The map shows the Salado River at coordinates (he says, but my atlas seems to disagree) 64 west longitude (When I’m Sixty-four—Sergeant Pepper), and 26 south latitude (the four Beatles have 26 fingers extended in one photo in the Magical Mystery picture book). Follow the Salado River (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” says “Picture yourself in a boat on a river … everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers …”) and you will come to an island at the river’s mouth, called “Florianopolis” which, says Freddy, means Place of Flowers, and, natch, the Beatles’ faces are found amid flowers on the cover.
Is Florianopolis Pepperland? Or is Pepperland the island John Lennon bought in the Mediterranean but doesn’t want any publicity about?
Freddy believes that all this is a hoax played chiefly by Lennon. He also feels that Americans who are playing the game, and who really believe they can get to Pepperland by discovering the clues, are people who are trying to shorten the odds against their ever getting to paradise. “They say,” says Freddy, “that if I guess the clues, I’m going to win a lifetime for free with the Beatles.”
But Marek Lewanda wonders, not unreasonably: “Why should the Beatles want random people in America to live with them?”
All three disk jockeys believe that some clues are valid—such as Paul without shoes, the hand over his head—but they don’t know what it all means. “I’m thoroughly convinced,” said Lewanda, “that he’s alive.” None of them believe in Pepperland.
McCartney was interviewed last week in Scotland and claimed to be alive, though earlier he said if he were dead he’d be the last to know. And if people want to believe he’s dead, said a Beatle spokesman, they aren’t going to let anything as flimsy as the truth interfere.
Well, we want to make it clear here that we haven’t been taken in by all this. We did some research of our own and translated “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” the title of a Beatle song (White Album), and came up with some viable goods. Unscrambled, “ob-la-di” comes out “libado,” the past participle of the Spanish verb “libar,” meaning suck, and therefore sucked, or colloquially, “sucked in.” As to “ob-la-da,” that is the scrambled past participle—bolada—of the Spanish verb “bolar” which means, to bowl, or throw a ball, but in colloquial Spanish means “hoaxed.” Get it?
To clinch our case we ran through the proper names of the women who appear in the songs on the white Beatle album—Martha, Julia, Sadie, Honey Pie, Mother Superior, Molly, Prudence and Georgia. Taking the first two letters from each name we arrived at MA-JU-SA-HO-PI-MO-SU-MO-PR-GE.
This, of course, when unscrambled, translates as MAJOR POSSUM GAME. And we all know how a possum loves to play dead.
There are some letters left over after this maneuver which obviously express the Beatles’ sentiments about all this, just as they express our own, namely P-H-O-U-I, which, linguists will note, when rendered phonetically, emerge as FOOEY, from the raspberry fields of the same name.
1969
Jiggs:
“What’s the Matter with Father? I Saw Him Drink Water.”
Jiggs. When I was growing up, reading him every day and especially in color on Sunday, he didn’t seem any more Irish than half a dozen of our neighbors who looked like him. He seemed to me just another American victim of success, trapped by his money and his wife Maggie’s social climbing in a world he loathed. He preferred old friends at the saloon, or at the construction job (Jiggs carried a hod before he got rich). Maggie chastised such recidivism by throwing rolling pins at his head.
I eventually came to realize that both Jiggs and my neighbors were indeed Irish-Americans, and that Jiggs spoke for his look-alikes in their ascendancy out of poverty into the sweet-smelling region of money. It was the specifics of these contrasting worlds that made the story of Maggie and Jiggs valuable originally and keeps it valuable today as peerless social history. Reencountering Jiggs in this book (Jiggs Is Back, by George McManus) is like shedding four decades, or six. It returns us to the time when the quartet sang at Rooney’s saloon until the boiler factory next door complained about the noise.
