1964

Getting Your Visions

2011-03-22T20:01:00.000-04:00

In 1964, a promising novel was published based upon a young writers’ family tribulations in the Pacific Northwest; this is only important because it was his second published work and writers will usually use their early lives for their first novel. Overshadowing the reception of this novel was the journey the young writer took on his way across the country to New York. It could be considered post-Kerouac, taking that journey from west to east in as much the same way Kerouac described himself and Neal Cassady rolling down two-lane highways on an all-night benzedrine bender. However, in 1964, this entire experience would most likely be considered post-modern-Kerouac: not only did the young writer make the journey in a dolled-up school bus; not only did the young writer have the actual Neal Cassady at the wheel; but the young writer’s journey was also turned into a novel – sadly much better received than his own second novel, sadly because someone else wrote it.

It would not be the first nor last time celebrity overshadowed art. Ken Kesey was already famous when his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, arrived. Less a publicity stunt, perhaps, than a defense mechanism against facing the Great New York Literati, Kesey – with a busload of emotional support and performance art – became the subject of yet another hallmark of 1960s counterculture literature: Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. But before all of that, in 1964, Ken Kesey was well-known for his debut novel – a once-in-a-lifetime achievement that makes you believe you are actually there, only because Kesey had already been there – and had the great notion to put his observations down on paper.

The circumstances under which the actual writing of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest occurred is rife with nostalgic hipster mythology. All sources agree that Kesey was working at the same mental hospital he had earlier reported to for his volunteer drug research (doubtful the pay was as good); all agree his after-hours position was a prime boxseat in which to watch the drama of asylum life unfold; but some sources wonder if Kesey took the job precisely because he had access to more psychotropic drugs and ultimately wrote OFOTCN while under its influence. It's definitely Martin Torgoff's opinion: In Can't Find My Way Home - America in the Great Stoned Age, he imagines Kesey's position: "Being on the ward under the effects of LSD and mescaline had the effect of a veil being pulled back to reveal a darkness in the American Soul." It certainly does not diminish the impact of the novel to take into account the writer's state of mind - Kesey follows a long line of authors who have successfully mixed altered states with literature.

Unlike the baby boomers, Kesey grew up as part of the first postwar generation. They did not use their affluence to rebel as much as saw their affluence as a reward to conform. It all comes down to whether Kesey and his contemporaries actually thought themselves as hip or breaking out of some established mode of literature prevalent up to 1962, when OFOTCN was written. Norman Mailer had already come up with the eclectic hipster definition as someone possessing an "intense awareness" when he was a big part of the fledgling Village Voice. Growing up amid the Cold War and its dark twin, McCarthyism, would certainly be a spark to re-examine one's society - just as the generation before Kesey's did and just as the generation after Kesey's did. A fiery, instant annihilation via nuclear bomb may have been a novelty during Kesey's young adulthood, but writers throughout history have been keenly aware of how the end times are always right around the corner.

What literature from the 1950s would have appealed to or ignited Kesey? J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye may have seem too conservative, although Kesey must have appreciated that singular narrative voice. To be trapped in the mind and smell the smells of a jaded teenager must have made being trapped in the mind and smelling the smells of an overmedicated mental patient a distinct challenge. William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Walker Percy's The Moviegoer are other examples of books Kesey had been exposed to that featured strong, psychologically-challenged narrators. If the literary world was taken aback with the sudden appearance of OFOTCN, it was because the subject matter was not usual for a young man's first novel. The accepted rite of passage in the 20th century was the thinly veiled memoir, because a young writer can only write what he knows and has seen in his life. (Kesey did write this novel, Zoo, but it has yet to be published.)

Postwar New York City was the undisputed capital of every slice of the culture pie except for film. The literary establishment oozed from all corners - universities, re-patriated Parisians, writers who were eaten up and spit out by the Hollywood studio system and who were begging to write for the theatre again. In New York in the 50's, Dan Wakefield makes it clear: "In New York the word was most honored, most powerful, most brilliantly imagined...gathered on one single island." Alcohol was the East Coast Literary Establishment's main vice, along with a haughty ability at self-serving debate. While movies in the 1950s were mostly selling fantasy, the giants of literature Kesey was exposed to were disavowing fantasy and embracing a startling blend of ultrarealism and psychoanalysis. (Theatre continued to vacillate between the eye candy of musicals and the taut electric current that can only be achieved by live theatre - the grittier the better.) Not only was writing a good outlet for anyone dissatisfied with their world (Kesey was also something of a sketch artist), writers had a certain leniency in society all artists shared. Creatives were allowed to be eccentric, where a mainstream citizen might easily, in the Post War era, be seen as a candidate for psychoanalysis, or worse, exile into a mental health facility.

In contrast to the East Coast, the California literary scene was newer, looser and decidedly anti-intellectual, easily adapting the latest Eastern philosophies into their art just as they would adapt the new Psychology. San Francisco's literary era was officially entered when Allen Ginsberg unveiled his syncopated performance of Howl in 1955, plunging poetry from something transcendent to an unrelenting indictment of society by bullet-pointing its lower depths. Ginsberg was wisely moving beyond the beat moniker to something closer to Zen prophet, leaving the movement he helped foster (literally playing nursemaid to many of the classics of his generation due to his patience, naivety and skill at working a room) to turn into stereotype. Kesey would not want to be associated with any long-in-the-tooth former torch, even if it did launch a certain zeitgeist, but he could have at least commended Ginsberg for going through the obscenity trial so later writers would not have to. Kesey would remain in synchronous orbit with the remains of the Beats up past the publication of OFOTCN when, one source claims, Neal Cassady – Jack Kerouac's sweaty muse – arrived fresh from prison on Kesey's doorstep. He had read Kesey's book, realized that somehow Kesey was writing about him when writing about Randall McMurphy, and ended up driving Kesey's bus (until he passed out in Mexico and died).

