The best of times or the worst of times?

This post originated as an email to my stepfather, Rev. Bill Kolb.

My best friend here and I have been having an ongoing conversation about how we are witnessing a revolution in filmmaking, at least in terms of the ways that films are distributed and watched. More and more, "little" films are being released on streaming services, and the multiplexes are reserved for action/adventure films and franchises. With more options in home theater, a film has to be seen as an "event" to compel people to leave the house to go see it. One of my favorite movies of the year was Booksmart, which got really good reviews but didn't sell a lot of tickets. It is possible that eventually all "little" movies like this will go straight to streaming. This leaves people like me in a bad position, because if I'm going to commit to a streaming lifestyle, it seems like I'd have to subscribe not only to Netflix but also to Amazon Prime, Disney+, AppleTV, etc, and paying for each of those will quickly add up—this in addition to paying for internet access in the first place. So I miss a lot of stuff.

And there is a lot of stuff! I've been following this awards season, and there are a lot of shows and movies that I feel like I might be interested in, but (a) I don't have the streaming services and (b) I don't have the time. And a lot of it is grossly overrated. There just doesn't seem to me to be enough ideas in the world to justify so much content. The content is being created because the streaming services exist. For instance, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has gotten a lot of positive commentary, but when I tried to watch it last year—when I briefly had a free trial of Amazon Prime—I thought it was awful. Fleabag is now the big thing, but I haven't seen it. 

It's funny, when I go to the theater, I see a bunch of old people and I think, "Well, this is my demographic now." Like everyone, I don't think I'm that old, but when I sit in a movie theater I realize I'm sitting with my peers. Young people don't go to the theater anymore, unless it's to see a blockbuster. I am nostalgic for the days when there were gatekeepers and a limited number of films were released every year, and certain films would become cultural touchstones that you could be fairly confident that most people you rubbed elbows with at work or at parties or at the grocery store had probably also seen. Of course there are problems with this system, but it did foster a cohesive populace. Somebody like Walter Cronkite could embody a centrist voice of reason that everybody could trust. Those days are long gone, the most significant casualty being trust itself. 

So much content, it seems to me, is a cynical ploy to make money. I measure every television series I watch against Mad Men, which was the earnest vision of one man who had an idea that he believed in that he wanted to dramatize for people. This is one of the reasons why Little Women is so powerful, because you can tell early and throughout that Greta Gerwig has a genuine belief in the story she wants to retell and that she is being honest in her retelling of it. 

Jordan Peterson talks about the importance of true speech. He actually interprets the opening of Genesis as a metaphor for the importance of true speech. The fact that God the Father Almighty pronounces that his creation is "good" is an example of this, according to Peterson. Peterson is an interesting personage right now. He is reviled by the Left because they feel that his critique of identity and gender politics automatically places him on the right, and indeed on the far right. But I consider myself a liberal and yet I am enthralled by Peterson's viewpoints. He is arguing that the radical Left and the reactionary Right have both lost their minds—and abdicated true speech—and for me he represents a voice of reason cutting right down the middle. 

Whether it's television shows and films that play fast and loose with the truth or politicians who refuse to acknowledge the truth and pander to their benefactors, our culture has lost faith in virtually all authority. And there are studies that show that young people do not believe there is any such thing as objective morality. This is a serious development that is having an absolutely devastating impact on our society. Although there are obviously some good things happening right now, the current epoch will definitely go down in history as one of the bad times as opposed to one of the good (the Renaissance, for instance, or the Enlightenment). Of course I know that there were bad things happening during those periods as well. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" can probably be applied to every epoch of human history, but clearly some times are better than others. And with the ineptitude and corruption of our government leaders, the vacuousness of our "art," the pervasiveness of mass violence, the demise of truth, etc, this epoch will, on balance, definitely go down as one of the poorer epochs of history.    

I think about those people who lived in other poor epochs. I think that there were enlightened people who lived during the Middle Ages. I reflect on the fact that the Enlightenment happened during the frivolous Rococo period of the eighteenth century. And I'm thankful that I am able to speak my enlightened thoughts without fear of being executed. The bottom line is that you just have to live your best life and let history take care of itself. If you want to change the world, the only real way you can do it, unless you break through and become famous or otherwise get a platform to promote your ideas, is to do it at the micro level, to treat the people you come into contact with the way you feel like people should be treated. "Always do right," Twain said, "it will gratify some and astonish the rest."

