What I Watched Recently: Boxing Day Edition

This was meant to be a Christmas Edition and published last night, but Ye Olde Author fell asleep in his office chair. Ho ho ho!

Here we go, in no particular order other than how they fall in my screencaps folder.

~

(2000)

A fast-lane investment broker, offered the opportunity to see how the other half lives, wakes up to find that his sports car and girlfriend have become a mini-van and wife.

Here's one of my wife's favorites. I'd never watched it until a few years ago, but I can see the enduring appeal. Whenever I feel like my life is not exactly where I want it to be and may never even get there in the time allotted me, I like to remind myself that at some point out there in the multiverse I chose this one over whatever other one. No one knows their own story, truly, until they're yanked out of it. 

Sometimes I like to yell out "Where were you on that one, Don Cheadle?" to the heavens when something goes wrong. Or "Don't try and Don Cheadle me on this, okay?" when anyone overstates my choices.

~

(2003)

Raised as an over-sized elf, a human travels from the North Pole to NYC to meet his biological father who doesn't know he exists and is in desperate need of some Christmas spirit.

Just perfect. I was late in seeing this one. Wil Ferrell's man-child schtick is suited perfectly for this (as it was for Anchorman, although this one stays PG.) 

Not enough credit is extended to Faizon Love as the straight man Gimbel's Manager as Buddy the Elf ascends through the realms of Christmas insanity. The contrast/ hard cuts from Buddy to the manager made me laugh out loud each and every time. Perfect expressions/ persona. He's the coach from the "Invincible" episode of Always Sunny, too - plenty besides that, but I love that damn episode. 

A shout-out to Jon Favreau, as well, who went from the kind of 90s-indie-guy I was truly sick of by the end of that decade into a pillar of the industry. An admirable career and I've never read an interview with him where he sounded like an asshole. All too rare. 

~

(1984)

A young man inadvertently breaks three important rules concerning his new pet and unleashes a horde of malevolently mischievous monsters on a small town.

Another first for the Dog Star Omnibus kids this year. I tried to introduce it into the Christmas round of viewing last year, but they thought they'd be too scared. But after a year of watching crazier nonsense than this over their shoulder in their Roblox Obbies and YouTube family Squidgame/ Pennywise/ Stuff-Like-This without batting an eye, I made an executive decision. 

A good time was had by all. They are always so grossed out by 1980s-style slimy-monster effects. My middle one made me proud by asking the type of questions throughout ("Wait, why does snow not get them wet? Doesn't that count?" Ditto for all the booze being lapped up and spilled on one another in the barroom scene, or the sliding scale of "bright lights". Or how in the department store at the end it takes Gizmo about five minutes of screentime to traverse the distance Billy and Stripe traversed in about five seconds, and he's in a moving vehicle.) that show the makings of a fine movie-mind. 

I've seen Gremlins many times since catching it on vacation in the States the summer of 1985. (Can that be right? Was it in theaters again the summer after it came out? Did I see it in 1984?) I've got to say the "Why not snow..." thing never occurred to me. This time, I had fun - and noticed Jonathan Banks in there as the deputy for the first time! Who else am I missing in here? - but it struck me as odd that they cast Zach Galligan as Billy. The part seems like it was written for someone Corey Feldman's age. Indeed, Corey Feldman is in the movie, as his buddy, even though it appears there's at least a ten year gap between them. I'm sure it's in any of the commentary or copious literature out there on the movie, but another thing that had never really occurred to me over the years. 

Joe Dante really likes referencing other movies, huh? He was doing mash-up/ sampling before it was cool, I guess. Or to a degree even Brian DePalma found excessive. 

~

(1997)

A seventeen-year-old aristocrat falls in love with a kind but poor artist aboard the luxurious, ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic.

Something happened to James Cameron around the time of The Abyss and he never got right. Well, "right" by my reckoning; by the world's, I'd say he's doing just fine. Like JJ Abrams, another of the world's most successful filmmakers, he makes movies that hoover up the box office and are perfectly watchable - even lovable - while watching them but fall apart like so much biomimetic matter on repeat viewings. 

