Diane Keaton + A Random Memory

Promotional photo for Hair by Kenn Duncan

I believe that Diane Keaton made her biggest impression on me in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. When I looked at her filmography today, I recognized that I would have seen her in the first installment of The Godfather (I didn't bother with the other two), and in three earlier Allen films, but it wasn't until Annie Hall that her name and face really took hold.

At that time, I was a Woody Allen fan, and as he had been in a relationship with Keaton for a number of years, she appeared in eight of his films, as best as I can tell: Play It Again, Sam (1972), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), Annie Hall (1977), Interiors (1978), Manhattan (1979), Radio Days (1987), and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). In fact, post-Annie Hall, she was as much a reason to see Allen's films as his involvement with them. Maybe it was her girl-next-door beauty and charm. Maybe it was because there often seemed to be little space between herself and the character she portrayed that lent authenticity to her performances.

While Annie Hall might have been pivotal as regards how Keaton came to be notable in my mind's memory (as I think about this now, her role in Play It Again, Sam, which I watched again last night, likely contributed as well), it was her role in Looking For Mr. Goodbar—or perhaps more accurately, the film itself—which had a significant impact on me. I don't recall now that I knew much about the film prior to going to see it. I might have seen a Siskel-Ebert review... I honestly can't say. That it starred Keaton was probably the biggest factor in my wanting to see it.

At the time, I was seeing a woman I had met at school, Robin, and during the Christmas-New Year break that year, after being "a couple" for a few months, I drove from Toledo to her family's home near Pittsburgh to meet her parents. Robin was cute and sweet and kind and smart. Bubbly. Also... religious. Her grandfather had been a minister, as would her father, I think, later in life. That said, I don't recall now that our time together was the constant push and pull you might expect between a Bible thumper and an atheist. We enjoyed each other's company and spent a great deal of our time out of class together.

The film was released in October of 1977, so only a couple of months before my trip to Beaver Falls (home town of Joe Namath and Papa John Creach, by the way). I stayed with Robin's family for probably a couple of nights, and one evening, we drove into Pittsburgh to the Showcase Cinemas to see the film. As I try to recall the evening, I can only imagine that she cringed through the whole thing, as Keaton's character was a school teacher by day and a barhopper by night who came home with a variety of men to fulfill either her sexual desires or to paint over her loneliness. Ultimately, she is murdered by a young man who had issues of his own, particularly as regards his sexuality. The scene is quite shocking, and the swift viciousness of the attack was almost as unexpected for me as it might have been for the victim.

Robin and I left the theatre stunned. Considering her rather Pollyanna life until then, it had to have been a brutal assault on her senses. I doubt she had ever seen such an emotionally charged, graphic film, much less one that depicted a world so different than the one she'd known up until then. I recall that she cried, but I don't recall that we talked much—if at all—about it on the way back to the house. As I think about it these many years later, I wonder if she thought I was depraved to have exposed her to such a shocking film, or that I had intended on dragging her into that kind of world.

We've been in touch sporadically over the years, and I think she managed to find some sort of forgiveness for my transgression, but she and Diane Keaton remain inexorably tied in my mind because of the film.

The random memory I had regarding Diane Keaton actually doesn't involve her, but seeing the above promotional photograph for the Broadway production of Hair in the 1970s spurred the memory I have of being in New York at the time the musical was running. My mom's father lived in Manhattan, and we stayed in Staten Island with Mom's best friend, Gladys, and her family. Making the trip to Manhattan meant riding the Staten Island Ferry. Since Hair was currently running, there were posters advertising it at the ferry terminal. I seem to recall that the posters were of a larger—mostly nude—group, which added a little more controversy to an already controversial play, but it might very well have been the above photo or one of several from that same session taken by Kenn Duncan. That's it. That's my memory.

Since beginning this post, I've re-watched Play It Again, Sam, Love and Death, and Annie Hall, and have watched a few clips of her appearances with Johnny Carson and David Letterman, and it's just so hard to grasp that her vibrance is gone from this world.

