in their own ways, would have been enjoyable, two women talking about their times.

From the Good Men Project

This contribution to a site that's new to me, the Good Men Project, came together quickly and amounts to all of two sentences. Still, I say a lot, from my heart on something that gives me happiness. Read it here. I'm essay no. 14.

My Favorite Oswald

[I wrote this in 2005. It has never appeared until now. I've updated some references but otherwise it still holds up.]

Classical actors are judged according to how well they play Hamlet. After seeing for a second time Gary Oldman’s bravura turn in 1991’s JFK, I’ve decided that modern actors must be judged by how well they play Lee Harvey Oswald.

What other character in recent American history, other than Richard Nixon, has been more complex and confounding, bullying his way into our nightmares and turning history? With his bayou-coonass and Bronx accents and shifty-eyed demeanor, Oswald presents physical and psychological dimensions that would challenge the most accomplished actors.

I was barely six years old on November 22, 1963, so I won’t claim I shared the nation’s grief and shock, other than being peeved at the pre-emption of Saturday morning cartoons on KRGV and KGBT in the Rio GrandeValley. Still, I grew up knowing Kennedy’s assassination was an intensely Texas affair and taint. I followed the twists and revelations in the case over the years, usually around anniversaries. My attention spiked when Oliver Stone directed JFK and I found myself both repulsed and fascinated by Oldman’s Oswald. Who was this guy? A few years later, Gerald Posner’s epochal investigation Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK satisfied most of my questions.

But different questions arose after I recently watched JFK for the first time since the movie’s release. I knew the facts about the assassin, yet I wanted to see what I call “Oswaldiana,” the cultural interpretations of Oswald, beyond Stone’s movie. I was curious about the bizzaro-world version of all the films and books about John Kennedy, from PT 109 to the latest revelations of his times and floozies. How does the entertainment industry view Oswald?

Stone’s movie was frustrating, as it left me longing to see a lot more of Oldman’s Lee Harvey Oswald and a lot less of Kevin Costner’s New Orleans DA Jim Garrison in smoke-filled rooms. Stone teased the audience with fragmented McNuggets of Oswald, and left me panting for a big juicy steak of the Marine-Commie-Castroite-defector-killer.

Using the Internet as a resource unavailable in 1991, I clicked and trekked to discover my favorite Oswald. There must many films about Oswald, I thought, beyond the Kennedy biographies and factual records of the assassination. Oldman set a very high thespic bar, but I was determined to find challengers to the throne of Oswald interpreters.

To my amazement, almost nothing exists. Nada; zip; bupkis. While bookshelves groan and the Internet crackles with details on Oswald and the whole sordid mess, the creative film effort is pathetically small. Fortunately, the creative catalog grows when books and other art forms get thrown into the mix. Thus, the Oswaldiana shelf of a well-stocked library would minimally contain these works:

Oswald, Up on the Silver Screen
Here's the rundown of Oswald performances or appearances by the mid-2000s; others no doubt exist but these caught my attention.

• Gary Oldman, JFK (1991). It covers the highlights of Oswald’s assassination-related life, some that really happened and others in dream-like uncertainty. Whatever one thinks about Stone’s politics, he created a hard-charging film brimming with colorful characters. Thrill at the opportunity to hear Oswald say, “I emphatically deny these charges;” “I didn’t shoot anybody, no sir;” and of course, “I’m just a patsy.” Plus, Stone made good use of cute-as-a-button Quitman, Texas native Sissy Spacek as Liz Garrison. And in one easily missed line, I think I found a South Texas connection to the intrigue, when Costner refers to McAllen as a center for gun-running.
• Willie Garson, Ruby (1992), Willie Garson plays a colorless throwaway role as Oswald, while Danny Aiello stars as Jack Ruby. Oswald doesn’t appear until an hour into this sluggish but sporadically entertaining piece of speculation, in which Oswald isn’t even the shooter. Forget about any major Oswald angle here. Watch for X-Filer and Princeton graduate David Duchovny in a minimal role as Officer Tippit, the Dallas cop killed by Oswald after the assassination. Sherilyn Fenn (post-Twin Peaks, pre-anorexia) is as delicious as her name as fictitious Carousel Club stripper Candy Cane. Aiello’s Ruby gets some amusing lines. In one scene, Cane’s abusive rodeo-rider husband attacks her at the club. Tough-guy Ruby intervenes and then beats the tar out of the husband, bellowing, “You make that the last time you take out your disappointments in life on Jack Ruby!”
• Two movies bear the proud title The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald. The first appeared in 1964. Director Larry Buchanan explores whether Oswald was mentally ill. The film appears in video with another Buchanan take on Texas terrors, titled The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde. Specialty house Something Weird Video in Seattle marketed this twin bill. The other The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald appeared on TV in 1977 and clocks in at an agonizing three hours and 12 minutes in length with John Pleshette as Oswald.
• Love Field (1992) deserves mention not so much for its Oswald presence (just the standard TV scenes to scoot the plot along) but the way it uses the assassination as a mechanism to propel a Jackie-obsessed Dallas hairdresser played by Michelle Pfeiffer on her odyssey to Washington, D.C., for JFK’s funeral. On her trek she meets Dennis Haysbert (he plays President David Palmer on the Fox series 24) and they eventually enjoy some amor prohibido. The film shows nothing more explicit than a hug, but Pfeiffer does appear with a lovely post-coital glow on her face.
• The PBS program Frontline did an episode in 1993 called, “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” Frontline rebroadcast it in November 2013 with an extensive website with more details about its content. While it’s a documentary, the teacher’s guide on the PBS website suggests that students watch the program and then stage their own trial of Oswald. The guide helpfully notes, “The teacher should allow some latitude in legal tactics. The purpose of this exercise is not to teach courtroom strategies. It is to explore the motivations and life of Lee Harvey Oswald.” I hope some of the trials were filmed. I fantasize the videos show students hamming it up as Oswald, while no doubt defended by Johnny Cochran-wannabees shouting, “If the Mannlicher-Carcano don’t fit, you must acquit!”

