No Fear

Hidden Cities: Travels to the Secret Corners of the World's Great Metropolises by Moses Gates

Moses Gates is the kind of guy, who after a few shots of hard liquor (indeed he recommends it for his adventures), decides to go and climb the Brooklyn Bridge. And if he can convince the pretty girl in the bar to accompany him, the two of them can make out on the top of the bridge.

Mr. Gates does not limit his climbing adventures to New York City and its bridges and the Chrysler Building. He has climbed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and been arrested for it.

Mr. Gates does not limit his adventures to the sky, he also has explored the Sewers of Paris and Moscow and ventured down a subway track or two in NYC.

Below ground or Above, Way Above, Ground; heights or narrow subterranean tunnels; Mr. Gates has no Fear. But he is human and he does have fear, he just doesn't explore it in his book.

If you have always wanted to take up this sort of thing, Mr. Gates has some good suggestions on how to do it. His book is a quick and thrilling read, like his adventures, with only a few rest stops for autobiographical details and love life failures that never really explain why a perfectly ordinary guy would do this sort of thing. Well, liquor is the reason for that. That is what I understood from his book.

The Worth of Geraldine Farrar

The history of Silent Film has always interested me. In my readings, I found it ironic that one of the early Silent Film stars was Geraldine Farrar who was a gifted and famous American opera singer of the early twentieth century. In the off-opera season, from 1915 to 1920, Miss Farrar starred in silent film where her vocal talents were unused but she did have "star quality" and she was a very good Operatic Actress and that was all she needed to achieve stardom in the film of that time.

She also had a core fan club of young women who adored her and called themselves "Gerry Flappers". I am sure that they all saw her films at least once if not twenty times.

Miss Farrar was born in Massachusetts and her musical ability was recognized by her mother at an early age (5 years old) and nurtured. Miss Farrar was an only child so her mother's attention upon her was absolute. 

At the age of fourteen, Miss Farrar was giving recitals and those recitals brought her to the notice of The Bonds of Boston who bankrolled Miss Farrar's further education to sing opera. Miss Farrar sought her advanced education in Europe and it was in the turn of the century Germany that she gained notice and earned her reputation as a soprano, much like Maria Callas of the later part of the twentieth century, who sang the emotions of the opera part. She had technique but it was the "acting" of the emotions of the part that was the most important part of the performance for her and her audience.

Miss Farrar made her American Metropolitan debut in 1906 and was the soprano who introduced the iconic and eponymous role of Madama Butterfly to American audiences. She was selected and coached by Puccini himself for the part. Although in her biography, she claims that she was his second choice.

The Autobiography of Geraldine Farrar was written by Miss Farrar in 1938. She has very fond memories of her career and life in Germany before World War I that carries over rather offensively to the 1930s. She finds no offense in Hitler's Germany.

She also divides the book into parts. One part is written by Miss Farrar with flourishes and innuendos and intransitive verbs and lush similes and flushed metaphors that makes the reader sometimes resort to diagramming the sentence to determine what is really being said.

For Example, she describes a tenor named Chaliapin:

"I am sure he was a kind if sometimes forgetful husband, and an affectionate father, in spite of having a brilliant reputation as conquistador in the domain of Amor. This was not difficult, given his tremendous artistic endowment, and the the undeniable attractions of a singularly elemental male."  

In real speak, the man was a Horn Dog and had a Big Dong. And she knows, because she had him. And he and his Dong were Good.

In the other part of the "autobiography", Miss Farrar's mother writes with exactly the same style as Miss Farrar and despite the fact that she, the mother, is dead. I suppose we are to assume that this is some "auto"matic hand writing channeled from the dead mother's spirit. Miss Farrar's mom discreetly covers the heights of Miss Farrar's career and love life that it would be unseemly for Miss Farrar to boast directly about herself.

Miss Farrar had an affair with Crown Prince Wilhem in her Berlin Glory Days, but Miss Farrar's mom writes about what a lovely wife and kiddies that he had, and that she and Geraldine got to see them all the time and practically live with them because they were so close to Mrs. Wilhem. I guess that they had the bedroom on the other side of Prince Wilhem's boudoir. And all those adorable kiddies were Mrs. Wilhem's kiddies, all her own, not one of them was Miss Farrar's.

Miss Farrar's love affairs with Toscanini and Enrico Caruso among others are covered in much the same manner.

Miss Farrar's movie career ended in 1920 when she tore up her contract with Samuel Goldwyn when he told her that her movies didn't make money anymore. Miss Farrar was a New England business woman and she made movies because that was where the money was. Miss Farrar's singing career ended in the late 1920s when she wore out her voice by constant travel in her own private rail car all over the US, because that was where the money was. She did record extensively in the early twentieth century because that was where the money was and you can find some of these recordings on CDs today.

Miss Farrar was a Lady who knew her Worth and got her Worth in every way possible.

Why Examine Life?

Full Service by Scotty Bowers with Lionel Friedberg

Mr. Bowers was a happy-go-lucky Marine freshly discharged after World War II which he spent in the Pacific when he got a job at a Gas Station in Hollywood. Back then, Gas Stations were full service where attendants pumped the gas, checked the oil, checked the fluids, and washed the windshield of nasty bug bodies. The Gas Station attendants met and served all kinds of people who had cars.

