Recently I’ve spotted a couple art cars in our neighborhood. Although I’ve seen others on the street, I haven’t been able to photograph them. I like them because they are sort of forms of guerrilla art, created by ordinary people in explosions of creativity. That spirit is one of the things I love most about Portland.
| Taggart Street Car | Portland Sheep Car |
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This year we will spend a quiet day at home, with a meal for the two of us and a friend. With spiced mulled cider simmering in the background and a fresh bouquet of orange roses on the table, we’ll have a nice fire in the fireplace.
The menu is modest this year and includes:
Happy Thanksgiving from both of us.
What are your holiday plans?
Autumn has never been a good season for me. I am a lover of summer, of squinting at the sun, sweating, sandals, shorts, and threadbare T-shirts. I remember so many poems about the season are quite sad and depressing. Even those that extol the beauty of the colors seem to end in images of piles of rotting, acrid leaves. So, I turn to Robert Frost, who is so tuned to the rhythms of nature, for perspective.
My November Guest
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.Robert Frost (1874-1963)
With over 300 miles of bike boulevards and marked paths (projected to be over 900 miles in the recent Bicycle Plan for 2030), bike boxes at many intersections, bike-only areas, detailed maps, free parking, and amazing online resources (for example, see http://bikeportland.org) Portland is a cyclist’s paradise.
Many bikes means that drivers are more watchful than in any other city I have seen. Still, there are accidents. Scattered throughout the city are a few “ghost bikes” marking locations of fatal bike accidents.
Several blocks away in our quiet neighborhood there is a truly remarkable “Lifehouse” memorial for Matt Schekel, a film school student and avid cyclist who was killed in May 1998 at the intersection of SE 37th Ave. and Taylor St.
A traditional ghost bike is chained to the stop sign that was run by the driver of a truck that killed Matt. But the entire corner was transformed by neighbors. Using cement, stone, solar-powered electric lights, plants, mosaic, and bicycle parts they have created a memorial shrine. It is a remarkable place where people still burn candles and leave memorials. His parents set up a scholarship in his honor. It is true Portland.
(The snapshots are mine. See a blog with good photos.)
I learned today that one of my heroes passed away recently from a heart attack at age 75.
My first encounter with August Coppola came shortly after I graduated from high school in 1966. (Yeah, I know, 90% of the world’s population wasn’t born yet and I just dated myself.) I had won a couple of scholarships, which I planned to put to use when I entered California State University-Long Beach in the fall. I was flattered to get an invitation from Augie—then a renowned professor of comparative literature—to apply for the General Honors Program. When I interviewed he asked me if I knew what “interdisciplinary” meant (remember, this was 1966) I gave him my best explanation. He smiled broadly and said, “This kid is the first to answer the question right.” I am sure he lied, but I walked out feeling taller and smarter than I ever had. I felt like I could take on the world.
I was accepted into the program, so I assumed there would be hundreds of others. There were only a couple dozen and they were the brainiest people I’ve ever dealt with. I was in his Freshman Honors Colloquium class for my full freshman year. In his class I did my first serious reading of Freud, Darwin, Kant, Marx, Jefferson, Sartre, Aristotle, Heidegger, the Beats, Saint Augustine, Buddha, Auden, Weiner, Yeats, Jung, Camus, Hesse, Mann, Kieerkegaard, Maslow, Kafka, Beckett, Buber, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Aquinas, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, a pile of contemporary playwrights, and so many more. Our reading list was 47 books long and included Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. I had never read so much in my life!
When we studied film he brought in his brother, director Francis Ford Coppola. When we studied Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf he brought in its playwright Edward Albee. When we studied music, it was for six weeks with fellow professor Frank Pooler, who had just finished his collaboration with Karen and Richard Carpenter on the Christmas standard “Merry Christmas, Darling” but had time to teach us about electronic music and had us composing music on synthesizers. Augie had us doing painting and writing poetry. And we felt good about it, even though we knew our work probably sucked.
(He even introduced me to his aspiring actress sister, Talia, with whom I had a memorable movie date. She went on to marry film composer David Shire a few years later and was nominated for an Oscar as Rocky’s wife Adrian, played a young bride in “The Godfather,” and many other roles.)
Our final project was a film based on Hesse’s Siddhartha. We adapted the script, acted, manned the cameras, edited the film, composed and played the music. His reluctant 3-year-old son Nick (now known as Nicholas Cage) was in the film (maybe his first acting role). When we held the premier of the film you would have thought the red carpet was waiting for us.