 By default, Oldman wins the nod as my favorite Oswald, in the acting category. Oldman’s a great performer in a tough role. Challengers will be minimal until, oh, 2060, when some bright-eyed director, now in diapers, decides the 100^th anniversary of the assassination will be a swell time to finally film an Oswald biopic.\

The Books of the Dead

Beyond the big and little screens, Oswald’s malign presence festers and sloshes. On the printed page and Internet, anything goes. Norman Mailer wrote the non-fiction Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery, while Don DeLillo wrote the novel Libra. Hard-boiled crime novelist James Ellroy’s American Tabloid explores the down and very dirty side of organized crime and the FBI and much more in the years leading up to November 22, 1963, with conspiracies, Oswald, and lots of Cubans. Fans of stomach-churning sadism will especially delight in Ellroy’s novel; consider yourself warned.

All Singing, All Dancing, All Dallas
Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman added music to the mix with Assassins. Oswald joins other killers and contenders, such as John Wilkes Booth, John Hinkley, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the Charles Manson acolyte who tried to kill President Ford, to do a little song and dance. (Interesting note: Squeaky Fromme was released from prison in August 2009 after 34 years in prison and lives in Marcy, New York, east of Syracuse. )

Staying on a musical note, Dallas musician Homer Henderson wrote one of the great transgressive songs of all time, “Lee Harvey Was a Friend of Mine.” The only rival inn outrage is Kinky Friedman’s “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Any More.” Henderson’s lyrics include:

I was born in Dallas in 1952,

Lee Harvey moved across the street on Bentley Avenue,

He used to throw the ball to me when I was just a kid,

They say he shot the president---I don't think he did.

And Lee Harvey was a friend of mine,

He used to take me fishing all the time,

He used to throw the ball to me when I was just a kid,

They say he shot the president but I don't think he did. 

Staring at Shadows
If you wallow in Oswaldiana for any length of time, the ambiguities and slippery connections start to play games with your head. Shadows and coincidences merge into confounding patterns. For example, Willie Garson of Ruby also played Oswald in episodes of “Quantum Leap” and “Mad TV.” John Pleshette of 1977’s The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald also had roles in the 2004 version of Helter Skelter (about Charles Manson) and the 1998 TV movie The Day Lincoln was Shot. Coincidences, you say?

The strangest dot-connecting pulls together JFK, Field, and the terrorist-battling series 24. Hang with me here: JFK cast Donald Sutherland in a pivotal role, as the ghostly government operative who steers Costner’s Jim Garrison toward the conspiracy. Then, Dennis Haysbert plays a lead role in Love Field. Finally, in 24, Haysbert played President David Palmer, while Donald’s son Kiefer Sutherland plays the anti-terrorism operative Jack Bauer, who works for Palmer.  President Palmer was assassinated on 24's fifth day. You figure out what it all means, there in the shadows.

Head On Back to Tennessee (Williams)

Lately, people have been talking about their binges of watching Breaking Bad. I’ve never seen a minute of it. Instead, here’s my binge-lite story.

I recently saw Blue Jasmine and liked Woody Allen’s reworking of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Having seen the play at least twice, I could pick up on the references. Last night I went back to the cultural output of Williams himself with The Night of the Iguana, directed by John Huston, with Ava Gardner and teen hottie Sue Lyon melting the DVD with fine support from Richard Burton.

