Monthly Archives: October 2011

Not that there’s anything wrong with that

05 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Uncategorized

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We will never know President James Buchanan’s sexual orientation with 100% certainty, but it would not be a total shock if he indeed turned out to have been gay.  We have had forty four presidents and what would be shocking is if at least one of them were not.  Several years ago certain groups argued Lincoln was homosexual because he sometimes slept in the same bed with other men during his years on the Illinois legal circuit.  The evidence, to put it mildly, was weak; sleeping in such a manner was common practice in mid nineteenth century America, when accommodations were scarce and travellers made do as best they could.  I am sympathetic to the search by persecuted groups in the  search for role models. History, though is about following the evidence where it leads, not making claims one wishes to be true. It will be interesting to see where the Buchanan story goes.  If true, it would add a more nuanced interpretation to Buchanan and his times.

Temple of Invention

05 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Museums, Washington, D.C.

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These last few years the Hayfoot and I have been visiting Washington fairly frequently.  Our favorite place is the National Portrait Gallery.  For better or worse, I have always taken a cross-disciplinary approach to art and literature, collating in my head the circumstances under which the book was written or the scuplture created.  There is no better place for this than the NPG, with its collections of historical paintings and sculpture that put the art into a historical context.  The last time we visited in July I was reading The Siege of Washington, which chronicled those tense days just after Fort Sumter when it appeared the Confederacy just might take the Federal capitol and end the war before it began.  In Siege, the Lockwood brothers describe how Clara Barton clerked in the Patent Office, which was located in the Greek revival building that is now the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery.  Unfortunately, sexual harassment was not uncommon.  Walt Whitman worked in the Patent Officen during the war, when the facility was used as a hospital.  The building’s history as a museum dates only to the 1960s, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things.

The museum is currently exhibiting a retrospective on the building called Temple of Invention.  Here is the online version.

Submitted for your approval

03 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Rod Serling

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Two years ago this weekend I spoke at the Rod Serling Conference at Ithaca College in upstate New York.  The conference proceedings can be found here.  As it turned out, the conference was a week before my wedding and an old friend whom I have know for almost forty years made the trip with me.  We had watched the Twilight Zone in high school when the show made a comeback in syndication.  Twilight Zone seemed like ancient history when we watched it in the early 1980s, but it had gone off the air just twenty years earlier.  Chronologically, that is the equivalent of watching Seinfeld today.

In preparation for the conference I bought the TZ boxed set Memorial Day weekend in 2009 and over the summer the woman who became my wife and I watched all one hundred and fifty-six episodes.  Speaking at the conference–on the 50th anniversary to the day when TZ first aired–was like entering the Zone myself.  My past and present were colliding.  A few weeks back the Hayfoot was looking at my high school yearbook and noted that my friend had mentioned Twilight Zone on the dedication page.  For me TZ has always been one of those cultural reference points, like the Beatles and Miles Davis, that have always been there.  Not something you necessarily think about everyday, but there in the background to pick up and put down as one pleases.

My friend and I saw Twilight Zone: The Movie the night it was released in 1983, which to tell you the truth wasn’t that great.  My memories of that night and the period are nonetheless warm.  Apparently another film is in the works.

John W. Whitehead at Huffington Post has this appreciation.

(Number 12 Looks Just Like You/Courtesy: Zjschertz)