What makes this all-hat-no-cattle process so baffling is how much freaking overhead and investment is involved. The epitome of scaling a volcano to toast a hot dog and swaddling the expedition in swirling choruses and epic shots. A three hour plus evocation of the paper bag maelstrom from American Beauty. Everyone does fine, everything's made with machine perfection. Each shot is wonderful, each lightbulb is probably authentic. What can you complain about? Antiseptic AF but hey, no germs.

I remember that French dinner scene cut from the original release of Apocalypse Now where Francis Ford Coppola took such elaborate pains to make the temperature of the wine right on the table, or paired with the food, etc. It strikes me as the epitome of a certain type of madness. 

When this came out I remember asking my grandfather (just before he went into the nursing home, i.e. in his last six months of life) if he had any plans to see it. "I've seen that one five or six times now," he said with a smile. I miss that guy. I watched an episode of St. Elsewhere the other night where one of the characters, referring to a deceased loved one, said something like "There was a time where (so and so) did not exist. And that time has come again." It's a very true, surgical way of looking at it. Surgery can be helpful; hell, it's often essential. I swear there's a tie-in, here, to Titanic, and making it over and over again, and diving down to the bottom of the ocean to remember its husk. R.I.P. to all granddads everywhere. 

~

(2006)

Two women troubled with guy-problems swap homes in each other's countries, where they each meet a local guy and fall in love.

Another one my wife showed me - only this year, so this was a first. Here's a rom-com that does everything right. Oh, it hits all the branches you'd expect: that cad Jude Law, Y2k's answer to Emily Blunt Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz proving a sincere study of Doris Day, a meet cute, and then another one - and then someone defines meet cute, and then references it again -, successful ladies who imbibe too much and the truth gushes out, examining their lives, connecting with the magical elderly, "they say when the Santa Ana winds blow, crazy things happen...", smarmy Jack Black - okay, that last one is a bit of a bump in the road.

But: even Jack Black's insistence on Jack Black-ing every gd situation of his life and ours isn't enough to ruin this one. A really cute and wonderful movie. Has nothing to do with Christmas, so far as I can see, or less to do with it than, say, Die Hard or Die Hard 2, but I don't see people having those kind of online arguments about whether or not it's a Christmas movie. 

~

(2005)

An uptight, conservative businesswoman accompanies her boyfriend to his eccentric and outgoing family's annual Christmas celebration and finds that she's a fish out of water in their free-spirited way of life.

Here's a movie that will make you unbelieve in Christmas... okay, not really. It should be on the poster, though. The lack of self-awareness from every character - as they discuss self-awareness - and that imbues every scene and line of the script is uncanny. Like someone saw Pieces of April (or looked ahead to Rachel's Getting Married) and thought 'What this story needs is less self-awareness.' I picture a Narcissism machine like the wind/rain machines big productions have, just raining it down over the heads of everyone.

Everything that happens in The Holiday as far as rom-com branches happens here, too, just brainlessly. Meet-cute becomes whoops-I-fell-off-the-bus-on-my-face! etc. This film needs to be studied. There's a certain type of furious self-absorption being celebrated here, the kind where characters in the same room fail to hear or see what other characters are doing or how their loved ones feel or how anyone actually feels on the inside, etc. as a virtue instead of the key to escaping the family horrorshow. 

I can't get to the bottom of it in a capsule review like this. Just two things  - throw a dart and there's fifty more but here's two:

- My wife and I do this "Dermony Mulroney... has... hu-man Christ-mas??" Frankenstein voice based on his character here. Holy moley. If the film had a line or two indicating he was a robot studying holiday customs, maybe it'd be fixable. Without it, you're left agonizing over his lack of human verisimilitude. He might get it from his family, it's true, and the two sisters joining in are certainly alien and insane as well. The whole "family stone" might be some kind of metaphor for (again) biomimetic death spasms and hallucinations. Just with none of the nobility of "Course: Oblivion."

- There's one scene where Diane Keaton's character (dying Mom) says to Rachel McAdams (cynical twentysomething) re: an old photograph of her when she was pregnant. "That's us, kiddo." But she says it in a gruff, low voice, and the reaction shot from McAdams is one of almost horror. The whole scene needs a David Lynchian re-tuning. I wish I had the kind of editing/You-Tube time to do it. But loop that, with the right sound design and close-ups, and you have struck close to the heart of existential parental horror. 

