My First Smiley

Call for the Dead, master spywriter John le Carré's first novel (1961), introduces George Smiley, the rumpled, curmudgeonly British operative, to a generation of suspense enthusiasts.  Short and squat, Oxford-educated, shrewd yet scarcely able to defend himself in violent encounters, Smiley is the anti-Bond, a dogged Inaction Hero without a hint of handsome, with only a reluctant, undashing dash of derring-do.

Structured as a simple mystery, with a murder investigation at its core and only tangential reference to geopolitical intrigue, le Carré's story presents Smiley and his surrounding cast in sharp relief, without the shadowy double-crosses and moral murkiness of his later novels.  Accordingly, this book is an easy read, save for a few quid worth of English colloquialisms, with simple exposition, only a handful of characters to follow, and several recapitulations of "what we know" as the unfolding proceeds. 

Invitingly, Call for the Dead draws the reader into the Smiley oeuvre with this initial foray into the world of old-school spycraft.  The beleaguered agent's life will soon become vastly more complicated.

Fox TV Pulls a "Reverse Heidi"

No, it's not a college football play, a call option trading strategy, nor even a subchapter heading in the Swiss translation of the Kama Sutra.

(Yes, I know Swiss is not a language. Work with me here.)

On November 17, 1968, the AFL's Oakland Raiders came back from a 3-point deficit with 65 seconds to play, scoring 14 points to beat the New York Jets. A thrilling finish to a critical game that would have been forgotten, ultimately -- except for the paradoxical fact that nobody saw it.

Nobody saw it, because NBC executives saw fit to cut away from the end of the football game to begin the previously scheduled, two-hour broadcast of Heidi, a dramatization of the beloved children's novel.

Outraged football fans lit up NBC's switchboard in protest of the network's boneheaded decision. NBC Nightly News anchor David Brinkley, on behalf of the besieged network, apologized to viewers on his Monday evening newscast, concluding in his trademark sardonic tones, "Next time, the little girl from the mountains will have to wait."

Last night, after a 40-year wait, sports fans everywhere exacted their revenge on the pesky little milkmaid. Only it wasn't football but baseball that did her in; and it wasn't NBC but Fox Television; and it wasn't even Heidi but the Hugh Laurie medical drama House that got kicked in the milk bucket.

You see, Major League Baseball playoff games are notoriously slow-paced. Managers bring in parades of new pitchers from the bullpen in the middle and late innings, and each new pitcher needs warm-up time. Pitchers, catchers, managers, and coaches don't want to make a strategy mistake, resulting in endless conferences on the mound. Batters adjust their helmet and batting gloves between pitches and call timeout if the pitcher is taking too long. Closely competitive games often go into extra innings.

Last night's Dodgers-Phillies game, which aired on the Fox Television Network, actually ended in regulation innings, with a Jimmy Rollins double in the ninth giving the Phils the walk-off win. But by the time the parade of 10 pitchers ended and the bullpen catcher spat tobacco juice in the dirt for the last time, a mere 3 hours and 44 minutes later -- reasonable, actually, by post-season standards -- Fox's prime time programs had been delayed, starting with House.

Fox aired House in its entirety immediately after the ballgame. In today's TIVO-driven, DVR-equipped era of time-shifted viewing, however, many fans missed it. Those who had pre-set their DVRs to record House at its scheduled time found that their 60-minute recording consisted of 45 minutes of baseball and only the first 15 minutes of the medical mystery -- minus commercial time. Hardly enough time to warm up the MRI machine; barely enough time for Dr. House to insult two patients and three colleagues.

House fans were livid. On Internet message boards, they posted in protest. On Twitter, they tweeted in hash-tagged agony. A few Luddites (those with DVR capability, anyway) probably even phoned the Fox switchboard. But it was all in vain. None of them realized that it was Fortuna, Karma, and the Universal Studio in the Sky all rolled into one, messing with their viewing obsession and evening up the score. Heidi climbed the Alps; the Fates, represented by Fox, tripped her up (using House's cane) and pushed her back down the mountain, 40 years later. And then they stole her goats.

