Medieval Treasures, Part I

This past Christmas, while visiting the Washington DC area, I was blessed with an embarrassment of riches, a medieval two-fer. The first was like something out of a Tolkien dream, a priceless hoard of precious metals and ornaments from the Dark Ages, found lying beneath the earth; the second, a long-lost text from the 10th century whose story reads like a Gaston Leroux novel by way of Dan Brown.

Part I
Sic transit gloria Angli...

In July of 2009 [coincidentally right before I visited London for my first extended visit], an enormous hoard of gold and silver was dug up in Staffordshire, England. As it turned out the treasure dated back to the Anglo-Saxon era—a Sutton Hoo for the new millennium! I was dying to view the loot when I was actually over there, but the experts were still cleaning it up and had not put it on public display yet—I had to wait until the Brits brought it over here, to be exhibited at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, DC.

Thankfully they were open on Christmas Eve, since that was the only day I could go! Walking into the exhibit hall was like entering Smaug's cavern. I couldn't stop staring at these pieces.  They were breathtaking—incredibly detailed, dazzling and golden and captivating.  And mysterious. Who buried this collection and when? And why? Who was the man who displayed these pommel atop his sword, the warrior who had first worn that helmet plate, what do we know about their violent, cold, vivid world?

The defender of earls then

Commanded that eight steeds with bridles

Gold-plated, gleaming, be guided to hallward

Inside the building; on one of them stood then

An art-broidered saddle embellished with jewels

The Anglo-Saxons predated what we think of as England*--they were only two of a number of Germanic tribes that surged into the power vacuum that was the British isles after Shit Started Getting Real in the Roman Empire in the early 400s and onward [when the Romans pulled out of Britain because their empire was busy falling apart. You know how it is]. Everyone knows the date 1066, when William the Conqueror [or the Bastard, if you prefer--he answered to both names] won the Battle of Hastings**...but there was nearly 700 hundred years between the pullout of the Romans, and the appearance of the Normans [who were really Vikings just a few generations removed***]. What happened in the intervening years?

Well, an awful lot of fighting, mainly. The Germanic tribes--the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Frisians, all swept across the North Sea like a cold wind, all part of what the Germans call the Völkerwanderung, the Migration of Peoples, a long, long period from the 400s AD to roughly 900 or so, when seemingly every people in Europe was infected with restlessness and had to move, to go, to invade, to conquer.

Two of these tribe (the Visigoths and the Vandals) sacked Rome--in the same century! Before that Rome hadn't been sacked for 800 years but by the 5th century, things had deteriorated so badly in the Empire that a horde of illiterate long-haired tribesmen was able to bring down the Caput Mundi.

What were they seeking? What were they trying to accomplish? What caused so many kind of peoples, so many tribes and clans and kindred to pick up and move across the landmasses of Europe?

No one really knows.

Which brings us back to this glittering, alluring pile of gold, the perfect fancy for these turbulent, hungry times. As vast as the hoard was [the largest EVER from the Anglo-Saxon period!], it offered only a few, tantalizing clues as to its origins. For one thing almost all the objects were military in purpose--no coins, no combs or belts or jewelry, just things like hilt collars, scabbards, helmet plates. For another--most intriguingly--almost none of the pieces were intact; many of them were deliciously mangled and even torn.

"The Folded Cross."  This may have been held aloft into battle, as religious artifacts often were. 

His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment 

and with the desire of dwarves; 

and he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, 

at the gold beyond price and count.

Like Bilbo, I too was dazzled, my heart was caught by these lovely, delicate, intricately worked objects, precious pieces over which some anonymous, long-dead artisan had worked, imagining his hands twisting the thin strands onto the plates, shaping and polishing the garnets, creating a thing of beauty to last the ages. 

A hilt collar--this would have decorated a sword handle.

Imagining some fierce Danish or Welsh fighter grappling with an enemy, their swords clashing and rending the gorgeous metalwork.

