by Ralph Maltese | Sep 25, 2016 | Uncategorized
Maintaining the Maintenance
In 1964 I saved up my coins I earned from my job as an assistant cable splicer for Bell Telephone in New York City, and purchased a transistor radio. Back then to have mobile music, to be able to listen to Dean Martin belt out his hit Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime while walking up Sixth Avenue was a big deal. Granted, what music I listened to was limited to what my favorite radio station played. That transistor radio was the first non-hand-me-down electronic device that I owned. On my first day of ownership I pored through the instruction manual, especially the part about maintenance. I was required by the warranty to keep the radio clean and free from crime and dirt. This was difficult since I worked in a job performed often under the streets of New York City. It would be like asking Ed Norton to keep his vest sparkling clean and dry while he worked in the sewer.
I did my best. One of the instructions cautioned “Remove batteries if you do not use the device for a long period of time.” What was a long period of time? A week? A month? A year? Eventually the transistor radio went the way of all toys. I failed at my first maintenance responsibility and did not remove the batteries and the contacts were corroded. My defense is that at the time of my transistor radio’s death, I was in college, and maintenance of owned things was not a priority. But it seems that everything I have purchased since my collegiate years requires my attention.
One of the items that almost every family needs to maintain is a car. During my youth I changed the oil, rotated the tires, replaced the wipers, and washed and waxed the car repeatedly. Now my car sends me an email telling me what maintenance is due—five point engine checkup, fluid replenishment, and ash tray emptying. But the smaller items also require periodic checkups. And these maintenance instructions have become more authoritarian, more threatening than ever. “Probably need to clean the keyboard more often than the rest of the PC. Dust and debris [like shrapnel?] can collect between the keys and can affect their functioning. The surface of the keyboard and keys can be wiped over with a cloth lightly dampened with warm non-soapy water. You must avoid getting the keyboard wet as it may cause damage to the keyboard circuits.” Isn’t non-soapy water wet?
All our electronic devices must be plugged in and periodically charged, itself a consumption of energy and time. Maintaining them requires special care. “Dampen the corner of a soft microfiber cloth with a trickle of water. Never apply water or cleaning solutions directly to your iPhone. With the damp corner, gently wipe the iPhone, paying special attention to the touch screen, but avoid wiping the ports. If your screen is especially dirty, you should attempt to remove surface dirt with a soft brush or compressed air first.” I never imagined I would have to take my phone down to the local gas station to use its compressed air.
Even when built in obsolescence has run its course, and I have to replace my phone, I can’t simply use my trash can. “iPhone must be disposed of separately from household waste. When iPhone reaches its end of life, contact local authorities to learn about disposal and recycling options.” “Hello, Sheriff, I have an expired phone here. You wanna come pick it up, or do you want me to bring it to the coroner?”
And a significant portion of my life is devoted to maintaining non-electronic devices. “To keep your knives sharp at home, use a Chicago Cutlery honing steel; Use a cleanser made specifically for metal. Dampen a soft cloth and sprinkle some of the cleanser on it. Rub the stainless steel with the grain.” And, “For concealer and foundation brushes, clean at least once a week to prevent a buildup of product. And because these brushes are used on your face, the cleaner, the better. Brushes that are used around the eyes should be cleaned at least twice a month, while all others can be washed once a month.” Some of the maintenance instructions demand we only use exotic items to clean our devices: “Use specialized cleaning solutions to clean your coffee maker.” Like soap? “After going over the entire sink with the cleanser, rinse off the excess by using a feather from a Peruvian condor.” Okay, I made the last one up. But I am glad I do not live in a log home. “The best preservative family for house logs are the borates. They are less toxic to humans than table salt, they don’t change the color of the wood, they have no smell and they poison the wood as a food supply to just about every wood destroying organism known to man, including decay fungi, beetles, and termites. However, there are limitations. Wood needs to be retreated about every 5 years when it is in contact with the ground. The wood needs to have some moisture to allow for proper diffusion and you must apply and maintain a water repellent finish over the borate treated wood to keep them from leaching out.”
Devices I associate with simple removal require my attention. “Once a month empty a tray of ice cubes into the sink and turn on the garbage disposal to grind up the ice cubes.” Another maintenance hint. “Do keep your garbage disposal clean. Pour a little dish soap inside and let the garbage disposal run for a minute or so with some cold water after washing dishes.”
I could spend every waking moment taking care of the things I own. Henry David Thoreau, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, cautioned, “We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us.”
The older I become, the more I time I seem to spend on maintenance, especially the maintenance of my body and my health. When young every movement, every jump or hop was thoughtless, was conducted free of thought. Now every physical action demands thought, each twist and turn requiring my full attention. Even before the Parkinson’s, I awoke in the morning and performed triage—-checking the inventory of all ailments and testing the joints still working. Then there is the morning, mid-afternoon, during supper and before bed pill scheduling, a ritual that causes some consternation during vacations.
I try to maintain this flesh and blood frame by periodic visits to a variety of specialized physicians all of whom have their own instructions about diet and exercise (I have an exercise regimen tailored to the Parkinson’s and cardiac conditions which I include as part of my maintenance). Every day the newspaper or online information warns me about the avoidance of a food or drink and the ingestion of a miracle fruit/vegetable/herb that would contribute to a superb maintenance of my not-so-superb body. And during those few moments not spent maintaining the things I own (including my body), I reflect on the whyness of it all. Basically I get tired of all the “shoulds.” The “shoulds,” especially compared to the “coulds,” are often more time consumptive, boring, and occasionally painful. Another philosopher theorized that if we spent our time contemplating meaning and purpose we would go crazy so we focus on the mundane. Thoreau also observed “Our life is frittered away by detail.”
I realize that I have to maintain my maintenance. At what point do I decide that enough maintenance is enough? Am I living to maintain? When do I remind myself that the reason for the maintenance is so that, ostensibly, I could live. Where does life come in among the care for the car and the mobile phone and the garbage disposal unit? How do I build into my maintenance routine time to enjoy a food that is not healthy for me, that won’t lower my hdl or cleanse my internal system. How do I reserve time to curl on the couch and watch an old Barbara Stanwyck film noir, or to sit amongst the trees in my backyard allowing life to wash over me? Obviously each of us has to work out that balance. Despite all the physical maintenance, the eventuality is still the same, and the meaning of my existence becomes more important than that finality. My maintenance is not going to provide eternal life.
“Sitting is the new smoking,” so goes modern conventional advice. But I enjoy spending time in contemplation and observation. Einstein’s famous quote echoes through my mind. “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” I would much rather spend what time I have left imagining than lifting weights or using cleanser to rub the stainless steel sink with the grain.
P.S. I just spent four hours on the phone with tech support to correct a computer glitch. I love it when I spend time on my time saving devices which allow me to spend time on my other time saving devices.
by Ralph Maltese | Sep 18, 2016 | Uncategorized
Am I Who They Think I Am?
I was watching on television either the national political campaigners or the Olympic synchronized swimmers. I forget which, although both were pretty funny. Both made a lot of splashes, were upside down most of the time, and, despite their efforts, did not get very far in the pool. My mind drifted and I wondered if I was wise. How does one know if one is wise? Centuries ago young people considered “elders” with deforming arthritis in their knuckles to be wise because to get that condition they had lived to the ripe old age of forty. Socrates, during his Apology (defense at his trial) claimed he was the wisest man he knew. His reasoning was thus: Socrates sought out the most learned men he knew and questioned them. He came to the conclusion that he was the wisest man because, unlike the “experts,” who claimed to know, he knew that he did not know. Socrates’ tactic was, through dialogue, to reduce his “expert” to ignorance or “aporia.” This was a good thing because through admitting ignorance, thus unchained by social biases, scholars can begin the search for truth. There is a koan in Zen Buddhism, “Who were you before your parents named you?” This is usually interpreted as “who are you, your identity, before your culture, your time and place, infused you with its belief systems, values, and mores?” Unfortunately for Socrates, his wisdom did not mitigate his sentence.
I know that I do not know a great deal, unlike when I was twenty-one when I knew everything—I thought I knew why people behaved the way they did, what was right and what was wrong, the meaning of life, what was the meaning of the Beatle song, “I Am the Walrus,” and how to stretch Hamburger Helper with filler during the lean years. So am I wiser now because I have more questions than answers? Has my Parkinson’s slowed me down, including putting my perspective in first gear so that I see things more clearly? I am not certain. I do know that I fret less about things. My college roommate’s mantra was, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” I try not to.
There is a lot of small stuff out there. One piece of small stuff I don’t fret about is how people perceive me. Teaching taught me that. The ancient Greeks (who considered themselves quite modern, mind you. Millennia hence will we be considered ancient Americans, or ancient reality show watchers, or ancient internet surfers?) believed that every person had two faces—the face they knew and the public face or how people saw them (sometimes referred to as the “daemon”) Early in my teaching career I erroneously thought I controlled the image I projected as a teacher. I was the nice genial fellow who was there to help them navigate the waters of intellectual curiosity, and, well, learn things. I worked hard at developing that image. Through a great deal of effort I created what I hoped were engaging learning activities, struggled to be just and fair in my small domain, and I tried to demonstrate my genuine care for their well-being.
Then there strode into my classroom one September the lad who thought I was not that person I thought I was. The class filed in, some nodding greeting, some nervously seeking the last seats, others flashing mini-smiles on that first day. Grumio entered slowly with a glare spread across his visage and, all the time that he took to corral the last seat in the middle row, that glare was directed at me. That look of anger and possibly hatred was quite disconcerting. As I introduced the opening day festivities, expectations and goals, I found myself repeatedly returning to Grumio who never once took his eyes off me. How could anyone dislike me so much on the first day of school? Was my reputation that bad?
This dueling eye contact continued for a couple of weeks until I called Grumio’s counselor and asked her to find out what was going on. Ray called me into her office the following week.
“I called Grumio into my office and asked him about you.”
“And?”
“He does hate you…vehemently.”
“Hate me? Why?”
“We didn’t get that far. Want me to transfer him?”
“No.” I was never into transferring problems. “But see if you can find a reason.”