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Anniversary

Wedding Day, 7 August 1982

Is there a name for an anniversary that is no longer celebrated?

Today, while tending to my routine of posting deck logs to a Facebook group dedicated to the history of the USS Zircon (PY-16), one of the two ships my dad served on during World War II, I naturally had to look at the date on the log sheet. While the year was 1942, the day was the 7th of August, the date on which I would get married forty years later.

When I recall that day, my mind often refers back to the photographs that my then-bride Penny's sister Paula took using my Nikkormat FTN 35mm camera. The above photo is one that often sticks in my memory as it's one that years later—at the time we were going through our split up—Penny would point to (literally or figuratively, I can't recall) as proof that I didn't want to be married, or words to that effect. And because I am nothing if not a rehasher of the past, I've often thought about those remarks, picture or no picture.

Of course, those words, on their face, are not true. I did want to be married to her. But I just didn't know what that meant. At just over three years, our relationship had been my longest to date, and for most of that time we lived a little over two hours apart—I in Bowling Green, Ohio, and she in Lansing, Michigan. I lived with her for about three weeks while I commuted back and forth to Jackson, Michigan for a job I had as part of an internship, but by and large, we didn't spend a whole lot of time together until after I'd graduated. I recall living with her for a spell in which I took a piddly job with some kind of mail-order operation that didn't last long, but I eventually went back to Toledo to work with Lane Drug, a pharmacy-convenience store which had stores throughout northwestern Ohio, and owned an East Coast company, Peoples Drug, which was fairly massive.

While the relationship seemed to be heading toward marriage, we didn't talk about it much. As best as I can recall, we didn't talk about our aspirations as regards children or career goals, but we seemed compatible in so many ways. Penny's folks approved of me, and I got along well with her siblings. Her mom had been adopted as a young girl, and Penny had a pretty close relationship with her mom's adoptive parents, especially her grandmother, Laverne. If memory serves, sometime in 1981 Laverne took a fall or two and—as seems to be typical in such cases—developed pneumonia and/or other complications. During this time, Penny brought up marriage; she wanted to tell Laverne that we were getting married. It wasn't a proposal per se, it was more like a strong suggestion, but of course, I agreed. Laverne would die in September of that year.

We agreed that the wedding would be a simple one, and the plan was to hold it on the front lawn at her parents house just outside Laingsburg, Michigan proper. Penny had great affection for the large tree just outside the front door of the house, and that's where she wanted the ceremony to take place. We agreed to invite a very limited number of guests, which would bend the noses of a few of her life-long friends, but neither of us were big-time partiers, so something low-key was best served by inviting fewer than seventy people.

As I was in Ohio for most of the year leading up to the event, Penny took care of most of the details. She designed the invitations and had them printed, she made her own dress, she had the rings of silver made by a local artist. I think her dad took care of procuring a canopy or two to cover the food. My biggest contribution besides saying "OK" a lot was probably putting together the mix tape (which kicked off with this), and—on the day of the wedding—running speaker wire from her parents' living room to the outdoors and mounting speakers on the house's exterior. I also brought the camera and film for the pictures.

The pictures.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most marriages are a first time occasion for the couples involved. Getting married was absolutely new to me, but also, I have to admit, was making public displays of affection. On this particular day, I had no clue about what to do with my hands or my body. Why didn't I take Penny's hand? you might ask. Yeah, I wonder about that, too. Why didn't I stand closer to her? I have no answer, really, other than that maybe... MAYbe it had something to do with the fact that in all the weddings I'd ever seen, the couples actually only unite once the vows are spoken. I'm kind of grasping at straws, because I was totally enamoured with Penny and thrilled that I was the lucky one to be standing so awkwardly to her right.

Ultimately, though, the marriage didn't work out. I honestly feel as though Penny was ready to call it quits not long after our son Zachary was born in February of 1985. I was so ill-prepared to be a good husband or partner. For one, I spent more time at work than I did at home. Not because the job meant more to me than she did—far from it—I was just not good at what I was supposed to be doing, and I lived in constant fear of losing the job and the relatively good income that supported us. It was something that I kept to myself when I came home, as I wanted neither to burden her with my crap nor to admit to my weakness. A guy thing, I guess. This went on year after year after year until it came to a head ten years later and I felt compelled to resign. Whatever fine, scintilla of a thread that might have been holding the marriage together snapped that day. Yes, there was so much more to it than that, but that was a huge factor, and one which I think led to everything else.