In his prime Jiggs had eighty million readers in forty-six countries and sixteen languages. His creator, George McManus, bragged he was as rich as Jiggs: he made $12 million in the forty years he drew the strip. Oliver St. John Gogarty, the Irish writer, told McManus he was a genius, and Gogarty was right. Nobody invents like McManus anymore. He once spent two weeks drawing one picture for the strip—a single panel of Times Square, drawn for the Sunday pages on New Year’s Eve, 1939. Compared to what today passes for cartooning, Jiggs qualifies as a kind of War and Peace of the Golden Age of the funny papers. Charlie Chaplin said he studied Jiggs with profit, and what comic couldn’t? It was heroically funny work; Jiggs, for instance, reminiscing to Maggie about her family: “Your grandpap … lived to be eighty and never used glasses. He drank out of the bottle.… Your uncle Bimmy lived in the kitchen so he wouldn’t have to go so far to eat.”
“I was just thinking,” says Maggie, “how marvelous it is that all my relations are talented in the world of music.”
“Yes,” says Jiggs, “it is marvelous that you think so.”
McManus probably heard such lines in the same way I did—uttered by Irishmen about Irishmen, self-criticism being a cherished Irish heritage second only to criticism of others.
There is grand hyperbole in the world of Jiggs, but it also cuts close to the real bone: realism in the funhouse, which is the foundation for so many of the major comic strips that were. To be sure, some were born in cuckooland: Popeye and Li’l Abner and the Katzenjammer Kids, and there were the improbable worlds of Mandrake the Magician and Buck Rogers.
But think of that realism: a world hostile to children in Little Orphan Annie and Little Annie Rooney; trendy adolescence at the soda fountain in Harold Teen; the boxing world in Joe Palooka; adventure in exotic Asia and Africa in Terry and the Pirates and Tim Tyler’s Luck; and then the mainstay—the family—in Mickey Finn and Moon Mullins and Gasoline Alley and Blondie … and Jiggs.
The funnies taught us about all those sweet truths that would become the essence of Hollywood’s happy-ending movies. There was no divorce in the funny sheets, and no death. Life was wacko and it went on forever. Jiggs went on until 1954, when George McManus died. McManus had kept up with life, evolving the strip to conform to changing times. When the rolling pin went out of style Maggie threw vases instead. I don’t remember the demise of Jiggs as a strip. Maybe my attention wandered, or more likely it was because the funnies went minimal, editors double-shrinking them to save space, treating them like poor relations which, predictably with such treatment, most of them became. Pogo, a latter-day wonder, is gone. Beetle Bailey endures, and so does B.C. and the remarkable Peanuts; and now Gary Trudeau with Doonesbury and Berke Breathed with Bloom County and Bill Watterson with Calvin and Hobbes are keeping the art form respectably savage and original and funny.
But it’s just not like it was and it probably won’t be, either. We’ve climbed out of the saloon era, the soda-fountain era, and today Little Annie Rooney would have to be a hooker. The great comics of yore exist only as artifacts of an ebullient past. When you enter into that past in the book that follows you will, among other excursions, go on vacation across the country with Maggie and Jiggs. And when it’s over you’ll return to the old train station in the neighborhood where Jiggs began and you’ll see the neighbors turning out to welcome the old gent.
“My he looks grand,” says one neighbor. “He’s not staggerin’ a bit either.”
Not a bit. He stands up to time.
Welcome back, Jiggs. And stick around. We got some on ice.
1986
The Photography of Stillness:
Muckraking the Spirit
“One reason I so deeply care for the camera is just this.… Handled cleanly and literally in its own terms, as an ice-cold, some ways limited, some ways more capable, eye, it is, like the phonograph record and like scientific instruments and unlike any othe
r leverage of art, incapable of recording anything but absolute, dry truth.”
This is James Agee, writing in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, that extraordinary, inexhaustible book about Alabama tenant farmers. I came to the photographic work of Walker Evans for the first time when I discovered the book eleven years ago, and, together with Agee’s moving words, it helped fire me up and turn me into a muckraker in the slums. I had seen Evans’s work before in photo anthologies, which I used to devour, but only in bits and pieces. My brother-in-law was a photographer with a dozen such collections, and I would sit there thinking Wow! Fantastic! at confronting all that absolute, dry truth of life.