One cool thing that happened to me recently involved utility shears. I had a pair of scissors that I was using in the kitchen that I finally figured out were the wrong type of scissors. But it took me a long time to come to this realization, partly because they were good scissors. They were Scotch scissors, made by 3M, with beautiful Cherokee red handles with grey highlights. But they sucked. They couldn't cut through the bacon wrapper. There's this pasta that I get from the deli section that comes in this sort of wax-lined paper bag that these scissors just would not cut through. And I was like, "Why do these scissors suck so much? They're a good brand of scissors." It was infuriating. 

And the scissors were real nice about it. I know they wanted to say, "Dude, you know we weren't made for these jobs. We're paper scissors." But they didn't say anything, even as I was badmouthing them.

Then one day I was in the Target, looking at the kitchen utensils. I wasn't actually shopping for kitchen utensils. Whatever I had gone into the Target for I had already gotten, and now I was just looking at the kitchen gadgets hanging on the wall like I was looking at art in a museum. And then I saw them. KitchenAid utility shears. They were gorgeous. And, of course, I'm a sucker for established brand names. (I was thrilled a couple of years ago when I realized that "Cuisinart" was a portmanteau of "cuisine" and "art." I had never noticed it before because we don't pronounce "Cuisinart" "cuisine art," we pronounce it "quiznart." But then one day I saw it and it blew me away, like the first time I saw the arrow in the FedEx logo. My last girlfriend, whom I lived with, the house she bought came with a vintage KitchenAid dishwasher that still worked like a charm, which I loved.) Looking at the KitchenAid utility shears in the Target, I thought, "That's what I need in the kitchen." I mean, I think in the back of my mind I always knew I was using the wrong scissors. I knew that utility shears existed, but I'm an old bachelor, so I had never bought any. I know what a duvet is, too, but I don't own one.

So I bought these shears and brought them home and they changed my life. And the scissors were, like, "Dude, yes!" I always knew that the scissors belonged in the pen cup that I keep on my desk. Every month when I pay the bills and I have to cut the payment portion off of the bottom of the bill, I think I should keep the scissors in the pen cup on my desk, but I say to myself that I use them more often in the kitchen, even though they suck. So when I brought the utility shears home, the scissors were so proud of me. "I know you probably thought we'd be insulted if you replaced us, but we aren't because we just weren't made to be used in the kitchen. We're so proud of you." So I placed them in the pen cup on my desk, and the pens and the ruler and the letter opener were all, like, "Dude, where have you been?" And the scissors were, like, "In the freaking kitchen!"

And now I'm buying things at the grocery store just to cut them open!

Clemson and bowl games

This post originated as an email to my brother, Gus Hartley.

I said [in an earlier text to Gus] that I have a soft spot in my heart for the Sun Bowl. When I was a kid growing up in the Seventies, there were far fewer bowl games than there are now. There were the big four--Rose, Orange, Sugar and Cotton--and then there were a handful of other bowls, including the Gator Bowl (first played in 1945), the Tangerine Bowl (1946; now called the Citrus Bowl), the Liberty Bowl (1959; first played in Philadelphia, hence the name), the Bluebonnet Bowl (1959), the Peach Bowl (1968), the Fiesta Bowl (1971), and the Sun Bowl, which was first played in 1935 and, with the Orange and Sugar bowls, is tied for the second oldest active bowl in the land, after the Granddaddy of Them All, the Rose Bowl, first played in 1902. (These dates all come from Wikipedia, so they could be slightly off.) There were a lot of other bowls that came and went during that time, so I give props to the Sun Bowl for surviving. It ain't the most prestigious bowl, but since the late Sixties it has attracted major programs, and it has a competitive payout. It's a cool stadium--a horseshoe bowl carved out of the rock in El Paso, hard by the Mexico border. And, of course, it honors the Sun, which I am a big fan of.

So, you could have a good year in those days and still not go to a bowl game. It wasn't until the 1980s, starting with the Outback Bowl, that there started to be a plethora of bowl games that were basically marketing tools, mostly named for commercial products rather than having clever names based on things that go in bowls (like sugar). You look at storied programs like Alabama and Michigan, and even they didn't go to bowl games every year the way they do now. Frank Howard coached at Clemson for thirty years and won 165 games, but he only took six teams to bowl games. But when they did go to bowl games, as often as not they were the Orange and Sugar bowls.

