Hello from a wet and windy Friday….They say it’s going to rain forty or fifty mms. over the next twenty hours…and the snow pack is still melting, so the chances of flooding are high. Probably not where I’m sitting but along the rivers…for sure.
Days like this, the sun stays hidden and I’m morose…I’m reading Philip Kerr (Metropolis) and it’s chasing memories through the fog. Most of all it has Jeffry Kaplow back to my mind. Along with a great friendship Jeffry and I shared a love for Bernie Gunther stories and in particular the wild and crazy period of European history between the first and second world wars. Philip Kerr captured the milieu perfectly and while Bernie Gunther isn’t always the most sympathetic character…he’s exactly the guy needed to guide a reader through this seedy, erotic, insane, desperate, tortured world that gave birth to the Nazis. There was an explosion of creativity and a revolution of culture born out of the total destruction of illusions…so many dead…so pointless…so badly resolved. Artists of all kinds from painters to photographers, architects, film makers, musicians, dancers, all escaping the chocolate box romanticism of previous eras and bringing a new and more terrible reality to their work.
They had a message and a mission. They knew that it would all happen again…that the second Great War was inevitable. George Grosz, Otto Dix, Fritz Lang, they were reading the tea leaves of the streets. For me it was the period in art that most affected my work…and my thinking. And it held the same challenge for Jeffry.
It was a period like a fat aunt with scarlet lipstick and lilac perfume who could hold your head in her hands and kiss both sides of your face at the same time…when you looked in the mirror…you looked like a clown. That’s what the world looked like.
Jeffry liked Bernie Gunther because he thought Kerr had made him an honest German cop…whose eyes saw things clearly without being squeamish or voyeuristic. It’s a world that has no easy comparisons today…but we should be warned. We’re not living in the Weimar Republic of Germany but there are some cautionary signs popping up around the world. The shift to the right has generated populist leaders whose policies are becoming more and more Draconian…When we look around we see people having a good time…new cars, loud music, bigger and wilder shows, shopping sprees, legalized gambling, legalized weed, world travel, cheap money…Looks like we be rolling. But then there’s more homeless, more poverty, more abuse, more guns, more shootings and stabbings, more corruption, more venal politicians, more thoughtless bureaucrats, more greed. And don’t let’s get started on the environment.
All of this is generating a frantic anxiety that finds outlets that are unpredictable and scary and the official responses are more and more militarized. Even small towns that used to have three cops and left their doors unlocked, now have SWAT teams with more equipment than a platoon of infantry…because one never knows when a finally fed up housewife is going to finish chopping celery and notice that her abusive husband has dozed off at the kitchen table. The point is not the housewife…a stupid example, really, but that there’s an unfathomable disconnect everywhere…a fear that things could explode anywhere…and that we need some heavy defences against the dark arts.
So I’m reading Metropolis and missing my pal Jeffry…I’m not so much in despair as feeling thoughtful…and I’m seeing signs and portents that should be warnings. This isn’t a book review…it’s rainy day ramblings. What I’m thinking is that while global warming and environmental disasters are a huge danger….the biggest threat we’re facing right here right now…is people…
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