For the next month I taught Grumio’s class with my back to the blackboard, writing on it without removing my eyes from Grumio. My penmanship was bad enough but writing behind my head resulted in total illegibility. Aware of his hatred, I went out of my way to make every test and essay appraisal more than favorable to Grumio and my politeness to him increased exponentially. Still that awful set of dagger eyes put me on edge.
Finally Ray called me down to her office.
“Well, I found out why Grumio hates you…he thinks you are Mexican.”
“I am not Mexican.”
“But he thinks you are.”
“What’s he got against Mexicans?” Why pick on any race, especially one with a rich cultural history?
“Who knows with kids? Or with adults for that matter. Maybe his great great grandfather was at the Alamo or some Mexican girl with taste wouldn’t dance with him or maybe he once ate a bad taco. Who the hell knows?”
Now I was provided with an ethical dilemma. Do I not tell Grumio that I am NOT Mexican and continue to be the object of his seething hate, or do I get myself off the hook by telling him I was not a Mexican and thus tacitly be complicit in his hatred of an entire culture? Do I teach the remaining of the school year as his “bigotee” or do I join his clanship as fellow bigot? I opted for the former and continued to use my chalk with my back to the blackboard.
Sometime later in the school year, from some unknown source, Grumio discovered that my ancestry was not Mexican. His eyes softened somewhat, but he never exhibited any warmth or congeniality towards me. I tried to talk with him several times, but there are some rivers that cannot be bridged. My failure to communicate with Grumio and to help him eradicate his bigotry and seething hatred was one failure which still haunts me.
The lesson I learned from that experience was that I could set an example of proper behavior for my students, but I could not control how they saw me. How they saw me was almost totally dependent on what they invested in me. To some I was the helpful and caring loco parentis, to some the authority figure, to some the hated father or the good fatherly cop there to protect them from bullies, to some the only person between them and four years partying at a flaky college at their parents’ expense. Still others saw me as a societal failure from the first day of school—usually this attitude was learned from parents who judged all humans by the number of things they owned. “I mean, what can this schmuck holding a piece of chalk pulling in only forty thousand a year teach me? If he had any talent or brains he would be CEO like my dad of a company that makes tuxedos for dogs and other crap.” One of my educational goals was to acquaint my students with certain realities such as the fact that education/intelligence and wealth do not automatically go hand in hand. As my father told me repeatedly, give a million bucks to a gorilla and all you have is a rich gorilla. Look around you. I rest my case.
So I sit in front of the television or peruse the newspaper at the breakfast table and chuckle at the tremendous effort and energy human beings expend to project their public image, their equivalent of the Greek daemon. Cosmetics are a multi-billion dollar industry as is fashion design and hair styling and all the other ingredients of our public clothing display…all to create that daemon, that public image. Consider the money poured into shaping voters’ images of candidates all to control how the people see them, ignoring the fact that people see what they need to invest in that candidate. The candidate is a chameleon colored by the voter’s dreams. The truth about the candidate—what he or she has really done or said is irrelevant. If I want the candidate to be my hero or heroine, then no amount of reality will change that. In fact, the more bad things ascribed to my candidate, the stronger I defend my choice, clinging to what I want to believe. Studies have demonstrated that the adherence to an idea, no matter how stupid or irrational the concept, is directly proportional to how many people believe it. In other words, if I am running for office, I go for the numbers, and outrageous and stupid pronouncements only get me more air time (free) and thus more voters. If I can plug into their imagined fears, I have a good chance. Democracy going back to the ancient Greek’s version was built on the belief that voters could put aside what they wanted to see in a candidate and made their decision on what was really there. I wish Grumio had done that. Human nature, however…. The Stage Manager from Thornton’s Wilder’s play, Our Town, says in the cemetery overlooking the fictional Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, “Wherever you go near the human race, there are layers and layers of nonsense.”
So am I wise? I think the trick to being wise is, like Socrates, to admitting to having more questions than answers, to wonder at the immenseness of the universe and to marvel at the mysteries of life. Shouting to the world that one is wise does not convince people it is true. Even Socrates saying politely that he was the wisest man did not save his life. No. I think wisdom has to be conferred upon one rather than simply claimed…a concept political candidates should observe. As the poet Rumi said, “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” At least I am more relaxed, not sweating the small stuff. How people see me is what they want to see. I’ve got nothing to do with it. Whew! That’s a relief. Think I’ll go out in the backyard and watch the trees gently swaying in the summer breeze.
by Ralph Maltese | Sep 11, 2016 | Uncategorized
“Lights, Camera, Action, Squat.”
Tastes change over time. When I was a ten year old, the idea of sliding a raw oyster down my gullet had all the appeal of licking a movie theater floor. During my collegiate career any form of edible substance was acceptable. A Slim Jim was a highly touted study treat. The same is true with taste in movies. Re-watching The Creature from the Black Lagoon, I cannot recapture that childhood sense of suspense and thrill, as the heroine spends four hours watching the monster approach her before she considers the possibility that she can get up and run away from him. The film is the same. The film viewer is different.
One thing about the movies. Movie going is often a communal event. Kids will jump up and exclaim, “We’re going to the movies!” Teenagers, spending six hours determining what the group should do, inevitably fall back on, “Let’s go to the movies.” Does not matter what movie really. Movie going is an event unto itself.
During my economically lean college years, our favorite movie-going involved taking the P&W (Villanovans called it the Toonerville Trolley or the Pig and Whistle) to the 69th Street Terminal which housed two movie theaters. Not only was the purchase price within the range of students who survived on Peanut Butter Helper, but one store in the terminal sold, at a modest price, hot onion rings. We would chip in to the Snack Fund and buy a paper cup or two of those delicious, round, batter-crusted ovals and inside the theater we tantalized our fellow movie goers with the enticing aroma. Some withstood the torture, but most raced out in the middle of the showing to get some of their own onion rings. It was the sixties, and we knew how to be subversive.
The 69th Street Terminal Theater often showed two movies for the price of one, and, if we were lucky, one of those movies was from the twentieth century. The first film was usually a relatively new (though two star rated) endeavor involving spying, adventure, jewel heists, shootouts or Brigitte Bardot. The second showing was often a cinematic venture that we had already seen on the Student Union television several times, usually a western. One such movie involved Jimmy Stewart as the sheriff, and, since all six of us had seen the film several times, we knew what was about to happen, so we felt obliged to tell Jimmy how to survive the gunfight. “Lookout Sheriff behind the rain barrel!!,” we would shout. From behind the rain barrel up would pop a villain, but Jimmy heard us and wheeled and dropped the evil doer. When you have seen a movie nine times, you have to generate your own entertainment, although the other members of the audience did not see it that way. Necessity is the mother of invention, and as, college students, there was plenty of financial necessity to go around. We learned to entertain ourselves.
Cinema for me is one of those threads that weave in and out of the fabric of my life. When I met Polley in graduate school, we talked about, among other things, movies. A movie maven, she was horrified to learn that I had not seen Gone With the Wind—ever! Having watched that dreamboat Clark Gable six times she insisted that, for our dating to continue, I experience the fictional history of the ante-bellum south. Luckily for me, Gone With the Wind was playing at a theater in nearby Indianapolis, so we continued to date. I liked the burning of Atlanta best.
The cinematic sewing of the fabric of my life resumed one summer during my teaching career. Late one August I received another one of those calls from one of my assistant principals. “We want a different take on teaching the Cinema elective. We immediately thought the best teacher for this would be you. How about it?” I knew this was code. The summer before it was the Creative Writing elective. Two summers before that it was the Computer Assisted Composition course. Four summers before that it was the Journalism course. The code was encased in flattery for my teaching skills, but what the compliment really meant was that the teacher who formerly taught the course was sick of it or learned to hate teaching it, and before the assistant principal had telephoned me, nine other teachers had declined. These calls were always made about a week or two before the start of the school year, so I began a crash course in: semiotics, mis en scene, anamorphic effect and what a key grip did (supervises the other grips who support camera movement) and what role a gaffer played (electrician). The truly great thing about being assigned a new course is that, in order to teach it, one has to become a student again and learn everything he can about the subject….albeit in a short time frame.
At the very beginning of teaching Cinema, I decided that the approach would be similar to teaching literature. Art is often self-reflexive. It is influenced by the culture that produces it, and the culture is frequently changed by that same art. Cinema is the one art form that encompasses all the other art forms: literature, music, visual arts, dance, kinesthetics, etc. The major problem was convincing my high school students that they could actually learn something about the movies as an art form.
“Mr. Maltese. Really! We’ve all been to the movies—what can we learn about the movies, I mean, really…..can we watch Dumb and Dumber?”
No, we cannot. My biggest problem was what cinematic tour de force NOT to show. My first choice, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, initiated a revolt. “Aw, Mr. Maltese, I have never seen a black and white movie in my life. We have color now. Why can’t we watch a color movie?!! Anyone else in here want to watch a black and white movie?” Many shaking of heads. In these situations I have a strategy.
“Would you feel better if you voted as a class?”
Many nodding of heads.
“Okay. Let’s vote. Who doesn’t want to watch City Lights, a black and white movie?”
Twenty-five out of thirty hands go up.
“Okay. Put your hands down. Do you feel better voting?”
Again, many nodding of heads. “Good. I am glad you feel the joy of democracy. Now, City Lights was one of the hardest films Chaplin made…”
“Hey, Mr. Maltese, we voted NOT to see City Lights!”
“That is correct. And, if this class were a democracy, we would NOT view City Lights.”
God bless democracy, but not in the classroom. Dumb and Dumber will not reign.
As I taught Cinema over the years the pattern was always the same. They protested, and then grudgingly liked most of the movies I showed. Most importantly some of them even learned. I would stop often, pointing out a cinematic technique or a contribution to the film’s theme, or a camera movement. The longer I taught any course the more reinforced was the lesson I learned for all my teaching. My teaching responsibility was not to indulge their interests (especially recalling my own adolescent predelictions), but to expand their interests.
I knew I was on the right track when a student told me one day, “My boyfriend hates you.”
