The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

    Cinema fans will know this property as the second feature Orson Welles shot at RKO. Then the studio tested the movie in a preview somewhere and decided to rework the ending and trash what Welles shot. Did they really not think it worked or was that part of the "comeuppance" that the old guard had in waiting for golden boy Welles? What remains certainly is worth watching, it's really good in fact, but likely would have been better and a bit edgier. Actually they have been hunting around in Brazil or somewhere in South America for the lost footage. The idea being that Welles was sent to South America on a wartime goodwill mission at the same time that RKO was trashing his footage and he might have had a print with him down there (or some such, I haven't really been following this recovery search story).

This is not about the movie but the novel. The novel is quite good. I gave it 5 stars on my Goodreads. Published in 1918 it has some kinship to other novelists on the period, Theodore Dreiser (From Indiana, like Tarkington, but working class immigrant stock), Frank Norris and some others, sweeping realistic work that emerged from the social and political changes of the new century.  

This is the second novel in Tarkington's Growth Series, which chronicled some of the enormous changes that hit the USA with technological development and the rise of factories and industrial work. It deals with the life of a rich pampered child George Anderson Minafer. In fact the earliest movie version of the novel was called Pampered Youth (1925) of which only an excerpt survives. (One can watch this on youtube presently. May 2022. Typical Hollywood product that changes many things, little things like names, then they add a horserace and a big fire, cinema action, that takes us to the happy ending absolutely different from the events in the book.)  

If you have seen the movie you know what the plot basically is. This brat George is the town rich kid and people are waiting for him to get his "comeuppance". His bratty attachment to his mother ends up disabling him, throwing himself, his mother, and Lucy Morgan and her father Eugene into lives of longing and lovelessness. 

The novel spends a good deal of time looking at these rapid changes to the fictional "Midland" city. It shows how the car culture made the old town sprawl out from the suddenly old city center into the burbs. It explains how the impulse to get out was propelled by industrial pollution from the new factories and all the coal fired furnaces in town, industrial and domestic. He talks about the soot covering everything so that people painted their sooty dirty white houses some darker color so as not to show the dirt. I remember when I was a child in the mid 1950s in Ohio. We lived for a time with my great grandmother who had a coal fired furnace in the basement. There was a very small ground level door and coal chute to the outside for deliveries. Yes, Canton center was more or less abandoned by the time I was around but reading this and connecting it to coal soot and general industrial pollution was a bit of a revelation of a further cause for sprawl. I suppose there is something to that.

I like these artists that are critical of the automobile. Jacques Tati with Traffic is another beloved auto critical artist.
Negative issues about automobiles are stated in the book, mostly from the brat George, but these are kind of left for the reader to finally judge.  

What did I expect based on what I knew before? I expected a portrait of a narcissist. And I expected to be able to look down on him and his ancient ideas of class and "what will others think?".  

What I got instead was a rather disturbing portrait of myself in the form of this brat George Minafer. Except I turned out a good deal worse. I didn't even get the mother love part like George had.
The strange thing is that I didn’t have the class background of George. I was not the son of the city’s rich man. But entitlement of a different, more ignorant, sort can arise. In the mid-20th century the working class could shelter their own children from the realities of the marketplace that is our world. TV helps. I lived in a magical world of TV stories. There seemed to be money. I had what I wanted, if I ever really wanted anything. My parents were able to buy a 1964 Chevy Impala brand new. I remember being in the showroom looking at the SS, Super Sport, models. This became the car I learned to drive about 4 years later, with driver’s ed at public school. Then my parents built a big new split level house on a wooded lot on a hill. Where did all this supposed wealth come from?  They both worked at jobs for wages. The jobs were off stage from my life. I never saw what either of them did or where they worked. They just went away every day and came back able to buy a house, a car, lots of Sinatra LPs, a color TV. I was sheltered from what they did. I knew my dad worked swing shifts but what sort of hellhole Republic Steel was I didn’t experience. A high school dropout, his union wages allowed me to think I was middle-class. In the novel George refers to new people as “RiffRaff”, but the alienated suburban youth can transform his very own worker parents into the riffraff in his life. They are the ones kids desire to get away from and who we look down on for their lack of sophistication.   

