Reminiscing, with Receipts

Thornton Wilder himself played the minister
in a 1950 production of Our Town.

Thornton Wilder's Our Town was one of the first 20th Century plays that we read.

The language was not above our heads, but few seventh graders had a lived grasp of the theme: that life in all its moments, special and jejune, is not appreciated until it's over. But who can fault us; not quite teenagers, our eyes were looking forward, not back.

Speaking of looking back, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright kept meticulous tax records:

Like any conscientious taxpayer, Wilder carefully documented his tax-deductible business expenses. His returns from 1968 to 1972 include meticulous, multi-page accounts of his work-related travel and associated expenditures. Originally intended to justify tax write offs, today these records offer a unique perspective into Wilder’s writerly life at the twilight of his career...

Wilder explained [in an attachment to his tax returns] that living in a big city or near New York subjected him to constant harassment from “interviewers, photographers, enthusiasts, student delegations, visitors from Europe and Asia.”

“It is necessary that I remove myself,” he stated...

For Thornton Wilder 1968 was especially noteworthy for his (deductible) European travels to watch and work on plays that he adapted to the American theatre. He spent months in Martha's Vineyard recuperating from surgery, then returned to Paris in the fall.

His travel and hotel expenses for 1968 totaled $4,658.76, according to the tax documents, which is about $34,000 today adjusted for inflation.

Comments:

1) Thornton Wilder does look like an accountant in his college year book photo, doesn't he?

2) Yes, boys and girls, CPA's used to type the tax returns. (Look at the mis-aligned "X" in the middle photo.) Typing often took more time than filling out the draft in pencil.

3) To pre-empt possible questions, additional documents and/or explanatory notes such as Thornton Wilder's narrative descriptions were regularly attached to tax returns. Later this practice became impossible with some e-filing software.

Giving Peace a Chance vs. Saving the Planet

1967 poster

An iconic poster from the days of Woodstock, flowers, and the Summer of Love reads:

War is not healthy for children and other living things.

The danger of full-scale war has receded, but another fear has arisen, that of anthropogenic global warming.

Like the 1960's the goal of the revolution is simply stated. Back then it was to stop war. Today it is to lower the carbon content of the atmosphere.

It is with some bemusement, then, that we are discovering that the past and present revolutions are in conflict. Peace destroys the rainforest. [bold added]

(Image from uww.edu)

The return of normalcy [in Columbia] led to a spike in rainforest-clearing, as landowners mowed down former guerrilla hide-outs to establish cattle ranches and plantations. Colombian researchers say that much of the country’s portion of the Amazon jungle is now in danger.

...When conflicts end, developers rush in to take advantage, and rates of deforestation accelerate. Governments tend to be unprepared to enforce preservation of the sensitive, newly accessible territory...

In a paper published last month in the journal Land Use Policy, researchers at the University of Vermont and the University of Waterloo showed how dramatically rainforest destruction sped up after peace arrived in Peru, Sri Lanka, Ivory Coast and Nepal in the past dozen years. In those four case studies, the average annual forest loss was 68% greater in the five years after conflicts ended than in the five years before. Forest loss also has increased globally but more slowly, at an average annual rise of 7% since 2001.

Peru and Ivory Coast suffered the biggest absolute rainforest losses. Peru lost almost 840 square miles annually—an area roughly the size of Jacksonville, Fla.—in the five years after the Shining Path rebel group effectively acknowledged defeat in 2011. That was 58% more than the average during the prior five years.

Whether it's by clearing trees or crossing borders, people will do whatever it takes to improve their lives and could not care less about First-World values and laws.

Round and Round It Goes

Composer Michel Legrand, 86, died on Saturday. Famous within entertainment circles, he won three Oscars and five Grammys. Speaking of circles, his "Windmills of Your Mind" is one of those songs that gives me an earworm ("a catchy piece of music that continually repeats through a person's mind after it is no longer playing").

Round, like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel....

So Serious

The Cinerama building is an O'Reilly Auto Parts Store

Cinerama was once the most technologically advanced movie theater in Honolulu with its large curved screen and stereophonic sound--the IMAX of its day.

In the first two years after it opened my parents and uncles took me to see It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and How the West Was Won, the latter because my grandfather liked Walter Brennan in TV's the Real McCoys.

(Image from Pinterest)

The last and greatest movie I saw at Cinerama was 2001: A Space Odyssey. I still remember the "profound" after-school discussions we had about the movie, especially the psychedelic ending, when we kicked around eschatology, Übermensch, and the nature of consciousness. We were so serious back then.

Now it's an auto-parts store, as prosaic as it gets. The universe laughs.

50 Years Old and Still the Greatest

Amidst all the 50th-anniversary celebrations (and mournful remembrances) is the release of Bullitt, whose car chase scene has been hailed as the "greatest":

it’s the nine minutes and 42 seconds in “Bullitt” that changed the landscape....The duel between Bullitt’s Ford Mustang and the 1968 Dodge Charger R/T driven by the villains, in which the hunted (Bullitt) becomes the hunter, took three weeks to film. An Aeroflex 2C, a portable movie camera that had been used by the military during World War II, was mounted by suction cups across the back seat to give moviegoers the driver’s perspective.

The car chase is all real, i.e., it was filmed before computer generated imagery (CGI) had been invented. The entire movie, except for two seconds added post-production, was filmed in San Francisco.

When [Director Peter] Yates and [film editor Frank] Keller were editing the film, they felt something was missing in the chase. Finally, they came up with an answer: Just as the chase revs into high gear, one of the villains fastens his seat belt. Yates and [cinematographer William] Fraker filmed it in a studio in Los Angeles. It lasts all of two seconds.