We've now been divorced for over twice as long as we were married. It took a while but for several years now, the 7th of August has passed without notice (as has 22 June, the date we met), but as I still have four years worth of deck logs to post at Facebook, it'll probably be at least that long before the date doesn't bring back the best of the memories from that day and those times.

Penny and Me

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Exploitive A.I. Slop

I got blocked by a Facebook page called Historic Voices last night because I called it out for its exploitive use of A.I.-generated images to evoke emotional responses and hence create engagement (read: monetization).

I had come across this image—complete with fake dust artifacts—on a friend's Facebook page via my feed...

Exploitive A.I. Slop from Facebook page Historic Voices

...which is accompanied by this text:

The Bread Was Still Warm — Mauthausen, Austria, 1945

As American troops stormed the gates of Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945, they were met with silence—followed by the slow, trembling steps of starving prisoners emerging from the shadows. Among the supplies brought in was freshly baked bread. One survivor, skeletal and barely able to stand, took a piece into his hands and began to cry. Not because he was starving—though he was—but because the bread was still warm. "I forgot what warmth felt like," he whispered, "in hands or food."

That single moment—one man holding bread like it was life itself—was captured in a haunting photograph and sent home. It became a symbol of both suffering and survival, a reminder that sometimes, hope returns in the smallest of gestures. For many, that warm loaf wasn’t just food—it was the first sign that the nightmare was ending.

The page, of course, is full of these bullshit narratives, many of which—like the example above—suggest that the image is an actual photograph. The intent, of course, is to pull on the heart strings of people for the purpose of engagement, and it is remarkable how many people fall for this exploitive bullshit because... I don't know... they want to show that they're sensitive to Nazi war crimes? As of this writing, the image has over 46,000 reactions, 3800 comments, and 10,000 shares. One such comment:

Thank you for sharing such an incredible story and photo. My husband bakes bread and has found that fresh bread is one of the most emotionally intense experiences.

Another image, albeit this time without dust artifact...

Exploitive A.I. Slop from Facebook page Historic Voices

Note how there are no other human beings in the "photo" which ostensibly was "taken" while "American troops stormed the gates" to liberate the place. It looks like there's a whole lot of storming going on!

The bullshit text:

He Hugged the Fence Goodbye — Dachau, Germany, 1945

A young American soldier named Thomas Ray entered Dachau during its liberation and saw an emaciated man crawling toward the electrified fence. Thinking he was trying to die, Thomas ran to stop him—but the man simply embraced the cold wire and kissed it.

He turned and said, "I waited three years to say goodbye to this cage. Now I leave with my soul." Thomas wrote home that night, "I’ve seen freedom reborn through tears."

Comments:

• Probably lost his entire family 💔
• God bless his soul
• God Bless you 🙏 Both
• I pray he lived a long healthy happy life!

A second Facebook post—with basically the same narrative, but with a different image, and one in which the supposed American soldier, Thomas Ray, looks like a completely different person—popped up on the page as I was writing this.

Exploitive A.I. Slop from Facebook page Historic Voices

The text, modified a bit:

He Hugged the Fence Goodbye — Dachau, Germany, 1945

When American troops entered Dachau, young soldier Thomas Ray saw an emaciated prisoner crawl toward the electrified fence. Fearing the man meant to end his life, Thomas rushed forward—but instead watched him gently embrace the cold wire and kiss it. The man turned and said, "I waited three years to say goodbye to this cage. Now I leave with my soul."

That moment seared itself into Thomas’s memory. He wrote home that night: "I've never seen someone freer than him." In a place built to crush human dignity, a simple farewell to the fence became an act of spiritual liberation—proof that even after unspeakable suffering, the soul could still stand up and walk out.