The beat generation gets a bad rap because few remember what flowered in their wake: the Village Voice, The Evergreen Reader and works published by Grove Press went a long way in helping new and raw voices like Kesey get a wide readership. The beats did not dwell much on the psychological in their work, they were concerned with the moment of experience. Writers who used the blank page as a form of self-analysis risked being put in the same suspicious light as psychiatrists themselves. In New York in the 50's, Dan Wakefield sets the stage for Kesey's later arena: "One of the most prevalent criticisms of psychiatry in the fifties was that it somehow led to conformity, that its goal was to "shrink" the patient to fit the mold of middle-class society." He goes on to point out that artists feared having their creativity drained away by modern psychiatry as much as homosexuals had to worry about being cured of their preferences.

Meanwhile Timothy Leary was at Harvard as a research psychologist specifically targeting his drug of choice, the hallucinogen psilocybin, to his most attentive guinea pigs, the artist. Leary cut a wide swath throughout most of the literary East Coast, converting many of the creatives (with the exception of Jack Kerouac, an especially mean drunk, even when tripping on Leary's mushrooms). Psychological began being traded for the psychedelic. While the government was using Kesey to further its own experiments in mind-control, Kesey was quick to realize these same drugs, in enlightened hands, could, as Ken Goffman defines in Counter Culture Through the Ages, "[fuel] the countercultural drive by illuminating utopian visions, inspiring artistic departures, and exposing consensus reality as a buffoon emperor with clay feet and minimal clothing." Leary himself would later describe LSD trips as analogous to the Tibetan Book of the Dead in its mystical properties.

If Kesey and his West Coast friends were looking for the mystical, it did not surface in his observations while working as a nurse's aide. Perhaps taking a (half) Native American as his storyteller says more about Kesey's quest for shamanic experiences with peyote and its natural properties – LSD was manufactured in a sterile lab. Kesey was raised in Oregon, where OFOTCN is set, and much of his youth was spent in the same wilderness Chief Bromden fondly recalls. Peyote, and its synthetic counterpart, mescaline, could have been brought to Kesey and his friends' attention in 1954 when Aldus Huxley's The Doors of Perception appeared. The connection between watching his friends blissed out on peyote and watching mental patients in a Demerol haze would not have been lost on him. He also experienced the double standard of living in a country whose government will simultaneously use drugs for their own devices while condemning and persecuting those who self medicate for recreational purposes.

A lot of mid-20th century American literature's purpose was to expose society's ills. Films were just coming to that same conclusion, American theatre had broken a lot of ground, but in 1962 a serious young writer knew the longform novel was the greatest weapon he could wield. Ken Kesey belongs to this cadre, often unrecognized because they do their best work alone, instead of capturing media attention by igniting protest or entering politics. Live entertainers like Lenny Bruce fired their vitriol directly at their audience - the delivery mattered as much as the material; Filmmakers and playwrights accepted that what they brought to the table visually or through the power of speech were the important channels in which to funnel their message; writers, however broad their pallet, have to make the visuals, the sounds, the speech, all work in their readers' heads. Therefore, add the novel to the list of potentially dangerous mind-altering experiences.

---

Works Cited

Boon, Marcus. The road of excess: a history of writers on drugs. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.

Faggen, Robert. Introduction. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. by Ken Kesey. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Print.

Goffman, Ken. Counterculture through the ages: from Abraham to acid house. New York: Villard, 2004. Print.

Hughes, Jim. Altered states: creativity under the influence. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1999. Print.

Kaplan, Fred M. 1959: the year everything changed. Hoboken, N.J.: J. Wiley & Sons, 2009. Print.

Plant, Sadie. Writing on drugs . New York: Farrar, Straus, And Giroux, 2000. Print.

Torgoff, Martin. Can't find my way home: America in the great stoned age, 1945-2000. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2004. Print.

Von Bergen, Julie. "Ken Kesey." Ken Kesey (2005): 1. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. Web. 19 Feb. 2011.

Wakefield, Dan. New York in the fifties. Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1992. Print.

Writing the truest sentence you know

2011-01-28T11:12:00.000-05:00

Many readers learned about the American expatriates in 1920's Paris in 1964 when A Moveable Feast was posthumously published a few years after Ernest Hemingway's death. Like many young Americans born in the new century, Hemingway had witnessed the European devastation of World War I and the experience diverted both his path as an artist and his attitudes as a man. As some alcoholic depressive writers return to their past as a way of entertaining others and reinforcing their own self worth, one can do worse than the episodes chronicled and famous personalities exposed in A Moveable Feast. Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin makes a good point when dealing with any Hemingway writing touted to be truth, saying projects like "A Moveable Feast are barely more autobiographical than his fiction, and, in many ways, just as fictional." In other words, it's the same old problem with memoirs - there's little emotional distance to vet accuracy.

Some analysts claim Hemingway wrote these remembrances to get back at those he felt had slighted him in the years since he lived in Paris, but A Moveable Feast isn't as tough or mean-spirited as it could have been. Hemingway wasn't known as being particularly woman-friendly or gay friendly. (Even soft straight men like Fitzgerald generally worried Hemingway.) Luckily, as it was Paris in the 20s and not Berlin in the 20s, Hemingway had little to concern himself, masculinity flourished everywhere, including when socializing with women like Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. Men like Ezra Pound were able to barter mentoring Hemingway's literary ambitions in exchange for boxing lessons.

If Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Co. bookstore functioned as a sort of 1920s Paris internet, Gertrude Stein's salon was its Facebook. Anybody who was anybody (as long as they didn't piss off the hostess) showed up to be introduced to anybody who was anybody. Stein is credited with telling Hemingway to trade in his journalism experience for the world of fiction, but in reality, it was the vogue for many journalists in the new century to have a book or play on the back burner. During Hemingway's first months in Paris, he didn't have many nice things to say about the poseurs he was surrounded with, as if "the scum of Greenwich Village...has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladles" in his new Paris café society.

Hemingway and wife Hadley weren't the first nor last Americans striking a Bohemian pose in Paris, but at least they could write home about all the cheap wine available - the U.S. was in the throes of prohibition, Europe was not. Hadley's fatal mistake was packing a year's worth (some say 3 years) of Hemingway writing into a suitcase and then losing it in a train station. Perhaps she was fed-up with the poverty-crying she endured from her groom, who said they were too poor to "afford a dog...or cat" and who told others he would duck into the Luxembourg Gardens to strangle pigeons for meals when he was "belly-empty, hollow-hungry".

