Ancient Echoes and Banshee Screams

The arrival of summer means I’m getting out more, but, with the “re-opening” proceeding at a crawl, “out” mostly means just outside my own house – and an occasional trip to the local lumberyard. Repairs are unending, as with most middle-age homes (and people), so there is always something to do. This weekend I’m repairing the wooden staircase leading to the garage attic. A lot of my time after dusk continues to be spent on books and TV, however. Few alternative activities are preferable to those at a social distance of two meters. For other stay-at-homes, I can recommend one recent read and one recent watch.

Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles

The adage “history is written by the winners” is not entirely true. The winners get only the first draft. Later generations (including descendants of winners) tend to indulge in revisionism. In the case of Carthage, however, the winner’s history is pretty much all we have in the way of literary sources. Aside from some stela inscriptions there is virtually no literary record from the Carthaginian point of view. The reason, of course, is that the Romans calculatedly obliterated Carthage. They razed the city completely to the ground, destroyed its records and monuments, seized its territory, and sold the 50,000 or so survivors of the final siege into slavery. There was no one left to write a losers’ history. Total destruction is still sometimes called a Carthaginian peace. Carthage eventually was re-founded but as a fully Roman city, which only emphasized the totality of the former extinguishment.

There are, at least, very good Greek and Roman historians who wrote about Carthage and Punic civilization. “Punic” is derived from “Phoenician.” Carthage, in present day Tunisia, was founded in the 9^th century BCE by colonizers from the Phoenician city of Tyre. At the height of its empire, Carthage dominated the western Mediterranean with its merchant and military fleets. It controlled territories in North Africa, Spain, Sicily, and Sardinia while monopolizing sea trade beyond the Strait of Gibraltar to northern Europe and west Africa. Between 264 BCE and 146 BCE Carthage fought three desperate wars of survival with Rome. Polybius, a Greek aide to Roman general Scipio Aemilianus, wrote a chilling eyewitness account of the final fall of Carthage in the Third Punic War.

Unsurprisingly, Greco-Roman sources, despite their merit, are uniformly biased against the Carthaginians even when respectful of their military achievements. For this reason Richard Miles’ competent modern treatment of Carthaginian civilization is welcome. (His title, of course, is from Cato’s refrain Carthago delenda est.) Miles supplements Greek and Roman sources with archaeological evidence. He provides insight not only into historical events, but into social structure, customs, and religion, and how they evolved over centuries. In part because of the long contact of Punic civilization in peace and war with western Greeks, religion in particular diverged from its Phoenician origins; the demigod Melqart, for example, blended with Heracles. Miles offers as comprehensive and even-handed a view of Carthage as can be accommodated in (including notes) 500 pages.

Banshee (Cinemax)

The Cinemax series Banshee ran from 2013 to 2016. I did not then and do not now subscribe to Cinemax. Among the premium channel’s limited audience at the time, however, the show was a hit. I heard of it back then but knew nothing about it. I’d since forgotten even having heard of it until a couple weeks ago when I put a link in the text of a blog post (See That Other Richard below) to the music video for the Nickelback song Rockstar; the video contains cameos by numerous celebs, among them Eliza Dushku (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Tru Calling, Dollhouse). In the way that one thing leads to another, I idly checked IMDB for her more recent projects and saw the final season of Banshee on the list. A click on the link to the show revealed exceptionally high customer ratings. By way of this roundabout series of links and clicks I soon found myself ordering a discounted Blu-ray set of the show.

Banshee often is briefly described as a crime drama, and it is that, but the description gives insufficient hint of the show's weirdness. There are some satires that are played so completely straight that many viewers are apt miss the satire (e.g. Starship Troopers and John Wick). The ones that work tend to win cult followings. Banshee is played intensely straight and it has a cult following. “Preposterous” is too gentle a term for Banshee, but the show is the very definition of a guilty pleasure.

We meet the nameless central character (played by Anthony Starr) at the end of his 15-year prison term for a jewel heist gone wrong. During his incarceration he refused to give up to authorities the name of his partner and love-interest Anastasia (Ivana Milicevic) who had escaped from the scene of the crime. Upon his release he looks up an old associate, a cross-dressing uber-hacker named Job (Hoon Lee), in order to find Anastasia. Anastasia now goes by the name of Carrie Hopewell and lives in the small town of Banshee Pennsylvania; she is hiding there not from the police but from a ruthless Ukrainian mobster who goes by the nickname Rabbit. Rabbit is her father and she has daddy issues. Rabbit hasn’t forgiven her for that failed jewel job in which he knows she and her lover planned to betray him. Carrie is married to the Banshee DA who knows nothing of her real past. She has a rebellious teen daughter and a younger son with health problems.