“Do I know your boyfriend?”
“No, but he hates you because we will be watching a movie in my living room and he will have his arm around me, and I stop the movie a lot and point out the lighting or the dolly movement of the camera.”
“Oh, I see.”
When I introduce Casablanca, another groan goes up. “Another old movie!” But the end result is usually the same. I can tell by their eyes they are immersed in the film. Sitting on the edges of their seats awaiting Ilsa’s decision, most of the young ladies stomp their feet and yell at the end of the film, “She stood have stayed with Rick!!!! What a dummy!!” The little darlings. It just goes to show–quality will out. This, even though I taught Casablanca as a propaganda film and not as a romance. I point out the resistance fighter dying at the foot of the poster of Marshall Petain (the Nazi collaborator), Rick (representing America) tossing aside personal interests and getting involved, Captain Renault committing himself to the cause, and that wonderful scene in which the French people in Rick’s Café led by Victor Laszlo sing La Marseillaise and drown out the Nazi officers and their version of Die Wacht am Rhein. If truth be told, it is the greatest military victory the French accomplished in both World Wars. They should have employed that tactic more often. I remind students how the audience, seeing Casablanca for the first time in 1942, did not know how the war would end.
“Geez. Didn’t they have history books?”
“Hmm. Our next film….Citizen Kane.”
Technology drives cinema. This is different from some other art forms. Having a better keyboard or pen does not translate into better writing. But better computer graphics and more sophisticated cameras can open up possibilities for directors. High speed film helped Stanley Kubrick shoot scenes in candlelight for the first time. The zoom lens aided other directors in their camera movements.
Cinematic criticism is another story. While teaching cinema I required students to read several critical reviews of movies we viewed. I still occasionally read reviews if only to chuckle at the frequent sesquipedalism and pomposity of the reviewer. I am convinced that the more confusing and irrational the plot of the film, the higher ratings it will receive. Consider this portion of a New Yorker review by David Denby. “the impatience, the sharpness, the full-bore egotism that modulates into rueful self-recognition. Intellectual passions have hardened (in many cases) into arid rectitude; autumnal emotions such as sarcastic rage dominate the dinner table; and, in the future, the terminating scythe awaits. The positive side of the shift is that these roles bring out the toughness of aging hides.” It does not matter what film this refers to. It could be The Creature from the Black Lagoon. What I do know for certain is that none of this happened at my dinner table. And I have yet to experience “autumnal emotions.”
This kind of criticism must be fun to write. Here is my modern artsy attempt at a critical review of Soup to Nuts starring The Three Stooges. “The pugilistic triumvirate are once again thrust into a universal dystopia unplagued by a moral epistemological compass and unfettered by economic deprivation. Their tactile hostilities, buoyed by a fraternal covalent bonding that is only superseded by a primal quest for identity, result in a reflexivistic cascade of eye-poking and nose twisting…a wheeling tantrum tour de force.”
I do know this. Highly rated modern artsy attempts at film making and television (think Orphan Black, American Odyssey, Orange is the New Black, all decent shows) must include two scenes. There is the obligatory cocaine sniffing scene. At some point in the film, the protagonist must sniff the white stuff whether he or she is in the middle of a pool, the middle of a sky dive or the middle of a fire fight. This is another attempt by amateur film makers to be “cutting edge,” as if doing drugs is cool. The other scene that modern artsy attempts at movie-making must have is the toilet scene. A city slum apartment, a posh party or a fire fight in the desert is the locale for the protagonist to relieve himself or herself. One movie combined both kinds of scenes in one take. I don’t know why this trend is, but it is true. I am puzzled as to why directors believe that a human function that has been rehearsed by millions of people over thousands of years is worthy of a camera shot. I guess this is what they consider pushing the envelope. Suddenly, urinals and lavatories and outhouses have become the cinematic rage. It is as if modern movie makers have just discovered one of the most basic of human activities. I don’t remember a shot of a person relieving himself or herself in Citizen Kane or Lawrence of Arabia (and there was plenty of desert to do so), or Singing in the Rain. This trend is also popular in modern television series. Entire plot expositions are delivered in rest rooms while the characters are in the process. Well, not all television series. I don’t remember such a scene in Downton Abbey.
I envision a conversation between a modern assistant director and his boss.
“Hey, Cecil. The picture kinda bogs down here. Suppose during the chase through the rain forest, we insert a potty scene? While Olivia is squatting, she flashes back to her and Antonio punting on the Thames and she realizes that she has loved Antonio all along. I mean it is a romance, right?”
“Sounds good. Work out the camera angles.”
When the actors finish these scenes, they must also spend several minutes staring profoundly. Staring pointlessly for five or six hours is another artsy attempt some directors employ, especially those from Scandinavia.
I also see a pattern in the assignment of rating stars. A four star movie is a film that neither the critics nor the movie goers understand. This cinematic triumph is rarely a comedy, and, if it is labeled a comedy, it is usually not funny.
An artistic movie is awarded five stars if we do not understand it, and if our minds drift during the first half of the movie, and we start thinking about mowing our lawns diagonally instead of using a crisscross pattern.
Despite the many poorly made movies that do not withstand the test of time, going to the movies is still a phenomenal artistic event. We sit in the dark and lose our world and embrace the fantasy that is projected on the screen, the two dimensional cosmos that we know is not real but which continues to elicit the tears and the laughter and the excitement and the dreams that drive the projectors in our brains. We want to shout out to the heroine as the monster approaches to “Get up! Get up! Run away!” But we cannot interact with the reality of the flat screen. We invest our energy in the temporary belief that what we see and hear on the silver screen is real and worthy of our emotional and intellectual commitment. We are drawn in. If the movies is made well, like a good book, it refreshes our soul.
by Ralph Maltese | Sep 4, 2016 | Uncategorized
Frankly, My Dear, I Give a Damn
My back was hurting from the Parkinson’s or from the humidity or from the way I slept last night. Who the heck knows? So I tried to find a comfortable position in my easy chair and searched through my six hundred television channels when I hit gold. The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the 1954 cinematic gem starring Richard Carlson, Julia Adams, and Richard Denning. This was the stuff that filled my eight year old brain with nightmares of beasties hiding in my bedroom closet. So I started watching, eagerly trying to recapture that youthful thrill of vicarious danger. Five minutes later I was wondering what was so nightmarish about an amphibian in a shaggy, baggy suit of badly painted green cardboard scales staggering slowly in the marshland. Some fond artistic remembrances are best left locked in the vault of undusted memories.
My mind drifted as I watched the aquatic monster stagger slowly toward the heroine who had tripped and fallen on an imaginary leaf and spent considerable time looking back at the snail-like approach of the Creature as he closed the distance. I figured she had about two hours to get up and continue running away so I began to reflect on my youthful movie going experiences.
Down the block from my apartment building in the Bronx was the Avalon movie theater. My older brother was an usher, and, for fifty cents, I would spend most of my Saturdays at the Avalon watching two features, ten Merry Melody cartoons, a short subject featuring the Three Stooges or Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello, two adventure sequels sporting heroes like Flash Gordon and Commander Cody and at least one newsreel, The Eyes and Ears of the World, the latter affording us kids a break in the action and a chance to go to the snack bar.
Adults view the life of a kid as a simple time, but to a kid there are no simple decisions. Quarter in hand I agonized over what to buy at the snack bar of the Avalon. There were many factors to consider: 1) price; Ice Cream Bonbons were everyone’s favorite but they were expensive, and the four bonbons would melt quickly which affected factor 2) lasting power; would the candy, carefully rationed, last me through an afternoon or would the edible be gone before the first cartoon ended? 3) mood; was my sweet tooth monster requiring sustenance or did my salty taste buds want to be fed? Did I feel my young age or was I aspiring to be more adult in my choice of candy thus giving serious consideration to King’s Candy Cigarettes or Bubble Gum Cigars or a Licorice Pipe (horrible taste but elegant)? Before me in the glass case were arraigned my choices: Charleston Chew, Jujubes, Candy Necklace, Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy (Banana flavor, please), Jujyfruits, Chuckles, Boston Baked Beans, Bit-O-Honey, Necco Wafers, Mike and Ike and their cousin Good and Plenty, and Dots candy. For some reason the older kids who sat in the balcony preferred tossing Dots candy at their victims below. Cherry, interestingly, seemed to hurt the most. If I made the right choice, the candy would carry me through at least one of the features. To this day my dentist is still trying to extract a remnant of a Peanut Chew I worked on during a Roy Rogers and Dale Evans cinematic triumph, Rainbow Over Texas.
The Avalon was noisy as kids laughed and shouted at the screen and jostled for elbow position on the arm rests or screamed when the Creature from the black lagoon, eschewing the boat’s ladder, struggles mightily as he climbs aboard the vessel harboring the heroine whose back seems to be perpetually turned toward the monster in the shaggy suit. But the worse moments came when the characters on the screen were just talking, deep into exposition, or holding each other tight and kissing and exhibiting other forms of what we kids considered adult violence. That is when the wrestling broke out, and I had to be on the constant lookout for incoming volleys of Dots candy from the urchins in the balcony. Between watching the antics of my fellow movie viewers and spending considerable time scraping off the gum on the soles of my shoes (the Avalon theater floor was a virtual minefield of gum and other candy splotches), a significant portion of screen watching was lost.
