“I heard Ruth Brown, and I just found my kind of music,” — Janis Martin

Cultural history is peppered with What Ifs. What if someone like Janis Martin had gone the distance? What if she hadn’t lapsed into obscurity? Would she have carved out a small space for women in rock ‘n roll (alongside the likes of Wanda Jackson)? Rock ‘n roll was so associated with men. The sexual energy coming from the stage was male, and geared towards … everyone, really. The energy did not discriminate. But, like it or not, there is a difference between a young man gyrating on a stage in front of people and a young woman doing the same thing. There are thousands of years of cultural/social history behind this being the case. Men presenting themselves as sexual objects in such a frank way was new. And controversial. It exploded norms. Women doing the same thing brought about the usual: they were sluts, they were vulgar. The boys were called vulgar too, but again: we have thousands of years of history bolstering up why it’s different when you call a woman “vulgar”. If you come into conversations like this thinking male sexuality is the default (first of all: you’re brainwashed. Work on it), thinking the rightful order is women being the objects of male sexuality … if you can’t dismantle the web of inherited associations, then of course it would make sense men would lead rock ‘n roll. You wouldn’t question the bias, you would assume it was true, you would believe the assumptions, and would believe that of course there’s just a smaller audience for women who rock. It’s not like some conspiracy or anything. Time has proven all of this to be untrue. How many artists have been casualties of these unexamined, or – worse – examined, biases?

This is not to dismiss the importance of The Boys. You don’t have to crash anyone off a pedestal when you’re questioning the underlying assumptions. There’s a reason the Boys were “the ones” and it’s not just a conspiracy against women. I’m of the opinion that it had to be The Boys who eventually broke through, and what they were doing WAS more of a threat, because it cracked the edifice of conformist masculinity, they kicked down the door for other modes of expression, their own. So, there’s that. The Boys, though, through no fault of their own, dominate the landscape of memory so totally that posterity has forgotten the others, the ones who came before, or their contemporaries who may not have been as massive but who also had an impact.

People like Janis Martin. (It’s her birthday today.) It has taken time to dig her legacy out of obscurity. In the 80s, she started performing again, and her audience remembered her. 30 years after the fact. Think about that.

Janis Martin was a child performer, born into a musical family. They lived in Virginia, steeped in a strong country music background. Just like Elvis, Janis Martin was born at the right time, in terms of the cultural upheavals to come. – 1933-1940 is really the time to have been born. If you were born in that span, you were at the right age and in the right moment when the mid-50s rolled around. Like so many others in her generation, like Carl Perkins, like Elvis, like Wanda Jackson, Janis Martin just assumed she’d be a country singer. But by the mid-50s, things were getting a little, how you say, interesting. The genres were starting to blend together. These changes were amplified by new technology, powerful radio stations: things happening in one region could carry more easily to the next. News could spread.

You could say Elvis was the one to crack it open and you wouldn’t be wrong. Just in terms of impact and reach. But it didn’t just come out of nowhere. Carl Perkins was there first. Carl Perkins was the first to sell a million records. Elvis’ success, though, showed the way for others. En masse, country singers switched to rockabilly. It took over a generation for country music to recover. Janis Martin was part of this first wave. She loved Carl Perkins. She heard what he heard.

Janis Martin loved Hank Williams, because you could move to his songs. But it was when she heard Ruth Brown that the roof blew off and she saw all kinds of possibilities (the same possibilities everybody else was feeling). In her own corner of the cultural landscape, Janis Martin was very unusual, in the same way Elvis was unusual, or Carl Perkins was unusual, and etc. One of the original DJs at WDIA in Memphis (Black-owned and run radio station, the first of its kind) said, “You can’t segregate the airwaves.” This was the real revolution. You could keep white people and black people separate in public spaces, but you literally could not stop white kids from tuning into the “black” radio stations, and you could not bar black kids from listening to the Grand Ole Opry broadcasts, even though they wouldn’t have been allowed inside the building. You could not force people to NOT be “into” music made by …. whoever. The controls were loosening.

Martin started incorporating her inspirations in her performances. Reminder: she’s still just a kid, basically. 14 years old. She was a rarity, a teenage girl rocker: her voice could be growly and sexy, but also pure and clear as a bell – like Patsy Cline’s. I love her voice. It goes right through you. Her sexy voice was not va-va-voom sexual. Oh, no. It was more threatening than that. She sounds like a regular teenage girl with regular desires. No big deal, in other words. And the powers that be can’t have THAT.

The ball started rolling when Martin recorded a demo for two songwriters whom Martin knew from the radio broadcasts she appeared on. The guys were radio announcers, and they wanted to shop their song around – a little thing called “Will You Willyum”. So Martin recorded it. The demo somehow found its way to Steve Sholes at RCA, the same Steve Sholes who had just signed Elvis to the label literally a couple months prior. Sholes was impressed with what he heard. The Elvis Wave was breaking. It was the Gold Rush. RCA signed Janis Martin on the spot, and began marketing her as the “Female Elvis”.

Let’s get down to specifics, though. Let’s look at the numbers. The real story is there. Just because Janis Martin’s name doesn’t have the recognition factor of Carl Perkins (a big influence on her) doesn’t mean her accomplishments are somehow lesser. In fact, it makes you MAD when you look at the numbers.

RCA releases “Will You, Willyum” as her first single. This, as you recall, is the demo that caught RCA’s ear in the first place. On the B-side was Martin’s own composition, a song called “Drugstore Rock ‘n Roll”.

And “Drugstore Rock ‘n Roll” was the one that “hit”, even though RCA was pushing the A-side. This is very significant. The song SHE wrote is the one people flipped over. “Drugstore Rock ‘n Roll” sold 750,000 copies. I’ll say that again. 750,000 copies. 3/4s of a million copies. Those are almost Elvis numbers. You don’t have to grade Martin on a curve. The song was a massive hit AND she WROTE it, whereas Elvis wrote none of his. And “Drugstore Rock ‘n Roll” is a banger!

She paints the picture. She includes all the details. The clothes. The jukebox. The feet tapping.

“Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll” is a personal song, coming from Martin’s personal experience. It’s pure rockabilly. Things were moving so quickly, things had moved far away from drinking liquor out of an old fruit jar. Now we’re having a milk shake and banana split. The transformation was so rapid nobody could get a handle on it in the moment. Eddie Cochran became the Platonic Ideal of this final transformation, with all of his hot sexy songs about drive-in movies, borrowing Dad’s car, and partying on a school night. Janis Martin said of the song, that sold 750,000 copies: “I wrote ‘Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll’ in about 10 minutes. Everything in that song is actually the scene that was happening for us as teenagers. The drugstore was the only place we had to go and hang out after school.”