After cinematic-level violence with Rabbit’s goons in New York, Anthony Starr’s character travels to Banshee and stops for a drink at a bar owned by long-retired fighter Sugar Bates (Frankie Faison). Also at the bar is a loner from Oregon named Lucas Hood who is coming to town to be the new sheriff. (Local corruption induced the mayor to call in an outsider for the job.) A fight breaks out between the prospective sheriff and two thugs in which all three are killed, so naturally the protagonist takes Hood’s ID and decides to impersonate Lucas Hood and to be sworn in as Sheriff. His hacker pal Job can supply the necessary adjustments to official records. “Hood” and Sugar bury the bodies from the bar in the woods. He still can be close to Carrie/Anastasia this way. “Lucas Hood” acts as sheriff in a rough-and-ready fashion, yet continues to execute elaborate crimes on the side. He is not just a criminal psychopath though. He is a Nietzschean anti-hero with his own rigorous ethics that simply bear no relation to the law.

If there weren’t women among the writers I’d wonder if the creators all had Mailer-esque masculinity issues, but there are. So, apparently the testosterone-filled scripts are a considered choice. In Banshee there is a lapsed Amish crime lord who stops at nothing to get what he wants, rampant sexual hijinks (including by wayward Amish), kickass female characters with fighting skills and guns (sans misandry this is a male fantasy), ethnic gangs (native Americans, Columbian drug traffickers, and Neo-Nazis) with automatic weapons, corrupt military men (also with automatic weapons), and even a Satanist serial killer. There is gory violence and soap-opera-style intrigue. Nudity and sex (often between unexpected characters) are as graphic as they possibly can be and still be aired on Cinemax rather than on an outright porn channel. The result of all this is ridiculous yet addictive. One component of the show’s addictive qualities is the one serious theme running throughout the series: a search for personal identity. Some characters submerse themselves in a predigested group identity (ethnic, religious, familial, or philosophical) while others more thoughtfully reinvent themselves as individuals even when that means breaking from the past, from upbringing, and from family.

My reaction to the first episode was “What the hell?” The reader’s response to it is likely to be the same. However, give the show a chance for a couple more episodes. Just accept the craziness. If you’re like most viewers (myself among them), you’ll then keep returning to Banshee until the Season 4 finale.

Banshee Trailer

Stealth Summer

Summer sneaked up on me this year. The general weirdness of the past several months seemed both to shrink and stretch time in ways that bear little relation either to the wall clock, the calendar, or even Einstein’s formulae. Only last night when a firefly flew past the window next to my computer did the time of year finally register. Here we are: at long last summer. I usually have a solstice party at my house on or about the 21^st with grilled burgers and the like. That’s a pretty tame celebration compared to an ancient Gallic practice of burning humans in giant wicker men. [From Caesar’s Commentaries: Alii immani magnitudine simulacra habent, quorum contexta viminibus membra vivis hominibus complent quibus succensis circumventi flamma exanimantur homines/ “Others have figures of vast size with limbs made of wicker, which are filled with living men who are killed by enveloping flames.”] All in all, I prefer the burgers, but even these were out this year as a social event (social distancing and all that). So, the solstice somehow came and went without my notice.

Sharon in Boston 1970

It is in particular the 23^rd. On this day 70 (!) years ago my sister Sharon was born. The timing was fortuitous for my dad. On June 25 (still the 24^th on this side of the Dateline) North Korea invaded South Korea. Sharon was my father’s draft exemption; otherwise, just 4 years after his discharge, he likely would have been called up again for the new conflict. I came along a couple of years later. Having an older sister, especially one far hipper than I ever was, was always a big advantage growing up. It kept me more aware, at least, of the zeitgeist than I otherwise would have been. On this day 25 years ago – again “(!)” – she died. The last person standing in an immediate family is apt to be acutely aware of birth dates and departure dates. Among the things she left behind was a box full of poetry. Some years ago I posted 100 of her early poems. Perhaps I’ll yet post a collection of later ones, but the early ones provide a youthful window on the 1960s. The reader can sample them at Echoes of the Boom.