Notice the eagle's head on the left, and the scales on the other end.
The Anglo-Saxons loved visual jokes and puns such as this.

Imagining too how these riches ended up sleeping beneath the earth for over 1ooo years...Perhaps some enterprising Mercian warrior, lucky enough to be on the winning side [the typical Anglo-Saxon practice was for all the losers to be slaughtered], crept out under cover of darkness to strip the bodies and hurriedly buried his stash, hoping to retrieve it later.

Four bright jewels with gold-work embellished.

'Round the roof of the helmet a head-guarder outside

Braided with wires, with bosses was furnished,

That swords-for-the-battle fight-hardened might fail

Boldly to harm him... 

Perhaps the gold was buried in tribute--to an enemy, to a god, perhaps in thanksgiving to a battle won...

No one knows.  

*Although they gave us their name--Angle-land.  According to legend, Pope Gregory eyed a group of fair-haired, fair-skinned slaves in the Roman marketplace and wanted to know their origins.  Upon being told they were Angles, he quipped Non Angli, sed Angeli.  Oh, Gregory, you so funny...

**Which, by the way, was the very LAST successful invasion of the British Isles.  Take THAT, Philip II and Hitler!


*** Norseman --> Norman, just another variation on the Big Incestuous Melting Pot of Northern Europe.

Two Flights, Two Rivers

A few weeks ago, January 13, was the 30^th anniversary of one of Washington DC’s saddest stories, the ill-fated Air Florida Flight 90.

I am the daughter of a commercial airline pilot (former Navy) and my family and I have always been hyper-aware of airplane crashes.  Having grown up in the DC area, I vividly remember this accident when it happened—the magnitude of the disaster stunned me.  A heavy snowstorm, the really wet, icy, messy kind in which the DC area seems to specialize.  14^th Street Bridge taken out.  78 people killed, mostly immediately.  In the water. They were never even really airborne, the plane just kind of lumbered into the air and flopped down into the river like a dodo bird, breaking through the ice and disappearing almost completely.

And worse and worse.  

• The federal government had released its employees early that day because of the storm, so the roads were packed with commuters—4 of the killed were on the bridge.

• Metro, the DC area’s subway system, had its first fatal accident that day—so the Orange and Blue Lines were both suspended.

The few passengers who survived the crash found themselves in the Potomac River—a dangerous river even in optimum conditions, it was now choked with ice floes.  Stunned, broken and literally freezing, they could do nothing to help themselves—they could only wait to be rescued.  And wait they did—the only way to reach the survivors was now either by air or by water.

There is something especially haunting about dying underwater—the claustrophobia, the dark, the horrible inversion of Freudian birth imagery.  And the river was cold, so cold.  The survivors had only minutes to spare before hyperthermia would kill them, and many were blind from the aviation fuel that now covered the surface of the river.  The helicopters arrived and hovered over and on the waters, throwing down rescue lines to tow the people to shore.  At one point the skids of the 'copter went below the surface.

Bystanders on the bridge and the riverbanks were shouting encouragement to the flailing survivors.  Hold on, just hold on.  Help is coming.  Stay strong.  The river was so narrow, the survivors so close, everyone could see them easily--you could feel their struggles, you could read the expressions on their faces. 

Eventually Priscilla Tirado, who’d broken both her arms and had lost her husband and baby in the crash, simply could not hold on any more and began to go under.  In a breathtaking feat of heroism, Lenny Skutnik, one of the bystanders on the bridge, stripped to his shirtsleeves and bare feet and dove in to help her.

To this day, if you asked a DC-er who was around in 1982 who Lenny Skutnik is, they will remember.  A month after Flight 90, the Washington Post published its annual Valentine's Day personals, and one anonymous admirer captured the gratitude of a region, saying simply WE LOVE YOU LENNY SKUTNIK.  But Skutnik was only the most famous--the day had several other heroes.  Roger Olian, who jumped in merely to give comfort to the survivors, even though he believed the situation was hopeless.  Arland Williams who survived the initial impact and passed the rope to several other passengers until he slipped under the waters. That section of the 14th Street Bridge is now named after him.

