Cold War Tango

Posted on June 10, 2013 by sheila

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Henri Cartier-Bresson. Tallinn, Estonia. 1973. Two dancers training for a competition. Lenin approves.

Posted in Art/Photography | Tagged | 4 Comments

Laurel and Hardy, the Delicious Duo

Posted on June 10, 2013 by sheila

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Excerpt from Trav S.D.’s wonderful book Chain of Fools – Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to YouTube:

As a team, Laurel and Hardy played with audience’s expectations by ritualizing them, elaborating on them, embellishing them. They seemed to savor each moment, milk it, and wring every possible gag out of every situation. This is the word I would use for the duo: delicious. Even when I am not laughing I am filled with a pleasure from my head to my toes at the absolute poetry of their interplay. But times when I am not laughing at them are rare. As I said, Hardy is my favorite comedian, and Laurel, ironically the brains of the team, can’t help but impress me as well. Several of their shorts may be deemed among the funniest movies of all time, exceeding those of Chaplin and Keaton. The fact is, I laugh longer and harder at their films than anyone else’s, and by a wide margin. Further, as with Keaton, the formal beauty of some of their moments on film often approaches dance or music, and even may be said to possess profound meaning.

I am thinking primarily of one of their most commonly used comic devices, dubbed by the duo and their support team the “Tit-for-Tat”. It’s an old English expression meaning roughly the same as “measure for measure,” “an eye for an eye,” or “giving as good as you get.” By way of illustration one must unavoidably cite what may be their funniest movie (although it would be impossible to choose). In Big Business (1929), the pair are a couple of door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen who make the mistake of annoying Jimmy Finlayson one bright, sunny Southern California day. Fin slams the door in their faces, accidentally trapping a branch in the process. They irritate him some more by ringing the doorbell so they can free the tree, and then a kind of symbolic defilement happens as Laurel and Hardy proceed to destroy Fin’s house and all its contents, while Finlayson tears apart their automobile. By the end of the movie, all is rubble.

The humorous part of such exchanges is the veneer of civilization that governs them. It is a ritual, exactly like the chivalrous codes of a duel. One person stands and politely makes himself available as a target, while the other carefully takes aim and fires (or dumps a bowl of cake batter on his head, as the case may be). Often, as it is in Big Business, it is directed against a third party. Just as often, the boys engage in an internal quarrel and do it to each other. They each have their own style. When Hardy waits to “get his” he includes us, silently imploring “Isn’t this humiliating?” When Laurel waits he just stares vacantly at the ground like a cow or a mule, almost as though he’s already forgotten a scrap were in progress. When the deed is done, he merely blinks, the epitome of blankness. It’s a beautiful thing.

Laurel and Hardy’s greatest contribution to World Peace however is what I call the epidemic Tit-for-Tat. This is a sort of comical zombie apocalypse scenario where the battle starts with a couple of characters and spreads to the general population like a virus, culminating in great, glorious set pieces of comedy, truly spectacular moments of cinema. This interesting innovation seems to have begun with Hats Off (1927) , a lost film the first act of which was later remade as The Music Box (1932), substituting a piano for the washing machine in the original. The climax of the film had Laurel and Hardy mixing their hats up (as they would often do), then drawing another passerby in, and then another, until the entire street is full of mixed, discarded hats like some bloodless battlefield.

This was followed up with The Battle of the Century, a film justly renowned for showcasing the most epic pie fight ever recorded. How good is it? Let’s just say it’s impressive enough that even I like it, and I generally scorn pie fights, mostly due to the saturation and overexposure that has happened over the last century. In my view, a pie in the face ceased to be funny before your great grandfather was born. Buster Keaton agreed. When he started his solo contract in 1920 he vowed that there would be a moratorium on thrown pies; it was already a cliche by then. But Laurel and Hardy (and I of course include their directors, gagmen, and co-stars) made ballet out of a pie fight – as they did with all physical business. In The Battle of the Century, the boys accidentally cause a pie delivery man to get one right in the puss. In retaliation, he starts to heave his wares out of his truck, which is naturally lined with an impossible number of pies. Soon, everyone on the street is drawn into the melee. The entire block resembles a Tong War, the very atmosphere criss-crossed with airborne pies. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right, and that includes pie fights.