Teenagers know authentic when they hear it.

Just for kicks, here’s the A-side. The demo.

RCA really pushed the “female Elvis” thing, which didn’t really work out in the long run, and nobody had the time or inclination to figure it out. She had fans but she also faced a lot of hostility. They forced the connection by making her record a song called “My Boy Elvis”:

Martin’s career was over almost before it began. The label discovered she had been married – in secret – to a paratrooper stationed in Germany. She got married at 15, and kept it a secret for two years. Then she got pregnant. The label tried to make her get an abortion. She refused. RCA dropped her.

And that was it for Janis Martin. It makes me angry just typing those words.

There are deep pockets of history buried within the well-known narrative. People who were dropped, people who had bad luck, people who weren’t protected, who were bad with money, who had substance problems and didn’t get help. The business is brutal. The business was also totally NEW in 1956. Everyone was just making shit up as they went. However: telling one of your artists to get an abortion, and then dropping her because she’s pregnant, is not “new”. That shit is as old as the hills. Janis Martin was a casualty of the oldest bullshit in the book.

I am happy her fans remembered her, and when she started doing little tours in the 80s, the clubs were filled with people who remembered. I hope that felt good. But still. This is not a good story.

Her music is still there to be discovered. I have such an ambivalent relationship with current technology and in many ways MISS my analog life. One of the up-sides, though, is that people like Janis Martin don’t have to be discovered only by rummaging through bins in second-hand record stores anymore. Their music lives on in the eternal present.

If you want to hear more about her origin story, and the tracks that launched her very short career, this site breaks it down in admirable detail.

My brother-in-law Ben turned me on to this great podcast 500 Songs, and one of the episodes is devoted to “Drugstore Rock ‘n Rolls.

I love “Let’s Elope Baby”, which definitely connects to her own story!

I found this clip of her performing “Drugstore Rock ‘n Roll” in 2006 – the year before she died – and it makes me so happy. She sounds great!

From the same show, and this made me cry: Ruth Brown was there too. It’s the first time she and Janis met. So Ruth performs, and Janis sits next to her, just marveling at her, and grooving with her. Beautiful.

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“Attention equals Life.” — Frank O’Hara

FrankOHara2

“I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.” – poet Frank O’Hara

It’s his birthday today.

First up: I launched my column at Film Comment with a piece about American poet Frank O’Hara’s love of the movies.

Sometimes I feel I know everything I need to know about Frank O’Hara just from reading his work. His personality is on the page. You feel like he is sitting in the room with you. He operated from love and generosity, and so his talent was often drawn to tributes and celebration, although as any deep person knows: tributes/celebrations often come out of sorrow and loss. It’s not either/or. O’Hara felt things deeply. Feelings overwhelmed him. Mitchell and I reference his poem about Lana Turner all the time. One day, Mitchell did it for me as a dramatic monologue.

Poem
by Frank O’Hara

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Frank O’Hara lived and worked in New York City and his poems clatter with New York sounds and sights, brightness, life, bustle. Nights in jazz clubs, days on 2nd Avenue, diners, movie theatres. Frank O’Hara was not a native New Yorker, but like many transplants he SAW the city in a way those born-and-raised did not. New York almost literally made him possible. O’Hara was a very serious and precocious youth. He was in the Navy, attended Harvard on the G.I. Bill. He found the university atmosphere stifling, met a couple of other artists there, and eventually moved to New York.

O’Hara had found his “tribe”. His friends were artists, many of whom would become world-renowned. John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, to name a few. Some were gay, some were not. What really mattered was whether or not your art was good. In New York, he could be free. People valued his opinion and turned to him for advice. He got a job as a cashier at MoMA and eventually worked his way up to being a curator (this alone tells you so much about O’Hara and what he must have been like). He curated some very important shows at MoMA, probably the most important one being the Abstract Expressionist show in 1958-59, which toured Europe, bringing William de Kooning, Mark Rothko, etc., to the world.

He died at 41 in a freak accident on Fire Island. Terrible loss.

In his poems, O’Hara doesn’t observe life. He’s in the thick of it, soaking it in.

POEM

Light clarity avocado salad in the morning
after all the terrible things I do how amazing it is
to find forgiveness and love, not even forgiveness
since what is done is done and forgiveness isn’t love
and love is love nothing can ever go wrong
though things can get irritating boring and dispensable
(in the imagination) but not really for love
though a block away you feel distant the mere presence
changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper
and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement
I am sure of nothing but his, intensified by breathing

O’Hara loved other people’s work if it was good, celebrated and championed others. He was ambitious, but not ruthless or envious. This does not mean he loved everyone and everything, or cut people slack if he thought what they were doing was bad. He had serious issues with “confessional poet” Robert Lowell, the superstar of the Day. O’Hara was not an ivory tower/academic writer. He had a day job, so he wrote poems when he could: on the bus, on his lunch break, in the bathroom at parties. He would forget where he put them. Often, he would only have one copy of a poem. After his death newly discovered poems started arriving, at almost the speed of light. He had given one to a friend, he had ripped out a page in his notebook and it was discovered somewhere. Poetry was part of the rhythm of his life. He was very conscious of what he was doing. He thought that while you were here on this planet, you might as well enjoy yourself. This “attitude” is one of the reasons why critics sometimes pooh-poohed him. He seemed “light,” “surface”-y. (This type of critique always makes me think of Oscar Wilde: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”)

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mikes’ painting, called SARDINES.

As an example of O’Hara at his best, a poem he wrote in 1964 about the day Billie Holiday died.

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

frank&ashbery
Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery

Joan Acocella’s essay on Frank O’Hara, included in the wonderful collection Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays, is one of the best things I’ve read about him. She reviews a biography of O’Hara by Brad Gooch, a book she does not like all that much. To Gouch, the work is secondary to the life, and that’s a real issue, especially with someone like O’Hara, whose life WAS his work. Because O’Hara died young, because he was gay, there is a lot of retrospective analysis going on (i.e. “He knew he was going to die, he was a martyr to the cause”, etc.) However, as Acocella points out, O’Hara was not “gay enough” for Gooch: Gooch scolds him for this throughout the book. For example, O’Hara slept with women sometimes too, and Gooch labels this as “self-denial”, when .. I don’t know … maybe O’Hara was the type of guy who loved sex and intimacy and loved women too, maybe his sexuality was fluid, Gooch, and also it was a different day and age, and why are you scolding the subject of your biography in the first place? O’Hara displayed attitudes that do not line up with contemporary thinking. He got annoyed by “queers”, for example, and Gooch disapproves of that. (Who cares, Gooch.) Of course O’Hara doesn’t express himself in a 21st century context because … he lived in the 1940s and 50s, not now. Why does this even need to be said?