Recently, a friend who had abandoned photography in favor of writing had me almost convinced that its power to evoke the response it did when the camera was still young had seriously declined. I think he was a little bit right. I look at David Douglas Duncan’s Self-Portrait: U.S.A. (Abrams), on the Miami Beach and Chicago conventions of 1968, and I know I’m supposed to react because I always reacted to such handsomely mounted authenticity by an old master. But I don’t. I’ve seen too many political delegates in funny hats. I know the shallowness of their knee-jerk loyalties. I understand convention rituals, for I’ve been there for years through television. The disappointed faces of youthful McCarthy supporters are sad antiques from the sixties. And so it’s not entirely Duncan’s fault that his book just lies there. Yet he’s got to take some blame, for he didn’t prevail over my saturation the way another recent book, Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street (Harvard), prevailed over my very personal saturation with the slum.
Davidson’s book has been out a while and has expanded his reputation as a photographer of the first rank. In going through it, I was struck by the similarity of some of his photos to those of Jacob Riis, the daddy of all muckrakers, in the classic Riis work, How the Other Half Lives. That was published first in 1890 and has been republished periodically ever since. The newest version has also been published by Harvard and contains forty-six Riis photos. Unfortunately, Harvard printed them on inferior paper, kept them much too small and arranged them in a pinched and cluttered layout that has all the feeling of a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. Davidson’s book is a triumph of simple design. It gives the photos their due, although overly dark printing of my copy obscured details I saw clearly in the same photos printed elsewhere. Harvard should shape up.
Recognizing Riis as an ancestor of Davidson, realizing Walker Evans was also part of the family, I went through Peter Pollack’s monumental (708 pages, 742 photos) work, The Picture History of Photography (Abrams), published first in 1958, and vastly expanded for a 1969 edition that takes the state of the art up through Davidson. I found in it work by the Mathew Brady group, Eugene Atget, Lewis Hine, Harry Callahan and others, which also belonged to this special category that has moved me so much; and I began to see why it did. On top of this came two more new books: Walker Evans (Museum of Modern Art), a superb collection of Evans’s work, much of it done in the 1930s but never before published, and here accompanied by John Szarkowski’s fine introduction, which illuminates Evans’s eccentric and aristocratic personality as well as his art; and Face of an Island (Grossman), a pictorial record of Negro slaves and their descendants in the early 1900s and 1920s on Saint Helena Island off South Carolina. The photos were taken by Leigh Richmond Miner, an unknown but highly accomplished photographer who worked contemporaneously with Atget and Hine. A botanist, art teacher and dabbler in many arts, Miner packed away his glass-plate negatives and ignored them. He died in 1935. A few years ago, the plates were rediscovered and now have been edited into a beautifully printed book that recreates a time in America most of us have never seen pictured anywhere.
The thing that brings all this work together for me is the absolute stillness of the best photos; not only the absence of action but the absence of overt or easy emotion within the picture itself. Evans could easily have indulged in pathos, but absolutely purged his work of anything resembling it. Riis never bothered with manipulating emotion because he was too busy tracking down yet another scene of horror and degradation. Miner is also free of it. Davidson isn’t quite.
In relating to the rural poor, or slum people, we often conclude that they deserve our pity. What they deserve is our comprehension, which Evans unfailingly gives us: a man in his Sunday best, an ill-fitting, wrinkled coat, but in no way apologetic; looking, in fact, like an eccentric personnel manager who can’t quite decide whether to hire you or not. And in a Miner picture, old Jesse Dorkins, about 1905, sits in the doorway of his rotting shack, dressed in tatters, hands on knees, woolly hair and beard in snarls, mouth slightly open, lower lip jutted. He is in the throes of no particular emotion we can recognize, but his condition cannot help but move a viewer to an emotional comprehension of the cancerous residue that slavery has left in his life.