Anyway, though I “missed” the first two days of summer, at least to the extent of being aware that’s what they were, I did (and do) enjoy the warmth and green. Summer remains my favorite season long after its association with “school vacation.” As a kid I used to pretend that I preferred winter, but that was only to be contrary; it always got a rise out of adults who would tell me, “When you’re older you’ll feel different!” There are, of course, latitudes where summers are punishing, but in NJ the other seasons are more punishing, still. The days between June 21 and September 22 are few enough: so few in fact, that I’ll spend no more of this one tapping at a computer keyboard. It’s time to go outside and laze in the sunshine.

Sam Cooke – Summertime (1958)

That Other Richard

David Hepworth begins his book Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars with the statement, “The day of the rock star, like the day of the cowboy, has passed.” Just as reenactors strap on replica holsters to stage the gunfight at the OK Corral, wannabes continue to strap on guitars to play the part of rock stars, he says, but one struggles to take them seriously. “Rock star” doesn’t even mean “rock star” much of the time, he tells us; it’s apt to be a metaphor as in a rock star money manager or a rock star chef.

Hepworth overstates his case, but he does have a case. For one thing, rock is over as the dominant popular music genre. A straight-up rock-and-roll song hasn’t broken the top ten chart in the US in a decade. It’s a pop and hip hop world. There are still rock fans, of course, but they are now a niche market – a largish niche but still a niche. It’s hard to be a star when your altitude maxes out in the troposphere. But it’s not just preferred musical styles that have changed. So have the musicians and their fans. Play-on-demand used to be costlier both to produce and buy: records and tapes vs. streams and downloads. People literally had more invested in their music 40 years ago; today for the consumer content most often is free and there is a lot more of it. This very much has changed the consumer’s relationship to it and to the creators of it – many of the latter being (in an era of electronic music) unknown programmers. As for the modern pop celebrities, they find it nearly impossible to emulate the classic rock star lifestyle in a world with zero presumption of privacy: cell phones, drones, and security cameras record everything.

Rock had a good run though: 40 years on top, more or less. There are countless books on the history of rock – some general and some specific to a subgenre, band, or person – but Hepworth gives a pretty good overview: readable and informative without getting too lost in the weeds. He tells us, “In the pages that follow I’ve profiled one rock star per year over each of the forty years from 1955 to 1994, and listed ten records, either singles or albums, that were made, were released, or were hits that year in order to give a flavor of the time.” And that’s exactly what he does.

But for a timing fluke, this might have been one of the numerous books I read recreationally and then set aside without comment here or elsewhere. However, the coincidence of picking up the book so soon after Little Richard’s death last month evoked memories that inspire a mention, for Hepworth’s very first profile is of Little Richard (Richard Wayne Penniman), whom he identifies as the archetype of rock stars who followed. I think Hepworth is right about that. Little Richard wasn’t the biggest rock star of the 1950s but he set the standard in every other way. His “I don’t give a crap if you think I’m crazy” flamboyance and his pulse rousing music outshone his better-selling contemporaries (Presley, Vincent, Lewis, et al). Even Bobby Zimmerman (Bob Dylan) put in his 1959 high school Yearbook as his ambition, “to join Little Richard.”

I remember Top 40 radio broadcasts in the late 1950s and early 60s when my age was still in single digits. I was no prodigy in music or anything else, so my tastes were … well … childlike. I was aware of Little Richard and liked him, but my primary reason for doing so was that he was named Richard. Hey, I said I was no prodigy. Purely by chance nomenclature, however, I had chosen well, as I began to realize as adolescence neared. I was still an utter unsophisticate at that point, of course, but I had the advantage of a sister 2½ years older (the ½ makes a difference at that age), so I always was exposed to musical trends well before I would have found them myself. By then Little Richard's star already had dimmed from its brightness in the 1950s when he had 18 hit singles. (By the way, did the socially powerful prudes of the 1950s simply not listen to his lyrics, which played without remark on the air: e.g. “Good golly Miss Molly/Sure like to ball”?) Yet, Little Richard continued to perform and in the process jumpstarted the careers of massive ‘60s stars. Jimi Hendrix and James Brown both got their start with Little Richard. The fledgling Beatles opened for Little Richard who helped them hone their sound. The Rolling Stones also toured with Little Richard in the early 1960s. Mick Jagger called him “the biggest inspiration” and added “he was always so generous with advice to me.”

By the 1970s the first round of nostalgia was kicking in (that always happens after 20 years, hence Grease) and Little Richard was back in demand as a top billed act. By the 1990s, when he himself was in his 60s, he was pulling bigger audiences than he did in his first wave of popularity in the 1950s. I’ll still take his music over the uninspiring pop sounds that dominate the charts today. So, silly as my motive may have been for initially becoming a fan, it worked out pretty well in the long run. If only my other early life choices (regardless of sense or motive) had been as good.