“There’s a ‘click,’ and then you know something big is about to happen...Then you know you’re in for a ride.”

I liked the chase scene when I saw it in the 1970's and '80's, but I enjoy it even more now that I know San Francisco well and get a chuckle out of watching the cars instantaneously appear in different locations around town. And what's with the all the green Volkswagens?

Tripping Again

(Image from Live Science)

One Sixties trend that petered out quickly was the use of psychedelic drugs. While LSD use could be mind blowing, there were many credible reports of "bad trips that sent people to the psych ward". (Whether or not it influenced their behavior, LSD became associated with the Manson Family serial killers.)

New research into psychedelics, however, has shown that they could have powerful positive effects: [bold added]

a single guided psychedelic session can alleviate depression when drugs like Prozac have failed; can help alcoholics and smokers to break the grip of a lifelong habit; and can help cancer patients deal with their “existential distress” at the prospect of dying. At the same time, studies imaging the brains of people on psychedelics have opened a new window onto the study of consciousness, as well as the nature of the self and spiritual experience. The hoary ‘60s platitude that psychedelics would help unlock the secrets of consciousness may turn out not to be so preposterous after all.

Brain imaging and other techniques not available to Timothy Leary show how psychedelics may work:

When scientists at Imperial College began imaging the brains of people on psilocybin, they were surprised to find that the chemical, which they assumed would boost brain activity, actually reduced it, but in a specific area: the default mode network...

Our ego defenses relax, allowing unconscious material and emotions to enter our awareness and also for us to feel less separate and more connected—to other people, to nature or to the universe. And in fact a renewed sense of connection is precisely what volunteers in the various trials for addiction, depression and cancer anxiety trials have all reported.

This points to what may be the most exciting reason to pursue the new science of psychedelics: the possibility that it may yield a grand unified theory of mental illnesses, or at least of those common disorders that psychedelics show promise in alleviating: depression, addiction, anxiety and obsession. All these disorders involve uncontrollable and endlessly repeating loops of rumination that gradually shade out reality and fray our connections to other people and the natural world. The ego becomes hyperactive, even tyrannical, enforcing rigid habits of thought and behavior—habits that the psychedelic experience, by loosening the ego’s grip, could help us to break.

As is often true in science, something that we thought we knew about can turn out to have surprising, new, beneficial applications.

Peripherally related: writer Tom Wolfe, 88, died today.

Mr Wolfe was also on the cutting edge of the so-called New Journalism that exploded onto the scene in the 1960s along with sex, drugs and rock and roll. Mr Wolfe travelled with Ken Kesey, one of the apostles of psychedelic drugs, and captured the experience in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968).

TEKAAT is an acclaimed depiction of Sixties phenomena that according to admirers helps us to understand what is going on today.

Exercise Can Make You Sick

Norway has two million(!) sheep.

News item: Sheep poo makes Norwegian cyclists sick.

Of the 300 cyclists who took part in the TransØsterdalen race at the end of June in southeastern Norway, at least 50 were struck with fever, stomach pain and diarrhoea in the days following the competition, according to public broadcaster NRK.

"This is most likely a Campylobacter infection," race doctor Tor Halvor Bjørnstad-Tuveng told NRK, referring to a bacteria which is present in the intestines of many animals.

He said material from the sheep droppings, which have decomposed during heavy rain and projected on the bikers' route, must have sprayed onto their bottles, faces and hands as they rode by.

Ah, the great outdoors, just smell that....fresh air.

Your humble blogger's monkey mind hopped to this great moment in television from the 1960's:

Not 1968 Yet

This week's fatal police shootings of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana brought the issue of "blue on black" violence to a boiling point, culminating in widespread demonstrations. Tonight's headline, Snipers open fire on officers during Dallas protest, killing 4, is shocking, but not surprising, given the inflamed emotions of the current day.

[Update - 7/9: the final casualty count is 5 officers killed, 7 officers wounded, 2 civilians wounded, and 1 shooter killed.]

The zeitgeist of the times has evoked memories of a Presidential election year a half-century ago, but we have a long way to go, thankfully, before 2016 will be as tumultuous as 1968, which had two assassinations and hundreds of American troops dying each month in a far-off war. True, there are protest movements that threaten to disrupt the major parties' conventions, there's a cloud of uncertainty over Europe as Russia and China are ascendant, and neither of the leading Presidential candidates excites the majority of the country, but 2016 is not 1968, and we'll pull through.

In one respect the past was much better than today. Here are 1968's top 20 songs, many of which are still played. (50 years from now I doubt that we'll have more than a couple from 2016.)

1. Hey Jude, The Beatles
2. Love is Blue, Paul Mauriat
3. Honey, Bobby Goldsboro
4. (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay, Otis Redding
5. People Got to Be Free, The Rascals
6. Sunshine of Your Love, Cream
7. This Guy's In Love With You, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass
8. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Hugo Montenegro
9. Mrs. Robinson, Simon and Garfunkel
10. Tighten Up, Pt. 1, Archie Bell and The Drells
11. Harper Valley P.T.A., Jeannie C. Riley
12. Little Green Apples, O.C. Smith
13. Mony Mony, Tommy James and The Shondells
14. Hello, I Love You, The Doors
15. Young Girl, Gary Puckett and The Union Gap
16. Cry Like a Baby, The Box Tops
17. Stoned Soul Picnic, The Fifth Dimension
18. Grazing In the Grass, Hugh Masekela
19. Midnight Confessions, The Grass Roots
20. Dance to the Music, Sly and The Family Stone