Nowadays, Dear Reader, if you happen to see a forlorn, 50-year old woman wandering around Canton Bern, tending no goats, her long, blonde braids streaked with gray, her empty milk buckets in crooked hands, take pity. Listen for a while to her wistful, bittersweet stories of when she skipped along mountaintops. Maybe give her a hug and toss a Euro or two into her rickety buckets. Above all, Dear Reader, please don't ever say the words "Baseball", "Fox", or "McCarver" in her presence; that would be the cruelest cut of all. For now you know what turned Heidi 'ho'.

All Tomorrow's Parties

What happens if a bunch of humans are stripped of their rationality and critical thinking abilities, electrified beyond the point of recovery with high-voltage music (and non-music), and let loose en masse to collide into one another for several days in a village?

I think I just caught a glimpse of that unsettling scenario tonight at a Milwaukee Film Festival offering. All Tomorrow's Parties, a feature-length documentary, captures the annual U.K. rock festival of the same name, for which various leading bands "curate" each year's acts. Named for a Velvet Underground lyric, the ATP festival was conceived as a counterreaction to the creeping corporate control of youth culture and music -- so sayeth the painfully inarticulate kid interviewed in one clip -- and by the usual metaphoric extension, as a critique of all society, man.

Staging a festival without overbearing corporate sponsorship is laudable. When you do that, however, the best act you can get just might be Iggy and the Stooges. That's okay; the real action in ATP is in and around the decrepit resort dormitories, which look like the worst two-level, exterior-entrance motels that you've ever stayed in. Here, beyond the obligatory Intermittent Spontaneous Musical Occurrences, we're treated to clips of drunken post-partiers wandering around aimlessly, peering into other people's rooms, and falling through cheaply constructed second-floor balconies. Before you can attend tomorrow's parties, it would seem, you have to survive today's first.

Anarchic and chaotic as the music festival itself, the documentary cobbles together miscellaneous film clips gathered from numerous attendees and participants over the years. Like the festival, the film seems not so much curated as thrown together. The only concession to the left-brain that craves information and a semblance of order is the briefly displayed band names, with curator and festival year, for a number of leading acts. The director overuses a multiple-windows technique for concert footage; somebody must have thought it looked really cool back in film school.

I didn't like many of the bands, but so what; it's no longer my generation's turn. Choppy editing aside, All Tomorrow's Parties is a fair depiction of a significant youth music gathering, now sprouting offshoots around the globe. A cultural time capsule, I suggest it be suitably buried for posterity. Perhaps in velvet. Definitely underground.

Hail to the 1970's! (Or Not.)

Are you embarrassed by your own generation? I was, at the time: the mid-to-late 1970's. I still am, to an extent.

From the predictable, drunken calls for semiprofessional garage bands to faithfully reproduce "Freebird"; to my college classmate who squealed his tires in a trashy salute while pulling away from my grandparents' house; to sportscoats in patterns and colors not found in nature; it was not the best decade in terms of taste.

We started the decade with a power-mad, bombing-happy crook in office and ended it with a moralistic, tone-deaf technocrat. When President Carter phoned U.S. Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks to congratulate him on the team's astounding Gold Medal victory, including the "Miracle on Ice" game against the Soviets, Carter explained that he didn't watch the games because he was working on the Afghanistan crisis. No complaint here about the man's priorities, but he could have worked on his audience identification.

Don't get me started about President Ford's "Whip Inflation Now" buttons.

When Reggie Jackson held up three boastful fingers to the camera upon hitting three home runs in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series, the social virtues of modesty and good sportsmanship flew out the window, forever lost to the ages. When you see T.O. autographing a football in the end zone, or Jim Edmonds turning a routine fly ball into a highlight-reel catch, think Reggie. Braggadocio is classic and human, but amplified bombast is what our culture produced in the 1970's.

