FInal blast from the past

I was recently recol­lect­ing the bad old days when I thought I was some kind of Internet Film Criticism police­man, and I got into it with not Some Dude™ but a guy I’ve come to have a reas­on­able rela­tion­ship with, and one of the points he tried to make was that I had some nerve giv­ing anoth­er writer TMI grief when I myself pos­ted vaca­tion pic­tures on my blog. Well. It was/is MY blog, and they were, you know, vaca­tion pic­tures. And now, as I begin out­lining a hope­fully brief piece con­cern­ing the crit­ic­al repu­ta­tion of Woody Allen, I relax by shar­ing with you a last few treas­ures from my late mom’s seem­ingly bot­tom­less photo stash. 

I some­times tell close friends that as a baby, I was so fat that my par­ents could pretty much leave me alone any­where and be assured that, unless I was kid­napped, I’d be at the spot at which they left me when they returned, because I lit­er­ally could not move. (And as for kid­nap­ping, no one save a can­ni­bal wants to snatch a fat baby.) Anyway, I did­n’t have any actu­al recol­lec­tion of this state, but now I have pho­to­graph­ic proof. 

My sis­ter and I had an often frac­tious rela­tion­ship in our child­hood and teens, so this mid-60s snap­shot inspired lots of oohs and aaahs from older rel­at­ives, “Look how nice they can be togeth­er,” that sort of thing. I’d like to say that whatever cine­mat­ic allu­sion attaches to my cos­tume—Rules of the Game, for sure!— was entirely delib­er­ate, but of course it was not. 

I include this shot not to mark the begin­ning of my young­er brother­’s brief but power­ful Jodie Foster phase, but to again provide a form of pho­to­graph­ic proof: Yes, those long shirt col­lars in Goodfellas were a thing. 

Eighth Grade Yearbook photo, 1972. Glenn Kenny, The Awkward Years, Part II, a saga which I believe is still ongoing. 

Two things about this photo: One, how is it that nobody in New Jersey with a cheap cam­era between the years 1962 and 1985 knew how to prop­erly com­pose a shot? Even the most headroom-batty among us would have to cop to the over­abund­ance of neg­at­ive, no make that use­less, space in this photo, which I have declined to crop out of respect for verisimil­it­ude. Actually, the cul­prit might be yours truly: that Ken Follett book is from 1982, the asphalt beneath the beach chair is a drive­way; this places the shot at Katz Avenue in West Paterson, where my mom and I (and some­times my broth­er) lived for a few years until I finally up and moved to the Big City full-time in ’86. 

Two, I don’t want to slog Ken Follett, but it’s doubt­ful that whatever my mom was think­ing when I, or who­ever took the shot, took the shot, was spurred by that thrill­er. I don’t know if it’s me or if today’s atmo­sphere of cul­tur­al dis­course is so inflamed or what but I feel weirdly com­pelled to defend my mom’s read­ing habits here. Hell, I kind of liked Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal myself. Yep, my mom liked pot­boil­er thrillers but she also loved Rex Stout, who really is the V.S.O.P. of what he did, and it’s due to her influ­ence that I got into him—and to Conan Doyle as well. When she saw me read­ing a bio­graphy of Oscar Levant, she asked to bor­row it when I was done, and she enjoyed that.  And my mom adored Simenon—when she died, she was halfway through a new trans­la­tion of The Late Monsieur Gallet that I brought her at the hos­pit­al. She liked the Silvina Ocampa poem I read her in the days before her oper­a­tion, too…but she liked the Eliot cat poems I read to her from Kingsley Amis’ col­lec­tion of light verse a little bet­ter. Thank you T.S. Eliot and Kingsley Amis. Love you mom. Miss you every day.