Flight 90 happened 30 years ago, when the airline industry was very different from what it is today.  In the early '80s airline travel, in the midst of de-regulation, was nonetheless comparatively glamorous and exotic.  My father and his cohorts were widely admired.  And gradually the glamor eroded--as customers compared bargains, precipitating a race to the bottom, the legacy carriers, with infinitesimally small profit margins, eliminated more and more perks.   Airlines are considered by some today little better than buses in the sky, the highly-trained pilots and crew dismissed as mere functionaries.

And then, a few years ago, another airline disaster nearly happened, and the parallels were striking.  A southbound flight, crippled just after takeoff.  A river in a major metropolitan area.  Mid-January.  But Captain Sullenberger and his crew rewrote the narrative and gave us the Miracle on the Hudson.  Instead of 78 killed, every single passenger and crew member was saved, with scant injury.*

To put this in perspective, this was the most successful ditching of a commercial liner EVER--all previous commercial ditchings incurred fatalities.  The margin of error is so much less forgiving with commercial jets--they are more unwieldy and more difficult to maneuver, the wings are longer, the number of possible casualties much higher.  But Sully never blinked--cool and calm he told his passengers to "brace for impact"** and guided his wounded craft onto the freezing water.

He and his crew made me proud, so proud, to have a father who's an airline pilot.

*Admittedly faced with a very different kind of challenge.  Pilots [i.e., military ones] are trained for ditchings, whereas Captain Wheaton and First Officer Pettit, the Air Florida pilots, never had a chance, as the plane never even really lifted off.


**Sully seems to have a gift for pithiness--I love his reply to the air traffic controller's suggestion that he turn around and land at LaGuardia.  One word: "Unable."  

The Paris of Appalachia

So for Thanksgiving I had the pleasure of visiting…Pittsburgh! Gateway to the West, the City of Bridges, home of:

• the mighty Steelers,
• Carnegie Mellon University [my actress grandmother’s alma mater],
• a thriving arts scene including the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Pittsburgh Opera,
• and the dearly departed Three Rivers Stadium, named for the Ohio, Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, whose confluence forms the heart of this sturdy, scrappy city. 

Pittsburgh [like New York City] developed as a port city, albeit an inland one, with a thriving business in trade, exploiting its strategic position between the East and the Midwest, amplified by its access to the Great Lakes. In fact one of Pittsburgh’s sobriquets is Gateway to the West. Another one is Iron City—and the city’s other main (historical*) industry is manufacturing. Iron, steel, glass—all drawing from western Pennsylvania's vast natural reserves of coal, lumber, petroleum…

Which perhaps is what drew the attention of the man who created one of the Pittsburgh area’s best-known treasures, the breathtaking Fallingwater, designed by the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

[I have long had a fascination with FLW’s works—my great-aunt and –uncle lived in one of his Usonian houses in Pleasantville, and my mother told me they were always tripping over architecture students crouched in the bushes, scribbling notes. When I read The Fountainhead I suspected Howard Roark was based on FLW and apparently I’m not the only one! Typically perversely, both Rand and Wright denied it but girlfriend, please. Roark even designs a GAS STATION.]

Apparently the original design called for the "udder-like" pumps
to descend from the ceiling "like mother's milk." Gee, that DOES sound exciting! Or something.

ANYWAY. One of Wright’s guiding design principles was integration, and so he conceived Fallingwater’s interiors as well as her structure, using building materials from the same natural reserves from which Pittsburgh** industry drew.  The same lumber sources, the same copper mines and stones...Wright's magnum opus could have been erected nowhere else but in this particular corner of the world, western Pennsylvania.

Notice how the perspective compels you to look
 through the windows, to the outside.