Gertrude Stein – according to Hemingway, they were like brothers – convinced Hemingway to check out the bullfighting scene down in Spain. (This, apparently, he could afford.) Hemingway not only turned on some of his Paris friends to the spectacle, but also wound up writing all about them, and as is so often the case, not all the characters based on real-life friends were flattering. The Sun Also Rises can be considered a fictional account of Hemingway's Paris experience, written as it was happening, contrasted with the memoirs of A Moveable Feast, written some 30+ years after the fact. Not that his eye for sacrificing truth for a good plot wavered much in between those projects. Even though Hadley was with her husband during the real-life events in Spain, she was deleted from the novel so the Hemingway stand-in hero could be free to pursue another woman (Hadley divorced Hemingway around the time The Sun Also Rises was published. Coincidence?) Unflattering portrayals were the literary equivalent of brawling back in the early 20th century. Hemingway withered Gertrude Stein's reputation in A Moveable Feast as much as Stein has shot Hemingway down in her own The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Wife #2, Pauline, appeared around the time The Sun Also Rises was published. In fact, it looks like Hemingway often had a new wife whenever a major literary work of his completed. But first wife Hadley got the bulk of The Sun Also Rises money and Hemingway was back to the bottom rung financially if not for Pauline's help. She was the wife to lead him up to A Farewell to Arms and closed out Hemingway's Paris adventures for the Key West life.

All of this drama really stands as a testament to what happens to projects whose artist dies in the middle of its creation or original material is subsequently discovered (the original "scrolls" of Jack Kerouac's On the Road were recently unearthed and published). By the time of Hemingway's self-inflicted death in 1961, he was married to Mary, a journalist in her own right, whose job it became not only to coordinate the memoirs, but to give it its title – the publisher was just going to title it "Paris Sketches". In 2009 the controversy over a "new" edition of A Moveable Feast came to light when one of Pauline's grandsons didn't like how Pauline was portrayed (blaming her solely for breaking up Hemingway's marriage to Hadley, but otherwise removing her from the narrative) and he launched a campaign to have a different version of the book released. He even claimed that Mary herself wrote the original last chapter of the original publication, Hemingway's apology to Hadley. (Read a denunciation of the whole business by one of Hemingway's friends, A.E. Hotchner in the NY Times). It is also alleged that despite Mary's declaration that the book was completed before Hemingway died and that she didn't add a thing, the original material discovered shows she handled consideration alterations to an unfinished manuscript. In the end, no one will ever be sure whether Hemingway's words wound up being the truest words he knew.

Work Cited

Brenner, Gerry. "Are We Going to Hemingway's Feast?." American Literature 54.4 (1982): 528. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 19 Jan. 2011.

Burke, David. Writers in Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light. Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA, 2008.

Carpenter, Humphrey. Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, 1988.

Hotchner, A.E. "Don't Touch 'A Moveable Feast'." New York Times. 20 July 2009.

Rich, Motoko. "Moveable Feast is Recast by Hemingway Grandson." New York Times. 28 June 2009.

Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline. "Fact and Fiction in A Moveable Feast." Hemingway Review 3.2 (1984): 44. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 19 Jan. 2011.

Wiser, William. The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties. G.K. Hall & Co., 1983.

Flying by umbrella is not a drug metaphor

2010-11-22T12:17:00.000-05:00

She slid up the banister yet no one connected her with the experiments Harvard man Timothy Leary was doing with LSD. Cold war enthusiasts will be sad to know that 1964's most ironic and iconic image doesn't belong to Dr. Strangelove, but to an unauthorized home practitioner who was known to dose children on sugar in order to get them to take their meds.

When I think of children's books made into film - up until the '60s, I assume there wasn't a whole lot of conflict, that filmmakers needn't have worried if the sweet verses of Lewis Carroll or A.A. Milne would hold their audiences in as much thrall as their literary origins. Walt Disney Co. had appropriated but not fully controlled the future merchandising for neither Peter Pan nor Alice; Pooh Bear continues to be a legal battle worth exploring in another blog; but Pamela Travers takes the cake when it comes to control freak and all-around ungrateful author.

JK Rowling can probably attest to the firm hand wielded while films were being created out of her property. Roald Dahl's estate has made no secret of disappointments following the first big screen presence of Willie Wonka. Travers, on the other hand, went head-to-head with the force of nature that was Walt Disney when he set his sights on her creation, Mary Poppins.

Walt's daughters had enjoyed Travers' stories back in WWII and a deal was almost struck at the time, except Travers wanted script approval and Walt refused, wanting to distill a film from only the best scenes in the series. (Interestingly parallel to today, in the books, not only is Mary P a purveyor of magic, so are members of her family.) Almost 15 years passed and Travers was savvy enough to hike her financial demands considerably, remaining difficult to work with, no matter how much Walt tried to appease her, and she literally scowled all the way to the bank. The road from book to film replaced the lead character's saltiness with sweetness, her coldness with warmth. Travers fumed right up to the film premier, where she reportedly took Walt aside to bitch about the innovative animation sequences. All Walt could do was remind her what was done was done.

It's pretty to believe Travers wrote only for the children and was hellbent on protecting her characters or that even Uncle Walt was more concerned about making movies for a family audience, but the truth is surely more than money or literary merit. Travers distanced herself from the claim to wealth and legacy, cited Beatrix Potter as the inspiration of writing "to please myself. Was Pooh really written for Christopher Robin," she asked in the Saturday Eve Post, "or Wonderland for Alice Liddell?"

Although the reviews were ecstatic, the idea of a modern film portraying a lack of adult concerns created many ruffled critics who saw this throwback to a less sophisticated cultural time out of step with what audiences wanted in 1964 (wait till they got a load of The Sound of Music, Nazis notwithstanding). Attesting to the millions of fans of the movie worldwide, even those who have seen the nanny airborne over the Broadway stage (similarly wired Mary Martin of Peter Pan fame was one of Travers' first choices for Mary P), the musical is forgiven for whatever inconsistencies it has from the line of books, which Travers went on churning out until the 1980s.

