Friday, January 28, 2011

The Original FitTV

I remember watching Jack LaLanne on my parents’ old black-and-white television when I was a little kid in New Jersey in the mid-1960s. He was quite the spectacle to my young eyes—an old guy with an unnerving abundance of enthusiasm for an adult, maniacally doing jumping jacks, push-ups and other calisthenics in a jumpsuit that looked not unlike what the aliens had worn in low-budget science fiction movies from the 1950s that already had made their way to rerun-happy non-network TV stations like WOR and WPIX.

Honestly, I couldn’t have been more than 6 or 8 years old when I first caught LaLanne’s low-tech “Let’s start a muscle!” pep rally, yet I had the sense even then that there’d always been a Jack LaLanne. That although I personally had only just discovered him, he might well pre-date TV, or perhaps recorded history. TV still was relatively new then, after all, and this guy looked like Methuselah to me. Cripes, when had he been born—1216? Yet, his physique and musculature were such that he might easily have ridden roughshod over the alleged infidels during the Crusades.

OK, at 6 or 8 I probably wasn’t actually conversant in the Crusades. Still, the point is, I instantly recognized Jack LaLanne as an institution of some sort—albeit an extremely odd one—some 45 years ago. And in fact he was kind of old already then. I now know that Jack LaLanne was born in 1914. That made him at least 50 by the time I first saw him. My parents, by contrast, were still in their 30s. And we all know how ancient our own parents seem to us when we’re kids. Jack LaLanne, to me, seemed more of my grandparents’ generation. Yet none of my three living grandparents were then jumping around on TV—lifting weights, doing deep-knee bends and clapping their hands together for emphasis while barking out exercise instructions. To the contrary, my grandparents were operating at 33 rpm, to this muscle-bound madman’s 78.

In one of my earlier blog posts, “The Immortal Mortals,” I wrote about people whose deaths have caught me off guard, even though I’m intellectually aware the Reaper claims all of us in the end. My catalyst in writing that piece had been journalist Daniel Schorr, who’d died last July at age 93. He’d been a newsman forever, and had long outlived his antagonist and contemporary Richard Nixon. I still was listening to his commentaries on National Public Radio in the weeks before he ascended to that big broadcast booth in the sky. It surprised me more that he’d finally succumbed to age than it would have had he lasted another decade or two.

By contrast, I hadn’t seen much of Jack LaLanne in more recent decades. Every once in a while I’d catch a nanosecond of a juicer infomercial he was hosting on some off channel at some off hour of the TV day. He looked more wrinkly than he had years ago, and of course he now appeared in living color. (His hair matched no color in nature, I found.) But LaLanne remained in great shape, and he still had that capacity for making viewers of any age feel like sluggards, lying at home on our sofas and stretched out on our easy chairs when, were we to be half the match of this peripatetic grandpop, we’d instead have been dropping to the floor and giving him 50.

The salient fact was, I always knew Jack LaLanne was alive and active, however old he must be by whenever he occupied my passing thought—whether the year was 1980, 1997, 2002 or 2010. And this seemed the natural order of things. The world was round, our two-party government was paralyzed by partisanship, the Israelis and Palestinians hated each other’s guts, and Jack LaLanne was still doing his thing. It was comforting, somehow. Much more so than governmental dysfunction or that Middle East powder keg situation.

So, yes, I was surprised and saddened when news came several days ago of Jack LaLanne’s death, even though he was 96 years old when his strength finally failed him. I found myself devouring every obituary I could find online, as if they might collectively tell me how death could claim a guy whose body had been such a temple. (He, rather than the semi-famous musician, might better have gone by Taj Mahal.) But I found no quotes in the obits by specialists in geriatric medicine expressing disbelief that LaLanne had corked off, just like everybody else. Still, I did learn things that made me appreciate the strange old muscle man all the more.

