I’M GETTING REALLY ANGRY!

My impatience is showing – and I’m not happy about it.

I cannot contain my irritation that while I was sitting around doing next to nothing – a whole generation had grown up around me – a generation of test-messagers, a generation who stand in line at midnight to buy the new I-Phone so they can be part of “where it’s at!” Hurrah!! \

But I accept it all, understanding that what I feel is part legitimate disdain, but a larger part jealousy. Yes, I am impatient with them because I can’t be impatient with myself. But let me leave all that psychobabble of projection to other armchair would-be shrinks.

I surrender. I accept your right to spend your money foolishly. I accept that you have to create a culture that is yours – not one that is mine, old, dusty and irrelevant.

What I can not tolerate is that you have become part of a dumbed-down generation, dependent on television, not only for your view of the world, but of the priorities and obligations that are part of our lives.

To wit: a few days ago, watching CBC TV news (remembering with regret that once that august organization was a shining light of enlightenment – and if not enlightenment – at least a certain standard of excellence when it came to the English language.

No longer.

We are all, including the young commentators, newspeople, announces, and talk-show hosts, the victims of education via American television.

Why else would I hear this young woman, speaking on the CBC, abandon the once-cherished Canadian (and English) linguistic tradition of how to pronounce the article “the” when it preceded a noun with a vowel. .Remember, we would say “thee edge.”
On CBC she said, having heard it on U.S. TV which long ago abandoned correctness in favour of inner-city jargon. So it is now customary to say “thuh edge.”
My daughter-in-law, who is a school teacher said that some of her students were startled that she added an “n” to the article “a” so than she said “an edge” and not “a edge.” The kids were mystified.

The CBC woman further irritated my by referring to Ralph Klein as the former “pre-meer” of Alberta. In fact, the august (but not for long) CBC is full of promos announcing the “premeer” of new Fall programs Strictly an Americanism, based not on a legitimate reality, but on illiteracy and disregard for the beauties of Shakespeare’s English.

But the vocal critics of language misuse, of solecisms, of bad grammar, of comic-book based literary standards, insist that the language is a dynamic, growing,. Changing thing.

I agree. But change based on new realities is acceptable. Change based on giving dignity to illiteracy – is not.

But hell, when I was in public school our teachers insisted that we pronounce the word “clerk” as “clark.” I didn’t.

HUBBUB IS NOT HUMDRUM.

For more than 41 years my wife and I lived in a pleasant, four-bedroom home in a “near”suburb of Toronto – Fores5t Hill. It was what you did. It was where you raised your kids. Never mind that it imposed on them a homogeneity that was all at once racial, religious and income-related. It felt safe.

You have to move downtown to realize what a trap that ersatz security is.

I am writing this remembering a conversation I had more than 30 years ago with Kingsley Amis, who will be remembered for “Lord Jim” whether he wrote another book or not.

I had just finished “Ending Up, a wickedly clever, witty, darkly-humorous book about a group of elderly people living together in one house. It was fun to the point of being wicked, with characters like a retired army colonel who lived with his loyal batman (who may also have been his sweetheart.)

I asked Amis why he continued to live in North London. With all the money he has made and the royalties that would pour in, why would he continue to live where he had to pay7 burdensome taxes? Why not move to some secluded palm-fringed island?

He to me he lived where he did because he was always with people. He could go to his “local” and be with people who talked and who argued. It was this yeasty atmosphere that kept his creative juices boiling. (My words – not his.)

He said that if he moved to that pal-fringed island he would write one book about living on that island and that would be it. {Period. End of Amis the novelist,

(I you Google his name you may be astonished at how prolific he was. Most people know and treasure Lord Jim, but that was just the beginning.)

Back to my own choices sharply reminiscent of what Amis said to me. So when I moved from the humdrum to the hubbub it was perhaps to keep some juices lowing. Living downtown where people congregate, where at night club-goers can be heard in the streets, where there are more restaurants per square foot than I place I have been to, where people jostle and push for space; where there is contention, and if not contention, not complacency.

I should have made me a better writer. It helped Kingsley Amis.

Memories

MEMORIES

Fred Astaire singing "S’wonderful" to Audrey Hepburn in Daddy Longlegs and I nearly lost it. What flooded in on me were more than memories, they were chronicles, a catalogue of where I’d been and what I’d done. The trap of getting older is to weep for what used to be.

Turner Classic Movies should be out-of-bounds for anyone over the age of 60. I’m convinced that this wallowing in the past is counterproductive. It adds to the years which become a burden more than a bounty.

And I do like to think of my own past as something of a bounty. It is the spring from which flows much more than memories. From it flows what I hope are new ideas, new horizons, new challenges.