To walk through Fallingwater’s cantilevered terraces and stone-laid floors is to be immersed in the sounds and smells and feel of the Allegheny Mountains, to be a footfall away from the rushing of the Bear Run. A veritable organic cathedral, the perfect marriage of form and function, created by a modern Daedalus!

*The steel industry is but a shadow of what it was--it went belly-up in the '70s and early '80s, hence the term Rust Belt.

**One of the days I will have to write about Chicago—you gotta admire a city so can-do that the city civil engineers actually REVERSED THE FLOW OF THE RIVER.  Now that is some Midwestern pioneer spirit!

1963, 1970, 2011

Remind you of anything?
































What about this?

Or this?

Notice the Guardsman on the right of the picture (circled),
taking dead aim at the photographer, Ruffner--who was in fact a student.

Nothing galvanizes a movement like excessive force.  The children who demonstrated in Birmingham and the children who marched on the hills of Kent State were ultimately victorious--the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed, de jure segregation was overturned, and support for the war had finally eroded, due in large part to those anti-war students, just a few years after the Ohio State Guard wheeled around as one and fired on a bunch of unarmed students.

Just a reminder...

The Lambeth Goosestep

I’ve been busy lately digitizing my (huge) collection of musical theater cassette tapes. One that I came across this week was the mid-‘80s hit Me and My Girl, a fluffy tap-tastic import from across the pond. Me and My Girl has the most perfunctory of plots, about a young Cockney man who suddenly discovers that he is the Long-Lost Heir to the earldom of Hareford--but only if the executors of the will decide he is “suitable.” Gender-reversed My Fair Lady hijinks ensue!

If you can get past the enormous suspension of disbelief required by the audience (such hereditary peerages as dukedoms and earldoms are or at least were, things have changed a bit in the last several generations protected by entailment and certainly not subject to conditional snobbery tests--the barons of Runnymeade would rise up from their graves before they allowed THAT to happen!):

King John: Can I just add a quick rider about how the heir has to speak RP--

Looming Knight: NO. Sign it already, Softsword.

King John: But it would make such a great musical!

...Me and My Girl is a delightful bit of puffery, one long silly music hall number after another, dotted in between with comfortably predictable jokes.


HEATHERSETT: Aperitif, sir?
BILL: No thanks, I got me own.

DOWAGER: Do you know my daughter, May?
BILL: No, but thanks for the tip!

And certainly its most engaging and famous number is the first act finale, “The Lambeth Walk*,” one long rollicking set piece designed to take the piss out of British aristocracy.

We play a different way
Not like you but a bit more gay,
And when we have a bit of fun--oh boy!

Any time you're Lambeth way
Any evening, any day
You'll find us all
Doin' the Lambeth Walk--oi!

Robert Lindsay, Tony Award winner, singing The Lambeth Walk

As silly as it is, the number is truly infectious and was a HUGE hit in pre-War England--obviously a welcome distraction as Europe drew closer and closer to near-annihilation. As the saying went:

While dictators rage and statesmen talk, all Europe dances — to The Lambeth Walk.

Even King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (mother and father of the current Queen) came to see the show in 1939, and sang along with the rest of the audience.** Within a few years, of course, the Kingdom had need of even more distraction--and here their affection for The Lambeth Walk brought its own rewards.

During times of challenge humor is an invaluable coping mechanism--it contextualizes, it cuts down, it reduces, it adds perspective. Monsters have frequently been cut down to size through humor--in fact this is the stratagem behind the riddikukus curse in Harry Potter, that you conquer your boggart by placing it in a silly context. In this age of irony we like to think we invented this technique, that the generations before us were all terribly earnest and brave and stalwart. Brave and stalwart the Greatest Generation certainly was--but no one can cut you down with humor like the Brits! During World War II some filmmaking genius had the clever idea to match an orchestra track of The Lambeth Walk to some footage from Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will--and thus, the mashup was born.

If this is not the funniest thing you've seen all week, there is something wrong with you.