Like the fact that this all-American prototype had been born Francois Henri LaLanne, the son of poor French immigrants. And the fact that this professed one-time “sugar addict” decided to devote himself to fitness training and a largely vegetarian diet as a young man, after having been scolded by pioneering nutritionist Paul Bragg, “Jack, you’re a walking garbage can.” And the fact that to the end, he deemed exercise a necessary evil, even though he could make it seem fun. To him, exercising and eating well was the price one paid to have energy, to stave off illness and injury, and to live to be, well, 96, as it turned out.

One of my favorite LaLanne quotes, repeated often by news outlets this week, was, “I can’t die—it would ruin my image.” Not with me, it didn’t. Throughout his long life, Jack LaLanne remained, in my mind’s eye, the same sculpted geezer from another planet he was when I first saw him. That his death in the year 2011 caught me off guard in the slightest attests to the power and constancy of the image he so painstakingly—with every grunting rep—maintained, until reality at last trumped self-invention.

Monday, January 17, 2011

A New Page

I’m not sure if I’d ever made a firm New Year’s resolution before this January 1st. By “firm,” I mean something specific and measurable. Just about every year I vaguely resolve to “be a better person.” Twelve months later I make the same pledge because I feel pretty strongly I haven’t achieved that goal and had best give it another try. And anyway, shouldn’t I always want to be a better person?

But without specific benchmarks, it’s hard to tell if I’m making progress. What would those benchmarks be? “Increase compassion by 50%?” “Confine self-indulgent whining to two e-mails and one conversation per week?” The former seeks to quantify the unqualifiable, and the latter strikes me as frankly impossible.

I’ve felt for some time that I need to read more books. I read the Washington Post every day, the Sunday New York Times, and The New Yorker and other magazines as the mood and subject matter suit me. But books, not so much. Maybe three to five any given year. I’m a slow reader with lousy retention. And I often read at night, when I’m tired. Thus, I spend a lot of time rereading the same 10 pages I’d perused before I dozed off. I have friends who devour 10 books a month and can quote favorite passages from each. By contrast, it can take me months to finish a book, and by a few weeks afterward I’m incapable of sharing much more from memory than whether or not I liked it. By then, all but the broadest outlines of the plot and maybe a single main character’s name have escaped me.

For this reason, intricately plotted genres that demand strong powers of recall, such as mysteries, are non-starters. For me, it isn’t so much a matter of putting the pieces together as it is scrambling to gather together and store the pieces for later placement. It’s like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle with half the box’s contents missing.

Resolving to read more books—20 in 2011 in my case—of course does nothing to address my retention issues. Even if I achieve my goal, the upshot presumably will be that I’ll end the year with the vaguest recollection of many more books than I typically do over the course of 12 months. Still, I feel good about having set a firm goal. And reading 20 books has got to be enriching, right? Well, no, of course it doesn’t. I could meet the letter of the resolution by reading a bunch of trashy crap with large type and few pages. But I won’t do that.

Now, I’ll concede that War and Peace is nowhere on my radar. I’ll save that one for the year I resolve to actually be a worse person—constantly blowing off people who need my help by yelling “I’ve got to reread pages 910 through 920 right now if I’m to have a prayer of finishing this f*cking tome by December 31st!” But I do intend to dig into a stack of “substantial” books, both fiction and nonfiction, that I’ve been given as gifts. These are well-reviewed books that promise to be interesting and perhaps illuminating.

In fact, I’ve already finished my first book: You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, by Heather Sellers. It’s a fascinating, harrowing and often humorous memoir by a woman who has the rare neurological condition known as prosopagnosia, or face blindness. She spent roughly the first 40 years of her life thinking she was crazy because she often couldn’t recognize faces, even of loved ones. When she finally was diagnosed, she not only was relieved, but also grateful for a disorder whose distancing effect had helped her survive a dysfunctional family life with a mother who may have been a paranoid schizophrenic and a father who was a drunk.