I love the guy who falls in the trash can, and I love the snooty woman looking through her lorgnette at the pie fight. She brings the lorgnette down for a split second and, of course, gets a pie in her face. She doesn’t react. She seems to be stunned. Then, she puts the lorgnette up again. It’s hilarious.

Humorously and coincidentally, only days before I read this passage I had said to some friends over drinks at the Algonquin Hotel that cinema today would greatly benefit from more pie fights. I want directors to feel free to have their actors throw more pies at one another. I’m dead serious. But Trav S.D.’s point is well taken!

His book is a wonderful sweeping (and yet detailed) look at silent comedies and the comedians who helped develop the form.

Posted in Books, Movies | Tagged | 8 Comments

The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Dylan’, by Hendrik Hertzberg and George Trow

Posted on June 9, 2013 by sheila

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Next up on the essays shelf:

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks) is a collection of “The Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker, grouped by decade, which is a lot of fun because you can see how the “voice” of the magazine developed, and how “The Talk of the Town” has grown and changed over the years.

In January of 1974, Bob Dylan and The Band played Madison Square Garden. They were on a brief tour (two months), and it was Dylan’s first tour since 1966 which took him around the world.

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So there was a great deal of curiosity about him, and all of those mixed emotions/expectations that seemed to dog Dylan no matter what he did. People wanted him to be their poster child. People wanted him to properly represent the nostalgia that they had for him. Obviously, Dylan never played the game that way. It’s probably one of the reasons why he kept growing and changing and developing as an artist (and continues to do so). If he had listened to his critics, and kept his career on a re-tread to satisfy the unimaginative earnest folk-singer types who never wanted him to change … then Dylan would have only had one season in the sun, as opposed to decades.

Of course you have to give a shit what the audience thinks of you. But honestly, you can’t care TOO much. Because often they don’t know what’s best for them, frankly. Often they are wrong in what they want from you. The anxiety about change is rich considering that he was representative of a “movement” that was all about change. But there was that undercurrent, dwelled upon in the Martin Scorsese doc, and elsewhere, of: If HE changes, then were they wrong about him in the first place? If HE changes, then does that mean I’m growing old and don’t “get it” now? If HE changes, then I don’t know what my life is about anymore. People placed so much importance on Bob Dylan. The noise surrounding Dylan, in this regard, has always been loud. People acted like it was a personal betrayal when he famously “went electric”. Now I’m no Dylan aficionado, unlike, say, Jonah Lehrer, but those who were disappointed on a personal level by Bob Dylan doing his own thing misunderstood his message in the first place. Misunderstood what he was all about. Doing what was expected would never have been what he was about! But this is the way the story goes with giant celebrities. It has always been the case. How much will audiences “take”? Do you expect them to follow you everywhere?

The 1974 tour was lucrative, involving sell-out shows, massive crowds, and intense media scrutiny.