"That's us, kiddo..." FOREVER. AND EVER.

~

(2003)

Stranded at a desolate Nevada motel during a nasty rain storm, ten strangers become acquainted with each other when they realize that they're being killed off one by one.

Here's a film I always refer to as "the other 9/11." Maybe the real 9/11. Because after this movie, nothing was ever the same again. Suddenly every film had fifty stupid nonsensical twists at the end, by law it seemed. An entire way of filmmaking was gone in an instant. Scripts were reverse engineered from nonsensical twists. Better than nonsensical religious dogma, I grant you, but not much.

And the movie marks a certain change for John Cusack as well. He went from an actor who chose interesting roles and seemed to be realizing something pretty cool onscreen, project to project, to someone just doing Identity ten to eleven times a year, every year, for the rest of his and our lives. He and Nic Cage seem to be competing on the wig-and-hair-dye/how-many-movies-can-I-be-in-this-year front, but at least Nic seems like he's working or is occasionally animated on screen. I can't remember the last performance from John Cusack where I felt that was the case. 

Identity seems like the conspicuous pivot, both for his career and for us as a nation. If only the movie was meant as a metaphor for our schizophrenic American consciousness! I'm sure someone involved probably though it was.

~

(2019)

In rural 1977 Georgia, a misfit girl dreams of life in outer space. When a competition offers her a chance to be recorded on NASA's Golden Record, she recruits a makeshift troop of Birdie Scouts, forging friendships that last a lifetime.

Another film where you have to marvel at the lack of self-awareness on the part of the filmmakers. The transparencies of casting and theme make this Amazon commercial seem subtle. Our cultural betters are 1000% focused on their reflection in the mirror and editing it in Photoshop. 

What they get right here:

- I mean, the kids are all cute, performance-wise. Likewise, I mean, it's not a mean-spirited film or anything, excepting the offense-to-spirit that all such optics-jihadism represents.

- Viola Davis and Allison Janney can do no wrong. They're great. But that's no news.

- The smoking. Holy moley - this was like every memory of every family get-together I had in the 70s and early 80s. 

What they get wrong:

- Oh, let's just say everything else, to be charitable. Holy moley, though. There are scenes and sequences here that so perfectly illustrate why simplistic commitments to woke optics by any means necessary end up undermining whatever message you think you're sending. 

- The commitment to unreality is as well-sketched-out here as it is anywhere. Each of the kids is a grotesque, a simulacrum of the (affluent lefty parent)'s fantasies. It's like a kids pageant drag queen show in many respects, with religion and caste lanes for everyone to see. For a more insightful take on such, you're better off just watching the "Always Sunny" episode. 

~

(1996)

A father vows to get his son a Turbo Man action figure for Christmas. However, every store is sold out of them, and he must travel all over town and compete with everybody else in order to find one.

We did not set out to watch this one this year. It's safe to say no one does. But I threw it on while we were wrapping presents and it just kind of stayed on, minute after agonizing minute. 

What on earth were they thinking with this movie? I really would love to sit down with Arnold, Jim Belushi, and Sinbad and talk to them about it. (Similarly, are they buds? Were Jim and Sinbad guests at the Governor's Mansion? I hope so.) It's like at every turn they made a movie that would repel you visually and emotionally. What should have been if not a slam dunk at least some kind of reliable moneymaker is a turkey in every respect.

When this came out, it was probably at the height of my and my old buddy Klum's Arnold-mania. One drunken night in Oakwood, Ohio we got going on Total Recall and laughing and the next thing I know I was talking like Arnold for years. (This was the mid-nineties, so about ten years after the first wave of everyone-talking-like-Arnold; we were bringing it back, bigtime.) People still see me sometimes and yell out "GAAAA!" so associated was I with making that Arnold-noise at one point.

All of which is to say you probably could not have found two people more motivated to find something to love in Jingle All the Way than me and Klum were the day we saw this in the theater. And yet the most we could muster was a groan here and there, or a mild chuckle. 