Acocella understands why the focus of Gooch’s biography is ONLY on O’Hara’s sexual orientation. We are in a corrective atmosphere now, and that’s a good thing, for the most part. But lets not scold O’Hara for not living up to Tumblr’s rules of engagement and language requirements, which will also – incidentally – be out of date by next week! O’Hara is an important mid-20th century American artist. His sexuality is part of what made his voice what it is.

When he loved something (a person, a celebrity, a diner, a sunrise), he LOVED IT.

O’Hara’s rhythms are sexy, informed by his love of jazz and ballet and the movies. He created collages of words, just like disparate pieces of film are put together to create montage. He has a flowing lyricism, and great descriptive power. New York was O’Hara’s ultimate muse.

gay_1

At O’Hara’s funeral, one of his friends said there were about 60 people there who introduced themselves as “Frank’s best friend.” And each person meant it. Nobody was lying. Frank O’Hara was a man who had a gift for intimacy and friendship. He knew how to connect, he knew how to listen, to be there for people. Not everybody does.

Frank-OHara-007

QUOTES:

Joan Acocella on “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”:

In the doomed-poet drama that has been retrospectively read into O’Hara’s story, this poem [‘A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island’] has been taken as a premonition of death. But to me the most remarkable thing about it is O’Hara’s sense of blessedness, an emotion that surfaces again and again in his verse. Indeed, it is one of the things (“gay, glancing”) held against him by those who feel that he was not a serious person. This, in turn, has led some of his defenders to overstress the sadness – presumably a warranty of seriousness – that can sometimes be detected in his poetry. The light tread of his lyrics, Geoff Ward says, “is only a step away from the grave.” It is true that O’Hara had the Irish sense of life, but the note of grief would be far less persuasive if it were not accompanied, as it almost always is, by the keenest possible responsiveness to life’s goodness. Even at his most depressed, when his romance with Vincent Warren is falling apart, O’Hara is witty. (“I walk in / sit down and / face the frigidaire” – presumably Vincent.) When, on the other hand, that relationship is going well, even bad things seem good to him: “Even the stabbings are helping the population explosion.”

Boyfriends aside, he finds a thousand things to like. Ballet dancers fly through his verse. Taxi drivers tell him funny things. Zinka Milanov sings, the fountains splash. The city honks at him and he honks back. This willingness to be happy is one of the things for which O’Hara is most loved, and rightly so. It is a fundamental aspect of his moral life, and the motor of his poetry.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

His casual attitude to his poems tells us much about him and them: it’s not that he didn’t value them, but he didn’t worry much about them after they were written. He was not especially interested in a final permanent text … He preferred to work with galleries, as though the poems were entries in an exhibition catalog, an exhibition made of his daily life.

Frank O’Hara on the “confessional poets”:

Lowell has … a confessional manner which [lets him] get away with things that are really just plain bad but you’re supposed to be interested because he’s supposed to be so upset … I don’t think that anyone has to get themselves to go and watch lovers in a parking lot necking in order to write a poem, and I don’t see why it’s admirable if they feel guilty about it. They should feel guilty.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn, on “A Mexican Guitar”:

…a coterie poem with a private frame of reference and cast of characters that needs as many marginal glosses as a Neoclassical satire by Alexander Pope. Though it may never be completely decoded, O’Hara’s poem nonetheless delights and rewards the reader with its vivacious imagery, waves of excitement, and unexpected emotional turns. Indeed, our bafflement may replicate the poet-protagonist’s sense of overwhelmed imagination, his striving for meaning and reassurance and for a place in the world.

Michael Schmidt:

Though Ashbery and O’Hara are often evoked together, Ashbery is different in kind from O’Hara. He admires O’Hara’s effortlessness, a function perhaps of O’Hara’s more unproblematic adjustment to New York and his homosexuality, his natural campness, his carelessness about the opinion of others unless he loves them. Ashbery is complex. Like O’Hara he is in love with French writing (O’Hara loves Pierre Reverdy particularly, Ashbery loves Roussel). … His cityscapes are not so consistently New York as O’Hara’s. He tunes in to America and Europe and Orients, often all in the same poem. While O’Hara walks about New York and makes poems, Ashbery doesn’t … his is a different and intellectually more varied world.

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, March 30, 1959:

There is one other poet I have found occasionally good–mostly bad in the surrealist way–but I think he’s improving, and very, very clever: Frank O’Hara.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn, on “A Mexican Guitar”:

The high pitch of the poem–its hectic animation, volatile mood swings, and erratic exclamation points (ten in all)–is defiantly anti-masculine. But it’s like music: O’Hara was a gifted pianist who had planned to be a composer until he was converted to poetry in college by James Joyce’s musicality of language. “A Mexican Guitar” is a capriccio–a free-form up-tempo jeu d’esprit with the lilt of a dnace tune. It has the brilliant attack and shifting opalescence of a Chopin etude. The poem is also a pastiche of American idioms, swanky to slangy, and at times parodies the convolution of formal French syntax, literally translated into English. O’Hara wrote his poems at top speed on his typewriter (as if playing the piano), and he treated them cavalierly, indifferent to their fate. That transience also characterizes the social constellation of “A Mexican Guitar,” where Jane and Violet, along with the inquisitive reader, become an impromptu foster family, held together for only so long as it takes to read the poem.

Joan Acocella, “Perfectly Frank”:

Important though he was as a curator and writer, he was probably more influential in the art world simply as a hand-holder, an encourager. He would look at his friends’ work and tell them what it was, and how wonderful it was. As Kenneth Koch described it to Gooch, “they’d have all these wonderful ideas and feelings about themselves, and they’d say ‘Duh’, and Frank would say, ‘Yes, you put that green there. T hat’s the first interesting thing that’s been done since Matisse’s Number 267.'” Larry Rivers and Grace Hartigan notably thrived under his encouragement, and so did others. Edwin Denby, though he was twenty-three years older, said that O’Hara was a catalyst for him. “But then,” Denby added, “he was everybody’s catalyst.”

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn, on “A Mexican Guitar”:

Like [Wallace] Stevens, O’Hara was deeply knowledgeable about modern painting: he fraternized with the New York Abstract Expressionist and Action painters and became a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. But unlike Stevens with his genteel reserve, the gregarious O’Hara recklessly plunged into direct experience. His swift, surreal poetry was a diary of his brooding longings and sophisticated, febrile life.