A friend of mine calls us a Lost Generation. I say, it's all been downhill since the 1969 Mets and the moon landings.

Our next-door neighbor's dad had a theory about the previous decade: the reason that the 1960's kids were angry enough to protest was that their pants were all too tight. Disco notwithstanding, ours in the 1970's may have been too loose, culturally speaking. Thirty years on, it still shows.

On Baby Boomers, Silver Zloty's, and Cosmic Things

It's happened. Our tame, elegant family cruiser, The Silver Zloty, has become an object of nostalgia. If only in our own minds, that is; you don't hear the music industry writing songs about 1992 Camry's. But it had to happen, just as assuredly as once-modern '57 Chevy's, '66 Mustangs, and '73 Super Beetles in their time became wistful objects of recollected desire. My '82 Tercel may have been the bee's knees, and our '88 Dodge 600 took us from Point A's to Point B's, but the Silver Zloty really aims to please!

This fact was driven home, so to speak, on this past weekend's round trip to Madison on I-94 for a Mothers' Day gathering. The Silver Zloty's ancient C-V joints popped and creaked, its tires flopped, its obsolescent cassette deck whirred, and its A/C system went unused due to a lack of ozone-destroying freon, its original supply of which we'd long ago released in a bid to kill off what remains of Earth's atmosphere. Long the recipient of $500 and $800 repair increments, per Wait's Laws, the Zloty has seen us through three multiple-trip moves, numerous weekend outings and holiday sojourns, and hundreds upon hundreds of workday commutes. It's been the sole survivor in our livery stable for more than ten years. It's still running -- just like us.

When my beloved spousal unit and I take the Silver Zloty out, fill it with 87 octane, and pop in the cassette of The B-52's Cosmic Thing album -- our soundtrack for twenty years of happy travel, the tape itself starting to fade and wobble -- it's not just a drive but a cruise. "Roam if you want to!/Roam around the world!"

Road trip!

You Never Can Lose, You Always Win

I'm not a jazz musician on a Saturday night bandstand. I don't have the talent to improvise nine or ten riffs around a recognizable theme before powering up with a Big Band flourish on the last verse while the beloved, Italian-American bandleader croaks out the familiar lyrics, wails out the climax, and takes a warm bow to scattered applause in the room.

But if I were, I'd arrange an 8-minute jam to the Schenectady Savings Bank's 30-second television commercial of the 1960's and 1970's, the one that's still lodged in my cranium like a crowbar:

          Get the most,
          Get the most,
          At Schenectady Savings Bank!
          It's the most,
          Yes the most,
          That's Schenectady Savings Bank!
          You never can lose, you always win
          When Schenectady's the bank you keep your money in!
          Get the most,
          Get the most,
          That's Schenectady Savings Bank!

God forbid this should be the last tune going through my mind when I pass away, but based on the commercial's reach and frequency when I was growing up, not to mention its penetrating melody and vocal harmonies, I wouldn't bet against it. It's not a bad little tune, actually; the syncopation is rather catchy. I'll take it over that cloying, ubiquitious Jared Jewelers jingle anytime. A toast to the composer -- wherever he may be banking now.

As for the lyrics: the careful observer will notice that there's some serious public policy embedded in the song's bridge, resulting in today's claims in perpetuity on taxpayer dollars. I'll bet Bernanke and Geithner wish they could musically improvise on that "never can lose" line right about now.

Schenectady Savings Bank eventually merged with Hartford Federal Savings & Loan in 1982; the combination was federalized and renamed Northeast Savings. Northeast Savings was bought out by Shawmut National Corp. in 1994; which merged into Fleet Financial Group in 1995; which in turn merged with BankBoston -- itself a 1996 merger of the Bank of Boston and BayBanks -- to form FleetBoston Financial in 1999. All of which was acquired by Bank of America in 2004.

In 2009, Bank of America, too big to fail, received $20 billion of taxpayer money and $118 billion in government guarantees against toxic assets.

Get the most? I'll say!