They say that Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, flipped. out. when he saw this footage, throwing chairs across the room. God, I love British humor.

And oh, what a right little island.

A right little, tight little island...

*The actual Lambeth Walk is in the South End of London, off of Lambeth Road. The reference is to the strutting evening promenade popular amongst residents--Noel Gay had the idea to set it to song and thus an iconic song was born.

Notice Mayfair across the river, to the northwest--Mayfair is where the aristocracy, and thus new Earl's "posh" relatives, lived.

**Adorably--and cheekily--Lupino Lane, the star of the show, reported afterward, "They [Their Majesties] said they had been walking the Lambeth Walk the wrong way--the ballroom way--and promised to do it our way in the future."

Give Yourself Over to Absolute Pleasure

Apologies for the too-long absence, I have been hard at work tapping up a storm as Columbia in a production of The Rocky Horror Show.  This is of course the stage version of the '70s movie classic--as a teenager I saw the movie many times at the Key Theater in Georgetown and listened to the soundtrack religiously. I even drew in my diary an approximation of the famously lippy RHPS logo:

Freud would have a field day.  Although he might have a hard time determining whether Frank N. Furter was fixated on the oral or the anal stage.

The meaning behind the tagline never dawned until I was cast in September and then the answer popped into my head.  The movie came out in 1975, and what other "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" film came out that year?  Everyone's favorite updated Moby Dick epic, Jaws.  More on this below.

RHPS somehow manages to simultaneously spoof horror and sci-fi flicks and capture the unabashed hedonism of the '70s, the era of suburban key parties and the gay liberation movement.  Its first song, "Science Fiction Double-Feature," is a roll call of genre classics:

Michael Rennie was ill
The Day the Earth Stood Still
But he told us where we stand
And Flash Gordon was there
In silver underwear
Claude Rains was The Invisible Man
Then something went wrong
For Fay Wray and King Kong
They got caught in a celluloid jam
Then at a deadly pace
It Came From Outer Space
And this is how the message ran...

Fascinatingly, all of the movies listed here are American, and the creator of Rocky Horror, Richard O'Brien, is English.  (Although it should be noted that the Hammer movies, to which RHS also pays homage, were English.) What is it about these British composers who are so well-versed in American pop culture capital?--the song "Tiny Dancer" is so convincingly early '70s Californian in spirit ("blue jean baby, LA lady," "the headlights on the highway," "Jesus freaks, out in the street"), it might have been written by any wistful go-west-young-man free spirit but was instead composed by Bernie Taupin, also English. The American invasion?


And for all of Rocky Horror's celebratory pan-sexualism, it ends on a haunting note--Brad and Janet stumble through the mist in the aftermath, wondering what the hell just happened to them.*

And all I know
Is deep inside I'm
Bleeding...

Perhaps this is the true genius of RHS--embodying the ethos of the '70s, it then anticipates the aftermath, the Big Chill of the '80s.  Gotta pay the piper sometime, sadly...

This poster--and endless riffs thereon--was EVERYWHERE after the movie came out.**

Back to the other set of lips: the movie Jaws is actually quite different from its source book--most people think the movie improves on it, but I have a great fondness for the Benchley novel which is both witty and dark and (like RHPS) very much a product of the '70s (and unlike the Spielberg adaptation which is surprisingly undated, hirsute heroes aside).  The novel is less of a Man vs. Beast thriller and more of an extended metaphor--the shark is not just Brodie's obsession but also a symbol of the forces that threaten to tear apart the town and Brodie's marriage, not the least of which is the sexual revolution which, by 1974 (the year the novel was published) had filtered down to the middle class.  Most memorably, Brodie's wife Ellen has a very brief affair with the ichthyologist Hooper, whose older brother she had dated as a teenager.  Throughout the novel Ellen is a consistently sympathetic character and yet coolly plans and executes extramarital seduction.  What can I say?  It was the '70s--everyone had a lot more sex then.