John Ashbery:

He had a very sort of pugnacious and puglistic look. He had a broken nose. He didn’t look like a very cordial person.

Michael Schmidt:

O’Hara begins with a rather witty, spoken simplicity, the poems in the language he used with his friends, wry, light, a little naughty, but without the scatalogical grittiness of the Beats. Ginsberg may have affected some of his poems, “Second Avenue” in particular, but while Ginsberg is always comfortably unwashed and hairy of face, O’Hara is cleanshaven and unobtrusive, keeping his own rather than everyone else’s counsel. There is a reticence about the man and the poems. In many ways he is closer to Whitman than Ginsberg ever gets; and to Lorca and Mayakovsky because he understands Futurism and Surrealism, and when his poetry surrealizes it is with a knowledge of what he wants the surreal to do for the poem. He doesn’t blunder and risk like Crane, or rant like Ginsberg. His poems are busy in the world; they haven’t the time to stand back and preach or invent monstrous forms. He is the most New York of the New York poets.

Frank O’Hara, “Notes on Second Avenue

I have a feeling that the philosophical reduction of reality to a dealable – with system so distorts life that one’s ‘reward’ for the endeavor (a minor one at that) is illness both from inside and from outside… I don’t know if this method is of any interest in taking little pieces of it. You see how it makes it seem very jumbled, while actually everything in it either happened to me or I felt happening (saw, imagined) on Second Avenue… The verbal elements are not too interesting to discuss although they are intended consciously to keep the surface of the poem high and dry, not wet, reflective and self-conscious. Perhaps the obscurity comes in here, in the relationship between the surface and the meaning, but I like it that way since the one is the other (you have to use words), and I hope the poem to be a subject, not just about it.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn, on “A Mexican Guitar”:

The poem is about the movies. It dates from a period when the grittily realistic, socially conscious Actors Studio was in the ascendant and when gay men were virtually alone in taking seriously the splashy kitsch and brazen glamour of entertainment-oriented, studio-era Hollywood … O’Hara was well aware that his passionate response to Hollywood style would seem absurd or fey to most people, especially men. Here he and a woman friend (the painter Jane Freilicher) are seated in a theater and so united in admiration at what they see that they are ecstatically swept into the movie world, with its swirling conflicts and voluptuous seductions.

Michael Schmidt:

In many ways he is closer to Whitman than Ginsberg ever got; and to Lorca and Mayakovsky because he understands Furtuism and Surrealism, and when his poetry surrealizes it is with a knowledge of what he wants the surreal to do for the poem. He doesn’t blunder like Crane, or rant like Ginsberg. His poems are busy in the world; they haven’t the time to stand back and preach or invent monstrous forms. He is the most New York of the New York poets.

Frank O’Hara:

I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas.

Michael Schmidt:

O’Hara in love is overwhelmed, hyperbolic, preening or contemplative.

Joan Acocella, “Perfectly Frank”:

And this amoral, almost animal quality of attentiveness gives to O’Hara’s sweetness a sturdier character. What might have been sentimentality becomes large-mindedness, zest – a capacity for interest and enjoyment that can still, across the space of decades, suck us back into the minds-on-fire spirit of those years.

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“Make voyages! — Attempt them! — there’s nothing else …” Happy Birthday, Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams) was born on this day in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911.

tennessee

I love this early note from Tennessee Williams because it already incorporates his most famous line, from Streetcar Named Desire.

Will you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?

Thank you!

Thomas Lanier Williams

— Tennessee Williams, letter to editor Harriet Monroe, March 11, 1933

In his memoirs, published in 1975, Williams wrote:

Work!! – the loveliest of all four-letter words, surpassing even the importance of love, most times.

Editor John Rood wrote the following advice to Tennessee Williams (then Tom) on March 22, 1935:

Just keep on writing. It is remarkable how one begins to know what is right.

Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando, 1948

An interviewer asked Williams once: “What is your definition of happiness?”

He replied, “Insensitivity, I guess.”

When I first heard that anecdote, I felt like my entire sense of life was validated.

Tennessee Williams also said:

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

More – a lot more – after the jump.

Continue reading

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“Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous, and must be left in.” — Robert Frost

“[The poem] begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life–not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.” – Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes”

It’s Frost’s birthday today.

I’m with Lionel Trilling. I have always thought Robert Frost was dark as hell. He’s become so “acceptable” his poems could hang on the wall in a cross-stitch pattern. And maybe, yeah, some of his poems have an almost cheery homespun tone, but “homespun wisdom” is not what moves me about his work. His “philosophy” is present, you can feel it … but somehow (maybe because I’m a depressed person?) I feel his philosophy is a defense against chaos. Which, maybe most philosophy is. But I don’t feel like people talk about Frost that way. He “goes there” in his poems: his awareness of death, of the other world beyond, of events we can’t understand … and then he usually wraps things up with a bit of wisdom, an aphorism, a two-line ending that seems to say everything is going to be okay, or at LEAST: “we understand the world we live in”. Well, okay. But I can’t forget the rest of the poem, where he hears the quietness of the house around him, or his awareness of how things could get prickly with his neighbor across the way, or where he knows the long journey ahead of him before he will arrive home. Or that the road not taken really isn’t all that different from the road he took.

What does all this mean?

What I get is the sense of Frost erecting a defense against the madness of not choosing. He is the type of man who makes a decision and then erects all the justifications and reasons afterwards. He looks back on the “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” – and what is NOT said is (for me) the most obvious: What if you contemplate the possibility that the other road was actually better? Well, therein lies chaos and upset.

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“I did not begin to write poetry in earnest until the really emotional part of my life was over.” — poet A.E. Housman

OUCH, A.E. OUCH.

He was born in 1859 and he died in 1936.

That generation saw so much change it boggles the mind, and I say that as a member of a generation which grew up sans internet – who didn’t get “online” until my late 20s. The change my generation went through is so gigantic I can’t get my head around it. Like … going from no internet to … internet? How did we manage it? But Housman’s generation saw an entire world end.

He’s not as well-known today as he once was, and he is not as much studied as he once was. To people growing up in the first decades of the 20th century, he was THE poet. People knew him by heart. He was beloved. (Essential reading on Housman, and a truly great work of cultural criticism, is George Orwell’s essay “Inside the Whale,” which I excerpt below, but it really needs to be read in full.)