Mr. Bowers went from one service (of cars) to another (of people). He pumped the patrons, male or female, and somehow kept from catching any of those nasty STD bugs. Mr. Bowers got the side eye of "you got some time and the inclination?" look from a middle aged man who looked familiar and for a twenty buck tip, Mr. Bowers looked under the hood of Walter Pidgeon. Mr. Bowers used his day job as a gas station attendant to make extra money tricking and pimping for the people (mostly Hollywood types) who came by the Gas Station. Mr. Bowers had a lot of good looking Marine buddies who needed the extra money too.

Mr. Pidgeon preferred to perform fellatio on his partner and be the Top. Mr. Bowers should have just published a spread sheet on the sexual mores and preferences of the Old Hollywood Stars. That and a brief tally of Mr. Bowers' life (he is eighty nine now) is what this book consists of.

Mr. Bowers assures the reader that he was a happy hooker who liked to make people happy when he hooked and pimped. That was all there was to it. Mr. Bowers later moved on from the Gas Station because it did limit his outside activities, to catering and bar-tending where he could get closer and more intimate (in their houses) with his customers.

That maybe what Mr. Bowers lulls himself to sleep with every night, but his life story tells the tale of Mr. Bowers' sexual molestation by his best friend's father at the age of seven. Later when his parents divorced, Mr. Bowers never mentions his father again, and earned extra money for his mother and his sister and brother by selling newspapers and shoeshines and himself through elementary, middle, and high school in Chicago. Mr. Bowers did not just fall into pimping and hooking in Hollywood, he had been doing it  since the age of seven. Hollywood just gave him celebrities to trick.

Mr. Bowers assures the reader that he is a happy man and content in his lifestyle, and he doesn't appear to be a man of much introspection. If he were, he would have considered the implications of his childhood or the lack thereof much more closely on his later life. But Mr. Bower assures the reader that his lifestyle was just in his genes or jeans.

That Says It...

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

I like digressions, particularly literary digressions. This is an autobiographical memoir that is filled with digressions, there is no straightforward and progressive life plotted story of Miss Winterson's birth, adoption, and abusive childhood with her adoptive parents.

Origins....

Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay

This is an autobiographical novel about Miss Kay's beginnings.

Miss Kay was a mixed race child who was adopted by British communists in the early 1960s and raised with her mixed race adoptive brother in Scotland. The communist party, that her parents belonged to, appears to be much like a community church with much of its same meetings and testimonials and adult and youth camps. There doesn't seem to be much of a difference between religious and political in the human need to belong. But I don't believe in mixing them anyway.

Miss Kay, with the encouragement of her adoptive mother, begins the quest to discover her biological birth parents. She goes to the highlands of Scotland to find her mother, and to Nigeria to find her father. She also encounters the lives and the children that her mother and father made after her, and that they didn't or couldn't abandon as they did her.

Her mother had mental disruptions that have culminated in early onset Alzheimer's Disease. For a woman who was willing to buck her upbringing to make a baby with a Nigerian Exchange Student and who later married an South East Indian or Indonesian man and had three children with him, Miss Kay's birth mother is a very timid and fearful woman. The birth mother does allow Miss Kay into her life, but without the knowledge of her children or husband, and in a very limited way. Letters and five actual visits with her birth mother are all Miss Kay receives from that connection. The birth mother's highland family are more willing to accept Miss Kay, but they have no say with her mother.

Miss Kay's Nigerian father is a man of science and a religious Nut. Upon his first meeting with Miss Kay, he spends two solid hours singing and chanting bible verses, attempting to win Miss Kay to Christ. The communist party has already sowed that ground, Miss Kay is an unrepentant Atheist, which she doesn't reveal to her birth father because she hopes to have some sort of relationship with him.

The birth father considers Miss Kay to be his "Sin" and that is why she must come to Jesus, to wash the father of his "Sin". The converts of a religion are always the blood washing of the proselytizer's "Sins". Even Paul had the sneaking realization of that after his trip to Damascus.

Miss Kay does make the acquaintance of her Nigerian father's family and children without the father's consent or knowledge. The children, like her mother's highland aunts, are very welcoming to her. What is about these pesky birth parents that is so constipated in the familial way?

Miss Kay finds some new members of her extended family, but the core of that family, her birth mother and father, remain distant and uninvolved. No doubt, it was one of the reasons that they gave her up to the adoptive system.

There is No Dog by Meg Rosoff

One of the pleasures of reading young adult novels is the brisk pace with which the characters are established and the action commences. There is none of that meandering and digression that inhabits many "serious" fictions of adults.

This book considers the question of: "If God is Good, then why is there evil and suffering in the World?"

And the answer to that in this book is that God is a seventeen year old boy with all the emotional and hormonal fluctuations and motivations of a regular seventeen year old boy. Good Luck with reasoning with that.

And so we go on an adventure of the love life of a seventeen year old boy with a Big Case of Omnipotence (and some acne).