The rise and rise of Mary P's portrayer, Julie Andrews, is also a favorite film story from 1964. In one of those amazing tales of the underdog turning the tables, Julie was unceremoniously dumped by the film industry after bringing the role of Eliza Doolittle to life in My Fair Lady. Her acting and singing abilities had made her a theatre star, but Hollywood didn't want an unknown - they had rather bring in Audrey Hepburn and let someone else sing for her. Julie was back onstage wowing audiences in Camelot when Disney spotted her. On Oscar night, it wasn't even a matter of Andrews and Hepburn competing - Hepburn wasn't even nominated. Julie won best actress while My Fair Lady won best picture. For another outstanding Andrews performance in 1964, check out The Americanization of Emily, a comedy she starred opposite James Garner. By the next year, Andrews would be in charge of even more children in The Sound of Music, a film she got because Hollywood didn't think the woman who created the role onstage, Mary Martin, had any box office draw.

Read More

Flanagan, Caitlin. "Becoming Mary Poppins: P. L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the making of a myth." New Yorker, 19 Dec. 2005. Web.

Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney- the Triumph of the American Imagination. Vintage Books, 2006.

Perry, Danny. Alternate Oscars. Dell Publishing. 1993.

Travers, P. L. "WHERE DID SHE COME FROM? WHY DID SHE GO?." Saturday Evening Post 237.39 (1964): 76-78. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 12 Nov. 2010.

Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Houghton-Mifflin, 1997.

Disaster and blackout - the long farewell of the playwright

2010-10-27T07:17:00.000-04:00

It reads like a synopsis from a Tennessee Williams melodrama: amid the palms of the swarthy Florida Keys, a famous artist past the prime of his powers lives with a much younger companion while his former partner lives upstairs, dying of inoperable lung cancer.

For most of 1964, Tennessee Williams was a recluse. His partner since 1948, Frank Merlo, had died in a New York City hospital the previous September. After Merlo died there were no more Tony Awards, no more Pulitzers, no more NY Drama Critics' Circle Awards. Williams and Frank had been together for 15 years, shepherding 8 plays and countless films while creating a pseudo-domestic, settled homelife between Key West, New York, New Orleans and Rome. By 1964, the milk train didn't stop there anymore.

Occurring at the same time as his personal tragedy, there was another memorial service to attend: the end of Williams as master playwright and American theatre superstar. 1961's The Night of the Iguana squeaks by in anthologies as his last masterwork, according to critics of the day. By 1964, a rewritten version of his next play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, with Tallulah Bankhead, bombed, closing after 4 performances. (TW's next venture - 2 shorter plays under the title Slapstick Tragedy - would also close after 4 performances in 1966.) When Milk Train was rewritten, it became a more naked treatise about death and life's ultimate futility. The main character rails: "What the hell are we doing? Just going from one goddamn frantic distraction to another, till finally one too many goddamn distractions lead to disaster and blackout?"

Milk Train covers a lot of same ground sowed a few years earlier with Sweet Bird of Youth: an aging, rich woman lamenting her loss of youth, a younger man who is both artist and paid sexual companion. He actually may be the angel of death, so the subtle metaphors are becoming less subtle...but, he's also referred to as a beatnik, so at least the play's trendy. Flora Goforth, however, is much more crude and grotesque than TW's previous heroines, and the conversation, set on a terrace on the Italian coast, ambles around a missing "sense of reality" as well as Flora's always imminent death. It is well known that after writing a play, Williams was convinced it would be his last and he was not to survive long enough to write another. Eventually, he would be correct, but not in 1964. Was Milk Train derailed by too much talk of death? (The San Francisco production had actual plaster skeletons scattered throughout the audience) Can't be - much of modern American theatre has focused on death, from 'Night Mother to Angels in America.

It was more than just the nagging spectre of being washed up that many successful artists experience. Those artists who dare to deviate from the hitmaking machine they have invented are condemned to the inevitable vegetable medley audiences and critics like to throw. TW had been writing about washed up characters from the get go. Blanche Dubois in 1947's A Streetcar Named Desire refers to herself as "played out"; Rev. Shannon in Night of the Iguana is defrocked and disassembled. Actresses Karen Stone and Alexandra del Lago are at the end of their careers as women of a certain age denied the roles of younger actresses and they acted out accordingly (although Alexandria, like TW himself, with a whole lot more pills and liquor). By 1964 Williams was beyond complaining about age, vitality and being relevant.

The state of theatre in the early 1960s showed experimentation becoming mainstream. Except when Williams attempted it. TW was a fan of Beckett's minimalism, Albee's rapid-fire dialogue (Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf) and Orton's sex farce (Entertaining Mr. Sloane). TW enjoyed employing more humor in his plays, although the humor was far more grotesque than the sophisticated breezes of Neil Simon's 1963 night on Broadway, Barefoot in the Park.

In addition, unknown to most people was Williams' discovery of the Japanese theatre of Noh. He had visited Japan in 1959 and was affected by Kabuki theatre enough to write a play subtitled An Occidental Noh Play. Noh plays are, by their definition, full of minimalist dialogue, archetype characters (often without identities beyond their description), and pointed silences. Milk Train begins with stage assistants hoisting a flag, identified only as "One and Two" and actually refer to themselves as "theatrical devices...with occidental variations." Many of the plays TW wrote in the last 20 years of his life follow these attributes and were roundly panned by audiences and critics alike.

NY Times theatre critic Richard Gilman wrote: "It was clear to us that Williams was in flight from his own powers, that he was in fact beginning to parody them." Critics began attacking his plays for being too personal - but TW always claimed "all true work of an artist must be personal". This is the old argument about art vs. commercial art, or in this case, art vs. commercially-funded business of theatre. By contrast, in 1964, Arthur Miller had no qualms about presenting the fragmented memory play After the Fall - ostensibly about his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Intensely personal, sure, because writers write from their experience.

The vicious circle of bad reviews = more drinking = worse writing = more bad reviews. Williams would spend the remainder of mid-60s whacked out on a combo of speed injections and handfuls of downers until he ended up in rehab by decade's end.