This marked yet another checkmark on my list of Tennessee Williams’ plays and movies I’ve seen. Over the last six months, I’ve done my own slow-mo binge watching of his films and found them all riveting. I didn’t set out to do this; the works just crept up on me like a sinuous southern vine wrapping itself around my Netflix list and, with a drawl and flirtatious glance, beckoning me to abandon myself.

The addiction must have begun in my early years, as so many addictions do, when I saw a high school or college production of The Glass Menagerie. I’ll pay it the highest compliment I can for a literary work: I remembered part of it almost verbatim, the lines that say,

“The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass.”

The current Williams kick began about six months ago when I pulled Suddenly, Last Summer off the shelf of my local library, mostly because I was going through an Elizabeth Taylor movie binge. While I didn’t know what to expect, I was familiar with the iconic beach photo of La Liz, with her wind-tossed hair and tight one-piece swimsuit.

What a treat awaited me! The film’s over-the-top Southern atmosphere (always appealing to me) with high-voltage performances by Taylor and Katherine Hepburn, haunted by the mysterious death of Hepburn’s son on a European vacation, drew me in. Mental illness, asylums, lust-crazed patients, the final confrontation that explains everything and plenty of shrieking and emoting by Taylor made the movie appealing.

I checked out other movies as some buzzer went off in my head in response to external stimuli. When Scarlett Johansson played Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway, I decided to see the original film with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. This was one of those plays and movies I had always heard about but never seen. The title and general outline are so much a part of American culture that I had a sense of deja vue—like I had seen it, but I really hadn’t. And as I did see it, I felt I wasn’t seeing what I expected. Taylor delivered all the voluptuousness I expected, but the undercurrent of childlessness deeply moved me, as her yearnings collided with her husband’s drinking and unspoken feelings about a friend’s suicide.

Night of the Iguana took the basic elements of regret, alcohol, confusion, male dissolution and repressed female yearnings in a Mexican setting, with Richard Burton the fallen minister leading a tour group from a Texas Baptist college on a tour of Mexico. He’s got a troubling penchant for young women, and Carroll Baker steps smartly into the role to show that you don’t have to be unclothed to be steamy.

She soon leaves the stage as Ava Gardner’s Maxine, a hotel proprietor, takes the stage. I had never seen Ava Gardner in a movie before, and let’s say she made a big impression with her tousled hair, forward style and glimpses of longing and vulnerability. She plays off another female character, Deborah Kerr, as a hotel guest. I had to chuckle at the scene where Gardner romps in the Mexican surf with two shirtless Mexican houseboys at her hotel – the scene reminded me of Kerr’s aquatic embrace with Burt Lancaster in the Hawaiian surf 11 years earlier in From Here to Eternity.

Iguana rolls to an explosive end (typical for Williams material) with Burton trussed up in a hammock as he roars through his alcohol addiction. The romantic hopes and tangles sort themselves out and the movie concludes with a tentatively hopeful note.

I’m already looking forward to the next entries in my Williamsfest s drawn from this best-of list – Baby Doll, Summer and Smoke, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. I may not score many points in the pop-culture department, but I know what I like when I see it. Call it the writing, the late 50s-early 60s acting style, the Southern settings – whatever it is, I’m ready to curl up with some more Williams. And based on what I’ve seen, I’m going to spin off into more of Liz Taylor and Ava Gardner.

The Jong Show, Lust Made Flesh

Author Erica Jong is now marking the 40th anniversary of the publication of Fear of Flying. She has sold 27 million copies of it. She can probably be published anywhere she wants, on any topic. She's been a media celebrity since the Nixon era and she's working on a new book called, daringly enough, Fear of Dying (it's not a sequel). She's written 22 books, is 71 years old and looks and sounds great and she likes to write and talk about sex.

When I learned she would be speaking at the Westport Public Library last week, I knew I had to drop everything to get there to hear her. After all these decades of quietly, politely lusting after her, our moment of spiritual communion had arrived.

Actually, I didn't pine for her so much as for the concept of her. Erica the lusty (those early pictures of her!), Erica the educated, Erica the Jewish -- she fit into the image of women that fascinate me. I wasn't a groupie, wasn't a big reader of her non-Fear of Flying works, she just hovered in my imagination more so than, say, Mary Higgins Clark. And the fact that Jong and I live in adjoining towns means that we share even the same physical space--if she likes to go to the Stop & Shop in Westport, CT, that is.

After a slowww commute home from Manhattan, I raced to the library and found the meeting room jammed. I squeezed in and leaned against the back wall, camera and notebook in hand.