No such minefields or noisy intrusions existed in the movie theater that my mother and father attended. Saturday nights my mother required my little brother Jimmy and I dress in our best school clothes (which were always hand-me-downs from our cousins) because we were going to the elegant Loew’s Paradise Movie Theatre (that is “theatre” with an “re”) on the Grand Concourse. I wondered why my parents brought Jimmy and me to these adult entertainment events. At first I assumed it was because on Dish Night at the Loew’s Paradise my mother would get an extra place setting if her children came along. That was not the case (although the Loew’s Paradise did furnish the porcelain dinnerware for our Sunday sit-downs which usually accommodated a substantial number of relatives). Then I considered that my father would prefer to pay our admission than to hire a babysitter. Only years later did I realize the true reason. Families of Italian descent do not hire babysitters ever. The children accompany their madres and padres everywhere—even the youngest family members are in tow: weddings, baptisms, funerals, shopping, father’s tax audits, mother’s dental visits, grandpop’s hernia operation…
Whatever the reason, the Loew’s Paradise Movie Theatre awed my brother and me into respectful behavior. The lobby of the Loew’s Paradise Theatre gleamed from the fool’s gold pillars and glistening chandeliers; the floor was carpeted in red velvet which ran up both balcony spiral staircases that flanked four entrances into the theatre proper and were guarded by ushers dressed in wine red uniforms festooned with gold epaulettes. The “Refreshment Bar” appeared longer than a city block. Inside the theatre itself, Jimmy and I were cowered into best behavior by the dark blue night sky sparkling with stars and other heavenly bodies that was the Loew’s Paradise ceiling. The rim of the semi-circle theatre was punctuated by statues that I had only seen in history books of ancient Greece. There was no danger of incoming Dots candy here, nor was there any danger of getting stuck to the floor by a wad of Palooka bubble gum. Nosireebob. Although throughout the single feature Jimmy and I still elbowed each other for the right to use the arm rest. Most of the movies we saw at the Loew’s Paradise were beyond my eight year old understanding. The only thing I remember about On the Waterfront was that the main character talked a lot like my friends. My parents really seemed to enjoy Dial M for Murder but I did not. After the woman stabbed a guy in the back with a pair of scissors, which was pretty cool, the rest of the movie was just a lot of talk, and Grace Kelly sitting around in gray prison garb looking depressed because they were going to hang her, and the good guys searching for a key. It ended with everybody having drinks, including the bad guy. Fifty years later I consider the film one of Hitchcock’s best.
Oh my, but a great deal has changed in fifty years. The elegance and ambient charm of the Loew’s Paradise Movie Theatre has been replaced by, as Jay Leno noted, “the concrete pillbox at the end of the mall.” Decision making commences at the ticket aisle. What ticket showing do we prefer? The 1:30 show, the 2:00 show, the 3:15 show, the 4 AM showing on the Tuesday of next month? Wait! Which show we want depends on the movie’s format: IMAX, SHOWCASE MX4D, CINEMAX, SHOWCASE XPLUS, 3D, LETTERBOX…
We enter the rat’s maze of cordon guiding us back and forth to the ticket booth. Besides us there may be only two other people in line but still we must navigate the lanes back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes waiting in line and pondering what showing and what format we should choose, I study the other people in line and guess which movie they plan to see. The older man with a tie and distinguished gray hair and his pearl looped wife are probably up for the artsy Swedish movie, The Woman with a History. And the young couple with the three young children are probably opting for the Disney animated classic Chipmunk Galaxy. I am often surprised as the sharply dressed elder couple announce “Two tickets for Spring Break Mania,” and the father of the family orders “Two adults, three children for Babysitter Slaughterville.” After we take out a second mortgage and purchase our tickets, the next choice involves the snack bar, almost as wide as that of the Loew’s Paradise, but with two hundred adolescents with t-shirts advertising the name of the theater manning twenty lines of moviegoers.
There are the old movie standbys. Milk Duds, Raisinets, Whoppers, Goobers, Sugar Babies, and Baby Ruths, and, yes, Dots. But, in addition to snacks, there are basically mini-meals. Nachos, Philly Cheese Steaks, Pretzel Chunks, Pretzel Chunks Stuffed with Cheese, Tacos, Fully Loaded Hot Dogs, Chicken Bites, Pizza (Cheese or Pepperoni), and the occasional Beef Wellington for a family of six. All this to be washed down with a gallon of soda (diet if one is watching the waistline) and followed by Ice Cream Parfaits, Peanut Butter Stacks, and Blueberry Cheesecakes. In the future people will make reservations for both the movie and the movie fare.
I usually opt for popcorn, but the next choice involves size. The smallest size, LARGE, won’t last me until I get to my seat. The largest size, TRIPLE JUMBO FOR THE UNASHAMED, has enough popcorn to feed every pigeon in New York City. I usually choose the medium size, EXTRA LARGE FOR THE LOW PROFILE SEEKERS. Our credit line is good, so we also share a drink.
The next decision involves seating. Middle? Aisle seat for a fast escape after the credits? High up toward the back of the theater or down low where the screen fills my eyeballs? Once the seating choice is determined, we spend considerable time arranging our coats, purses, popcorn and drink. In the days of yore, I would perch my drink on my left foot which lay across my right knee, but, with the onset of Parkinson’s I refrain from that action, not wishing to spray the two rows in front of me with soda.
Instead of action serials or cartoons or short subjects or even the EYES and EARS OF THE WORLD NEWSREELS, modern theaters display previews and warnings. Sitting in the semi-dark, we are cautioned to TURN OFF CELL PHONES. We are reminded that it is impolite to TALK WHILE THE MOVIE IS SHOWING. We are also advised that FLASHING LASERS AT THE SCREEN IS NOT COURTEOUS. What does it say about modern communal human behavior if we are told DURING THE FILM DO NOT LOUDLY DISCUSS POLITICS OR THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE GREAT VOWEL SHIFT? Finally, BE CONSIDERATE OF YOUR FELLOW MOVIE GOERS. DO NOT DETONATE A GRENADE OR ANY OTHER EXPLOSIVE DEVICE DURING THE SHOWING. Apparently modern audiences must be reminded of these transgressions….ten times. At least ten times. All I know is, is that by the time these warnings are over, my popcorn is almost gone.
Then there are the previews which are always loud and are supposed to be tailored to the audience currently sitting in front of the screen, but I am not certain. We are there to watch The Sands of Time, a British-made movie about a post-World War I Turkish soldier who seeks redemption for his military exploits as he struggles against his weakening health due to being gassed and his nation’s entrance into modernity. The previews are Aqua Man and the Super Heroes Battle the Galactic Cyclops, Vampires Rule the Boardwalk, and The Cocaine Comedies. Sometimes there is a truly intriguing preview. Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Tommy Lee Jones in a suspense thriller involving terrorism, betrayal, and courage. The Last Stand. COMING: FALL 2025. We are assured that all these previews have been approved, but they do not identify which second grade class approved them.
Unlike the Loew’s Paradise Movie Theatre, modern movie going takes some effort. For example, while watching a tender love scene between spouses, I have to work hard to tune out the explosions and gunfire of the movie next door, Dogfights in Hell. Perhaps, though, it is not the movies that have changed so much. Perchance it is the viewer, moi, who must adapt to the realities of cinematic changes and the cultural preferences that accompany those changes, some of which will be explored in my next blog entry.
by Ralph Maltese | Aug 29, 2016 | Uncategorized
Button It! It’s Not Easy As It Sounds
I remember reading about a matador preparing to enter the bullring to begin the “dance of life and death” referred to in Hemingway’s stories as the “moment of truth.” The matador may have an aide who ritualistically helps him dress; tight white pants with a lime-green stripe, shirt with ruffled collar, jacket, wide brimmed black hat, blood red sash–all ceremoniously donned while the bullfighter prepares to enter the arena as the song/prayer Virgen de la Macarena plays. This must take considerable time as everything has to be just so. I imagine the bull consumes much less time in getting ready. If the matador is unfortunate enough to have Parkinson’s, it would take much much longer.
Whenever I plan to enter a social ring, a dinner engagement, an invitation to play bridge, a trip to a movie, I must plan for extra time to dress. If we have such an event to attend, and I yell to Polley “I just got out of the shower!” she knows she has time to mow the lawn, read War and Peace, and complete the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle.
Tying my shoes requires extreme concentration. My hands are actually boxing gloves, and my wrapping and tying of the laces reminds me of the first time as a young lad I learned to tie my shoes, eyes squinting, tongue projecting out of a corner of my mouth, brain totally focused on the task at hand. With the Parkinson’s I have returned to that boyhood challenge. There have been occasions when I have forgotten to put my pants on first…I stare disbelievingly at my stupidity. The shoes have to come off, and I have to repeat the ritual amidst much vocalizing of my displeasure through flowery invective.
But far more challenging than the tying of my shoes is the task of buttoning something. Anything. Putting on my shirt requires enormous effort and time. (I am thrilled that button down collars are not the rage) It is the buttons. Fairly often I misjudge the alignment of the top button, and after buttoning the entire shirt I look down to discover that. One side of my shirt is longer than the other. When that happens I really howl at the moon. The curses flow like water over Niagara Falls. That also adds an hour or so and Polley knows from the language emanating from upstairs that she has time to make a turkey pot pie from scratch (including hunting the turkey) and also watch the movie War and Peace…the Russian version. The curses flow and increase in length and include more similes unfit for polite society as my fingers fumble with guiding a button through a narrow slit. How could any item, so miniscule and yet so functional have a history of being mostly ornamental?
Archeologists have discovered buttons from the Indus Valley dating back to 2,000 B.C. Their function seems to have been more ornamental, and people exchanged buttons in lieu of currency. Buttons became faddish and fancy. As time passed, buttons became more functional. During the Napoleonic Wars when people fought to the death while observing strict dress codes, soldiers in most armies were covered with buttons. Since paymasters were notoriously late in compensating the troops for their service, a soldier might pluck a button off his uniform to pay for a pint of ale or for the chance to unfasten the buttons of a fine tavern lass. King Frederick the Great of Prussia, disgusted with inspecting his troops and learning of their tendency to wipe their noses on their sleeves, ordered buttons to be sewn onto all the sleeves. While I am certain that a few men could not shake the sleeve smearing habit and march toward the enemy with red scarred and scraped noses, Freddy was probably proud as he watched most of his men enter the fray and charge the cannons (and being blown to pieces) with clean sleeves..
Buttons have also become topics for heated debates. One of the great questions mystifying humanity is why women have buttons on the left side and men have buttons on the right side. Some chauvinists argue that the woman’s choice of button placement is another indication of female “contrariness,” and “dissatisfaction.” Personally I think the burning of bras to be a more effective protest. The most likely answer to this burning issue is that most people are right-handed. Men dressed themselves, unless they lived in Downton Abbey, while women were dressed by ladies-in-waiting, also more likely to be right-handed. Hence, for the maid’s convenience, buttons were sewn on the Mylady’s left side.