Recent reassessments say critics are often wrong to expect an artist to keep producing the same art as they did at the height of their powers - that TW turned abstract as his world closed in on him. Perhaps these plays were not good commercial theater - or even good theater - but as art, they definitely have merit.

Works Cited

Gilman, Richard. "The Drama is Coming Now". The Second Coming of Tennessee Williams. Yale University Press.
Hale, Allean. "Tennessee's Long Trip," Gale Research volume 45 of Contemporary Criticism. 1984. http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2003/5hale.htm
Rader, Dotson. Cry of the Heart. Doubleday and Company, 1985.
Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. Doubleday and Company, 1975.
Williams, Tennessee. The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. 1964.
Williams, Tennessee. Notebooks. Margaret Bradham Thornton, ed. Yale University Press, 2006.

When Art Film Smiled at its Own Reflection

2010-10-13T10:07:00.000-04:00

Cinephile sounds like a dirty word; I wonder if you called someone a cinephile on the street back in 1964 if they would slug you or invite you for an espresso. The '60s were the beginning of a new breed of audience who not only worshipped film but loved discussing it as one would discuss a novel or, more apt, a work of art. The studio system was on its way out; the era of the director-as-filmmaker-as-auteur arrived.

Considering the art film of the early 1960s – especially those coming out of Europe (and most were; to understand a history of American independent film in those years, you can usually start and stop with Cassavettes) – they were a cure from Hollywood churning out predictable product. If you lived in a large enough city, you had access to at least one old movie palace refurbed as the "art house". Since U.S. movie magazines catering to housewives and starry-eyed teenage girls didn't cover events like Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave, it was up to the audiences themselves to keep the conversation going, to influence friends to see films few newspapers and magazines would even review. By 1964, backlash was inevitable. Art film didn't go mainstream, but they were now commonplace enough to "jump the shark", and no one personified shark jumping better than Federico Fellini.

"What are you working on now? Another film without hope?"

In 1964, Fellini was an international prince of cinema thanks to 8 1/2, released the previous summer. Its success wouldn't make his next film any easier to make, nor would it make it a success, but it did help bring American audiences into avid discussion about world cinema and this movie about the making of a movie. I believe most 21st century Americans would fail to see anything odd about a film director being accused of self-indulgence. As if any artist would choose to create for themselves instead of the all-consuming public. Films are not personal canvasses - they are financed heavily, employ hundreds or thousands of people and live or die on the words of critics, reviewers and word-of-mouth audiences. It is doubtful Fellini made 8 1/2 for himself; his role had always been as entertainer. However, his stock had risen after the triumph, in 1960, of La Dolce Vita, a time capsule of life among the new glitterati in Rome.

Throughout the previous decade, Italy was experiencing an amazing bout of economic success - washing the world with vespas and kitchen appliances, Jackie Kennedy's Cassini suits and Anita Ekberg dancing in Rome's Trevi Fountain. La Dolce Vita was such a sensation that it was inevitable his next project would be closely dissected. The lack of linear narrative was a huge problem for those who were not used to movies employing vignettes, where daydreams and reverie were not bracketed by the convention of wavy lines letting the audience know what was reality or not. How could a movie about making a movie ascribe to reality anyway? 8 1/2 spends the bulk of its time lounging with the film's hero in a health spa - which in postwar Italy had more in common with the shrine at Lourdes than a weekend resort getaway. When we are finally shown a glimpse of movie set, it's a rocketship launch pad out in the middle of nowhere.

The idea of making the main character a film director evolved after the entire plot had already formulated in Fellini's mind. He originally had a Joe Everyguy escaping to a health spa, stressed from juggling wife, mistress, clergy, daydreams, flashbacks, psychoanalysis and mindreading. By the time he got the brainstorm to look in the mirror and make his hero a successful film director, he added muse, producer, critics and journalist to the circus.

In 1964, Fellini was busy on his next film with a similar theme: this time having his hero trying to find herself not through cinema but through the occult. Juliet of the Spirits asked some of the same questions concerning self-analysis - except from a female point of view. In contrast to a film about a famous man who has too many women, this film would focus on a woman who shares her husband. Divorce was illegal in Italy when the film was made, so there was really no big mystery about how the relationship would end up. The project had the added bonus of putting Fellini's wife back to work, the amazing Guilietta Masina, who hadn't had a hit film since she last worked with her husband 7 years earlier.

phantasmagoria (fanˌtazməˈgôrēə)
a sequence of real or imaginary images like that seen in a dream

Philip Kemp, writing in Sight and Sound, said: "'Felliniesque' ... usually means nowadays is 'overblown, self-indulgent, sentimental and featuring monstrously fat women and dwarves'. Less than fair." During the fallout reviews for 8 1/2, critics probably did not know that the film was a direct result of Fellini's forays into psychotherapy: the film is like one long therapy session or a Catholic confessional (same thing). It was also influenced by the fact that Federico had started keeping a journal of his dreams. He even gave a shot at celebrity-endorsing that mysteriously controlled experiment of the 60's, LSD, to unlock his creativity, but somehow did not allow his onscreen counterpart to indulge in anything nearly as trendy. A modern critique of 8 1/2 in Cineaste magazine claimed you could make good use of watching the film on DVD by running the scenes in random order.

Most European critics were unanimous in their praise (although, Derek Malcolm mentioned in The Guardian: "When it came out, the film seemed incomprehensible to many who had hitherto loved his work. In one Italian town, the audience attacked the projectionists."); in America, there were culture clashes. Time magazine thought 8 1/2's "stream of consciousness" fascinating, but "is that a reason for showing it publicly?" It wasn't a problem with sophistication or innovation; it was the idea of European films being told so differently than Americans were used to. Also showing in U.S. art houses circa 1964: Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert - another collaboration with his muse Monica Vitti - it received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Set in a factory-laden Italy, a neurotic young wife feels disconnected from pretty much everything. The film was mostly monochrome with very exact uses of color and not a whole lot happens. However, it's Antonioni, so it is a classic of world cinema.