Like George I didn’t really have a clue about what it really took to get on in life.
George intends to live without a profession.
I wanted to live without a job.
George is worried about what other people think. That an old fashioned notion isn’t it; caring about what the community thinks? I have done that a number of times mostly out of my own shame. Last year I ended a long love relationship with a younger woman because I was worried that since we worked at the same place people would look down on her as a daddy chaser and me as a little girl chaser. That grew out of a comment by a friend who was prejudiced because he was into the daddy dom thing himself and projected his thing on to us. Based on that I saved someone who I really loved and who loved me by getting her out of the situation of relationship to me. This was a disaster for her and me. Terrible, unforgivable.

I’m not exactly sure how the mechanics operate. But I think it was something in mass media that cut me off from my parents and the world around me. Of course my parents were very young and didn’t really know how to inform me what I needed to get through life, other than mom wanting me to do good in school which I was just afraid of and failed to do anything other than squeeze by.

I’m not unique. I feel kind of secure in stating that we are a Brat Nation. There is something in our nasty culture that makes people this way and it is not something that is fading and lessening. It is advancing. We are turning out brats.
That Capitol Building Jan 6th thing can be seen at a Brat Attack, distorted insane white people.
I didn’t expect this old novel to take me into my own life and current events as it did. I regret that the country and culture did not change fundamentally and become more healthy in the 104 years since the publication of the novel. Are we locked into this self destructive path? Apparently.

 

    

Yippie Girl by Judy Gumbo

 Rolling in late, comes this 1960s movement memoir.

Late because we are deep into the 21st Century now and embedded into someone's World Order in a way that can feel not much more than. . .hopeless.

This memoir could be a joyous read had the movement it is about not been a total failure.
The 1960’s Anti-war and black liberation movements could not build the class solidarity of the temporarily successful labor movement of the early 20th century. That type of massive solidarity was what was necessary to bring change when the power system was vulnerable after the 1929 economic collapse. The 60s movement never had that solidarity or collapse. It was a time of general prosperity, and no matter how nostalgically some of us feel about the youthful exuberance of the “revolution is just around the corner” things are far far worse today than they were in 1970. The movement for economic justice is a failure.

The book is an example of this collapse of common cause solidarity since much of it is really an old comrade saying that she was there and part of it but being a woman was kept on the margins. I have no doubt that this was true and Judy Gumbo has every right to toot her horn and ask for acknowledgement. OK, but now what? And what happened after? She mentions being a very good fundraiser in later life but we hear no more about that. The story kind of ends with the 60s events and the VietNam war. Being a successful fundraiser for Planned Parenthood might be a more heroic story to leave behind than memories of a flashy youthful failure of a movement. 
But then I probably wouldn’t have read Fundraiser Woman so the circle is complete I guess and sensation sells.

She comes into the yippie movement directly out of the old movement. She is a Canadian Red Diaper Baby, her father a lifelong career Communiest Party type who built a successful livelihood out of it as a promoter of Soviet Union concert performers in Canada.
This transition from Red Diaper Baby to yippsterville is not really explained. She wasn’t particularly a hippy or acid head, she was a divorcee who dumped her hubby really quickly when she discovered him in bed with another woman. (No hippie Free Love for Gumbo. Later in the story, polyamory was considered and rejected for monogamy.) It seems that she became a Yippee because she became the girlfriend of one of the three main OG yippies, Stew Albert.
From this origin information one could conclude that she went from old school commie daddy to cutting edge for-the-hell-of-it Yippie daddy. But telling it that way kind of derails the neo-feminist train and so it’’s best to not look at it that way. We all have to do what we have to do and times are different than walking a mile in anyone else's one toe loop authentic Indian sandals.
Why does she repeatedly mention the infidelity of her first husband? It seems a sore point even now 60 years, or whatever, later.

I don’t know, for decades it all seemed so recent and immediate, but now just very remote, far away. That movement now seems like an echo of an after shock, of the big somewhat successful movement before it. But we all will remember the hit, rather than the spin off with the kids in charge every week jumping the shark to get attention while sinking to the bottom of the what matters chain in the neo-liberal world that dominates and gained power in the last 60 or so years. The hit movement being the early 20th century movement that brought us SS, The kids movement, the Yippies 30 years later making a splash then passing on while I still have the benefit from the earlier movement. Monthly Social Security.