(An aside: The last book I read in 2010, The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls, also is a powerful memoir about surviving a dysfunctional family. Damn my own parents for raising me without so much as a trace of madness or rancor—on a Rockwellian suburban cul de sac, to boot. Where’s my harrowing survival story? I’d have to call my memoir I Looked Like Everyone You Knew. Try finding a publisher for that.)

When I told Lynn I’d resolved to read 20 books by year’s end, she supportively observed that seemed a bit ambitious for a guy who tends to labor over the Sunday comics. Still, I’m kind of pumped about it. Some books already are in the house and indelibly on the list. Other titles I’ll likely add along the way. It’ll be a mix of novels, essay collections, biographies, history books, short story collections and who knows what else. OK, maybe a sports book or two, but no complete pulp will be eligible for inclusion in the Group of 20.

By the final day of the year I’ll be one well-read guy. Better read, anyway. Just don’t ask me for details about any of the books. I will be able to give you a list of every title, though. That much I’m writing down.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Editing the Past

Recently, a friend with whom I once worked at a newspaper e-mailed me and several of my former colleagues an obituary she’d written about a longtime editor of ours who’d died at the age of 86. (My friend still works at that paper.) It was fairly extensive and contained information about him I’d never known, such as the fact that he’d flown combat missions in the Pacific during World War II. It struck me as a nice, respectful piece.

I thanked her for letting me know, and wrote, simply, RIP. I commended her for seeing to it that our late boss got his due.

A few mornings later, I turned on my computer to find I’d been copied on several other messages about our departed editor. The first and most extensive contained a heartfelt reminiscence that another one of my former colleagues had written for the newspaper for which he now works. Headlined “World War II Vet Pushed for Hard-Hitting, Eloquent Stories,” the piece began by calling the deceased “one of my first and best editors” and concluded “I’m still thanking him for teaching me to give my very best to this business we love, no matter how hard the challenges.” In between, the piece painted a glowing portrait of a member of the Greatest Generation who had personified journalistic integrity—encouraging investigative work and ably mentoring many eager young reporters such as the essay’s author.

Another e-mail made reference to a nice editorial about our former editor that had run in his old newspaper, and a news story about his death in which many touching things had been said.

The final message in my e-mail queue that morning was from my best friend at the paper during those years—a guy who himself now is another newspaper's managing editor. He thanked the essay writer for his “awesome piece.” It had nicely summed up, he wrote, “so much of what many of the rest of us thought.”

I had an incredibly strong urge at that point to join the conversation—to hit “reply to all” and share with all of these former co-workers my own thoughts about this man who’d been my very first boss, and part of my professional life for most of the 1980s. I’d had a strong reaction to what I’d been reading and badly wanted to weigh in. But I resisted.

You see, I didn’t at all recognize the man these people I respect were praising. I’d actually been glad to read about his World War II heroism because it had given me a reason to respect him and not think quite so ill of the dead. To me, as a boss he’d always been a dyspeptic boor and journalist of little consequence who'd spent most of his time holed up his office writing wishy-washy editorials and delighting in nitpicking grammatical errors. I’d never known him to crusade for hard-hitting stories or mentor anybody. To the contrary, he’d always seemed disconnected from the newsroom and lightly regarded by those who made daily coverage decisions. The one time I could remember his emerging from his office to argue a story placement was the day when, as I recounted in a previous blog post, he insisted the news of John Lennon’s assassination wasn’t a front-page story.

When I considered the word “mentor,” all I could come up with was a flamboyant puppy-dog crush he’d had on a young office assistant at a time that his first wife was dying—a sad episode that no doubt spoke to his loneliness but hardly had engendered respect.

I don’t mean to suggest I hated the guy. In fact, I’d seen him at a few staff reunions over the years—the last of which was not that long before his death—and I’d enjoyed talking with him. He’d had a rich and happy retirement, during which he’d indulged a passion for historical research, to his community’s benefit. He seemed happy and relatively health, and I was glad for him.