Critic Pauline Kael was having none of the Fellini love. (It wasn't that she had it out for any foreign film in 1964; she thought Godard's Bande à Part was a "charming" gangster movie.) According to Kael: "Someone's fantasy life is perfectly good material for a movie if it is imaginative and fascinating in itself, or if it illuminates his non-fantasy life in some interesting way. But 8 1/2 is neither..." Then again, she believed 8 1/2 was one of the first movies that some in the audience intentionally showed up stoned.

American cinema wouldn't catch up with the idea of the film director-as-artist until the 1970's when guys like Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese made film a subject one could study in school, like literature and art. We call it independent film now, or just: indies - supposedly small projects bereft of huge financing and studio interference. The advent of DVD means the playing field has evened out for all of world cinema. If you avoid the multiplexes and watch film based on interests and preference, it won't matter what studio is attached to it any more than it will matter how much money was spent on it.

Works Cited:

Affron, Charles, ed. 8 1/2. Rutgers Films in Print. Rutgers, the State University, 1987.

Celli, Carlo and Marga Cottino-Jones. A New Guide to Italian Cinema. Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.

"Cinema: Director on the Couch." Time. 28 June 1963.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,874998,00.html

Cowie, Peter. Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the Sixties. Faber and Faber, Inc., 2004.

Kael, Pauline. I Lost It at the Movies. Little Brown & Co, 1965.

Kemp, Philip. "FEDERICO FELLINI (1920-93)." Sight & Sound 19.9 (2009): 27. Art & Architecture Complete. EBSCO. Web. 6 Oct. 2010.

Kezich, Tulio. Federico Fellini: His Life and Work. Faber and Faber, Inc., 2002.

Malcolm, Derek. "Federico Fellini: 8 1/2." The Guardian. 22 April 1999.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/1999/apr/22/derekmalcolmscenturyoffilm.derekmalcolm

Monaco, James. "Federico Fellini's 8 1/2." Cineaste 27.3 (2002): 46. Art & Architecture Complete. EBSCO. Web. 6 Oct. 2010.

Mordeen, Ethan. Medium Cool: the Movies of the 1960s. Knopf, 1990.

Stone, Alan. "8 1/2: Fellini's Moment of Truth." Boston Review. 1995.

http://bostonreview.net/br20.3/stone.html

Alas, Poor Auric

2010-09-30T11:07:00.000-04:00

Who men choose for boyhood heroes is mostly a matter of what's culturally available. Boys are exemplary sponges and the advertising industry knows it. In 1964, there were mostly cowboys and soldiers, both hip as much for their firepower as for their steely-eyed strength. The spy, however – in a world overwrought with Cold War nuclear fear – had much more than ammo and tough, he had charm – and most important to me – tech. Undoubtedly he was sexist - some say misogynist - and ruthlessly cold-blooded when it came to indiscriminately taking life. Americans probably felt some relief that his teflon heart was British. Cowboys and soldiers under the Stars and Stripes would be unwavering in mowing down the enemy - cattle rustlers, Nazis, the Viet Cong - but throw a mother with a baby carriage in the way and they would most certainly swerve out of the way. Not so sure about James Bond.

1962's Dr. No wasn't much of a Bond flick (no cool theme, no cool gadgets, Bond singing, for god's sake), 1963's From Russia with Love was a decent although generic cold war flick, but 1964's Goldfinger set the bar for what will become decades of homage for other films to mine. In the now prerequisite pre-title scene, for instance, Bond surfaces from dark waters in a wetsuit, aiming to blow up a drug lab, eventually revealing the soon-much-used cliché of having his tux on underneath.

There's also the spectacle of seeing Bond strapped to a table with a laser beam crackling towards his privates. The censors of the day probably would've cut any decent kinky quips Bond could've come up with. What was allowed to pass, however, was the name of the Bond girl of the year: Pussy Galore. Were there howls in the audience when she introduced herself to James? Was America already that dirty-minded? Or did it go over most people's heads? Did moviegoers realize Ms. Galore in Ian Fleming's story was a lesbian?

The cultural touchstones in this film are numerous, merging with world consciousness as well as future parody: There is a somewhat megalomaniac villain, Auric Goldfinger, and he does have an evil (albeit brilliant) plan: explode a dirty bomb inside Fort Knox, contaminate the gold reserve for 58 years, economic chaos will reign. After defeat, the well-fed Auric is sucked out of a depressurized airplane's window. Bond dispatches his henchman, Oddjob – brandishing a decapitating bowler - with a big electric cable.

The future Bond template is quickly established within the first moments of Goldfinger. (Check out the opening seconds of the John Barry's theme during the gun barrel sequence to catch Bond sporting a Mad Men approved hat.) The amazing Binder titles are there, except they're not Binder this time around (He titled Dr. No, but sat the next two out). Instead of naked female silhouettes, Goldfinger's opening credits feature a gold-painted girl as a screen, projected scenes from the film on her body. Shirley Bassey gave us theme #1 of 3 (Diamonds are Forever and Moonraker will be her others).

Bond films are, at some level, thrilling travelogues for those of us stuck in smalltown movie theaters. His business cover, Universal Exports, allowed him staggering air miles. Goldfinger's great locale: Miami Beach in all of its ratpack-era grandeur – specifically, the Fontainebleau.

Death & the Maiden: Sex with Bond usually ends up fatal for the girl (unless she's able to make it to the closing credits). Appropriated as a cliché for teen slasher flicks, by the 1980s this equation became all too real. (1987's Bond became practically celibate.) In Goldfinger's day, the buxom body count was high:

Shirley Eaton's after room-service sex with Bond gets her gold plated, literally, instantly creating an icon out of a 5 minute film role. (Her avenging sister, refusing Bond's charms to focus on her assassin duties, gets mowed down in a gun fight regardless.) The jury's out on Bonita; she's the chick making out with Bond in her bathroom to distract him so he can be thwacked by a hitman. This is the scene where Bond sees the hitman's reflection in Bonita's eyes, swings her around so she gets thwacked instead (but perhaps not fatally).

It's hard to take Bond masculinity seriously in this film. Although he's ass-slapping and talking down to his latest eyeful, he's doing it while wearing a baby blue terry cloth mini jumper. He also proves himself a man of taste and breeding, knowing a '53 Dom Perignon needs to be chilled below 38°F and tags what's wrong with the brandy by smell alone. Is there anything he can't do? Golf is second nature, apparently, but bomb diffusing leaves him befuddled and clumsy.