I think my first encounter with Housman was in a college poetry class. I didn’t get how sad his stuff was. This seems insane to me now, but I can only report the truth (at least as I remember it). I am not sure how I missed his sadness. I suppose because the verse itself is so perfect, the rhyme scheme immaculate … and there are funny lines, the whole thing can come off as rather arch if you don’t pay close attention. Or, more likely, I didn’t get how sad he was because I was still an adolescent, and although I was an intense adolescent, I didn’t understand yet just how sad things could get, when you get to a certain age and realize your life isn’t going to work out as you planned, I didn’t get that love could be lost forever, and you could be haunted by the memory of What Might Have Been. And Housman is all about longing for What Might Have Been. At any rate, Housman just didn’t exist in my head until – while I was living in Philadelphia – I was cast as Agnes in a production of Lanford Wilson’s wonderful one-act “Ludlow Fair” (excerpt here).

Wilson gets the title of his play from one of Housman’s poems. The play itself takes place in Queens, New York – so to call it “Ludlow Fair” is mysterious, and never fully explained: once you pose the question and start digging for the answer, you get the sense of falling into an abyss. It just gets deeper and more interesting the more you look into it. When I was in that play, I needed to really understand what the hell I was talking about, so I looked into “Shropshire Lad” again, but this time I was doing so not to appreciate the poetry but to understand why the hell Lanford Wilson had called his play “Ludlow Fair”, and why on earth my character would remember that poem almost line for line. There is no right answer. Wilson does not provide the answer. That was my re-introduction to Housman after reading him in a college poetry class. My research for that play was part of me learning how to read poetry, I guess. The rhyme scheme can lull you into thinking that what Housman is talking about is easy for him. That was my mistake.

Now that I am grown, and emotionally battle-scarred, it’s as plain as day: Housman is one of the bleakest of poets, obsessed with death and suicide. He was one of those tragic Victorian homosexual poets, a man who could never be happy because the world around him would not allow it.

I will love him forever because when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for doing OPENLY what everybody else was doing in PRIVATE, most of his friends abandoned him. Word got out that Wilde had no books in prison, and this was considered an emergency. Housman sent him a copy of his A Shropshire Lad. Housman had sympathy and empathy.

Housman had an unrequited love affair in his youth. Eventually his object of affection left for India, where he eventually got married. Housman was devastated. He didn’t start writing poetry for realz until he was 30 years old (which is very rare). See the quote at the top of this post.

OUCH.

Here is a posthumously published poem to his friend Moses Jackson:

Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.

He did not like many of the contemporary poets of his day, and struggled to stay apart from them. His idols were William Blake and William Shakespeare. Housman was attracted to madness, to mad flights of fancy, to a non-literal approach. Yeats loved Housman and it is not hard to see why.

In the 1890s, he was deeply affected by a small item in the newspaper about a man who committed suicide, leaving a note behind expressing his love for another man. Housman kept the clipping always. It just makes your heart ache, thinking about what former generations had to bear.

Reading his stuff now I am truly baffled at my college-girl response to it as light, arch and rather funny verse. I hadn’t had enough heartache of my own yet to perceive Housman’s eternal sadness.

Here is what is probably his most famous poem. Breathtaking.

LXII. Terence, this is stupid stuff

“TERENCE, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ™’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
‘Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
–I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

QUOTES:

A.E. Housman:

In barrenness, I hold a high place among English poets, excelling even Gray.

On his deathbed, 1936, after the doctor told him a dirty joke:

Yes, that’s a good one, and tomorrow I shall be telling it on the Golden Floor.

George Orwell, “Inside the Whale”:

At the beginning of the period I am speaking of, the years during and immediately after the war, the writer who had the deepest hold upon the thinking young was almost certainly Housman. Among people who were adolescent in the years 1910-25, Housman had an influence which was enormous and is now not at all easy to understand.

Michael Schmidt on Philip Larkin, Lives of the Poets:

His work is controversial not in itself but in what he represents to poets and critics of different camps. He certainly did as much as Housman to turn back the clock of English poetry; like Housman, he is the modern poet most often quoted – in church, in Parliament, in the classroom–by folk who latch on to a phrase or stanza, without bothering to understand what the poem as a whole might mean. His was the characteristic voice of the 1950s and 1960s, regarded by some as the most significant English poet of the postwar.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems in the English Language, on “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries”:

Housman was a classical scholar, and his ultimate model here might be Simonides, the ancient Greek poet of epitaphs. Elsewhere in Housman, we are advised: “Shoulder the sky my lad, and drink your ale.” …But Housman, no Christian and a good Epicurean, makes these allusions ironic, since his mercenaries defended “What God abandoned,” unlike the loyal angels, who followed Christ as he, at God’s command, thrust the fallen angels out of Heaven. So we have a double lesson in allusiveness: is it accurate, and again is it itself figurative, as here?

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language:

Determined to be minor, Housman’s best work transcends its own intentions.

George Orwell, “Inside the Whale”:

In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the whole of The Shropshire Lad by heart.

A.E. Housman:

I became a deist at 13 and an atheist at 21.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

The interest in a small, predominantly rural area, the use of ballad meters, the sense of the world’s unsatisfactoriness, and the reiterated theme of unrequited love are aspects that Housman shared with the early Yeats in particular. The two poets also shared an intense admiration for William Blake, whom Housman put second only to Shakespeare. But Housman admired Blake’s subordination of idea to lyrical intensity, whereas Yeats was more occupied with Blake’s mythical system. Housman minimizes and disparages the intellect in poetry, whereas Yeats, like other poets of larger scope, recognizes the necessity of incorporating it. Housman, when he can, excludes; Yeats includes. It was characteristic of Housman to devote much of his life to editing a minor work, the Astronomicon of Manilius, rather than classical poems of greater enterprise.

George Orwell, “Inside the Whale”:

[The poems in Shropshire Lad] are the poems that I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy, just as earlier generations had recited Meredith’s Love in a Valley,” Swinburne’s “Garden of Proserpine,” etc. etc.

William Faulkner:

“The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes, Don Quixote – I read that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert, Balzac – he created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream running through twenty books – Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare. I read Melville occasionally and, of the poets, Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, Herrick, Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman. I’ve read these books so often that I don’t always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you’d meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes.”

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

His poems, written mostly after he was thirty-five, deal chiefly with young men between twenty-one–or as he would say, one-and-twenty–and twenty-five. Youth and life and love end at a stroke. He extracts all possible ironies from this situation in stark, lucid, elegant verse that recasts pastoral tradition. Nature adds to the gloom either by baleful destructiveness or by its phantasmal parade of meaningless fertility and beauty.

A.E. Housman, lecture, “The Name and Nature of Poetry” (1933):

[Poetry’s function is” to transfuse emotion–not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader’s sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer.

Read George Orwell’s essay “Inside the Whale” to understand how Housman succeeded in this.

