(Ray Milland in the Billy Wilder movie that won four Academy Awards. Jane Wyman has a solid supporting role in this account of a miserable writer who goes on a three day binge. In the Fleet we would have considered him a lightweight- most port visits went four days. Photo Warner Brothers).
Yeah, the time changed this morning and that was only a slight inconvenience, but I still lost the weekend. That pesky pine is still leaning against the barn, the snow is melting but still piled inconveniently around the cars, and the roads were icy early and crowded late and finally I just said the hell with it.
I moved all the clocks ahead yesterday morning, rather than waiting until bedtime, in the interest of getting the cocktail hour to the right place in the afternoon.
That worked out fine, and with the roads still thawing, I did not accomplish the rest of my weekend plan. C’est la vie.
I had some highly polemical exchanges with the usual suspects- not my Trotskyite pals, who I totally respect (and am reading a fine novel called The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, which features a walk-on by my favorite Bolshie Leon before Stalin’s guy put that icepick in his head down Mexico way) but the Libertarian ones, and I won’t tire you with that.
(Frida and Diego. Her self-portraits are amazing, and Diego’s murals of the Motor City in the Detroit Institute of Art formed the images of my youth).
It has Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo as essential figures in the narrative, and I am nuts about the art of both of them. So, if you are going to have a lost weekend, Lacuna is a fine bit of literature to spend it with, and it can- and did- lead me off onto some great sites with some art for the ages.
I like my literature, but my sense of order demands non-fiction as well.
As are the other three books I bought because people said they were good. I am done collecting the hard-bound volumes I love- they are too heavy to drag around any more until I figure out where I am going to spend the rest of my days, and the Kindle is intoxicating.
One click enables me to buy books that stay invisible until I remember to remember them. The future really is a far-out place, and if it doesn’t wind up killing us, it should be great.
Anyway, “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” by Daniel Okent is a grand read about the folly of thinking you can change human nature, and the unintended consequences of what happens when you imagine you are smart enough to try.
“Why We Lost” by Dan Bolger is a sobering account of the consequences in blood and treasure of really spectacular public policy failures from both sides of the aisle
Rounding out the lost weekend list is “We Meant Well: How I Helped to Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People,” by Peter Van Buren is a superb skewering of the bureaucracy we installed in post-Saddam Iraq. It seems sort of quaint these days.
When I wasn’t reading, I was binge-watching episodes of Life On Mars, the British series, not the briefly run US version. I got hooked on the show when I was working in Australia- the premise, if you did not stumble across it on American TV, is that a prim and correct modern policeman is in an accident and wakes up in bell-bottoms, big collared shirt, snug leather jacket and is now a copper in 1973.
I remember 1973. It was fun, but it wasn’t very pretty.
There are several very interesting- or horrifying- things going on, but we have a couple years to beat them to death. Instead, I was in the process of losing the weekend. This morning disappeared into research about real estate on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I have a pal whose place is perched on the east slope of the mountains, and he loves it, so I have been thinking about an extended road trip to look at the Great Northwest.
I recall the coffee was good there.
When the weather was bad last week, dapper Jon-without appeared at Willow as one of the few who bothered to don grown-up clothes. I think I was in jeans and a denim shirt, Old Jim about the same, but Jon was dapper in a long tailored car-coat, nice suit and shoes, snowy-white shirt and hand-knotted bow tie. Topping it off was a snap-brimmed chapeau like the one Ray Milland was wearing in the Lost Weekend.
He looked great, and as always I was impressed with his fashion sense. I think men ought to go back to wearing hats. They are quite the statement and I understand they keep snow and rain off your head more effectively than a hoodie. I think it would make our robbers a little more dashing, too.
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303