One more, also with fake dust artifact...

Exploitive A.I. Slop from Facebook page Historic Voices

The bullshit text:

Dachau, Germany, 1945 – The Singing Man

In the last days before liberation, prisoners at Dachau described an older man who sang quietly every night.

He had no family left, no voice left, but still hummed old Yiddish lullabies. One survivor later said, "He sang so the silence wouldn't win."

His name was never known. But survivors say they still remember the tune — and still hum it, softly, when they need to feel human.

Comments:

• A truly wonderful human being! All so tragic!
• Your a hero
• Rest in peace you were certainly a gift from God
• Kept him sane enough each day

I found something interesting when I took a look at the page's About section (click to enlarge).

About page for Facebook's Historic Voices

The page used to be called Floral Fantasies, which is rather curious. I wonder if the page got hacked and was taken over by someone who knew they could boondoggle people with fake historical narratives, or if the Floral Fantasies thing wasn't getting the traffic or engagement originally hoped for or expected.

I honestly don't know how people can be so fucking gullible and malleable. First of all, and I suppose it's because I'm a photographer that I notice such things, but photographs taken in 1945 on the films available at that time, would be grainy as hell, especially if they had been taken with a 35mm camera, which in all likelihood, is what a World War II soldier would have been carrying, if he had a camera at all.

This is not the only group that this person or persons has created to spread the A.I. slop. Another is called Historical Life, and I'm pretty certain I've seen another one out there, one which I might have blocked myself already. I've also seen a number of pages dedicated to spreading false stories about athletes donating millions of dollars to individuals or causes. The posts often feature images of the athletes hugging people who are shedding tears of happiness.

There is no doubt that A.I. is here to stay. I'm certain that I unwittingly use it regularly each day when I open Photoshop. There are so many features within Photoshop that are probably built around the technology that I can't help but use it. That said, I have been avoiding it whenever I can. When I do web searches, for example, I include "-ai" along with the search terms. I'm not positive that that is a cure, but when I've done it, the A.I.-generated summaries disappear, so I assume that the function is skirted. I just searched ways to turn off A.I. in searches, and found this site, which has all kinds of suggestions, many of which are browser-specific.

Getting back to the impetus for this post, though, A.I. is turning Facebook into an even worse hellsite than it was just a couple of years ago, with unnecessary A.I.-generated garbage proliferating faster than I can block the sources. And since the crap is getting shared thousands and thousands of times each day, it's getting harder and harder to not have it sully my feed. How did a site ostensibly designed for people to stay in touch become such a hellscape of bullshit? That's rhetorical, by the way. The answer is that it's run by an evil, malicious prick.

 

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A Farewell to Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers by Robin Holland

When I think of the development of my political ideologies, I pretty much tie it to having grown up during the liberal presidencies of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Presidential candidacies of Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern. But little would I have known back then that behind the scenes were the likes of Ted Sorenson, advisor and speechwriter to JFK, and Bill Moyers, who pulled the same duty for LBJ.

Bill Moyers died today, and I feel as though we've lost a giant. When he left politics as a full-time job, he took a bit of a sideways step into journalism, which is how I learned of him. While he would regularly give reports during the news, I primarily knew of him by way of his commentary which was a regular segment of the CBS Evening News.

On 8 December 1982, I was living in a tiny house on the corner of West Northgate Parkway and Bennett Road in Toledo, Ohio with my then-wife, Penny, and our cat, Cat. That day, Norman Mayer drove a utility van up a sidewalk leading to the Washington Monument and—claiming it was full of explosives—threatened to blow it up. He was protesting the nuclear arms build-up the only way he apparently knew how to, and maintained a standoff with law enforcement for the better part of the day. It got him killed. His threat, of course, was as empty as the the van was later found to be.

The following night, Moyers' segment was introduced by Dan Rather and he proceeded to deliver one of the most brilliant and memorable essays I've ever heard, one which has been etched in my brain ever since.