After my freshman year, I took some time off, then decided to serve a Mormon mission. I had talked to him about my faith and he had talked me through the writing of a paper on Mormonism and Existentialism. I gained a great deal of confidence from him because he accepted what I had to say and treated me with respect, as if I were the real adult I was. I returned to campus before heading to Peru and he was excited for me. He asked me to report my adventures when I returned. Lesser students and professors had ridiculed my decision to abandon my studies for at least two years to go off to South America to teach.
He later went on to become dean of the School of Creative Arts at San Francisco State University. He was a champion of the arts, working tirelessly and stubbornly to see that they got their due. As a result, in 1997 the school dedicated The August Coppola Theater in the Fine Arts Building in honor of his efforts.
About 20 years after having Augie as a teacher I had lunch with him in San Francisco. I waited nervously in a restaurant he had chosen, knowing he would never recognize me. He did, of course, and remembered much about my work. We talked about the nature of creativity in human beings, and how it manifests itself so differently in individuals, families, societies, and times. I was working for Gibbs Smith, Publisher, at the time and I was interested in the amazing creativity demonstrated by his family. His brother was one of the greatest film directors in the world, his son had won a Best Actor Academy Award, his sister Talia Shire is a much-lauded actress and producer and mother of actors Robert and Jason Schwartzman, his niece and nephew directors Sophia Coppola (”Lost in Translation”) and Roman Coppola, and his father was Oscar-winning composer Carmine Coppola. (See the Coppola Family Tree.)I wanted him to consider writing about his family as a study in creative influences. I had read his brother Francis Ford say that Augie was the intellectual core of the family. He took the project under consideration but eventually decided against it because he didn’t think he was talented enough to do it justice.
He was a true eccentric. He was often serious, but never took himself too seriously. He was a kid at heart, playful all the time and willing to entertain any idea—no matter how wacky. He was a visionary in every sense of the word, reaching farther than anyone I have ever known to understand how things connected. He opened up in me a sense of wonder and an intense desire for learning about how things relate to each other: history, literature, film, music, art, political thought, and theatre. When I went on to teach at a university, I tried hard to help my students find those same connections. He cracked the door to a whole new world for me and that door has always remained open. I’ll always be grateful that he introduced me to a true interdisciplinary way of viewing the world.
Looking back at this blog post, I realize that it is as much about me as about Augie Coppola. He had that effect on people. Many of the news items are about the death of Nicholas Cage’s father. But all who knew him will smile at that irony. He will be greatly missed.
Some obituaries:
A commentary. Click the image to learn more.
Since the death of Michael Jackson, distraught fans have created hundreds of heartfelt tribute versions of his iconic hit “Billie Jean,” some of them good, most of them not so much. Leave it to super cool jazz and classical double bass player Adam Ben Ezra to show up with the best one I’ve seen. Its success is in the subtle reverence with which he displays the underlying genius of the piece. This rises above the weepy, cloying renditions and imitations we’ve been hearing. Cool, sly, and just right. Like Michael Jackson.
This excellent music video was filmed and edited with the same sly reverence by fellow Israeli artist Guy Dayan.
I have written about the need to bring struggling lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Mormons back into the fold, as a demonstration of unconditional love and acceptance. It is a cause I believe in very strongly, as it is a cause of incredible family pain that does not seem to have its equal in non-Mormon families. (See Keep Them and Love Them.)
I have also written about the Foundation for Reconciliation and their laudable activities (see A Move Toward Reconciliation, Bring them In From the Plains and the Home at Last benefit concert). Wednesday, Nov. 4, the anniversary of the passage of Proposition 8 in California with tens of millions of dollars of help from individual Mormons and Mormon companies, all at the request of their ecclesiastical leaders, is another Foundation activity.
The Great LGBT Handcart Rescue begins at 1:00 pm at the This is the Place Monument. From there, the group will trek by handcart, as did so many of our pioneer ancestors, to a 3:30 pm gathering at City Creek Park, at the northeast corner of North Temple and State streets. At 4:00 p.m., the group will deliver a package with signatures from a petition asking for reconciliation with LGBT members to LDS Church Headquarters.
This is an important event in the continuing story of LGBT equality in Utah and in the LDS Church. I encourage all who can spare some time to join in the Wednesday afternoon trek—or at least a part of it—and join the gathering at 3:30. Because so few of us can travel to Utah for the event, we count on those of you who are fair-minded and care about your family members to stand up for them and participate.
And thank you, Foundation for Reconciliation, for your continuing hard work on our behalf.