The fly on men’s pants was also fastened with buttons. Not too long after I learned of my onset of Parkinson’s, in a moment of irrationality, I wore such a pair of pants on a trip to Colorado. Somewhere in Illinois we decided to eschew the rest rooms of an Interstate rest area and wait until the next rest area 37 miles away. This is a prototype of the challenges that we invent for ourselves on long trips. Can we make it to the next gas station? Can we hold off lunch until Indiana? The rest room challenge is especially daunting because of the immense consequences. On this trip we were confident that the Rest Area would be there. What we did not forsee was the ninety minute traffic jam caused by highway construction. By the time the Rest Area with the Rest Rooms appeared on the horizon like an oasis to one dying of thirst, my legs were crossed, my eyes were crossed, my fingers were crossed. Obviously other interstate travelers had embraced the same challenge because we had to park a half a mile from the Rest Rooms. It is difficult to run in a zig-zag pattern with one’s knees together. Once inside we realized we had failed to beat the tour buses which had already unloaded the two hundred members of the Brazilian Male Dance Team. I waited behind a line of yellow, blue-striped, forest green shirts and prayed. It was the first time in recorded history that the line outside the Men’s Room was longer than the line outside the Women’s Room. When my turn came, oh mercy, there were those buttons on the fly. As my fingers maddeningly fumbled with those nasty orbs of plastic, I recited the last words of the mentally unstable Colonel Walter E. Kurtz from the movie Apocalypse Now…..”The horror…the horror….”
If you have Parkinson’s and, like me, struggle with buttons, you have options. I have purchased fly fishing shirts which have replaced the buttons with snaps. Snaps require some digital dexterity, but they are a vast improvement over buttons. Another option is to move to India. My daughter Meredith married Ronak whose parents were originally from India. Afternoon wedding: American, suits, ties, and, yes, buttons. Morning wedding: Indian. As the father of the bride I wore an outfit of Indian style, a kurta, I believe. A kurta is a wonderful, comfortable, and elegant article of clothing, soft silky pants with an equally soft and silky shirt that pulls over one’s head. Unfettered by buttons I could have “danced the night electric,” as Amanda Wingfield might say, and that is a lot because at an Indian wedding there is a great deal of communal and joyous dancing. I did some research on my future transplanting to the sub-continent, but, alas, they have buttons in India as well…just not as many.
Like so many problems I cope with, I blame my parents for not being independently wealthy. Thus my inheritance would enable me to, like the Earl of Grantham, hire Bates to button my buttons. Unfortunately I am left with dressing myself. Like the matador I take some time to prepare, not out of vanity, but because of the damn buttons. I would much rather Zip It!
by Ralph Maltese | Aug 21, 2016 | Uncategorized
We’re a Little Testy, Aren’t We?
It is August so the nightmares will begin. I have had these beginning-of-the-school-year teaching nightmares since my first assignment in 1970. The venues and people in the dreams may change but the themes are usually the same: unpreparedness or lateness. I am late for one of my five classes, or I can’t find the right room to teach in or I forgot my notes or my roll book or my shoes or I can’t remember the lesson. These nightmares probably originated in their form during my student years when I dreamt of missing a class or not being ready for a class or a test…..you know, the fears that drive nerds to the psychiatrist’s couch. One weird fact is that I am retired. I have not directed a class in a few years but I still get those dreams. This is another testimony to the fact that teaching is not simply a job or a profession but a life unto itself.
I remain in touch with a number of educators who are still actively teaching. Some of the younger ones have newer nightmares that do not have to do with being unprepared for class but with the possibility that half their students missed the same question on the standardized test. The teacher is called to task, the entire school staff is mobilized, and the school district spends several million dollars on purchasing books that provide interventions that address that erroneously answered question.
No Child Left Behind, the law mandating testing(thankfully defanged), was the well-spring of this newest nightmare. A veiled attempt at creating a school voucher system, NCLB was not true educational reform. If schools did not make arbitrarily devised progress, the districts would eventually be penalized. NCLB (or, as teachers using gallows humor joked, NCL—No Child Left) was like a general who told his colonel, “Colonel, I want you to take 100 men and take that hill.” The colonel and his company do their best and get halfway up the hill, but the hill is heavily defended and the assault stops. The general then orders his underling, “Colonel. You failed. I am going to take half your men away and half your ammunition and I want you to try to take that hill again.”
Some defenders of the testing mania would argue that “At least after the testing we have identified those students who need the most help.” Gosh, teachers were shocked that economically deprived minority students were having the most academic difficulty. I needed a three day test to tell me that? Duh! Worse, once the students were identified, no help was forthcoming. Imagine going to the doctor to be tested for pneumonia. “Yep. Blood tests confirm you have pneumonia. Come back in three weeks and we will test again.” Returning in three weeks, the physician says, “Yep. Blood tests confirm you still have pneumonia.” Gee, thanks. I visit my neurologist periodically who examines the progress of my Parkinson’s, but he also prescribes medication to address those changes. He doesn’t just say, “Yep. You still have Parkinson’s. Whatta ya gonna do about it?” So why don’t politicians and policy makers understand a fundamental educational principle? To wit: Testing is not reform. Oh wait! I know why!
School districts, panicking over losing federal financial aid because of low test scores, seek help through the purchase of texts and programs that promise to improve certain elements of the standardized test. From The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss, March 30, 2015: “The four corporations that dominate the U.S. standardized testing market spend millions of dollars lobbying state and federal officials — as well as sometimes hiring them — to persuade them to favor policies that include mandated student assessments, helping to fuel a nearly $2 billion annual testing business, a new analysis shows.” Yessiree, testing is BIG business. I marvel at how many good teachers a district could hire for the amount of money it invests in test improvement. Or how many books or other media that amount could furnish. In my next life I will craft my fortune by designing a test that every high school student must take. I have already begun developing the test but my problem is where to stash it so my next life form will find it.
The other factor in the faux-reform testing craze is our obsession with data. ALL data. Newman, the mail carrier from Seinfeld, says it best. “When you control the mail, you control information.” We measure information about students simply because someone has developed a test to measure that information. Here is an example of how it works, changing the names of the actual skills to preserve their innocence. Reading, that wonderfully complex intellectual activity, is broken down into 600 mini skills each of which is now identified by a test. Say one of those skills is Sub Skill 509, Reading while Blinking. “Oops. Johnny is below proficient on Reading while Blinking,” notes the school statistician. “Johnny is one of my best readers. His comprehension is off the charts and he constantly relates what he reads to his personal experience,” retorts Johnny’s teacher.
“Does not matter. We will have to bring that score up!” So Johnny is plucked from his regular class and dropped into a group of other students with low Sub Skill 509 Reading While Blinking scores. Books are bought, programs are purchased, courses initiated all to address Johnny’s deficiency.
Why do we even bother to assess a student’s ability to Read While Blinking? Because we can. I suspect that you may be one of those contrary types who also expect relevance. Sorry. Imagine if your physician tells you, “We now can test for toenail damage due to exposure to the sun.” You reply, “Will this help me with my Parkinson’s?” “No, but we can test for it soooooo.”
A wise educator once told me that any test is only a snapshot. “It gives a small bit of information and its advantage is that it gives it quickly.” But the snapshot is not the whole picture. And any test contains the test-maker’s agenda. I talked to a person on a committee developing tests for teachers. “I believe there should be at least five questions on Finnegan’s Wake on the English teacher exam. I can’t imagine an English teacher never having read Joyce’s greatest novel!” I can. The SAT’s are designed only for one purpose: to project what a student will do his freshman year of college. (And the validity of that projection has been called into question.) Yet districts and states use SAT scores to evaluate high schools. That is equivalent to performing triage in an Emergency Room based on knitting ability. “Yes, I know your gunshot wound hurts, but, based on the fact you dropped a purl, you are last in line.” Teachers know that there are several forms of intelligence, but the SAT’s focus on only two: linguistic and mathematical. So if your child’s primary intelligence is visual or kinesthetic, he or she has some seriously prepping to do. And, yes, despite the ETS’s protestation that the SAT’s are above and beyond preparation, students and schools spend a great deal of time prepping, especially students who can afford to.
When I administered my first state mandated test, the PSSA, I noticed that there was a section on technology. As an educator interested in using computers in the classroom, I was intrigued. Obviously the test-makers realized the burgeoning role of technology in education. I examined the section. “Here are the contents of 2 CD-ROMS. Answer the following questions about where you would find information on these CD-ROMS.” I remember that all the content on the CDs was related to shoes.
“On what track of this CD would you find places to buy shoes?”
I laughed out loud….during the test! This was not an exam to determine a student’s computer literacy. The only thing it measured was a student’s ability to read a table of contents. This is important because it recognizes another failed effort to “measure” skills through bubble answer sheets. In graduate school one of our friends worked toward her advanced degree in music, specializing in piano. The college evaluators did not sit her down with pencil and paper to evaluate her skill. They put her on the stage and asked her to play the piano! We could do the same thing in our schools—the two obstacles are a lack of will in the citizenry and those powerful testing businesses.
From what I have learned, the tests have improved, leaning toward better measurement of skills, but there is still the tendency to teach skills (and test them) the way we teach and test for content. While conducting a project based learning workshop for teachers a few years ago, a young teacher melted right before my eyes and began crying. My first impulse is to ask myself what I did wrong. “What did I do or say to make you cry, Ms. Jones?” “Nothing. I like this whole concept of project based learning, but when I go back to my school, we have to do this program the district bought: 39 skills in 38 days.” 39 skills in 38 days? Imagine coaching basketball to novice players. “Okay, team, we are going to become proficient in dribbling on Monday, passing on Tuesday, shooting and rebounding on Wednesday, and Thursday is our first game.” Ludicrous, yes, but it is not funny. We are losing teachers. 65% of Pennsylvania teachers leave the profession before their fifth year. Number one reason given is “lack of support.” Another reason is the emphasis on test scores. As one young teacher confided in me, “I didn’t enter teaching to spend most of my time drilling and killing kids to improve test scores. I wanted to educate, to help kids grow intellectually and emotionally.” You cannot teach a million skills in a school year. A few skills are learned, very few, and they are learned over a period of time with lots of practice. Education 101.