This jointly-written Talk of the Town piece has a really interesting structure and is a fun dialectical piece, which gets at all of the things that were swirling around Dylan/The Band at that time, the stuff I mentioned before. Hendrik Hertzberg and George Trow sit down with two friends, one blond, and one dark-haired, both of whom were at the concert at Madison Square Garden. They both are asked to give their impressions of the concert. There is some disagreement, on a pretty basic level, about Bob Dylan as an artist. The blond one has some skepticism about Dylan, but maybe more so about his typical fans. This is a pretty funny statement: “I’ll tell you some people who weren’t there [at the concert]. There were no blacks there, and no transvestites, and there were very few people in embroidered jeans. Instead, there were extraordinary numbers of people who seemed to have come directly from registration at the New School. A very earnest group.” Ouch. The point the blond friend is making has to do with what she/he sees as Dylan’s lack of a sense of humor. The blond gets that there is irony in Dylan, but the humorlessness is why a more diverse audience stays away. The dark-haired person disagrees, admitting up front that he/she comes from a “Dylan-can-do-no-wrong angle”. The dark-haired person talks about Dylan’s elusive nature, how Dylan “manages to free himself from the expectations of his audience.” The suggestion appears to be that it is not Dylan’s problem, it is the problem with audience expectations (a concept that comes up again and again with Dylan). The dark-haired person was not crazy about the first half of the concert. He/she thought all the songs were played too fast, without any interpretation (or any that could be discerned or understood). However, the dark-haired person says that in retrospect the first half may be “a necessary softening-up process for both Dylan and the audience. The room was full of complicated yearnings, after all.”

The majority of this piece is made up of long quotes from these two people, and it’s a pleasure to read. “Complicated yearnings” is a hell of a line of dialogue.

Here is an excerpt where the dark-haired person talks about what happened during the second half of the concert.

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Dylan’, by Hendrik Hertzberg and George Trow

“And the second half of the concert?” we asked.

“Ah,” our dark-haired friend went on. “Dylan came out all alone, small and brave, with just his harmonica and his acoustic guitar. I was too far away to see the details of his face, but I could see his hair, curly and mousy, and that tense, crabbed stance. He sang ‘The Times They Are A-Changin” and ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ and ‘Gates of Eden’ – still too fast, still in that almost strangled high chant. Then, halfway through ‘Just Like a Woman,’ it started to get magical, and when he sang ‘It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ it all fell into place. He was still fooling with the melody, but with a purpose. I felt I was hearing that song for the first time instead of the thousandth. When he sang the line about ‘But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked,’ everyone cheered, of course, but they cheered even louder for the line ‘And it’s all right, Ma, I can make it.’ After The Band came back on again, he sang a couple of very pretty new songs, and then ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ People began streaming down the aisles, and everyone stood up – there was no particular cue; we just all stood up at once. Dylan’s accompaniment for the chorus was the whole audience – twenty thousand people singing ‘HOW DOES IT FEEL?’ at the top of their lungs. The houselights were turned on, so we could all see each other, and four huge klieg lights went on behind Dylan, making everything – Dylan, us, the music – seem half again as big. He did two encores: a reprise of ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine),’ much more melodic and accessible this time, and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ I’d never heard him sing it quite that way before. He never does anything the same way twice. His voice was clear, strong, and true. He pulled it off – he kept the myth intact.”

“Personally,” our blond friend said, “when it comes to mythic figures I prefer the ones like Elvis Presley, who stay mythic in spite of themselves. Dylan was never really a successful archetype, if you know what I mean. He was only someone who seemed to be somewhere we ought to be. That’s why people worried so much about his changes of style. People worried about where Dylan was and what he was doing because they wanted to know where they should be and what they should be doing. The style changes prophesied – falsely, perhaps, some kind of movement, and that mercurial quality of his appealed to our generation’s love of novelty. But now, you see, he has run out of ways to seem some distance ahead, and has fallen back on devices that will allow him to seem (at all but a few carefully chosen moments) some distance away. It’s a little sad to fight so hard for Mythic Distance.”

“But that’s precisely what I like about him,” said our dark-haired friend. “He lives by his wits.”

Posted in Books, Music | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

Review: The Kings of Summer

Posted on June 7, 2013 by sheila

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Two stars. It has some problems.

My review for Roger Ebert here.

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Review: The Internship

Posted on June 7, 2013 by sheila

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Loved it.

My review for Roger Ebert here.

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The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Elvis! David!’, by Hendrik Hertzberg

Posted on June 7, 2013 by sheila

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Next up on the essays shelf:

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks) is a collection of “The Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker, grouped by decade, which is a lot of fun because you can see how the “voice” of the magazine developed, and how “The Talk of the Town” has grown and changed over the years.