It was also in the 1980s that bowls started accepting corporate sponsorships. The USF&G Sugar Bowl. The FedEx Orange Bowl. The Rose Bowl has the gravitas to have never had a corporate name appear before its own name, always being called (in the era of corporate sponsorship) The Rose Bowl Game Presented by Corporation X. (They call it the Rose Bowl Game to differentiate it from the Rose Bowl proper, which is the stadium itself. There's an old trick question: Which team has played in the Rose Bowl the most often? The answer is UCLA, since the Rose Bowl is their home stadium.) The worst thing is when the corporate sponsor drops the traditional name of the bowl game altogether, which is how we got the Chick-fil-A Bowl for many years. Or the Taxslayer Bowl. 

I'm obviously too young to remember the Frank Howard years. I reached the age of enlightenment in 1970, a year after Frank Howard retired and a year after South Carolina won the ACC and went to the Peach Bowl (which they lost). So, the first years that I remember of college football in South Carolina, neither Carolina nor Clemson went to bowl games. Carolina finally went to the Tangerine Bowl in 75, but they lost to Miami of Ohio, which was embarrassing since this wasn't even a major program. Even the bowl itself seemed like a cheesy version of the Orange Bowl ("Citrus Bowl," for some reason, sounds so much better than "Tangerine Bowl"). Then we went to the Hall of Fame Bowl, which also felt like a cheesy bowl, and lost to Missouri. Then we went to the Gator Bowl and got waxed by Pitt, which was a powerhouse in those days. Then Clemson started going to bowl games again, first in 77, when they too were beaten by Pitt in the Gator Bowl. But then the next year they went back to the Gator Bowl and beat freaking Ohio State, which was a perennial power that usually played in the Rose Bowl and regularly contended for the national championship (which they won in 1968). And they had a famous coach with a famous coach's name, Woody Hayes. Well, Woody didn't take too well to losing to "little old Clemson," so when a Clemson player intercepted an Ohio State pass late in the game to seal the victory, Hayes punched him in the throat! Hayes was fired the next day, ending his storied career.

Then a couple of years later Clemson won the freaking national championship, beating freaking Nebraska in the freaking Orange Bowl. It always happens like this. Carolina had the first surge of success in the Seventies, under new coach Jim Carlen, but even when they showed promise, they usually got killed in their bowl games. Then Clemson comes out of nowhere and beats a traditional power like Nebraska in a prestigious bowl like the Orange Bowl. In the 2010s, Carolina had three 11-win seasons and beat the Tigers five years in a row. But when they played for the SEC championship in 2010, they got their doors blown off by Auburn. And since Spurrier left we've mostly sucked again. Then Clemson comes out of nowhere and not only starts winning but starts regularly beating traditional powerhouses and winning national championships. What I'm saying is, even when Carolina is good, they look like they're doing it with smoke and mirrors, and when Clemson gets good, they are genuinely good. 

I grew up pulling for the Gamecocks and so I naturally hated Clemson. As we age we mellow and now I like Clemson and hope they keep on winning. Dad's second wife, Frances Lawton, was the daughter of a man who played for Clemson back in the day. He must have played for Frank Howard. I don't actually remember his given name. His nickname was "Streak" (Streak Lawton), because he played running back and was supposedly fast, although I have never been able to find anything on his career as a player at Clemson. [I have since learned, via the Clemson football media guide, that Streak Lawton earned letters in football at Clemson in 1935 and 1936. This means he would have played under head coach Jess Neely; Frank Howard was an assistant coach on those teams. Streak's son Winston lettered in 1969.] Anyway, he was wealthy, and for the few years that Dad was married to Frances we all went to the Carolina-Clemson game whenever it was played at Death Valley (I think we went to two). The adults had seats in the stands, and we four boys sat on the Hill. I proudly wore my Gamecock colors, but Clemson won both games that I went to. At one game, I caught the football on an extra point attempt or a field goal. Okay, I didn't catch it outright, but nobody did, and I caught it on a couple of bounces and threw it back down to the field. I would have only been about ten at the time, and I remember that football feeling like it was about the size of a pumpkin! After I threw it back, I caught sight of my girlfriend at the time, whom I didn't realize until that moment was also on the Hill, down below me. She gave me a thumbs-up and a big smile. I felt like a total badass.