George Orwell, “Inside the Whale”:

Housman would not have appealed so deeply to the people who were young in 1920 if it had not been for another strain in him, and that was his blasphemous, antinomian, “cynical” strain. The fight that always occurs between the generations was exceptionally bitter at the end of the Great War: this was partly due to the war itself, and partly it was an indirect result of the Russian Revolution, but an intellectual struggle was in any case due at about that date… For several years the old-young antagonism took on a quality of real hatred. What was left of the war generation had crept out of the massacre to find their elders still bellowing the slogans of 1914, and a slightly younger generation of boys were writhing under dirty-minded celibate schoolmasters. It was to these that Housman appealed, with his implied sexual revolt and his personal grievance against God. He was patriotic, it was true, but in a harmless old-fashioned way, to the tune of red coats and “God save the Queen” rather than steel helmets and “Hang the Kaiser.” And he was satisfyingly anti-Christian–he stood for a kind of bitter, defiant paganism, a conviction that life is short and the gods are against you, which exactly fitted the prevailing mood of the young; and all in charming fragile verse that was composed almost entirely of words of one syllable.

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows.

This is the epitome of Housman: an air that kills. A genius for memorability sustains that negative intensity.

Introduction to Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896), Edwin Arlington Robinson’s The Children of the Night (1897), and Yeats’s The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) appeared in the waning years of the nineteenth century. These books continue Romantic and Victorian traditions — a language of personal feeling, regular meters and rhymes, the imputation of human feelings to nature by the pathetic fallacy. But the poetry of Housman, Robinson, and Hardy diverges by intensified doubt and pessimism, and that of the early Yeats by its thorough internalization of the outer world and by its apocalyptic anticipation.

George Orwell, “Inside the Whale”:

What was there in [Housman’s poems] that appealed so deeply to a single generation, the generation born round about 1900? In the first place, Housman is a “country” poet. His poems are full of the charm of buried villages, the nostalgia of place-names… War poems apart, English verse of the 1910-25 period is mostly “country.” The reason no doubt was that the rentier-professional class was ceasing once and for all to have any real relationship with the soil; but at any rate there prevailed then, far more than now, a kind of snobbism of belonging to the country and despising the town…Just before, and, for that matter, during the war was the great age of the “Nature poet,” the heyday of Richard Jeffries and W.H. Hudson. Rupert Brooke’s “Grantchester,” the star poem of 1913, is nothing but an enormous gush of “country” sentiment, a sort of accumulated vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered as a poem “Grantchester” is something worth than worthless, but as an illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of the period felt it is a valuable document.

Housman, however, did not enthuse over the rambler roses in the week-ending spirit of Brooke and the others. The “country” motif is there all the time, but mainly as a background. Most of the poems have a quasi-human subject, a kind of idealised rustic, in reality Strephon or Corydon brought up to date. This in itself had a deep appeal. Experience shows that overcivilised people enjoy reading about rustics (key-phrase, “close to the soil”) because they imagine them to be more primitive and passionate than themselves.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

[Housman’s poems] are easily parodied, as is his aesthetic, and perhaps inseparable from an element of “camp.” Yet they have a refined agony, a stylized pain, a kind of courtly lovelornness that insures their memorability.

Hugh MacDiarmid’s response to A.E. Housman’s poem “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries“:

Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
By Hugh MacDiarmid

It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.

Introduction to Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

In spare, pastoral lyrics set near the hills of Shropshire, Housman had sadly and stoically meditated on human transience, thwarted love, and failed lives.

George Orwell, “Inside the Whale”:

All [Housman’s] themes are adolescent–murder, suicide, unhappy love, early death. They deal with the simple intelligible disasters that give you the feeling of being up against the “bedrock facts” of life:

The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
By now the blood has dried;
And Maurice among the hay lies still
And my knife is in his side.

…And notice also the exquisite self-pity–the “nobody loves me” feeling:

The diamond drops adorning
The low mound of the lea,
These are the tears of morning,
That weeps, but not for thee.

Hard cheese, old chap! Such poems might have been written expressly for adolescents. And the unvarying sexual pessimism (the girl always dies or marries somebody else) seemed like wisdom to boys who were herded together in public schools and were half-inclined to think of women as something unattainable. Whether Housman ever had the same appeal for girls I doubt. In his poems, the woman’s point of view is not considered, she is merely the nymph, the siren, the treacherous half-human creature who leads you a little distance and then gives you the slip.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

He was brought up in the High Church Party of the Church of England, but at eight–also the age at which he first tried writing poetry–he was converted to paganism by John Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

When we say [Kipling] was popular, we can quantify what we mean. By 1918, Departmental Ditties, his least achieved book, had sold 81,000 copies; by 1931 it had sold 117,000 copies. Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses remained his most popular book, selling 182,000 copies by 1918 and 255,000 by 1931. The Definitive Edition of the poems, published in 1940, had gone through sixty impressions by 1982. Like Housman, even when his shares were no longer quoted on the intellectual bourse, and critics turned their backs on him, he remained popular with readers.

George Orwell, “Inside the Whale”:

There is no need to underrate him now because he was over-rated a few years ago.

A.E. Housman:

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

 
 
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On This Day: March 25, 1911: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a sweatshop located on 23-29 Washington Place, right off Washington Square Park. The majority of workers were immigrant women. In the years preceding the fire, The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union had been working to organize the garment workers all over America. There had been many strikes, some of them ending in violence. These brave women were arrested time and time again. Because the garment workers were mostly immigrant women, grateful to have jobs at all, organizing them to criticize working conditions was difficult. After fleeing pogroms in Russia, you tell the boss you need better ventilation? In the early days of the labor movement, there were organizations of mainly middle-class reformers who helped the workers to organize. The main requests were an 8-hour work day and safe working conditions. In 1909, there was an historic walk-out. But change was slow, and nothing had happened in time stave off the worst single disaster in the entire Industrial Revolution, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

146 people died. Remember them.

A first-hand account from Louis Waldman:

One Saturday afternoon in March of that year — March 25, to be precise — I was sitting at one of the reading tables in the old Astor Library… It was a raw, unpleasant day and the comfortable reading room seemed a delightful place to spend the remaining few hours until the library closed. I was deeply engrossed in my book when I became aware of fire engines racing past the building. By this time I was sufficiently Americanized to be fascinated by the sound of fire engines. Along with several others in the library, I ran out to see what was happening, and followed crowds of people to the scene of the fire.

A few blocks away, the Asch Building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street was ablaze. When we arrived at the scene, the police had thrown up a cordon around the area and the firemen were helplessly fighting the blaze. The eighth, ninth, and tenth stories of the building were now an enormous roaring cornice of flames.