To Elvis fans, this essay is well-known because anything ever written about Elvis is well-known.

The “David” in the title refers to David Cassidy.

So let’s break it down.

Elvis burst onto the national scene in 1956 after becoming a regional phenomenon the year before. After signing with the Colonel (it was more a handshake-“you’re-my-guy” than a signing), Elvis started making television appearances. First came a series of spots on The Dorsey Brothers: these were Elvis’ first moments before a national audience. He’s wild in those spots. Much more wild than he would be only a couple of months later when he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. After The Dorsey Brothers came his infamous appearance on The Milton Berle Show which really started all of his trouble. He gyrated like a maniac at the prolonged half-time ending of “Hound Dog”, and the shit hit the fan. He was denounced from pulpits, from op-ed pages. Cops threatened to shut down his show in Florida. Riots broke out at shows. Elvis was forced to hide in the backstage restroom after a show in Florida, but the girls found him there anyway and began to tear his clothes off of him. All of this spooked Ed Sullivan. It spooked Steve Allen, too, who – notoriously, awfully – had Elvis on his show and proceeded to make a mockery of him, dressing him up in a tuxedo and forcing him to sing “Hound Dog” to an actual hound dog. Nobody knew what to do with Elvis. Well, the girls knew. They always knew.

In June of 1972, Elvis Presley returned to New York after a nearly 20-year hiatus (and he didn’t tour there originally, he appeared on TV shows there) to play Madison Square Garden. He played four sold-out shows, breaking the record at the time. After a decade of not touring in the 60s, he opened at the International Hotel in Las Vegas in 1969, which would become his home away from home until he died in 1977. People made pilgrimages to Vegas to see him whenever he played there. He always returned. Starting in the 70s, Elvis began to tour constantly. He would take a month off, and then go back on the road again. He played small towns, big ones, and re-traced his steps through the South and South-East, where he had made his initial impression on young audiences. But playing New York? That was a different thing altogether. (And we shouldn’t forget that playing Las Vegas was also daunting to Elvis. He had had a brief gig there in 1956 which did not go over well. The middle-aged high-brow audience sat back and clapped politely when Elvis was used to mayhem. He walked the streets at night in despair. He couldn’t win them over. They didn’t like him! All is lost!! Returning to Vegas in 1969 was a way to slay that dragon of memory. Elvis never forgot a slight. He had a long long memory.) And New York was the place that had welcomed him in 1956, including him on the big variety shows, but had also humiliated him (phone call for Steve Allen). He was condescended to in the press, sneered at, held in contempt. That was in 1956. And if you think that wasn’t still on Elvis’ mind in 1972 when he returned, then you don’t know your Elvis!

Interestingly enough (and Conan O’Brien and Peter Guralnick cover this in their conversation), it was only when Elvis became a national phenomenon that his problems with public-image began. All those snooty Northeast elites treating him like a hick from the cow pastures, a perfect example of the “tolerance” of liberals who don’t hesitate to sneer at those with Southern accents. Tolerance, my ass. Elvis was very aware of all of that, and over the years his accent slowly disappeared, or at least lost its chewy edge. The overriding feeling in 1956 was: “Well, of course the hicks and hillbillies love you, you’re one of them, but this is New York, son, we have higher standards up here.”

It’s all rather gross and disheartening and still goes on, to some degree. Elvis was a flashpoint for all of that regional and class prejudice (not to mention race prejudice).

In some ways, this Talk of the Town piece, from June, 1972, detailing two concerts which occurred in New York City almost back to back (Elvis at Madison Square Garden, and David Cassidy at Nassau Coliseum), is about how Girls Know a Good Thing When They See It.