Maybe Norman Mayer never had a chance to be heard, given his criminal record: his arrests for drug dealing, assault and battery. Maybe he became a criminal because he couldn't be heard. We'll never know, and it doesn't really matter. What matters is that he wanted to tell us that humanity is drifting toward nuclear war. Perhaps this is a cry only lunatics and outlaws can hear. It would not be the first time truth had failed to get the establishment to listen, or the foolish had been chosen to confound the wise.

The wise yesterday were rattling their sabers in Moscow, or putting the finishing touches in the House of Representatives on a military budget of $231 billion for the coming year—$231 billion, including over $2 billion to continue research on the MX missile they had symbolically voted against the day before.

This is the wisdom of the world which proved too much for Norman Mayer, who wanted only to stop the arms race. Once you realize the futility of your cause, you can choose to live as a zombie, a martyr, a cynic or a saint—or today, a video terrorist. Norman Mayer chose to go out that way. It doesn't appear he really had the stomach for it. Those detonators had nothing to detonate. So he played Atari on the monument grounds and died when the game was over. Lunacy? Yes, but it is the lunacy of nations today who hold the world hostage, as he did Washington, with the threat of violence for the sake of peace. This sad little man had the superpowers for a role model. He died unheeded by them, but the star of his own television special. Such was the final lunacy. His pathetic charade received far more time from the media than we'll give the dialogue on nuclear issues which he was crazy enough to think we might honor.

Not much has really changed with this world in the last forty-three years as our military spending continues to rise with no compulsion on the part of our legislators to rein it in and put the money to better use than dropping billions of dollars of ultimately ineffective bombs on Iran. Day by day we step further and further away from anything even resembling sanity. And as shitty a place as this world is right now, it just got a little bit shittier.

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Worlds Colliding

These days, I spend most of my time on four research projects. I bounce from one to the next without much rhyme or reason, although I have to admit that for the last year or so, I've forsaken a couple of them. Three of the projects (two of which intermingle somewhat) are related to my dad's naval service during World War II, while the fourth is about the sixty-eight people with whom my mom graduated 8th Grade in the Bronx in 1940.

One of the projects, and probably the most massive of the bunch, involves researching all the men who served aboard the USS Zircon (PY-16). The initial scope of that project was very narrow, but the more I learned about the ship and its men, my interests fanned out into something way bigger. Probably too big. Nonetheless, I persist.

Out of the blue recently, I received an email from someone inquiring about one of the sailors of the Zircon, Stanley David Simon, who was the Medical Officer aboard the ship when my dad was one of its crew. Along with Dad, he was one of the key figures during the USS YF-415 disaster, treating the men rescued during that ordeal. In the initial days of my research ten years or so ago, I got in touch by email with Simon's children, and they shared some stories, but since then, I've not spent much time working on his story, so this inquiry nudged me to get back to him.

Simon went to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and graduated in 1937. There is a 1937 Cornellian, the school's student yearbook, available at Ancestry to peruse, and as I was flipping through the pages to find Simon's Senior portrait, another portrait and profile caught my eye, that of Henry Arnold Page, Jr., who just so happened to be from my hometown of Toledo, Ohio.

Because I am nothing if not curious, I did a newspaper search in the Toledo newspaper (The Blade) to see what might have become of him, and I found this mention of his impending degree at Cornell.

And what caught my eye about the article was that it included yet another Toledoan who was graduating from Cornell—Franklin Smith Macomber.

If you lived for any length of time in Toledo between 1938 and 1991, you would have heard the name Macomber. It was the name of the vocational high school in the city, its proper name being Irving E. Macomber Vocational Technical High School, and named for Irving Emerson Macomber, who died in June of 1935. According to Wikipedia, Macomber helped develop Toledo's schools and parks, and once lived on the property upon which the school was built. And... he was Franklin Smith Macomber's father. Also of note, one of Macomber's pallbearers was Wayne M. Canaday, President and Chairman of Willy-Overland Motors, Inc., which developed and produced the military jeep during World War II.

Beyond having friends who went to Macomber, I'd never given the place—much less its namesake—much thought. And because this post is about worlds colliding, my dad briefly attended Macomber before joining the Merchant Marines.

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