Originally a harvest festival, then reassigned in the U.S. to celebrate the Native Americans' gifting of food to the colonial religious fanatics. If they’d only known, they’d have poisoned that turkey. Still is a harvest festival underneath it all, I guess.
Malu and I take the train to my sister’s in DC.
Emerging from the tunnel in New Jersey the sun is shining over the vast swampy meadowlands. I look for egrets or herons — they are often standing knee deep in the water — but they’ve gone south by now. The reeds are golden in the sun and the sky is clear blue and elevated roadways and train trestles stretch over the waterways. It’s sort of magnificent.
As we cross the Mason Dixon line the vegetation visible from the train changes. Trees are strangled by vines and covered by kudzu, there is chaotic growth, suburban houses or decrepit industry visible beyond the tangle.
Passing through Baltimore, where I grew up, there are boarded-up houses, vacant lots, charred remains of burnt buildings surrounded by rubbish, billboards for churches and for DNA testing of children’s identity. Johns Hopkins hospital looms out of the squalor. An isolated island slightly east of downtown, which I can see just beyond it. Downtown is separated from the hospital complex by a sea of run-down homes, a freeway and a massive prison complex. Eastern Europe and the Soviet Bloc come to mind. Failed industry and failed housing schemes. Band-aids on severed limbs and bleeding stumps. Sometimes no band-aids at all, the wounded city just left to fester.
[Baltimore I read this weekend has five times the homicide rate of NYC. Five times!]
There are lots of other cites like this. Much of DC is like this though there are large swaths of wealth and middle class enclaves housing government workers. Baltimore lost its steel industry, its shipbuilding, its port industry and shipping, much of its aerospace industry (which was in the suburbs anyway) and its middle and upper middle class (white) population.
St. Louis is like this. Detroit is worse. Philadelphia has some of this infection; Wilmington also has quite a bit, as does Newark. Pittsburg is turning around, Cleveland, who knows? New Haven, Buffalo, Toledo, Gary, Youngstown.
I’m not nostalgic for steel mills and coal mines, not even for GM plants — they refused to make anything but gas guzzlers for decades, hell, they’ve got it coming. Sad thing is, it’s the little guy that loses his job for the big guy’s stupidity. Would the little guy be smarter?
It’s shocking when you see this decay and devastation in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, but we’ve been taught to expect it there, we’ve been told that those societies were under the boot of the evil empire and that explains it — the will and gumption of the people was squashed, and desolation was the end result.
But here the reality in front of me clashes with what I was taught — the reality I see says that there isn’t really any difference, that the end result is pretty much the same. I’m exaggerating, but from a train window we see mostly the backsides of everything.
After dinner we watch Oliver Twist, the old B&W Alec Guinness version, on TV. (Directed by David Lean.) The characters are all stereotypes, cartoon versions of the high and low of London society — Alec Guinness as Fagin the Jew, with a nose appliance like a bird:
Oliver a spotless blonde innocent and the beautiful and warm-hearted Nancy (the actress was married to the director.) It’s actually beautiful in its visual simplicity — the clichéd visuals and the characters’ appearances function to compress the storytelling, which is necessary, as the movie can’t be much longer than 90 minutes. The sets are amazing — not a single right angle in the whole of central London — only when we visit the upper class suburban mansion are the lines straight and walls bright white. Some backdrops in combination with sets are perfect and stunning — receding rows of tenements back onto a canal, a tiny arched bridge in the lower foreground, over which the ruffians scamper, looming in the distance, above the twisted maze of squalid dwellings, rises the massive dome of St Paul’s.
Inside Fagin’s den the doorframes are all crooked, there are timbers and beams crossing every which way, and the passageways are narrow and winding. It would make a great videogame environment.
I seem to recall an early version of Hunchback of Notre Dame got a similar treatment, the Charles Laughton version. Maybe it’s the similar high-low juxtapositions at work, or maybe the evocative archetypes in the stories themselves, or maybe they had the same design direction, but that movie was equally beautiful and resonant. I know there’s an innate attraction to images of a hidden and secret world existing right along side ours — whether in the warrens of the tenements, the passageways and parapets of the cathedral or the sewers and tunnels beneath every modern metropolis.