In the theater that day, there was one guy, though, in the back row, busting a gut laughing at every damn scene. Like DeNiro in the theater in Cape Fear. Me and Klum kept looking at one another and wondering - who is that guy? What the hell? I guess I can finally reveal, that was me - time traveled back to spend some time with 1997 Bryan and Klum but doing so gave me the bends. In my dizzied state I found the movie unbearably funny and didn't even get to interact with either of them. A kindly projectionist found me afterward, collapsed among the milk duds, and led me back to my time pod. I tried, fellas.  

Merry Christmas in the great beyond, old buddy.

~

There'll be one more of these before the end of the month. I watched a lot of movies lately - I don't want to rob myself of the opportunity to tell you all about it! 

Here are some leftover screencaps of films I left out of the above. Happy Boxing Day, world.

Personal Adventures At Sea and On Land: Coda

A side effect of reading the sailing books (and to an extent Cruising Speed and Overdrive as well) was wanting to know a bit more about the other passengers. I picked up the below pursuant to this and wanted to leave a few notes on what I call “the peripherals”, although this should not be taken as a statement of their quality or secondary importance.

In the order I read them:

~

(1983)

“I visited Central Casting and after an agonizing wait of several days, was finally accepted and enrolled as “Anglo Saxon Type Number 2008. Such is the efficiency of Central Casting that the first call I got to work as a professional actor was as a Mexican.”

One of David’s two memoirs – the other one is inexplicably pricey. (Note: in the month or two since I wrote that, the price has become more reasonable.) As you might imagine it’s wonderful. I don’t think he had a co-author, here, either, so doubly impressive. The arc of Niven’s life from WW1 orphan to British officer to Hollywood dilettante back to Britain for the war (and getting fleeced by Her Majesty's Government on his way back to the States) through all the Hollywood and Switzerland adventures is singular, charmingly told, and full of unexpected (by me) pathos and insights. 

Some bulletpoints:

-  POSH – Did you know this stood for ‘port out starboard home?’ I’ve been reading books on the sea for decades (and lived through the Spice Girls) and never came across this before. Niven recounts the snobbery of his shipmates whose supreme status symbol was a cabin on the shady side of the ship.

-  When starting out as an actor in Hollywood, he had a bit part in Mutiny on the Bounty, filming off the coast of California near Catalina. The night before he got wrecked with some old friends aboard the HMS Norfolk and ended up missing the ferry back to the shore. They were kind enough to drop him off on "set" the next day, so David Niven got to make a hell of an entrance climbing down the side of a county-class heavy cruiser before hopping onto the set of the Bounty.

-  When heading back to Britain to re-enlist for WW2, he took the Queen Mary to America with the 101st. So next time you watch that first episode of Band of Brothers, see if you can find him in the background.

“Live television, during its reign, proved one thing – that many actors are masochists. Without exception, the most ghastly torture ever invented for people in my profession, it incorporated all the worst features of films, radio and the legitimate theater. Before an unseen audience of millions, over-dressed and under-rehearsed actors struggled with badly written scripts in front of cameras which collided with sickening regularity and scenery that wobbled and often collapsed while the whole mess was directed by egomaniac directors, drunk with power in front of consoles studded with switches and buttons.”

I know Niven primarily – almost exclusively – as Dick Charleston in Murder By Death and James Bond in Casino Royale. (Not his finest work, the latter, although I’ve been using the “We’ve reached the time of the day reserved for Chopin” line for years. Like most lines I use for years, I'm probably getting it wrong.) And The Pink Panther, of course, although I’m not as much of a fan of the 60s PPs – really, the only two I need are TPPSB and in distant but respectable second TROTPP, neither of which star Niven. Anyway, I watched Wuthering Heights (a role he had to be tricked into taking by director William Wyler) as a result of reading this; I liked it – had never seen it before and had only ever heard a radio adaptation. (Although Niven was right when he wrote it's a thankless role.)

~

(2005)

As a result of the "How To Navigate" chapter in Airborne (and similar instruction in yachting magazines) Bennett Maritime commissioned Bill to do a home video version.