Little Richard – Good Golly Miss Molly.  The song was first recorded in 1958 but the vid is from a 1969 performance.

Sheepskin

I’m beginning to see the value of the sexagesimal (base 60) number system used by the ancient Sumerians. I wouldn’t have to face a landmark graduation anniversary for another decade. (The vagaries of life being what they are, I might miss it altogether.) Regrettably, we use a decimal number system, so anniversaries in multiples of 10 hold particular significance for us. On this day 50 (!) – not 50!, which really would be something – years ago I graduated high school. No, it doesn’t feel that long ago… and, yes, it does.

The teen years, largely coinciding with high school, are when we firm up our identities – our sense of self. I’m well aware of Freudian notions of early childhood personality formation (along with more recent developmental theories), and it is true that personality traits visible in childhood are commonly visible in adulthood, too. Yet, the precise way in which those often conflicting traits balance with each other is still in flux in our teens. By the time we graduate high school, however, we almost surely have calibrated our scales: our philosophies may change thereafter and we may (one hopes) continue to learn from experience, but our identities are pretty well established. I don’t think anyone who knew me in 1970 would be surprised meeting me today… aside, that is, from the purely physical observation, “Man, you got old!”

Because high school is such a key period in our lives and because of the “reminiscence bump” (the psychological phenomenon whereby we always remember our teens and 20s better than any years afterward), it looms large in our minds. It is why, weird as it seems from the perspective of adolescents, teen movies and YA (young adult) literature appeal to adults almost as much as to teens. Adults still relate to them, for pieces of us forever remain rooted in high school. The largest consumers of YA fiction, in fact, are actual adults with age 30-44 as the single largest demographic according to Publisher’s Weekly. At my own short story site (Richard’s Mirror) out of 65 stories posted there, 10 have teen protagonists. Ok, one is a student scribe in ancient Assyria (Dressed to the Nineveh) and two are prehistorical, but still… Two stories on the site are nonfiction and recount events in my old high school: Horse Sense and

The Final Conquest.

Saint Bernard’s School was an old-school old school. It was a nominally Episcopalian red brick boys prep school Forms I-VI (grades 7-12) founded in 1900. Total enrollment in any given year was 120 students, give or take a few. The school was steeped in deliberately old-fashioned values and it operated by a “study your Latin and algebra” philosophy. Henry Luce III (Time-Life) chaired the board of trustees. Yet, for all the required neckties and “sirs,” the atmosphere was surprisingly laidback in practice. (Currently named Gill St. Bernard’s, it’s a very different place today: coed, K-12, self-descriptively progressive, and far far more expensive in inflation adjusted terms.)

Back in 1964 my mom asked my sister and me if we wanted to attend St. John’s and St. Bernard’s respectively rather than continue in the public school system about which she had misgivings. My sister, two years older than I, said no because she didn’t want to attend a school with no boys. (Coed private schools existed back then, but they were still the exception rather than the rule, and none was conveniently nearby.) At 11 years old I said yes for the sole reason that the school offered horseback riding as a sport. So one day in the ensuing September, I donned a blue blazer jacket, struggled with a half-Windsor knot, and stepped onto the St. Bernard’s campus. I still remember being utterly lost that first day. (I didn’t think about it at the time, but because of my late-in-year birthday I was the youngest student not only in my Form but on the whole campus.) Six eventful years later came the annoyingly named “Commencement.” It’s a Termination by any proper assessment: calling it a commencement is as eye-roll inducing as those movies that end with the words “The Beginning.”

Is there anything I would say to my 1970 newly graduated self if given the chance via some time warp anomaly? Well, “Buy Intel” of course. I’d offer some relationship advice: particularly what and whom to avoid. I’d also make some remarks about what should and shouldn’t be taken seriously. I doubt I’d listen though. The younger me likely would point out that the older me couldn’t possibly be who I said I was or else I would remember this conversation, QED. Negated by logic, I guess I’d then vanish.

This tune has nothing whatsoever to do with high school or graduation. It just happens to have been the Number 1 song for the week of 12 June 1970 according to Billboard. I still have the vintage vinyl album that contains it. I liked the album in general back then but didn’t care much for this one track. It was inescapable though.