It’s difficult to convey this meaning without pictures to illustrate the point; but it may come clearer by comparing this stillness I’m talking about to the short stories of Isaac Babel or Hemingway, or to Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps, works that evoke emotion because the artist has not tried to capture emotion itself but conveys successfully the facts from which emotion is made and leaves our imagination free. It is the difference between the photo of a man caught at the precise instant he is being made aware of a tragedy in his life, and the same man weeping after hearing the news. The first photo would help us understand a particular man. The second is everybody’s soap opera.
There is another stillness, especially in Evans, a stillness of things: doorways, rooms without people, storefronts, suggesting not emotion but a phase or way of life. Davidson also has this, but he is less concerned with life purified than he is with irony: a GOD BLESS OUR HOME sign on the wall of a demolished house, Pope Paul’s photo blessing filthy rubble. This is jazzy propaganda, but too easy for an artist. He also manipulates subjects unnecessarily, posing a lovely girl in a paper-strewn vacant lot: beauty amid barrenness, a forced comment.
These are only occasional complaints about Davidson. He has done something rare to see the slums in a new way at this late date. Also, his personality must convey total trustworthiness for people to reveal themselves to his camera as they do—naked, shooting up, dealing, buying, pimping, hustling, dying in squalor. Pollack says Davidson has a powerful influence on young people considering photography as a vocation, and I understand why. Like the great ancestors of his art, he has seen and understood, then caught those moments of stillness when people define themselves not by doing but by being. This moves us, for we recognize a vital part of ourselves in the center of that stillness; which means art has done something important.
1971
Marshall McLuhan’s Message Is …?
(PHASE I—Let there be light.
Turn on the electronic age)
If the medium is the message, is Marshall McLuhan the medium?
If the medium is the massage, is Marshall McLuhan the masseur?
Question, question.
Communication:
Marshall McLuhan doesn’t like pictures. He shouted at a cameraman in Albany a week ago. He communicated to (them) (those with power over cameramen), saying: “That man is here again with his infernal machine.”
This followed a dictum: “That will be the last picture.” (The message.)
But then the infernal machine returned, was banished.
Clash of media.
“The spoken word can’t compete with these instruments for commanding attention,” said McLuhan. “To try to talk to a snapshooting process is impossible.”
Communication (Joke type) (McLuhan speaking in Italian dialect):
The captain of an Italian ocean liner turned on the public-address system to address passengers and crew.
“I got-a two pieces of-a news. One bad-a news, one good-a news. Ah’m a give you the bad-a news first. We are lost. Second. We’re a half an hour early.”
(Conclusion from the message: Marshall McLuhan doesn’t trust his fa
cts to speak for themselves. He is as insecure as any after-dinner speaker.)
McLUHAN APHORISM (Hereinafter known as MLA). “A funny man is a man with a grievance. Politicians might pay attention to this as an index of public feeling.”
MLA (2) “Real news is bad news. Good news is advertising. It takes a lot of bad news to sell the good news. Advertisers will eventually catch on and turn the good news into bad news.”
MLA (3) “The only people who read ads are the people who already have the product. Advertisers tell us this through their research. They read the ad to find out if the product is doing what it is supposed to do.”
(Transitional McLuhanism: prefatory to the message) (Hereinafter known as TMP): “We don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish.”
(Conclusion): “Nobody knows the business he’s in. He knows the other fellow’s.”
(Listener’s conclusion: this is the message to us all: if you’re a fish, look at the water you’re in.)
(PHASE II—The End of Nature)
“Nature ended with Sputnik and Telstar. Nature became art. The whole planet became a programmable entity.”
(Message: don’t look back.)
“New environments are lost on those looking in the rear-view mirror.… It is much safer to look back. You’ve been there and know what it’s made of.… It’s Bonanzaland.… It has nothing to do with the present world.”
(PHASE III—Fact, Scientific)
“Touch doesn’t create connections but intervals. Touch creates a gap which is filled in which creates rhythm.”
(Observation on scientific fact:)
“Bucky Fuller [i.e., Buckminster Fuller, creator of the geodesic dome] is an ear man, not an eye man. He’s tribal.… We’re retribalizing.”
Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction Page 39