I couldn’t really follow it – I hate to say it, but Bill’s voice can drive me nuts sometimes, I’d much rather read him - but I’m glad I have it. It’s like sitting in a colorful class conducted in another language. What could they be talking about, you wonder, as numbers and graphics drift by like shoreline seen from a boat cruising along at twenty knots.

~

(1993)

Bill mentions reading the first draft of this in Racing Through Paradise and it not being very good, but a later draft is much improved. I wondered a few times while reading this if I somehow ended up with the first draft.

I grew to like Van a lot through the other books - I suspect there's more than a little of Van in and was really looking forward to this one. But it just doesn’t flow very well. A sort of “typical month in the life of the French ambassador” is cobbled together, but it just doesn’t flow very well. A more straightforward memoir – perhaps one where he leaned on Bill or Christo or any of the Buckleys for some editorializing – might’ve been better. The ending reproduces, randomly, some other press. It feels like what it likely was intended as: a placeholder/ prelude to a political career that (due to illness and other circumstance) never materialized.

 

~

As Watergate and the Church Committee fade from memory, folks might need a refresher on Howard Hunt (once, like Oliver North, a household name.) Once upon a time, he was Bill’s boss at the CIA (in Mexico in the 1950s). A lifelong friendship ensued, with Bill named as executor of Hunt’s estate and godfather to his children. Bill stood by his friend through his well-publicized travails but was privately admonishing of his old friend’s “moral flexibility.”

Hunt was also a prolific author of spy novels and thrillers. I’ve read House Dick and the one up there. (A quick bitch about Blogger/ Microsoft Edge - so, if you use Edge, and Duck-Duck-Go, you don't download jpegs, apparently, you download something like 'jfifs.' You don't see these as 'jfif' in Windows Explorer; they look exactly like their jpeg equivalents. You only discover this when you go to upload the picture into Blogger, thus necessitating several extra steps. All of which is to say: I had some pics from House Dick for you but screw you, Authors of The Avoidable Miseries Aforementioned.) 

Definitely credible entries in the genre: sleazy, dangerous twists, breezy read. I imagine thriller-paperback audiences of the future will puzzle over the other aspects of author biography if they ever get there.

~

(2019)

Christopher Little was, if you recall, the sailing-books’ official photographer, hired in Atlantic High and having befriended all the principals, signed on for each subsequent journey. When looking up whatever happened to the other crewmembers, I was surprised to discover he’d written a murder mystery – and only published in 2019, to boot. 

I was ever-so-pleasantly more surprised to discover hey, this really is an excellent police procedural, steeped in the sort of details, characters, psychology, and twists that make the genre so enduring. It loses a step at the very end, maybe, but it holds together remarkably. It’s depressing to think a book of this quality can exist out there and then ask you in the ending (as the author does) to help him promote it. Sign of the times, but sheesh: the publishing industry is such a nightmare right now. Here’s a guy who hobnobbed with a lot of worldly and famous people over his career, so I imagine he has (or has access to) all those folks already. It deserves more eloquent acclaim and attention, not to mention a TV adaptation.

I hope that’s what happens. If there’s an agent out there that wants to make a lot of money, write him care of www.honeysucklepublishing.com or www.christopherlittle.com. He encourages such in the author's afterward. 

~ 

(1990)

By the mid- and late 1980s, after historic libel suits, with the press knocking off presidential candidates and Supreme Court nominees, unraveling the Reagan presidency, and in a position to overwhelm any individual or institution, a new era in press-public tension had arisen from the depths of America's civic religion: fair play. Why is the press accused of being so negative, so biased, so left-wing, so anti-establishment? Whenever people read or see something they know about, why is it so often wrong, naive, unfair, or all of the above? Why do the media arrogantly try to tell people what to think? Is there no line between privacy and the people's "right to know"? How can the public and government answer back after the media have spoken? 

Using the Westmoreland v. CBS and the Sharon v. Time trials as emblematic of how things go wrong, the author draws graphic lessons for improved press conduct and wiser public perception. This is an insider's look at what is right and what is wrong with the media's attitudes toward their work played against public and government expectations.

So says the publisher's description. Are these two cases still the last word on these topics? I suspect they are not and that there’s need for an updated edition with commentary from a (hopefully libertarian-minded) legal expert.  