Testing IS important. I administered thousands of tests and quizzes over my teaching career, and they usually provided me with the necessary snapshots, but they were not the most important element in my evaluation of a student. Effort, intellectual curiosity, perseverance, collaborative skills and a number of other factors were much more important….though not necessarily measurable. My analogy is the quest to obtain a driver’s license. The written portion of the driving exam is relevant and important. But the onus is on the driver, not the evaluator, and we do not blame the Department of Transportation if our cherub fails. However, the written test is only a snapshot. The actual skill of driving the car is most important. We have to ask ourselves as a society, do we want a nation of good driver’s test takers or do we want a nation of good drivers? They are not the same.
Unless we address two issues we will find ourselves in the midst of an educational nightmare. Schools are still operating on an antiquated structure built in the late forties when most students were prepping to work in U.S. factories. The game has changed, and we must have true educational reform by rethinking what schools must look like. (Hint: repetitive testing is not the answer). Secondly, most districts boast that they follow the data. Then let’s really follow the data. The data tells us that the most important factor which determines whether a child learns or not is the quality of the teacher in the classroom. A poorly prepared teacher will stumble through any course, while a talented teacher will make something good out of a bad program. Radical idea: Sink our efforts into teacher preparation and teacher support.
Unfortunately, American culture would have to develop a radical change in its view of educators. But I can still dream, can’t I?
by Ralph Maltese | Aug 14, 2016 | Uncategorized
Unfit to be Tied
One result of my Parkinson’s is that my brain has replaced my two hands with oven mitts. Surprisingly the oven mitts are still adept at certain things like tying small flies (an eighth of an inch), wielding the mighty dvr remote, and typing this blog (although that is becoming more difficult). Using the oven mitts to accomplish other tasks like dressing oneself is very problematic. It is like trying to use those two flame retardant gloves to thread a small needle.
For most of my tenure teaching, I wore a tie. I did this for three reasons which may be puzzling to non-teachers. I took the time each morning to create a Windsor knot out of respect for my students, to reaffirm that I was their teacher and NOT a friend (they had friends who knew only as much as they did. They needed adult perspectives), and as a legacy of my Villanova days. My esteemed alma mater required that students wear jackets and ties to all classes and meals. By the time we were sophomores we realized that financially we could not afford the thrice weekly visit to the Campus Cleaners (who cleaned us out, all right!), so we tended to use the same jacket and the same tie for all classes and all meals. At the end of the day these accouterments find themselves on a mountain of clothing in the corner of the dorm room shared with my roommate who did his part in adding to the pile.
In my junior year developed the protest against the cafeteria food (to go along with the protests against the Vietnam War, civil rights abuses, the wearing of a bra, Lyndon Johnson’s abuse of beagles, and whatever decision Dow Chemical made). Before I continue, I must pay homage to Villanova which taught me to think critically and to ruminate on how best to serve humanity. I should also take this moment to remind people that the Villanova Men’s Basketball team won this year’s NCAA Championship. But excellent academic institution and home of champions Villanova was and is, it had a fault, a fault which affected growing teenagers who consumed vast amounts of sustenance (and non-sustenance) where they were most vulnerable. Food. Through investigation by the campus paper, The Villanovan, it was later discovered that there were suspicious dealings between the supplier and procurer of our daily bread (always stale daily bread, I might add) but all we students knew was that we were tired of our color coded meals. The Yellow Meal sported corn, yellow grits, and yellow crusted mystery fish that had washed up on the Jersey shoreline, and a banana for desert or, if the bananas had thrice ripened, banana pudding with dark spots. The Brown Meal featured brown rice and brown mystery meat (we noticed the lack of road kills along Lancaster Pike) and for dessert a brownie that was useful in stabilizing a dorm room desk by placing it under one leg. I will spare you the details of the Green Meal. Protest at Villanova, considering the era, was a relatively peaceful affair—no throwing of rocks or Molotov cocktails or cafeteria brownies.
Villanova was primarily a “Men’s College.” The students of the nursing school were housed away from the main campus. So our protest of the color coded meals consisted of several hundred males showing up for dinner with jackets and ties…….and nothing else. Why should we dress for meals that included spaghetti sauce which looked and tasted suspiciously like the red stuff we plopped on hamburgers? We may have been inspired by that noted jokester, Edgar Allan Poe, who as company leader at West Point on Gloves and Swords day, showed up on the parade ground leading his company wearing only gloves and a sword. Unlike poor Edgar we were not thrown out for our hijinks.
Without any research to support me, I suspect that the quality of food on campuses has dramatically improved. When my children were accepted to the colleges they applied to, we had fun visiting those schools to help them make their choices. They had done the hard work of studying and learning to earn them the right to engage in “Shopping for Colleges.” All the cafeterias sported a cleanliness and an ambience that tempted Polley and me to consider reservations. And the menus!! The young, pretty college guides who led us on the campus tours pointed out the choices to accommodate every palate. Chicken Kiev, Beef Wellington, Moldovian mamaliga (porridge), Shri Lanka kottu (stir fry), Mongolian buuz (steamed dumplings), tofu flavored a hundred ways, more varieties of rice than cereal choices in a modern supermarket. “And,” the young pretty college student guide added, “to pay for any meal all you have to do is swipe your identity card which you can also use in the campus store and your purchases will immediately be charged to your parents’ account.” Much happy buzzing and smiling amongst the candidates as the parents looked up and stared at the ceiling anticipating bankruptcy.
I always wore a tie to the Shopping for Colleges escapades as I did in the classroom, but with less chance of mishap. In the classroom the tie was a handicap. In a strong wind it had a tendency to flop over my shoulder which I failed to notice as I conducted a lesson on The Great Gatsy, and there were several times when, while energetically directing a class, I straightened up abruptly after fishing for a piece of chalk in the top drawer of my desk only to realize painfully that my tie was firmly stuck in the closed drawer. My students found this activity to be immensely comical as I reenacted the Ox Bow Incident.
In one class we actually had a discussion about ties. It started with my referencing our lesson from the day before. “Remember yesterday when we discussed Othello and Shakespeare’s reinforcement of the Great Chain of Being?”
Blank stares.
“Othello? Great Chain of Being?”
Silence.
“Okay. Who wrote Othello?”
The students turned and looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.
“All right. Who wrote William Shakespeare’s play Othello?”
Silence. This class was not going to jump into the First Folios.
“Hey, Mr. Maltese, you wore that same tie last Tuesday.”
Non sequitur aside, I was curious that they remembered my pattern of clothing choice over a month’s span but completely forgot yesterday’s lesson. I tried to steer the conversation into how much of our modern culture is indebted to cultures from centuries ago. Our clothing, our customs, and why reading Othello was a good thing.
I started this diversion (always with an eye to returning to my main lesson) by sharing this historical footnote. Scholars agree that ties evolved from the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), when the French were impressed by the article of clothing worn by their Croatian mercenaries. Croat became cravat and the cravat attracted the eye of that noted creator of fashion trends, Louis IV, the Sun King. Ties serve no apparent purpose other than decoration. I forget how the class discussion ended although I remember asking them to identify, based on character, what kind of tie would Othello wear and why.
Alas. My fun-filled days of Tie Wearing are mostly at an end. Fewer social occasions require them. For example, I wore a tie during my first few airplane trips, but I gave that up about the time airlines decided peanuts was a main course and the width of each seat to be the width of a tie.
And the oven mitts make it much more difficult to flip one end of the tie under and over the other end. I usually finish with a tie that extends only two inches below my collar. But I am a stubborn cuss. I try again. I stand in front of the mirror and order my paws to create an accouterment that would make Louis IV proud. It is one of the few reasons I have to wear a tie.
by Ralph Maltese | Aug 7, 2016 | Uncategorized
I Want to Stop and Smell the Roses, But
I think I first noticed that something was wrong with my sense of smell when my English Leather didn’t smell right. For those of you young men raised on Prorosa or Truefitt & Hill Trafalgar and Dr. Carver’s Aftershave and other post shave “balms,” (how are young boys going to become men by applying balms instead of after shave which, when splashed on, sets the face on fire?) English Leather is a shaving lotion whose aroma wafted through men’s dormitories on Saturday nights in the sixties. A totally unscientific study by me came to the conclusion that ninety percent of college males used English Leather. The other ten percent grew beards and didn’t go on dates but stayed in the dorm listening to “Go Ask Alice” by The Jefferson Airplane. There may have been other after shaves, French Leather or Bulgarian Leather or Uzbekistan Leather, but almost everyone used English Leather.
But forty something years after drenching my face on weekends in English Leather, I noticed that it did not smell the same. The odor of “rich Corinthian leather” had changed to smell more like stale beer puddling on a metal card table. I also developed screwy smells. On a car trip out west, we stopped at a diner in Missouri which featured good burgers but awful French fries that had seemingly been cooked in rancid oil first used in preparing the “Today’s Special—Crusted Halibut.” You know how far away from fresh halibut is central Missouri? For the next week or so, I could not remove the smell of that rancid grease from my nostrils. I thought it odd, so I asked several doctors. “As you age, some loss of smell (hyposmia) is common.” In my case, my hyposmia was followed by anosmia—the inability to detect any odors. Years later, checking out my shaking left foot and learning that I had Parkinson’s, my neurologist confirmed that loss of smell was a symptom of Parkinson’s. Now before you become worried because your chicken noodle soup smells like your kitchen mop after cleaning up from your spouse’s Beer and Polka Night, you should know that other things cause loss of smell—allergies, nasal polyps, viral infections, and head trauma. Also check your chicken noodle soup.