Despite the age of the film, there are few wincingly dated aspects to Goldfinger. Bond is heard stating something is "as bad as listening to the Beatles without ear muffs", the square. In addition, setting women back 100 years: Pussy's co-pilot sits in the cockpit with her face glued in an issue of Vogue.

This was my first glimpse of the sleek steel grey Aston Martin DB5 replete with revolving int'l license plates; smoke screen/oil slick/machine guns/radar and the beloved ejector seat. However, the best gadget of the film wasn't Bond's, but Auric Goldfinger's - watch his Kentucky rec room reassemble like a Transformer into a war room and finally into a gas chamber. Push-button versatility at its best.

The third Bond adventure was a certified transcontinental phenomenon crowning one of the first franchise superstars with statistics that can only happen in Hollywood (or Pinewood Studios). Ian Fleming wrote Bond stories for only 14 years; the film series has survived for nearly 50. In 1964, Fleming was writing "You Only Live Twice" (and, oddly, "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" - a decidedly different high tech auto) and died two months before Goldfinger premiered. Fun fact: 007 was the bus line that passed Fleming's house.

a melting watch at every bus stop

2010-09-20T18:34:00.000-04:00

As an artist, I've been told to be concerned about employing a copyright on all of my work; of being vigilant to protect both my art and my artist reputation. However, I'm a digital artist; the ends don't merely justify the means, they pay for it repeatedly. There is no original artwork in digital art: if someone is willing to pay for a copy, they must realize they're getting the result of a file being sent to a printer. A year later, another copy can be produced with no loss of integrity.

This type of tech - tho' not yet digital - was hitting its stride by 1964 when Salvador Dalí, already blinded by the glare of his zenith, was entering an era when his extravagant genius lifestyle and that of his bride, Gala, needed to be assured. An aging couple living in a wonderfully funky house on the coast of Spain, in the midst of having the first Dalí museum built, they were all but semi-retired (but who can really elect to stop being Dalí?) Apparently, it never became an ethical concern whether Dalí would sell an original or a reproduction sporting with his fresh signature. In a time before rampant product placement and sponsored name brands, Dalí envisioned his artwork would appear everywhere: he creates it once, it magically duplicates and replicates until it becomes as ubiquitous as his name. Viral Dalí.

There are also tales about Dalí lending his signature to stacks of blank sheets of paper (10,000!). This wasn't as much a picture of an artist in his decline ("The Hallucinogenic Toreador" will appear in 1969), as it was a portrait of a celebrity who ignored the quality of his output as long as he was able to make money off it. He cannily knew how to expand his art beyond the realm of the canvas: By ‘64, he was designing liquor bottles, jewelry and golden chalices. One of his truly inspired commissioned projects was a chess set where the pieces were sculptures of his own thumbs and fingers. (The queens were Gala's fingers tipped with a tooth and the rooks were saltshakers from a ritzy hotel.)

Also paramount to the nurturing of the Dalí brand was his writing: 1964 saw the publishing of Dalí's "memoirs", Diary of a Genius, in which decades of carefully crafted suitable backstory - a lot of it contrived - got the stamp of legitimacy. Here’s an artist who is in complete control of not only birthing but also maintaining his own extensive self-aggrandizing mythology. Dali turned 60 in 1964 - he was as world famous for his personality as he was for his artwork. He publicly worshipped money, as far from the art-for-art's sake school he had decades ago become a poster boy for, taking on all manner of work. If a backer paid him to produce illustrations for the Bible, Dalí did so (but not as enthusiastically as he produced illustrations for The Arabian Knights).

1964 witnessed the unveiling of Apotheosis of the Dollar, where Dalí literally gilded the monetary sign, raising it to the sanctified holy relic most of Western civilization presumed it to be. Surrealist André Breton had already nastily anagrammed Salvador Dali into "Avida Dollars" as a suitable pseudonym for just this type of art. Fittingly, both "Apotheosis" and Dalí-designed jewelry were seen at the France and Spain pavilions of the World's Fair in New York City. Photographed alongside both Dalí and "Apotheosis" was Andy Warhol, I would assume, busily taking notes on the balance of art, commerce and public persona.

Works Cited
Caws, Mary Ann. "Chapter 15: Scandals and Seclusion, 1960-79." 143-151. Reaktion Books Ltd., 2008. Art & Architecture Complete. EBSCO. Web. 13 Sept. 2010.
Dalí, Salvador & André Parinaud. Maniac Eyeball: The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí. Creation Books. 2004.
Descharmes, Robert and Gilles Néret. Dalí. Taschen. 1998.
Gibson, Ian. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí. W.W. Norton. 1997.
Salvador Dalí: an Illustrated Life. Tate.
"SALVADOR DALI GIVES THE FINGER TO A CHESS SET." Antique Shoppe Newspaper Mar. 2008: 35. Art & Architecture Complete. EBSCO. Web. 13 Sept. 2010.
Schiebler, Ralf. Dalí: The Reality of Dreams. Prestel. 1996.

How I First Learned to Escape Reality (with Corporate Sponsorship)

2010-09-12T15:07:00.002-04:00

Although born in '64, my memory doesn't kick in 'til about '66: I have a flash of being unsupervised one morning, raiding the cookie jar, then arranging about 10 coconut bar cookies along the glass-topped scan design coffee table. Sadly, no snapshots exist of either my gluttonous smile of delight, nor the inevitable drama that followed once my folks woke up. One of the few early photos that does still exist shows me sitting in a stroller in front of a huge metallic globe, embarking on what would become a lifetime habit: themepark wanderer.

Much like myself, the 1964 World's Fair is just a few pieces of relic now. What actually remains has been engrained into our imaginations as most of us have seen that massive stainless steel orb in film or on TV - especially if we watched music videos. They Might Be Giants and Cyndi Lauper filmed there and one of the B-52's latter-day greatest hits packages showcased what's known as the Unisphere on its cd cover. Just as iconic, the towers of the New York State Pavilion feature prominently in Men in Black and Iron Man 2. It's all still there - out in Queens on the way to LaGuardia Airport. Has the New York State Pavilion finally been designated a national landmark? Don't laugh at the impropriety of tax dollars: remember that the Eiffel Tower is also a leftover reminder of a World's Fair.