A Taste for Ketchum

I’ve been a fan of Jack Ketchum for a long time, but left a few of his books unread until this year. (I reviewed one of those a couple weeks ago.) Dallas Mayr (1946-2018) while still a soda jerk began his literary career with short stories and articles in second tier magazines under the name Jerzy Livingston. (He was originally from Livingston NJ.) He gained notoriety, however, under the pen name Jack Ketchum with his 1980 first novel Off Season, the success of which seems to have surprised his own publisher Ballantine Books. A couple dozen books followed. Ketchum writes primarily in the horror genre. He is a multiple Bram Stoker Award winner and in 2011 won the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award.

Closing Time and Other Stories, which arrived in the mail a few days ago, contains 19 of his short stories. Jack adds a brief explanation after each story about what inspired it. Usually it was some personal experience that he embellished and gave a dark twist. There is a revenge tale about smokers in a Greek restaurant/tavern on the West Side of Manhattan, a spooky “honor system” motel with no night manager on a dark misty Florida highway, a suicide hotline operator who couldn’t be more wrong for the job, a patient who omits key details with his therapist, a sadistic robber, and a child’s 911 call. There isn’t a bad story in the bunch; each is well plotted, well-presented, creepy in a good way, and (except for the couple with ghostly elements) all too credible.

Not everyone, of course, would agree. Ketchum writes well – even his critics admit that – but he also writes in-your-face graphically, which in horror fiction can be quite gruesome. He omits no detail just for being unseemly. Because of this, and despite the commercial success of Off Season, Ballantine rejected his next novel Ladies Night, which offended the publisher’s reader. (Ladies Night found success later with another publisher.) The Village Voice reviewer in 1980 chided Ballantine for having published Off Season because of the violence. Sometimes other elements offend some readers. Regarding the origin of one of the short stories in Closing Time Ketchum writes, “Nanci Kalantra had asked me for a piece for Horrorworld Online and liked the story very much but said that it seemed that the only thing which outraged her readers at all seemed to be explicit sex. Not explicit horrors…” Ketchum is not alone in sometimes offending readers. J.G. Ballard, one of the finest prose writers of the 20^th century (predominately but not exclusively of sci-fi), received a publisher’s rejection for his 1973 novel Crash accompanied by the note on the manuscript, “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.” Crash, in which cultists find erotic satisfaction in auto crashes, found another publisher, is critically well-regarded, and has been continuously in print ever since.

Ultimately what we find acceptable is (tautologically) a matter of taste. Yet, this raises an old question. We know that some people’s taste (whether for coffee, music, literature, or art) is more refined than that of others, but is “refined” (which often means simply more knowledgeable) actually better? Is it wrong to prefer Twisted Sister to Georg Solti? Are there fundamental criteria for taste that make the judgment of some people more right than the judgment of others? Committedly religious folk often think so as do committed ideologues, and for similar reasons: for them “tasteful” equals “approved propaganda,” whether or not it twists the truth about the human heart and nature. Bad taste is whatever undermines the agenda. Among more deliberative secular thinkers, opinions have varied. Plato thought the answer was yes; he concluded that good taste was a search for beauty and that beauty is truth. (I think he was wrong about that for all his dialectics: the truth is often ugly.) Aristotle was less idealistic but still agreed the answer was yes; he tried to give some limited guidance in the dramatic arts with his influential prescription for a good (i.e. tasteful) dramatic script in Poetics. The more practical Romans gave us the phrase de gustibus non est disputandum (there’s no accounting for taste), which is a no. In the Enlightenment philosophers took another stab at it since it seemed to them that some things were plainly more tasteful than others, so there must be a way to explain why. Wrote Alexander Gerard in his Essay on Taste (1759), “But the maxim [de gustibus] is false and pernicious, when applied to that intellectual taste, which has for its objects the arts and sciences.” Yet by tortured reasoning he ended by conflating “refined” with “tasteful,” which is a conclusion not much different from his premise. David Hume (1711-1776) did a little better by distinguishing between sentiments and determinations. The former (essentially: “I just like it”) are purely subjective but the latter are not. Therefore we can judge, for example, a musical composition by making (objective) determinations of its technical merit independently of whether we (subjectively) fancy it. So, we can say in the same sentence, “Yes, it’s very good, but I don’t like it much.” This has the ring of truth to it. 20^th and 21^st century cultural critics by and large have returned to the de gustibus dictum as a stated philosophy, yet it’s pretty clear that they don’t really believe it: they make critical pronouncements about taste all the time, which would be impossible if they believed it.

I don’t think we’re likely to do much better than Hume, so I’m sticking with him, at least for now. With regard to Ketchum in particular, my determination is that he is a fine writer and my sentiment is that I like him. Someone else’s taste may differ.

The Cramps - You've Got Good Taste