But as I read all the posthumous tributes rolling in, my visceral urge was to shoot an e-mail to my friends and former colleagues whose content would be telegraphed by the subject line “WTF?!” What was the deal with all this revisionist history? I mean, good God, just because we’re in our 50s now, do we have to view everything through the fatuous glow of nostalgia? Had this guy been pretty much of a prick, or hadn’t he? Hadn’t we all mocked him behind his back when we worked under him? How had he suddenly become a composite Pappy Boyington and Walter Cronkite? Was this the same comically crabby scold another colleague of our era had smirkingly dubbed “Ming the Merciless”?

But I did not write and send such an-mail. Mostly, I’ll concede, because, whatever my friends’ willful delusions and aging-boomer sentimentalities might have been, they seemed to be enjoying this little world they’d created, and I didn’t want to crash the party and be seen as an asshole. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything, as the saying goes. I’d take the high road. My simple RIP had been sincere. I’d just leave things at that.

Yet now, just a few days after having read all those e-mails, here I am writing about this, in a forum where some of those former co-workers might read it. Why? Because I’ve had some time to reread and rethink things, and to adjust my perspective accordingly. Because I am enough of an asshole to feel the need to air my initial reactions to tributes that read too much like hagiography to me. But also because I feel compelled to issue a mea culpa, and an apology of sorts to a dead man.

When I took a closer look at the essay that my former colleague had written for his current employer, I was particular struck by the lines, “When he really liked a story, he’d sit down at his typewriter, peck out a short note about it, and pin it on the bulletin board. I got a couple of those notes from him. I treasured them.” I have no memory of any such practice. Could it be because I never received such a note? Could it be because I’d never really merited one? Might it have been that my old editor found little worth mentoring in me?

Because I’ve got to admit something. I wasn’t a great reporter. Or, frankly, even a particularly good one. Especially in my early days, when I covered news rather than features and had to dig for information, attend endless meetings and write about breaking stories on deadline. I always hated confrontation—still do—and thus never was a good fit for covering things like municipal government and the crime beat. My constitutional preference for routine and steady hours didn’t jibe well with being called after hours to check something out, or sitting at a zoning commission meeting at midnight and wishing the homeowner with the legitimate gripe would please just shut the hell up and let me go home. I was a limited interviewer, in that I can’t write both fast and legibly, I’ve always typed with one finger, and I never learned shorthand. I’m not cool under pressure and always hated writing on deadline. I got to where I was decent at it, I think, but generally speaking, the calmer the mind, the better-written and more thorough the story.

Later in his tribute essay, my former colleague recounted that he and another reporter once wrote an expose on illegal gambling operations in a neighboring county, urged on by the editor. Might it have been, then, that my old boss’s enthusiasms really had extended beyond pointing out misspellings and questioning the newsworthiness of an ex-Beatle’s murder?

Another thing caught my eye as I reread that essay. The writer mentioned that our editor sometimes would ask him why a story mattered. I’d completely forgotten about that, but that did ring a bell. Our editor had asked me that a few times. At least. I no longer recall any specific story about which he’d challenged me, or what I’d answered. But yes, he had asked.

What I mean to say with all this is, clearly my experiences with this man didn’t reflect everyone’s. Even if my colleagues’ praise still strikes me as hyperbolic, what I’ve come to believe and understand is that my longstanding denigration was unfair and one-dimensional. Whatever else he was or wasn’t, my old editor was a guy who’d put his life on the line for his country, who’d cared about his profession and who’d made a lasting and positive impression on many of the young reporters he oversaw. That’s not nothing. Far from it. When my own obituary someday is written, will I be able to claim that much?

In a subsequent e-mail, the essay writer had stated, “We really did have something special under him.” Did we? I’m not exactly a convert, but I’ll certainly concede that memory and perception are very tricky things, indeed.