This is an excellent work, and Dick – like Van – is someone you grow to love over the course of the sailing books. The revolutionary corporate shake-ups of the last decades of the twentieth century re-shaped the world as much as the end of WW2 did - the downstream effect of this on things like the fair play/ mission statements of independent news organizations was not popularly understood at the time. Maybe not even now.

It's funny to think of the exasperation of Dick in 1990 or of audience in the mid-70s (Rollerball, Network) and think of how exponentially worse things have gotten. By my reckoning, things accelerated from where Dick is warning us about to a new hyperspeed lane in 2008, then doubled in 2016 and proliferated unto infinity in 2020. The alarm bells rung in works like Beyond Malice can scarcely be heard over the canned applause, chryons, and other alarms ringing in unison. But worth tuning in to.

~

(1981)

I can see why someone like Bill got a lot more out of it than I did. I felt more politely interested than driven to finish it and skimmed a bit here and there. I should’ve just gone with those excerpts in Racing Through Paradise, which I greatly enjoyed – not so much the whole thing. Not that it’s not worth it, just a bit too much for me. 

~

The last time I lived in RI I had ambitions to charter a boat and have someone take me all around the inner harbor, maybe just to camp out on one of those islands out there. I think it might even be legal to do so and hell, I’ve got a tent. It never came to pass, but I can see the appeal of gunkholing, both around a harbor like Narragansett or up the New England and Canadian coast.

This is a pretty cool comprehensive guide that I picked up to see if any of Bill’s adventures (particularly the one with the angel of Craig’s Point relayed last time) made the rounds, but I think I got the wrong edition for that. The one I purchased looks like it spent some time at sea, from the water damage to the binding. Not that it’s falling apart – I mean, it will, but such is the fate of all things. I like that this edition was used for the purpose it was designed. I only wish the previous owner had left a list of places visited on the inside cover, or a treasure map or otherwise-cryptic note.

A few fascinating sidenotes on Gardiner’s Island, which reminded me of South County (RI) parties of yesteryear, partying out on the rocks amidst the lobster traps and looking out across the Sound. Block Island, Point Judith, Galilee, Jerusalem Harbor – all my old stomping grounds. A seascape sorely missed. Apponaug Cove even gets name-checked, Pawtuxet Cove as well - the stories I could tell you!

Apologies for the personal reverie. If you ever get a chance to cruise up and down the coast of anywhere, I say, take it; if it’s New England, all the better.

 

~

Liz Wheeler is the chef on a few of the sailing adventures. I was always intrigued by this. I wish she’d kept a journal, too, to be included in Bill’s books. 

What a great job this sounds like, though. Provided you don't get seasick or claustrophobic. You can get your own part of the ship with your own facilities and all you have to do is make dinner, and someone else washes the dishes? And you get to go around the world on fancy yachts? Holy moley. Of course, you have to have culinary flair adapted to maritime conditions: a unique combination. Plenty of people with one or the other - even more with neither – hello! Welcome to my world. I’d probably have made a good chef's assistant back in the scurvy days. 

On land or at sea, all of these dishes sound delicious - and none look too difficult to boot.  

And finally:

~

(2009)

This is Christopher Buckley’s very moving memoir - never iconoclastic, never hagiographic, always sincere and relatable, despite the rather remarkable family circumstances - of the year he lost both his parents. Filled to the brim with too many wonderful anecdotes, details and well-chosen references to count. 

The first part is the death of Patricia Buckley, including the awkward multi-state taxi ride back to Connecticut upon hearing the news and sharing fast food with the cabbie along the way. His memories of his mother include many well-chosen examples of her fiery personality (especially after the "supernumerary martini") and the chip on her shoulder for not graduating from Vassar. I never matriculated there, but I spent a lot of time there in the nineties. A lot of the caste-based issues we are taught to ignore are felt most keenly by folks who spend a lot of time at Ivy League schools without graduating from there, I’ve found. Not that it's a condemnation of any kind, merely sketching a portrait of his mother as he knew and loved her. And we can by extension. R.I.P.