The movement that pushed the government into Social Security was a great movement.
Its gains have been attacked by those always opposed and now they are winning. Finally destroying what was left in the New Deal era, the legitimately helpful Big Government. Meanwhile the corporate welfare and military goverment is growing and giving out even more power to those already in control.

So yeah, we boomers can look back at the glory days of the Chicago 8 show or whatever but we failed to even protect The New Deal.
Most of us have been well placed enough to ride out whatever insanity the USA comes up with. We survived Reagan, the Bushes.
No problem, we are still here if we can set our tolerance for the unacceptable ever higher. We have to tolerate the USA for 20 years tearing apart Afghanistan for really no good reason at all and now leaving them starving. We have to tolerate that voting rights are being taken away in favor of Republicanism. We have to tolerate the loss of abortion rights.
We have to tolerate the trickle down of death from the military-industral-news/entertainment complex that is in control of most of the national money, power, and consciousness.

We have to tolerate this or else die in our isolated social distant despair.
So we tolerate it. We are physically comfortable enough to not let it all get to us too much, plus that is that interesting new cutting edge series we are all streaming.  And weed is sort of legal here and there. All is more or less well for the aging white baby-boomers.
Maybe there were a million deaths in our name in the past 20 years but it doesn’t affect us enough to really do something about it.

I’m really complaining about our time through looking back at what we may have wanted it to be. There is nothing wrong with the book. It just hits me at a particular moment of hopelessness about The Revolution.

Stew Albert, the eventual spouse and babydaddy, was close to Jerry Rubin so there is more of the Jerry angle of things than the Abbie Hoffman side. They were often at odds and took their personal followers with them. Albert was also friends with Elldridge Cleaver, Black Panther leader. The stories about him are perhaps the most interesting in the book. 

Back then I was a Abbie Hoffman Yippie, or identified as such. I even met him for a moment at a big MayDay rally on New Haven Green 1970.
I was brought into the movement, as much as I ended up participating, which wasn’t a lot, by seeing Abbie Hoffman in the mass media when I was still in high school (Merv!) and wanted to be a hippy, now Yippee! But we still had hair length rules in high school, Bummer. Abbie was always very funny. He organized me. Brought me into the movement still as a kind in Ohio.
Later, after high school, I took LSD as soon as I was offered and loved it. I still love it and use it occasionally. In the book Judy Gumbo says she tripped only three times and the last years ago. Time for a booster granny! 

The book has one very sad story about insane Phil Ochs who at the end of his life visited them for a day, part of the time as his evil alter ego John Train. But nothing about Phil in his prime of any of the other movement performance people reviewed. Phil Ochs was particularly dear to me in my youth, he was a suicide at 35 and I kept on singing his songs for years. So, yes, a sad story in the book.
Phil and Abbie much later, both suicides.

Fine addition to some ancient history herein, although not really searching or personally deep and revealing.  

Getaway by Lisa Brackmann

Getaway by Lisa Brackmann

I read this because of the CrimeReads website and Goodreads.
CrimeReads mentioned another Lisa Brackmann novel, Go-Between, that I thought sounded interesting. Looking that up on Goodreads had me reading others saying “. . .read Getaway first so you know about Gary. . .”

Getaway is set in Mexico and coincidentally I sit in Mexico.
The novel is set in a beach town Puerto Vallarta, I’m in a completely different place in a small mountain city.
Michelle Mason is there after her husband’s death. They were going to go together except that he died. So she went on her own. We get pieces of her backstory throughout. It is basically that she was a married woman with a businessman husband. He had difficulties and left them broke right before he died. She trusted him and didn’t know.
That is kind of an unstated but shown message of the novel: “These men want women to trust them and go along, but they put a woman in danger with their big secret schemes.”

Michelle meets a gringo man and they hook up, but on that very night something happens and ultimately she is caught in the precarious middle of a conflict between two gringo men.

Drug smugglers? CIA? Michelle is kept out of the loop of what is really going on yet risking her life in the meantime. So like her days with hubby in LA this is Big Important Business that the men are involved with and “you don’t need to know right now. It will be OK.” Will it?

Getaway is an excellent crime novel. It’s a genuine page-turner.
Lisa Brackman is a writer who knows what is going on. That is clear because there are some passages about the Drug War and Iran-Contra. She states the facts in passing, in case someone doesn’t know, without preaching.

So now I know about “Fucking Gary” and can read Go-Between. I hope is it as 

good.