Word had spread through the East Side, by some magic of terror, that the plant of the Triangle Waist Company was on fire and that several hundred workers were trapped. Horrified and helpless, the crowds — I among them — looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. This went on for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street. Life nets held by the firemen were torn by the impact of the falling bodies.

The emotions of the crowd were indescribable. Women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.

More below the jump.

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the Berkshires

Re-posting my lengthy piece on the production I saw of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2016, in honor of the anniversary of the play premiering on Broadway.

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On the evening of July 4th, I took the Mass Pike west, far west, to the Berkshires to see the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by David Auburn (not only a gifted director but a Pulitzer-prize winning playwright for Proof). He’s directed a couple of productions in the Berkshires, including Sick and Anna Christie. The main stage is nestled in the middle of the green mountains, trees curving in around the theatre (the theatre has been there since the early 20th century.) It’s a beautiful space.

The production starred Rebecca Brooksher as Maggie, Michael Raymond-James as Brick (he’s mostly known for his role on True Blood, but also the great and unfortunately short-lived series Terriers – and here, he’s coming back to the stage after 8 years away) as Brick, Linda Gehringer as Big Mama, and Jim Beaver (from Deadwood and Supernatural) as Big Daddy. Filling out the cast of characters was Jenn Harris as Mae (that “monster of fertility”, as Maggie calls her), Timothy Gulan as Gooper, and David Adkins and Brian Russell as the tipsy preacher and the doctor, respectively.

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“We just always did what we fucking wanted to.” — Kevin Seconds

“We had all types coming to our early gigs – new wavers, stoners, Rocky Horror Picture Show kids, bored and rowdy native kids who lived in the nearby Indian reservation and colony. We always kind of related to a mixed bag of people.” — Kevin Seconds

It’s Kevin Seconds’ birthday. Front man of 7 Seconds, the influential punk band from Reno, part of the “straight edge” sub-genre of punk – for their so-called idealistic and positive messaging. The band featured two brothers (Kevin and Steve), a passionate fan base, and a hefty nonstop touring schedule that lasted for three decades.

They were off and on as a band, as Life happened to all of them, and they announced about 5 years ago that 7 Seconds was no more. But I just checked Kevin Seconds’ Twitter feed and lo and behold he announced that they were up and running again and going on tour. I also came across a really interesting interview with Kevin Seconds, where he reflects on the last 30 years, and what the experience of 7 Seconds was like.

As I periodically like to do, I’m resurrecting a piece my brother Brendan wrote on his old blog, which I rescued (as I did all of his music writing). Brendan was a massive 7 Seconds fan and he wrote about seeing them live at The Living Room in Providence. The essay has a killer last line. (Bren is very good at last lines, which is not a small skill!)

 
 
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“If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.” – Joan Crawford

Today is Joan Crawford’s birthday. Some links first:

World-Class Acting: On Joan Crawford and Sudden Fear

Here are the re-caps of Feud: Bette and Joan I did for The New York Times. Lots of discussions of Joan Crawford’s career and acting woven throughout.

A while back, Mitchell and I had a discussion about her. Well, we discuss her all the time. But this time I recorded it.

The setup of the conversation went as follows (an ongoing series): I throw names of famous people at Mitchell, and ask him to describe each person in only “one word”. Then we both take it from there. Enjoy.

JOAN CRAWFORD

Sheila O’Malley: One word.

Mitchell Fain: I’m looking for a word that means “of an era”. I guess I’m going to say Of Her Time. She invented film acting. She was this girl from the wrong side of the tracks, and a dancer, it was the flapper era, she was a wild girl. Talk about a chameleon. Fuck Madonna.

MF: (continued) She was the flapper girl, she was the good time girl, she was the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who makes good, she was the modern businesswoman, and then she was the hardened older woman, and then she was the grotesque. Very few people have careers who last as long as hers.

MF: (continued) It’s hard for me to talk about her because I know so much about her personal life, or what I think I know about her personal life. This was a person who loved being famous more than she loved anything else. And being famous meant she had to get good at her job so she became a fabulous film actress but it was about being famous. It was about saying “Fuck You” to the trashy weird place that she grew up in, living in the back of a laundry with her mother on a cot. But as an actress, she really did perfect a kind of film acting. First of all, the camera loved her face. Interestingly enough, she was a blue-eyed freckled girl with red hair. We’d never get that from black and white movies. Her freckles were covered. We never got the sense that she had blue eyes. Cinematographers loved her for her angles.

MF: (continued) So she learned the art of film acting while it was being formed, and everybody has benefited from Crawford’s discoveries.

My favorite Joan Crawford performance is in The Women.

MF: (continued) It’s a great example of her work because she’s surrounded by women who were her contemporaries. You look at Joan Crawford now and we see her movies and the acting may seem archaic in the way that people don’t understand that style anymore, which I get. But you put her around her contemporaries, like Norma Shearer, and she is so utterly real and contemporary. Crystal Allen, the woman she plays in The Women, is so going to get what she wants. And she’s so funny. The scene in the dressing room where she says to Norma Shearer, “Whenever so-and-so doesn’t like what I’m wearing, I take it off.” She is sexual, she is a sexual threat. That role is the personification of Joan Crawford. Working girl, clawed her way to the rich side, she’s stunningly beautiful, she’ll do what she has to do to get there, she knows what she looks like and how that works, she’s brutally honest with herself. To me, it’s her perfect role, because she’s funny and she’s real and she’s stunning and she is the kind of woman that we want to judge, but that we all secretly want to be. It is the way we hope we would be, that kind of tenacity, that kind of “Fuck you, I’m getting what I want.”

SOM: You know what else I love about her is how smart she was about material for herself. The story of Crawford, on bended knee, begging Otto Preminger to put her in Daisy Kenyon. She knew: This is mine. Nobody else can do this. She courted projects, she courted directors. She was in it for the long haul from the beginning, which I love, because she was a jazz baby dancing on tables. Who knew where the movies were gonna go?

MF: There were no VCRs. They didn’t know we were going to study these films with a fine-toothed comb. There weren’t film studies classes. That’s my whole point about what they did back then. When I try to explain to people about old movies and how fabulous they were, my point is they were making these films as entertainment. The idea of the auteur, the artist/director wasn’t really in play, not at the beginning. Roger Ebert does that thing where he watches a film frame by frame with an audience. Back then, there wasn’t even the possibility for people to do that, there was no thought that that was going to happen. So the kinds of movies that were made back then have an unconscious level of artistry to them. We now can study the unconscious intentions, the unconscious moments that came from all of these very conscious decisions. For example, watching Meet Me in St. Louis.