From there it moves into Bill’s unfortunate deterioration. Like a lot of sons who have lost their fathers, what starts as bad quickly moves to worse then falls off a cliff. Bill called the slow march to death “point of diminishing returns” and suffered much. Emphysema (progressive and incurable), diabetes, sleep apnea, skin cancer, heart disease, prostate afflictions, etc. Suicide comes up more than once, which “if it wasn’t for the religious thing…” his voice trailing off. 

In many of Christopher’s books, emphysema plays an conspicuous role. It was (and is, I suppose) a Buckley family affliction, no doubt accelerated by all the cigars and secondhand smoke. A very smelly and hard-to-breathe place, the past was. In this book, that “cold, sweaty panic of reaching for a lungful of air that isn’t there” is felt almost to the point of readerly discomfort. Especially this reader - I haven't breathed right for years and have panic attacks about this kind of stuff.

The sailing books chart some of the ebbs and flows of father/son relationship, and in this last year of Bill’s life all facades fell to one side. “Watching him suffer had made my lingering resentments seem trivial and beside the point.” I got a chill reading one passage where Van comes by along with old friend and neighbor Jimmy Edgerton, for Bill’s eighty-second (and last) birthday:

“When (we) arrived he greeted us in the garage and said, sadly, that he was too ill to make (their yearly trip to the family estate in Sharon, CT.) So we had Thanksgiving in Stamford, along with his best friend Van Galbraith. Van, once bulldog-athletic, had undergone thirty radiation treatments for cancer in the previous month. He could barely walk. Pup, Van, and Jimmy, handsome Yalies all. Within six months, they would all be dead.”

I had about a half-dozen passages I meant to reproduce here, but it’s all much better read there. I’ll finish with just a couple:

-  “'I miss your urine reports,' he said in his rumbly Teutonic baritone.” He being Henry Kissinger. That’s a hell of a phone call, right there. Reading the Buckleys has rehabbed Henry Kissinger, the CFR, and Bohemian Grove for me. If ever approached by younger versions of myself, the first three words out of my mouth will be ‘I Can Explain.’

-  After a lifetime of typewriters, Bill reluctantly installed WordStar in the 80s and kept re-installing it on subsequent computers despite the program no longer being made. Christopher describes the agony of this amusingly and that floor-dropping feeling when (after many travails) you go to hit save on something (the manuscript he was helping his father transcribe Flying High, about Barry Goldwater) and realize you’ve lost it all. To Christopher’s amazement, Bill patiently recreated – from memory – the entire text. “His mind was still a brightly burning fire deep within the wreckage of his body (…) Hardly any self-corrections, the words came out punctuated and in paragraphs.”

And finally:

“He taught me how to navigate by the sun and stars with a sextant. It’s a skill that today in the age of satellite navigation, fewer fathers impart to their songs. As I look back, it seems to me one of the most fundamental skills a father can teach a son: finding out where you are, using the tools of your ancestors.

“Since then I’ve taught my own son to sail. I remember the first time I placed his small hands, along with mine, on the tiller and taught him the feel of the boat and the wind and the sea. I thought back to when my father had first taken my small hand in his and taught me the rudiments of the same art. Now I was imparting to my son what my father had passed along to me: something elemental, thrilling, and joyous.”

I've loved a lot of Christopher's writing over the years, particularly his first novel Steaming to Bamboola, all the excerpts in the sailing books, and several of his nonfiction pieces, like this. The majority of his novels are satire, and some of that ages better than others. Not covering it here, though, is not a statement of any kind. 

 ~

So ends this readthrough of the above plus:

I collected a couple more memorials to Bill that I couldn't find a way to wedge into the above, but you can read a nice eulogy here and a piece from Bill reflecting on the end within sight (when he gave up Patito, I suspect this is shortly after the section recounted in Losing Mum and Pup). There'll be one more WFBJR post coming down the pike. 

As I write this it is December 23rd – I hope you’re all having a Merry Christmas out there if you celebrate, and a warm and gratifying week either way. Hug your loved ones and raise a toast to those loved ones gone; let us remember the lessons of Scrooge, McClane, and the manger not just this season but in all the ones to come. Happy Birthday, Jesus.