Rufus F.

In his voyage account from the 13th century, Marco Polo tells of “the old man of the mountain” (Book I: Ch. 21), or Ala’u-‘d-Din Muhammad, one of the last rulers of the Nizari Ismailis, a heretical offshoot of Shiite Islam in lands stretching from modern Afghanistan to Syria:

“In a beautiful valley, enclosed between two lofty mountains, he had formed a luxurious garden, stored with every delicious fruit and every fragrant shrub that could be procured. Palaces of various sizes and forms were erected in different parts of the grounds, ornamented with works in gold, with paintings, and with furniture of rich silks. By means of small conduits, streams of wine, milk, honey, and some of pure water, were seen to flow in every direction. The inhabitants of these palaces were elegant and beautiful damsels, accomplished in the arts of singing, playing upon all sorts of musical instruments, dancing, and especially those of dalliance and amorous allurement.”

In Polo’s highly dubious account, Ala’u-‘d-Din created this artificial wonderland to have power over the young male initiates to his military order. Claiming to be a prophet equal to Mahomet, and able to determine who would enter paradise, Ala’u-‘d-Din would have daring youths brought to his meagre castle, given opium, and transported by means of tunnels to his sound-stage seventh heaven, there to be given a supposed glimpse of paradise. Having thus been promised every form of delight in exchange for their obedience, the young men were enlisted into Ala’u-‘d-Din’s order of political killers, feared throughout the region. One version of the story holds the youth were regularly drugged with hashish and were originally known as “Hashshashin”, or “hashish users” giving the order its proper name Assassins. [click to continue…]

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Surge was a citrus-flavored soda pop launched in the US by the Coca Cola Company in 1996 as an American variant of the Norwegian Urge. It had an advantage over 7-Up and Mountain Dew in lacking a syrupy aftertaste, although, like them, it essentially tasted like what a kiwi fruit might urinate, if it could do so. What really killed Surge, though, was an insipid ad campaign, intended to evoke “extreme” sports, but instead bringing to mind rioting and a failed educational system. If you want to drink Surge today, you have to know a Norwegian. (Perhaps an extreme Norwegian)

But, in 1996, free bottles of Surge were offered up at many outdoor festivals and rock shows, and I was the right age to attend them. Coincidentally, that summer, I was wrapped up in the first great love relationship of my life with a tempestuous, beautiful, charmingly amoral, keenly sensual, intellectually exuberant, and deeply challenging young woman- a relationship that would burn high, flame out viciously and forever alter my views about love and the opposite sex; it undoubtedly prepared me in some sense to be with my wife, who is all of the above but more so. Surge barely outlived that young relationship.

Surge would be my equivalent of the madeleine in Proust, were it not discontinued. For me, the memories bring back the taste, instead of vice-versa. It’s strange, but years later, I can still remember that taste, along with the sense of being alive in my body, in love with someone who loved me, and for the first time feeling that I belonged in exactly the time and place I was. You’ll therefore forgive me if, perhaps, I remember the girl, the drink, and the relationship as all tasting a bit sweeter than they really did.

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In his 1877 preface to, and defence of, his novel L’Assommoir, Émile Zola writes:

“I wanted to depict the inexorable downfall of a working class family in the poisonous atmosphere of our industrial suburbs. Intoxication and idleness lead to a weakening of family ties, to the filth of promiscuity, to the progressive neglect of decent feelings, and ultimately to degradation and death. It is simply morality in action.”

Zola’s two great themes are poverty and vice. With a near-clinical precision, he shows them struggling against, while anchoring and giving rise to one another, fixed like the two headed serpent in Egyptian mythology. L’Assommoir, the story of a destitute family whose patriarch drinks away the earnings, triggering the vices of wife and daughter, caught hell from French conservatives for its adultery, promiscuity, and immorality; and from the socialists for its all-too-reproachable poor. Then, as now, poverty and vice are delicate subjects, particularly in combination. Suggesting they fuel one another is a provocation to both conservatives and socialists who bemoan vice and poverty respectively, while ignoring the effects of poverty and vice respectively.

Does Zola’s liberalism hold up? In 2012, his fascination with the “filth of promiscuity” likely seems old fashioned and “sex negative”, and his characters’ alcoholism seems positively antiquated in an era in which the situation of the poor has improved to the point that they have meth. But his paramount theme, beyond vice and poverty, is oblivion- the oblivion that men create for themselves and one another, but which seems to be the inheritance of a particular class. His great skill is in depicting his characters in a way that is at once pitiless and sympathetic. The milieu, those Second Empire industrial suburbs, is changed, along with some of the particulars, but the theme might be eternal in human life. Reaching ever upwards, we slide ever downwards.

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"Usherette"- Reginald Marsh

Over at the League sub-blog “Forbes”, E.D. shares Roger Ebert’s suggestions as to why movie theatregoing is declining. As avid cinephiles, one might expect me and the missus to go to the movies more frequently, and yet our attempts to do so this holiday season reminded us once again that, for adults, moviegoing is not all beer and skittles.

Here follows a chronicle of our holiday moviegoing crusades: the first was a children’s movie we saw with our friend and her kids. Unfortunately, the multiplex went suddenly and unexpectedly “offline” that evening, forcing us to pay cash; also, me to frantically scour the neighboring mall for an ATM machine and dash back to the ticket line, which snaked around the block as the pitiable teen cashier had to write out “tickets” for everyone paying. Luckily, your heroic narrator arrived ridiculously early and saved the day for the others, allowing us to make our way to the theatre for a pleasant evening of children crying and kicking our seats like they were filled with candy and needed only to be cracked open to spill their delicious sweets.

Undaunted, our hero returned a week later for a friend’s birthday outing. We were all fairly sauced after a brewery tour, which made the blaring children comfortably tolerable as we waited for the theatre staff to figure out how to get the movie to project- a puzzler that lasted until well over an hour after the movie was scheduled to begin. In apology, the theatre manager gave everyone free passes to a multiplex film of their choice. And lo, the second crusade ended in a draw.

The next week, the knight and his lady returned for a third time to cash in that free pass. Alas, we were thwarted by an officious 16 year old martinet who insisted we return to the meandering box office line to verify that my free movie pass was authentic. The line delayed us further and when we got to the front we opted against attending the movie (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) for which we were now thirty minutes late or any of the other films at the multiplex, all of which were made for and aimed at teenage boys and their girlfriends, perhaps explaining the self-importance of the teen usher. A bit sauced this night as well (she drove) I blared to the manager, “That kid should be fired!”, which my wife has laughed about for days since because I am usually a mild milquetoast. The third crusade ending in failure, thus ends the chronicles of pain and struggle. [click to continue…]

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