"It's an amazing event that Fear of Flying is 40," she said in a wry tone. "I wish I was 40." The sales went far beyond any possible expectation. She aimed for sales of 3,500 given the literary nature of the book. Instead, it found an audience and now three new editions are in the works, along with the digitization of her back list and decades-long discussions about a movie version (big-name actresses like Goldie Hawn and Barbra Streisand have aged into their golden years waiting for the role to materialize).

She gave the audience, mostly middle-aged and above suburban women, a shiver of naughty delight by reading passage of Fear of Flying about the world-historical concept of the zipless fuck. She read,

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game . The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.

"Nowadays they call these things 'hookups.' Are they better for today's girls? I don't think so," she mused.

Whatever Fear of Flying accomplished, it did not herald an ongoing surge of sexual delight. Forty years on, she says with dismay, she's hearing from young women that "the sex out there is not that great," what with men so exhausted and disoriented by computer sex that, come the opportunity to engage with a real-life woman, they just can't perform. Yes, impotence casts its fierce and flaccid shadow across the land.

I was surprised by the amount of time Jong and the audience spent slagging 50 Shades of Grey (soon to be a major motion picture, which Fear of Flying has yet to achieve). She called it "unreadable" and repetitious, badly in need of a copy editor. Not only the writing but the characters came under her harsh commentary. The main character, the young and sullied innocent Anastasia, disappointed Jong with her eager acquisition of stuff, a long, long slide from the enlightened women of the early 1970s, when Fear of Flying raised hopes that "we were new kinds of women" and nobody would have sex for money.

(Jong's comments echo a past theme of hers. In 2011, she edited the anthology Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex, which in one online ad compared itself favorably to 50 Shades, as if the two were in some kind of psychic, feminine competition.)

Time flies, and flying (a reference in part to Jong's literal fear of flying) will soon share space with dying in Fear of Dying. The book, 10 years in the works, is about a 60ish actress, Vanessa Wunderman, who can't get good parts and has to deal with the ageing process, made more painful because of her beauty. Death surrounds her, even her dog, a "Jewdle," or Jewish poodle. Still, "sex and death dance well together."

Asked by an elderly wag who yelled from the back of the room, "Is there sex after death?", Jong quipped, "I hope so. It's supposed to be the ultimate sex."

At 71, Jong knows about mortality, involving lives lived long and deeply. Her mother lived to be 101, and her father into his 90s -- she noted that the day after the Westport presentation was the yahrtzeit, or Jewish anniversary, of her father's passing.

Jong made her politics very clear through the evening. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the Tea Party, even the book Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg -- all the personifications of pure evil. Scandinavian democracies and progressive politics -- all good! I wanted to ask her if she had any political views that deviated even one iota from the standard progressive thinking, but I kept quiet. I didn't want to wreck our special time together with a dumb statement (I'm a master of that, you know) and, anyway, I didn't want to be mauled by the suburban matrons who clearly agreed with everything Jong said. She delivered her message and answered questions with grace and energy and the polish you'd expect from a veteran of decades of readings, interviews and appearances.

I'll check out some of her other books and see how they sound now that I've seen the author in the flesh. Maybe I'll pick up some good writerly ideas.

I should be so blessed at 71 as Jong is.

Listening in on Manly Men, at the Gym

I've belonged to the New York Sports Club since 1996, except for a four-year stretch in the early 2000s. I've always enjoyed the chain, which provides a very consistent experience -- I've used probably 10 locations in New York State and Connecticut since I joined, and I liked all of them.
Being the observer of human behavior that I am, I always keep my ears open for snippets of conversation. Locker rooms are good for that, better in Connecticut than in New York. On the other hand, the weightlifting areas at the New York clubs excel at providing manly conversations, since so many muscular studs are busy flexing their pecs and abs there at lunch.

Case in point, from the Rockefeller Center gym I now visit on weekdays. I was in the weight area downstairs, doing arm curls and other moves with modest weights, 10 lbs., enough to keep toned but not rupture anything. I was the exception. Two men were down there slinging the 105-lb. hand weights (that's 105 pounds in each hand). They looked suitably bulked up.

One man next to me told another, "They lifted 31,000 lbs."

"You mean, 3,100 pounds?" asked his friend.

To clarify, they asked one of the men.

"Yeah, we lifted 31,000 pounds together. It took about two hours," he said modestly. They must have kept a running total of weights x repetitions x men.

The two observers were in awe of this manly accomplishment. 31,000 pounds!

One said in amazement, "Not even A-Rod could do that!"

Hearty male laughter followed. And that's my tale from the sweaty inner sanctums of the New York Sports Club for today.