As my anosmia completely erased any stimulation of my olfactory lobe, I began to miss things: the earthy odor of a campfire in the woods, the wafting of honeysuckle in the spring, the warm, embracing, red-rich aroma of Italian gravy (sauce) simmering on the stove, the rustic whiff upon entering an Italian deli, the scent of a newly bathed and powdered baby. I read once that one of the strongest memory recoveries is triggered by smell. Before anosmia, I would walk past a bakery and into my brain would pop the experience of accompanying my parents as they purchased cannoli’s and pignolo and pizzelle and sfogliatelle and zeppole from an Arthur Avenue bakery in the Bronx.
Some people would argue that a loss of smell can be a good thing in certain situations. I am not certain. I am spared the olfactory childhood recall of driving down Route 1 in northern New Jersey past the Secaucus pig farms, and, years later, the assault on my nostrils when checking the boy’s lavatory for smokers, but even losing bad smells can be a bad experience. Natural gas is odorless and colorless. An odorant is added so people can smell a leak before the whole house suddenly becomes smithereens. Big help the odorant does us afflicted with anosmia! And there is no way to automatically spot a person that is hard of smelling. No canes, sun glasses, seeing eye dog, hearing aid or similar gadget shoved up one’s nose. We don’t have a sticker planted on our foreheads with a picture of a nose with a line diagonally through it. Friends will say as we enter a garden, “Oh wow! Smell those flowers, the lilacs especially.” I just shrug my shoulders. Usually Polley leans over and in a half whisper to them, “He can’t smell.” I give my clown smile, turn the palms of my hands up and say, “I am hard of smelling.” There are other moments pregnant with embarrassment. Imagine a nice, high class restaurant with low light, dark polished wood, and fragrant flowers which I cannot smell on the table. I order wine. The sommelier arrives with the bottle and pours a drop (quarter of a drop in a French restaurant) of wine in my class. He becomes a statue that could adorn Versailles and waits for my approval. Now, if truth be told, I cannot tell the difference between a four thousand dollar Chateau Lafite 1865 and a six dollar Harry’s Basement Burgundy Vintage Last Friday, 8 PM.
Smelling the wine and tasting it for acceptability is a relatively modern custom. In earlier times, Italians topped their bottles of wine not with cork but with olive oil. The host had the first glass to make certain that the oil was siphoned off. In the medieval era, the host took the first sip to demonstrate to his guests that the wine was not poisoned. So even though I cannot smell, I can serve those two functions. Besides, I like the seeking of my approval, the ritual, so I swirl the drop of vino in my glass and stick my nose in it. For some reason Polley believes that it is absolutely necessary at this moment to tell the sommelier and dinner guests, “He can’t smell. He lost his sense of smell.” The jig is up. Exposed as a fraudulent smeller, I just sheepishly grin and nod my approval. The sommelier pours and slowly and deliberately cracks a smug smile. I employ my thought net and capture his thinking. “I knew all along zis Amereecan peasant iss eh phony. He iss a non-smeller! Merde!” When Polley does not give me away, I go through the motions, and, unless the drop has shards of glass in it, I approve. The nodding of my head to the sommelier signifies that there are no traces of Bertolli Extra Virgin and that my dinner guests will not topple over dead on the table from arsenic. And, yes, people with anosmia do not enjoy the full flavors of food. For example, sometimes wine just tastes red.
There are other dangers. On a day scheduled for a major test, my honors class entered the room prepping and cramming for the exam. Five minutes into the period, there is a fire drill. This wreaks havoc with the administration of the test as kids gather in lines outside the building and discuss questions they have just seen. I wish administrators would schedule these necessary drills on non-testing days, but there are plenty more things I wish for in education.
My honors class reenters the classroom and most of them recoil as if Bull Connor had turned a fire hose on them. “Mr. Maltese, it really stinks in here!”
I ignored their protests. I did not smell anything. “Please take your seats and sit down and continue with the test.” Five minutes went by.
“Mr. Maltese, I really can’t take it. It smells awful in here.”
These were all good kids, the least likely to furnish an excuse for not taking a test. I called the main office and asked for an assistant principal to stop by. Mr. Jones opened the door of my room and promptly shut it. I left the monitoring of the test and joined him in the hallway.
“Ralph, what died in there?”
I shrugged my shoulders and we moved the entire class and tests to an empty room. More opportunities to exchange answers. We found out later that day that the company which empties the lavatory storage pits scheduled an emptying during my class period, and there was some “ordinary spillage” outside my room. The school’s air conditioner sucked in the fumes from the spillage and sprayed them into my room. Did not smell a thing. Why the company did not schedule this activity for after-school hours is another of those great educational mysteries.
In my more reflective moments I try to recall smells. My father taught me that one can find luxuries in nature if one only seeks them. We were camping on a lush forest-encircled pond in the Adirondacks, the Madonna blue water icy cold from spring melts. We had spent a long sweaty day portaging the canoe and equipment to this spot. After washing my face, my father brought me over to a large spruce tree. “You want refreshment? Rub these spruce needles in your hands and then rub the oils on your face.”
I did so. The scent lifted my spirits, filled my brain with a realization of the transcendent joys that nature offers us. The air in my lungs seemed sweeter, energy coursed through my body. I was not only looking at the pond and the forest and the dark blue sky. I was a part of all of it. I would love to re-experience that fragrance.
But I am afraid that once anosmia sets in there are no restorative powers that can retrieve my sense of smell. Perhaps someday someone will invent such a restorative power. Until then I am left with fantasies of training a Smelling Nose Dog or some such critter, maybe a trained squirrel, that could convey to me the odors that I am missing. Somewhere in my medicine cabinet is a ¼ filled bottle of English Leather. I reach out to it at times with outstretched arms like Gatsby reaching out to Daisy’s dock, wishing to recapture the redolent past that recedes from memory.
If you are a smeller, for those of us who are not, take the time to stop and literally smell the roses. Inhale and enjoy.
by Ralph Maltese | Aug 1, 2016 | Uncategorized
Blog8_2_2016
Sherri With an “I”
Parkinson’s has definitely affected my ability to argue, and that is a shame because I love to argue politics and ideas and ethics. That is a legacy from my four years at Villanova. I am certain this occurred on other campuses, especially in the sixties, but Villanova was big on questioning things, on finding the truth. It was not enough to make a statement. I had to back it up with some sort of evidence because, if I did not, the other five guys in the dorm room discussion would eviscerate my whole position. My classmate (and still good friend) Stan once walked into the middle of a bull session and he heard the term “U.S. Army.” Stan put down his text and notepad and said defiantly, “What’s wrong with the Army?” “Nothing. We were complimenting the Army.” Stan looked down at the floor. “Oh yeah?! What’s right with the Army?!” We just enjoyed intellectual jousting.
And there was so much to dispute. The Vietnam War, race relations, exploitation of migrant workers, communism and capitalism, the ethics of all of the above, whether it was more expensive to date a girl from Rosemont as opposed to date a girl from Immaculata (hands down, Immaculata—the train fare alone emptied pockets), and the argument as to who would win a match between the then reigning NBA champion Boston Celtics and the Harlem Globetrotters. You know. Important stuff.
One of the high school courses I taught was debate. This experience taught me that my method of argumentation was fading from popularity. I was fortunate to teach many fine young people who grasped the essential concepts and tactics of good debating and performed very, very well. Yet there were a few who did not see the need to learn any concepts or tactics. Usually these students were in my debate elective because their first course choice, The Visual Cliff Notes—Literature Summaries with All Graphics and No Text—was filled up. Research a topic? “Why bother?” Find the truth behind a declaration? “Seriously, I have homework in other courses.” Employ the Rogerian argument to anticipate the opponent’s cross examination? “Who has the time?” Scrutinize your opponent’s logistical weaknesses? “Hey, Mr. Maltese, you mean we gotta listen to the other guy?” The “method” employed by these students is best exemplified by Sherri. That is, Sherri With An “I.”
One of my less stellar tasks as a teacher was to supervise a cafeteria study hall. A study hall in a classroom was fine, but a study hall in the cafeteria with a hundred or more students meant spending the whole forty five minutes not marking papers or planning lessons but monitoring signing of lists of students who wanted to go to the library or the bathroom or their lockers or their cars (forbidden). When all that was finished I had to address students trying to sneak out, phone calls from counselors and principals who wanted to see certain students, etc. In study hall I was a babysitter rather than a teacher.
There were several types of passes. One pass to the men’s lavatory. One pass to the women’s lavatory. One pass to the locker. All these passes were to last only six minutes or the abuser would lose pass privileges. Three sign-up sheets. MEN’S LAVATORY, WOMEN’S LAVATORY, LOCKER. (Of course, modern schools will not require separate lavatory lists.) First come, first to get the pass. This protocol was an attempt to account for the whereabouts of all students. The last thing we wanted was for groups of students to wander the hallways, especially those with reputations for not grasping the purpose of academia.
Sherri With An I had such a reputation. Often caught by hall monitors aimlessly wandering the corridors or sneaking a smoke in the stairways or bullying girls with more academic intentions in the lavatory, Sherri With An I was well known for her meanderings. Sherri With An I’s prime directive was “socialization.”
She arrived about two minutes late to my study hall, thus already committing an infraction. She nodded at her friend Crystal who was lurking in the hallway, and my experience told me that Sherri With An I was anxious to join her friend in misadventures.
Her voice was loud and forceful as if her vocal cords had devoted her sixteen years to lifting weights. She marched up to me and planted her face six inches from mine. In a voice whose decibel level exceeded the landing of a 747 Jet in the cafeteria study hall and in a shrillness that would be the pride of a screaming banshee she began her “argument.”
I-AM-SHERRI-WITH-AN-I-AND-I-WANT-TO-GO-TO-THE-BATHROOM.
“Well, first you are late, but I’ll let that go. Sign your name on the lavatory list and take your seat. You are number three on the list, so it won’t be long.”
I-WANT-TO-GO-TO-THE-BATHROOM-NOW!
“I’m sorry [I really wasn’t sorry], but you have to wait just like everyone else.”
She turned and gave a half smile to Crystal who was peering in through the door.
What followed is hard to capture in print. In writing dialogue one person speaks, then the next, and so on. But in my disputation with Sherri With An I, my comments were simultaneous with her shouting so imagine my comments on top (or behind) hers. Imagine both of us talking not point-counterpoint but concurrently.