Key Party







The Ice Storm

Middle class '70s people preparing to have era-appropriate extra-marital sex. You just know Brad and Janet will be hosting the next one.

If you've read the novelization to the Jaws sequel, the first chapter reveals the shark that has come along to terrorize Amity THIS time is pregnant.  Even the shark had sex in Jaws!


*"Super Heroes," and Janet and Brad's bewilderment after their night of debauchery at the castle, always make me think of the last section of Steppenwolf when Harry is wandering through the club.


**Interesting perspective in the poster--in the book the shark is estimated at about 25 feet long but in this picture he sure looks a lot bigger than that!  When Hooper first sees the shark he is euphoric, rhapsodizing "Damn near megalodon!"  C. megalodon was a kind of proto-shark but much bigger and toothier, anywhere from 50 to 100 feet which is frankly terrifying.  

Jaws, the Prequel:
"You're gonna need a bigger--" CHOMP.
The End.

Name by Name, Face by Face...

Last week we observed the 10th anniversary of the attacks on September 11.

As someone who was living in New York City on that day, who stood on Fifth Avenue with countless other Midtown cubicle dwellers and messengers and deli workers, wondering at the burning towers, who bore witness to mass murder with the rest of her city...

From the background, these people are right by St. Patrick's Cathedral, on  Fifth Avenue at 50th Street.  
They would've been half a block away from where I was standing.  
All of us, filling the sidewalks and even the street itself, staring up at the sky downtown, unable to look away.

...the anniversary stirred up an unexpected well of emotions in me.  I thought I had moved past most of that sadness but it hit me harder than I thought.  And I didn’t even lose anyone—I reacted as a New Yorker, an American, and a human being.

There are so many approaches to history—political theory,  social theory, et cetera.  But as I told one of my classmates at Columbia, I’m an actor and to me, history is first an aggregate of people's lives.  The collective narrative of all of us. 

There were these flyers that sprang up almost immediately all over the city.  "Have you seen...?"  "Missing..."  You had to stop to read them. But carefully.  You didn't want to start crying again on the streets.  Which we were all doing anyway, on the streets, walking to church, at your cubicle.  But I would read these flyers when I could.  I felt I had to, to bear witness.  The least I could do was learn these peoples' stories.

 Visit Pompeii and see the graffiti scratched into the wall by a bored centurion millennia ago, 

now carefully notated and photographed by archaeologists.  Every cathedral, every bridge, every pyramid, every Book of Kells and Bayeux Tapestry, all the opera magna we take for granted were put together with the collective hands of millions of men and women exactly like us, who each had their own story to tell, to question, to live.  They cared about their children and worried about the future and struggled with the larger stones and swore when they made mistakes etching calligraphy onto the vellum.

I still remember some of the faces on the flyers--one was an Asian man, a businessman, "last seen at Windows on the World.*"  I remember thinking, what a beautiful, hopeful name...Windows on the World.  Who wouldn't want to be there on such a gorgeous morning?

"It is a story," said Sara.  "Everything is a story.  You are a story--I am a story.  Miss Minchin is a story."

There was a young black woman, whose relatives implored anyone with information to call the number below, "We're very worried about her!!!"  Oh, God.  That last... 
It just breaks your heart.

Our lives become the stories that we weave...

I remember reading about a young woman, 20s, dark blonde hair with an unusual name that jumped out at me...Giovanna.

History's deconstructed essence, its atom, is one person’s story.  StoryCorps is an oral history project, dedicated to capturing Americans' lives on tape.  They have interviewed several relatives of 9/11 victims and animated the results.







When you think you can bear it, go to the StoryCorps site and watch some of the videos.  Past the sadness and grief, there is just so much love.

To Giovanna--

I remember seeing your pretty face in the flyers posted all over Midtown after that day.  
Your name stuck with me--such a beautiful, old country name.
It's obvious your family loved you very much, I saw your flyer everywhere.
Bless you, dear one.