A World's Fair is another form of a themepark, temporarily constructed to tout a country's culture or a corporation's future tech (aka preview new gadgets to eager consumers). In 1964 it was all about monorails and videophones, jetpacks and moving sidewalks. Fair organizers were adamant about raising the bar on the experience by getting rid of the carny atmosphere that had reportedly made the 1939 expo a low-brow affair. What was needed was a class act, specifically: bring on board the mastermind who had opened that sensational wonderland out in California almost 10 years earlier. And what that gentleman wanted out of the deal was to prove he could be an equally sensational presence on the East Coast, where, according to his sources, audiences were much more intellectual and sophisticated.

There have always been parallels between Disney parks and World's Fairs - especially the concept of a corporation sponsoring an attraction: the trading of free advertising for upkeep. As a kid visiting Disney World in its first years, I quickly learned names like "Monsanto" and never connected them to anything scary like a world-dominating superpower. Walt was originally roped into the World's Fair scheme to oversee the children's area, but he envisioned something much bigger involving some of the era's most powerful acronyms: GE, IBM, AT&T, RCA. Once the corporate world found out Disney was involved, everyone wanted a piece of pavilion. Walt saw this as more than a chance at financial windfall - he wanted to beta test future Disney park attractions with corporate America's millions. Consider that none of the techniques he used at the 1964 World's Fair had ever been practically implemented before speaks volumes about Walt's trust in his imagineers.

Amid the original concepts for Disneyland was the inclusion of Edison Square, a fin-de-siécle themed section off Main Street that would, with General Electric's backing, show off their latest tech. This technology, now being built for the Fair, would feature the then-revolutionary theatrical robots called animatronics, of which 16th US President Lincoln would appear unsettlingly lifelike for a paying audience. Animatronics as a concept is very simple: robots instead of actors = efficiency (and no salary); it's an idea as old as Metropolis. So it's really not so farfetched that perfecting 3D simulation came from an animation studio where control of every movement was compulsive. Lincoln was chosen as the prototype as his speeches tended to carry goosebump-raising awe. Added bonus: the state of Illinois agreed to pony up the sponsorship.

This same tech also evolved into the Carousel of Progress, a theatrical presentation where the audience revolved around a center stage split into living rooms with families from different times of American history - showcasing GE products, of course. Today's attraction, oddly and sadly enough, does not look that different. We go from the turn of the 20th century, to the '20s, then the '40s - and jump right over to whatever tech has just passed us by. (Virtual reality goggles for gaming are currently the big thing). From the 1964 World's Fair brochure describing that last tableau: "The glories of today glitter in a living room at Christmastime, a glass-enclosed, electrically heated patio, a kitchen that all but runs itself."

It's a Small World came to life when Pepsi collaborated with UNICEF and desperately needed an attraction at the last minute; Walt loved the challenge of a tight deadline. One of the first concepts was to have the almost-300 children all sing their own national anthems - not exactly a harmonious idea - probably sounding more like a meeting at the United Nations. Instead, we got a song grown men like me are afraid to evoke out of fear it will stick in our heads all day. After the attraction was moved doll by doll to California, Pepsi handed over the backing to Bank of America, which was succeeded by Mattel. Added thrill - the attraction was designed by the incomparable Mary Blair.

Although the fair itself was a financial disaster, the success of Disney's attractions proved the eastern U.S. was ripe for the type of vacation destination Californians were enjoying and that corporations would agree to back attractions in return for a little promotion (decades before sports stadiums became synonymous with corporate identities). While all this was happening in the Northeast, Walt was also spending quality time quietly creating dummy corporations in order to buy up massive tracks of swampland near Orlando for what he called "Project Winter". By 1982, Walt Disney World would launch what was basically the World's Fair of World's Fairs when it opened EPCOT, part preview of tomorrow, part international showcase.

Work Cited

Foglesong, Richard E. Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando. Yale University. 2001.

Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. Random House, NY, NY. 2006.

"THE GREAT FAIR." Saturday Evening Post 237.20 (1964): 26-35. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 7 Sept. 2010.

Koenig, David. Realityland: True-life Adventures at Walt Disney World. Bonaventure Press, Irvine, CA. 2007.

Smith, Dave. Disney A to Z: the Official Encyclopedia. 3rd Edition. Disney Editions, NY, NY. 2006.

Walt Disney Imagineering. Welcome Enterprises, NY, NY. 1996.

Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Houghton-Mifflin, NY, NY. 1997.

"World's Fair 1964 guide book."

Camelot exists only in wedding photos

2010-09-05T20:28:00.004-04:00

I showed up fairly late in the 1964 world arena: America was nearly a year into an accidental presidency following a televised, public execution. My parents were both what I always refer to as Camelot-era kids, wed at a time of pillbox hats and elbow-length gloves, both younger than I ever got to see them, faces full of promise and, I will assume, a certain Cold War angst.

If you're an astrological purist, you might consider the time I was conceived to be more important than my actual birth. Was I conceived the night the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show (9 Feb.)? The Beatles (or Elvis, for that matter) were never on the radar for a young couple from East Harlem living in the Bronx. I was exposed to pretty much nothing but Sinatra on the turntable 'til I was old enough to get my own vinyl (the soundtrack to The Sting, but that's another story).

By October, the Summer Olympics were going on in Tokyo. (Yeah, I guess they wouldn't call them the Autumn Olympics, but it does seem a bit strange.); MLK received the Nobel Peace Prize; Khrushchev was dumped in favor of Brezhnev. None of this would have effected my family's world. But, the Yankees were losing the World Series to the Cardinals: that would be the hospital waiting room chatter while my mother was busy in labor.

So, I will have to dig deeper, spend time reconstructing and reimagining. There are a great many influences to the person I will become, many of them living, loving, creating and destroying in 1964. I'll put on a pot of coffee and start the expedition.