I-AM-SHERRI-WITH-AN-I-AND-I-GOT-TO-GO-TO-THE-BATHROOM-AND-YOU-CAN’T-STOP-ME-BECAUSE-I-GOT-TO-GO-AND-MR.JONES[assistant principal]-IS-MY-FRIEND-AND-I-DON’T-HAVE-TO-WAIT-IF-I-DON’T-WANT-TO-AND-I-DON’T-WANT-TO-SO-JUST-GIVE-ME-THE-PASS-TO-THE-BATHROOM…
“Please sit down and wait until your turn like everyone else.”
I-AM-SHERRI-WITH-AN-I-AND-I-GOT-TO-GO-TO-THE-BATHROOM-AND-YOU-CAN’T-STOP-ME-BECAUSE-I-GOT-TO-GO-AND-MR.JONES-WILL-GET-IN-YOUR-FACE-IF-YOU-DON’T-LET-ME-GO-TO-THE-BATHROOM-AND-I-AM-NOT-EVERYONE-ELSE-I-AM-SHERRI-WITH-AN-I-AND-I-GOT-TO-GO-TO-THE-BATHROOM.
“Please sit down, Sherri. Oh, look, Margaret returned with the pass. You are next.”
I-AM-SHERRI-WITH-AN-I-AND-I-GOT-TO-GO-TO-THE-BATHROOM-AND-I-CAN’T-WAIT-AND-I-AM-GOING-TO-TELL-MY-COUNSELOR-ABOUT-YOU-AND-YOU-WILL-BE-IN-BIG-TROUBLE-IF-YOU-DON’T-LET-ME-GO-TO-THE-BATHROOM-YOU-CAN’T-STOP-ME-THAT’S-THE-LAW-I-KNOW-MY-RIGHTS
Of course, every student in the cafeteria study hall was watching her explosion when suddenly she just left. I watched as Sherri With An I and Crystal stomped away from the lavatories and toward the gym. I followed protocol, called the office and alerted a hall monitor to the whereabouts of Sherri With An I and Crystal.
I spent the rest of the study hall period monitoring the sign out lists and keeping the room quiet so students could, well, study.
With five minutes to go in the study hall, Mr. Jones appeared with Sherri With An I who sported a smugness that had not taken very long to cultivate.
“Sherri told me you would not let her go to the bathroom.”
HE-WOULDN’T-LET-ME-GO-TO-THE-BATHROOM-MR.JONES-AND-I-NEEDED-TO-GO.
“Shhh, Sherri. I will handle this.”
Jones was basically a good guy, but like everyone else he had his favorites.
“First, she was late to study hall. Second, she needed to sign up for the lavatory on the lavatory list which she refused to do. Third, she would not take her seat when I asked her to. Fourth, she cut study hall and did not go to the lavatory but to the gym with her friend.”
HOW-DO-YOU-KNOW-WHERE-I-WENT-MR.JONES-HE-IS-ALWAYS-PICKING-ON-ME-LIKE-EVERY-DUMB-TEACHER-IN-THIS-SCHOOL-AND-HE-SHOULD-BE-FIRED-FOR-NOT-LETTING-ME-GO-TO-THE-BATHROOM.
“Sherry, sssh.”
“Ralph. Let her slide on this one.”
“In front of all the study hall she wouldn’t follow my directions and wouldn’t sit down. And she wandered the halls the whole period.”
Jones took my elbow and led me away from Sherri With An I. Whispering, “She has a tough home life.” I hated that argument. So what? Far too many of my students had tough home lives and most of them were good students and civil. Besides, how did allowing the student to get away with murder help the student or the student body as a whole?
“So you want me to allow her to go whenever and wherever she wants?”
Jones looked down at his shoes. “I know she gets in people’s faces with that shouting act. She has done it to me.” Jones lifted his eyes to mine. “But you know, really, you cannot deny a student from going to the bathroom.”
Really? And that was it. Not quite. During my next supervision of cafeteria study hall two days later, Mr. Jones visited me in the middle of the period, visibly upset. He wanted to know why I had issued nineteen lavatory passes simultaneously. That conversation is for another blog entry.
Looking back over the experience with Sherri With An I, I think she was, in the argumentation department, way ahead of her time. Because, in the current adult world, shouting out loud, shrilly and forcefully, platitudes and promises and falsehoods, invoking emotions ballooned with fear and hate, cultivating bluster and me-hood have replaced true intellectual exploration of ideas and energetic and insightful dialogue that would benefit us all.
Parkinson’s has drained my ability to project my voice. The development of ideas in my brain is still operating, but the physical shaping of words to express those concepts comes hard. And I have learned that the method of disputation I learned at Villanova and taught to my debate classes is outdated. Debate is one form of argumentation, one in which the participants try to score points. In everyday life with everyday people, scoring points is not as important as resolving the issue that caused the dispute. In a democracy especially, the ability to compromise is a keystone of progress.
Intellectual exchanges and disputations that lead to understanding and growth have faded from the public eye, residing perhaps only in academe. In far too many “debates” being true or untrue is not a priority. Shouting fast and loud is the tactic which seems to reign. In today’s social climate, Sherri With An I would stand a good chance in the political arena.
by Ralph Maltese | Jul 26, 2016 | Uncategorized
Blog7_22_2016
In the Blink of an Eye
As I wrote in My Left Shaky Foot, on my first visit to my neurologist, he pointed out to his resident student that I was not blinking. I blinked a few times. The blink was working. What was he talking about? There are so many actions and reactions that our body conducts every single minute that, if we paid conscious attention to them all, we could not function as an organism. Consider this definition of a blink from Wikipedia: ” A single blink is determined by the forceful closing of the eyelid or inactivation of the levator palpebrea superioris and the activation of the orbicularis oculi, not the full open and close.
Polley and I are perhaps more conscious of blinking than the average couple. A few years ago she was diagnosed by our optometrist with a “defective blink.” That night we opened a bottle of wine and, as the night progressed, we practiced defective blinks, slowly and spasmodically lowering and raising one eyelid, rapidly alternating closing and opening both eyelids, holding one eye shut for an inordinate length of time, etc. As the wine bottle emptied, the practice came easier, until we determined that her blink defect was not all that bad. Hardly noticeable. Of course, I took this opportunity to lord it over her that my levator palpebrea and orbicularis oculi were superior to hers.
That superiority ended with my being diagnosed with Parkinson’s. I did not have a defective blink. My problem was that I was not blinking for long stretches of time. In effect I was staring. Now there is staring and there is staring. Polley is fond of Scandavian mysteries and movies (Wallander comes to mind), so we watch many of them. There is a great deal of staring in Scandavian media….lots. I have noticed that this trend has appeared in a number of supposedly artsy American tv series. The camera cuts to a closeup of the protagonist’s face as she stares. I guess the idea behind the form is that the viewer attempts to interpret that stare (“Why is she staring?” “What is she thinking about?” “Why am I staring at her staring?”) Personally I think that all the protagonist is thinking is “Can I hold this stare for another six minutes?” and the reason for the stare is because the writers have run out of dramatic dialogue or action. “Let’s plug a twelve minute stare in the screenplay the moment the protagonist realizes that her shoelace is untied.”
That is one kind of stare—the pretentious “artsy” stare. There is another kind of stare. Most times when I looked into the eyes of my students, I witnessed an energetic galaxy. Ideas, like stars, were born and died. There was even the occasional supernova as a concept exploded into realization. With a very very few students looking into their eyes only revealed the enormous space between stars. This was the blank stare. Total emptiness of thought. This was the stare I feared I had developed with the Parkinson’s. And the problem is that I am not aware I am exhibiting the stare. There are no alarms sounding to warn me. “Hey, idiot, people are going to check your pulse! Start an animation! Blink or crinkle your nose!” Always trying to make lemonade from lemons, I am trying to find an upside to the Parkinson’s. Perhaps I can move to Sweden or Norway or Finland and become a movie star. I wouldn’t even need a Stare Coach. I might even be nominated for the equivalent of an Oscar, the Fika or the Tjock or some other cinematic award. Wouldn’t winning a Fika for staring be something? We Parkinson’s people could dominate the industry. There could be subcategories: the longest stare, the blankest stare, the inscrutable stare, the stare that confuses the viewer even more, the stare that makes the viewer change the channel.
The worst part about the staring is that without blinking my eyes dry out. And when my eyes dry out, one or both start to burn and I instinctively close them. I go blind. This is very inconvenient when I am walking down the aisles of our supermarket or tying flies for fly fishing or reading the Final Jeopardy Answer. Most of the time these blink attacks are unpredictable, but there are situations when they are more likely to occur. Outdoors when a strong breeze comes up and slinks under my glasses and immediately dries out my eyeball is one such occasion. Another is barbequing. As I lift the lid of the Weber a combination of hot air and smoke causes the blindness.
Sometimes I can feel the blink-which-precipitates-burning-and-thus-blindess coming on. I discovered that if I can try to prevent the dastardly blink I can forestall the burning of the eye, but usually the blink wins, the burning commences, the eyes close, blindness ensues. I have considered exercises to strengthen my eyelids, have searched online, and have thought about asking the attendants at the gym we frequent. No luck. No one has invented barbells for eyelids. Eye drops don’t alleviate the situation, and if I put drops in prior to an attack, they initiate the assault. I think it is a losing battle. A warm cloth over the eyes for a few minutes usually eliminates the burning and restores sight. Another fast remedy is to pull out an eyelid wipe (makeup remover), and cleanse the afflicted eye. I find this especially useful when immediate regaining of sight is imperative, as when I am going 80 on the Interstate. (For some reason I don’t get these burning eyes while driving.)
We are only aware of some of the body’s automatic functions when they break down. Only then do we appreciate how we operate on a daily basis thanks to these same activities that allow us to walk in breezy fields of grass, barbeque steaks, and beat the contestants on Jeopardy. So be kind to the starer. The galaxy in his brain might be filled with hustle and bustle but a condition causes him to stare. Put yourself in his shoes. Try staring for a while. There. Made you blink.