MF: (continued) Vincente Minnelli chose every moment specifically, maybe more so than any director who was a big director at that time. But he made so many different kinds of films that to see him as an auteur is almost difficult because he seemed to be a workman, a journeyman. However, the story that emerges from the details he chose back then then tells the story that we can look at 60 years later.

Then there’s a story that really warms my heart and that is Joan Crawford’s relationship with Billy Haines.

MF: (continued) Billy Haines was a number one movie star in the silent era, he was openly gay, he had a partner. Louis B. Mayer said, “You have to fake a marriage like everybody else or I’m going to fire you” and Haines said, “Would you leave your wife?” And Mayer said, “Make a choice, Hollywood or your partner.” They fired him and put it out that his popularity was going down because of sound, which wasn’t true. He was a top box office person in the country for three years running, and then they kicked him out of Hollywood. He decided to become a designer, which had been his hobby. Joan was a really good friend of his. They had worked together in silent films. In fact, he named Joan, I think. Anyway, she stuck by him. She would have him decorate her house, and would have people over, and people would ask, “Who decorated your house?” He became one of the most influential interior designers in American history and it was partly because of Joan Crawford’s loyalty.


Joan Crawford in her living room, designed by Billy Haines

MF: (continued) So the idea that she was a monster who used people and threw them away is not true. There were people who very loyal to Joan. And she was also a loyal friend for many many years.

Unfortunately, because of Mommie Dearest, which may or may not be apocryphal but which Christina Crawford has certainly dined out on ever since, the book and the movie has made Faye Dunaway‘s impression of Joan Crawford into Joan Crawford.

Nobody’s watching Possessed and no one’s watching The Damned Don’t Cry and no one’s watching Daisy Kenyon, which is one of my favorites. It’s such a beautifully ambiguous movie. Dana Andrews, Henry Fonda, it’s so beautiful. You have no idea who to root for.

SOM: Exactly.

MF: Who’s the good guy here? You don’t know. It’s so brilliant. I also think that she, like Elizabeth Taylor, although Taylor was more hit or miss, Joan was best when she was pushed, when she was challenged. If she had a director like Otto Preminger, who expected her to be an actress, she pulled it out. If she had a weaker director, she was just going to play Joan Crawford. Like with Elizabeth Taylor, when she was working with Rock Hudson or James Dean or Richard Burton or Mike Nichols or Monty Clift, she gave some serious performances.

MF: (continued) When she was working with Paul Newman, she was like, “I gotta bring my A game”. But left to her own devices, when she was the one who was calling the shots, just because she was the biggest star on the lot or the biggest personality, she phoned it in a bit. I think Joan was a little bit like that. For Elizabeth Taylor, it was like she was a little girl trying to prove something, and Joan Crawford was a poor girl trying to prove something.

But like Cary Grant, I am not sure anyone else has known how to use a camera better than Joan Crawford to tell a story. Her face and the camera working together, understanding what that meant, and how that tells a story.

There’s that scene from Sudden Fear where she’s in the closet.

SOM: The slant of light across her eyes.

MF: She knows exactly how much to do with the camera, and what it is, and what the lighting meant. That’s what I mean about film acting. They were creating film acting. In movies now it’s mostly natural lighting, and realistic acting, and we don’t have to worry about those elements so much anymore, it’s not the same artform in a lot of ways. The idea of moving the pictures forward is now all in the director’s and cinematographer’s hands, except for people like Meryl Streep who is still doing that old-school kind of acting work. But back in the day, your face WAS the architecture of the movie. Your face, your body, your shoulders. Look at how Bette Davis walked. The stars were the architecture, their shape meant something to a camera, and I think they knew it and I think they were making it up.

MF: (continued) She’s so fabulous-looking. The image of her will always be jarring and beautiful. There are certain images of her, from the 1940s, with her hair in a snood, and the cheekbones and the lips, and the light across her face, that noir lighting that they perfected on her, that is just so iconic. And then Adrian, the designer, who created the big shoulder thing for her, which made her look like an Amazon.

SOM: She was probably very tiny.

MF: She was tiny. There’s ways that she used herself that they didn’t even know what they were doing, because there weren’t gender studies programs at the time. It’s like Johnny Guitar. Nicholas Ray may have known it on some subconscious level because he was dealing with those things in his own life, but Joan Crawford didn’t know it. But even before that, there was something masculine about the way she strolled across a film. The Bride Wore Red.

MF: (continued) Even though she’s very feminine and very beautiful in that movie, there’s something very masculine about how she goes about getting what she wants, and so the fact that her style became these huge shoulder pads, as though she had these crazy broad football player shoulders, was very deliberate and interesting, in terms of gender. And they put the shoulder pads in everything. It became ridiculous. She’d be wearing a dressing gown with shoulder pads the size of Gary Cooper. It’s also interesting that she did a lot of films with Clark Gable, successful in their time, although they weren’t as famous a duo as Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy or William Powell and Myrna Loy. But they were very successful, and there is something there in the dynamic that reminds me of what Robert Redford said about working with Barbra Streisand: She’s so masculine that you get to be your most feminine, and she’s so feminine you get to be your most masculine. Now, Clark Gable isn’t gonna say that, but that’s what happened with her and Gable.

MF: (continued) He ended up looking pretty compared to her. He had to use feminine wiles to win her over until he became “the man”. Her persona was masculine and feminine. She is a pre-gender-studies classic gender studies subject.

SOM: That’s what we were texting about with Johnny Guitar.

MF: That whole movie is a gender studies class. All of those roles existed, the lipstick lesbian, the bottom boy who was there to please and complement the top guy. It all existed. It’s just that nobody talked about any of it until there were gender studies classes and queer filmmakers and female filmmakers.

SOM: Most of the great movie stars, especially of that era before the sexual revolution, the ones who still resonate for us today, are the ones who have that mix of feminine and masculine. So Joan is hard, Clark gets to be soft. Or Cary is soft and Hepburn gets to be hard. But then they flip. And it’s all delightful. Who’s doing that now? It’s kind of out of style, I guess, but it’s so attractive.

MF: I mean, think about Kristen Wiig‘s persona in Bridesmaids . She’s so honest. And there’s something stereotypically male about her neuroses. She ends up being the female Woody Allen.

SOM: That’s more interesting than the one-note characters of uptight bitch, or an entitled Sex and the City Carrie Bradshaw type … maybe funny, but not attractive, ultimately, as a leading lady, at least in the classic sense.

MF: By the way, these are all Joan Crawford prototypes. I could pick a Joan Crawford movie that is the “entitled bitch”, that is the “uptight ice princess”. Crawford did them all. She practically invented them.

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Dynamic Duo #39

Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler, 1963

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