Alas, it was everything I remember coming from people long gone. From Astaire with Rogers – "Dancing Cheek to Cheek," "All my Eggs in One Basket." With Gene Kelly resurrecting old Gershwin songs. Even an old black and white kinescope of the Oscar Levant show where Levant races through "Lady Be Good" and Astaire puffs and pants to keep up the tempo.

And they are all gone. All of them but me – and you..

As a watched I wondered what anyone of the 20-something or 30-something group would think. Did they care? Was it utterly irrelevant? Did they really want to see Judy and Fred doing their two tramp song and dance from "Easter Parade?"

I don’t think so. To them it is what all of the fogeys are about. To them it does not have the ring of rock “n roll. But to that generation, Disco is yesterday.

So I teared up a little. I sang along. I remembered being ten years old when Rogers and Astaire went "Flying Down To Rio." I remember being a teenager when Fred did that horrible movie about being in the army and played opposite the devastatingly beautiful Rita Hayworth.

I was grown up with a small family when he did "Silk Stockings" with Cyd Charisse.

So what’s all the fuss about? Is this kind of nostalgia self-defeating? Does it give me an alternative to “Looking Ahead” – which is what my blog is supposed to be all about.

Dunno.

Who's to Blame

WHO’S TO BLAME?

For every person who declares, not without a heavy dose of self-righteousness “People should learn to be responsible for their behaviour,” there are some of us who think otherwise.

The case of the four carefree kids who drove into the water in Muskoka a few weeks ago, is still with us. Not because three of the four are dead, the girl having miraculously escaped, but because of the unanswered question. “Who served these kids the drinks?”

It has taken several weeks, but now the father of one of the dead kids has come pleading for government action to curtail this kind of behaviour. He has a record, from the restaurant or club bill, that the four of them consumed 31 drinks in about three hours. That’s more than seven drinks each!

This is where the righteous among us declare that responsibility rests with the kids themselves, or with anyone too foolish to drink and then drive.

This is also where I, bleeding heart liberal that I continue to be, believe that blame should be laid with the servers who fed them the drinks, and with the establishment that let it happen. This is nothing new. Even though the Liquor Licence Act spells out quite unequivocally that (and these are my words) the establishment is responsible for being sure that they do not serve alcohol to anyone they suspect has had too much to drink.

It may be that I will be gagged on this issue if and when there is a case against the establishment that sold them the drinks. They can be found guilty under what the law describes as “standard of care.”

Why does it happen? Because the wait-person has a “live one” and as long as they keep drinking the tips will; get bigger. Or the management that makes it part of every training manual to be sure that the wait staff pushes the product.

The mayhem that we have in our downtown club area is a classic example of the rampant selling of too much to drink. The chaos in the streets, sometimes with fatal results stem from the effects of too much alcohol, often mixed with too much testosterone.

The Liquor License Board can’t do much about testosterone, but they can enforce their own laws so that establishments, when they empty as closing time, do not disgorge hordes of dangerous (to themselves and others) drunks.

And in the case of the three who died, it was just a harmless afternoon of the kind of fun young drinkers get into. Was the alcohol responsible for the drowning deaths?

I would not like to be the proprietor or the server at that Lake Joseph establishment.
I hope they are dealt with severely, and maybe a message will be sent to proprietors and wait staff that they are at least partially responsible for their patrons leaving and killing themselves. Yes, people should be responsible for their own behaviour, but alcohol has a way of dulling judgement.

About incentive

Thanks to Mark Kolke and his blog "frameyourmessage.com, I am going to get back into action.I apologize to regular readers for allowing my posted items to become obsolete and irrelvant.

But, after all, that is what happens to people of my age - and also - to many who are much younger and should know better.

I have warned myself, to no avail, that unless I maintain a structure, I will lapse into indifference and sloth - both of which are supposed to be the prerogatives of those who have "paid their dues." I do not want to lie fallow, waiting for The Muse to strike me.

What Mark has reprinted in his blog is my comment about incentives. I realize that without a deadline to meet or an editor waiting for me to produce, or a boss who has me chained to a desk, I have no tangible incentive to keep at it. The only incentive has to be the one I generate myself, out of the imperative that says I must. I must remain relevant. I must remain motivated I must nourish my own incentives.

So, my dear friends, if you find yourselves watching just a little too much TV, or (as I did last week on two occasions) not getting out of my bathrobe all day, and of delaying the things you should do but keep putting off - then gather round.

I commented to Mark that two articles I had written, one of home exchange for the Toronto Star, and another on my love of my home city in spite of all the negative cassandras who think that we are boring compared to Chicago - two pieces that remain unpublished. The Star because I am waiting. The Toronto piece, because I have been too lazy to edit, rewrite and tweak.

This will be the first of many pieces as I hope this sudden burst of energy does not leave me flattened.

I trust you will share and/or cheer for - my resolution.