Old Hollywood

 A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss. -- Thucydides

In light of Robert Carradine’s self-inflicted expiration date last Monday, I thought I would write a caution about memoirs and biographical stricture, however otherwise unwound: be wary. I did not pay much money for Endless Highway, considering the tomes I own outright in hardcopy editions, and what I pay for in terms of kindle “services” for digital  etexts, four dollars plus tax isn’t that concerning, not against the estimated two thousand USD I’ve spent on kindle technology since the turn of the century, but I find David’s voice hard-scrabbled, even while haunted by his enigmatic passing in the spring of 2009, which happens to be the same year I paid too much money for my more primitive second generation device. Still mourning – which means still fond of, the early tablet-sized casement over disk, still in my possession, but mysteriously hidden, hopefully, in a slot between weathered books in the foyer, the lithium battery quite dead, worthless except to be dismantled when I get a chance to return it, tagged—always nagging in the back of my mind.

The most celebrated son of the Carradine clan deserves credit for writing Endless Highway on his own, but a ghostwriter, like Cybill Shepherd’s Aimee Lee Ball, might have given his voice a polish he isn’t able to manage pitching his own stones. What this disabled writer knows about ghosting is a never attempted writing advice article on how to do it on consignment, but those who could benefit from it comprise a diverse group: crime bosses, athletes, clergy, and politicians included. Perhaps David didn’t have the hindsight, or, since Kwai Chang Caine became his alter ego, that ego may have gotten in the way. Assailing fans with the notion that God doesn’t like me very much is the immature spurting of the boy within the man, carrying his wounds. This is self-evident from his second sentence in the next paragraph: “When I was five, I tried to hang myself in the garage by jumping off the bumper of the Duesenberg.” Fans of David, of which I am one, will perhaps find this admission eerily prefigures how his life would end. One hopes he wasn’t this calculating in late his fifties, despite his revitalization as the malice-riddled manipulator in the heady Kill Bill saga. From as far as I’ve gotten in the book, David’s father seems both itinerant and errant, and these traits haven’t worked out so well for the weather beaten working-class mien of the sons. The Kennedys, also in decline, always carried their royalty with them, not the Carradines. As actors, they were anything but the Irish who had beaten the sticks. Perhaps this was part of problem, whatever the proclivities. Do those of European descent still have the ability to create history, let alone feint the immersion which made John and David so notable? (Keith handles his characters differently.) Generational shifts have also challenged the norms of what used to be the standards Caucasian excellence. This may not trouble the younger talents behind boomers on their last legs, like JD Vance, who found what he needed in the cooption of a diversity marriage, but for every Vance, how many deluded men like Crooks, a nearly successful assassin, has the US nurtured over the last 25 years? Mental illness is a classification, after all, but Robert’s suicide runs in close tandem with the aspirational sniper, and it points to a larger crisis within Western culture, one wherein we do not have a Peloponnesian War to eke out a victory.