Guralnick and O’Brien did not touch upon my theory that much of the dismissiveness and condescension that Elvis still receives critically is due to the fact that his core audience was screaming women. Women just don’t seem as “serious” as men, it’s all rather silly, what women do when they go crazy for a star, isn’t it, tut-tut … if only men were also fans, then he could be seen as serious. (Of course Elvis had male fans, he always had, but the girls made more noise.) Now, granted, some men have a blindspot about such issues. The male experience is seen as The Default in our culture. It just is. But when women decide to love someone? They can move mountains. They can make people stars. Get out of the damn way.

Obviously, David Cassidy’s solo star did not shine as brightly as Elvis Presley’s. There are many many many stars who blaze across the covers of Tiger Beat for a season only to disappear when their fan base graduates to 9th grade. He was one of those. Although he did come back to Broadway to star in Blood Brothers, with his brother Shaun Cassidy and Petula Clark – and my aunt Regina was in that show! I met the Cassidy brothers! And Petula Clark. So he’s still out there. Nostalgia will carry him a long way. Interestingly enough, I Googled to check out any reviews of that Cassidy concert at Nassau Coliseum and the first thing that came up was an essay by my old blog-buddy Michele Catalano (she who organized the Sacks for Sandy wrapping party I attended). Michele Catalano was remembering her first concert, which was, unbelievably, that David Cassidy concert. I love her memory of it, how she tried to remain distant and “cool”, only to find herself screaming like a banshee.

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Elvis’ return to New York was a major media event. Of course there were no personal interviews with The King (there never were), but he did hold a press conference which has to be seen to be believed. WORK that crowd, country boy. He looks amazing, he’s funny, he’s intelligent, and in a couple of more awkward moments (when reporters ask him about the Vietnam War or his opinion on the women’s movement) he gently steers them off that course: “I’m an entertainer, honey,” he says to one woman. Brilliant.

You’d never know that that man at that press conference was terrified, terrified of being rejected and sneered at. Well, we all know what happened. He was a triumph. Not just with fans but with the press, many of whom were getting their first look at him live, ever.

Recently, a box set called Prince From Another Planet was released, with re-mastered great-sounding recordings of all four shows Elvis did at Madison Square Garden. Of course, tracks had been released before, but the sound here is now pristine. You feel like you are at the concert. Elvis sounds incredible.

And he looked amazing too.

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The “Talk of the Town” report on these two concerts – one from a guy almost 20 years into his stardom, and one from a guy just hitting it big – is very interesting. During the David Cassidy section, the author says that Cassidy doesn’t seem to take it all too seriously, and neither do the girls in the audience. That’s what these serious worry-warts don’t understand. Stop condescending to girls about what they choose to love, and how they choose to express their passion. Stop worrying about what it all means. These figures are fantasy-figures to girls, and girls love to let those fantasies out, love to scream and go mad. People still worry about the downfall of society when girls, en masse, decide to love something.

At the start, you can see some of that New York attitude in evidence (although the comedian who opened for Elvis did bomb, that’s a fact). There is some confusion about Elvis’ gigantic operation, the orchestra, the chorus, all that. This was common for many of the members of the press, who had memories of Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show with two or three guys behind him, and that was it. Who was this new Superman-figure, with a cape, and glitter, and a horn section?

What I love about this excerpt, though, is the comments included by the author’s “companion”. And there are some very interesting observations here about Elvis’ conscious manipulation of his own persona, his awareness of what was expected of him, and his sense of humor in offering it up (or not offering it up). Elvis knew what he was doing. I sense a tone of surprise in this line: “it became impossible to avoid the conclusion that he is a consummate professional”. Again, that has to be taken in context. Of course Elvis was a professional, Jeez, right? But if you think of 1972, if you think of the fact that Elvis was relatively new to the concert-touring circuit, if the majority of regular people out there knew him from his movies and the soundtracks … then yes, a feeling of surprise of how in CHARGE he was makes a lot of sense. Remember, the Beatles were out there in the world, the Rolling Stones were out there in the world. Elvis had been confined to the drive-in movie screens for almost 10 years. And unless you made the trek to Vegas, how would you ever see the guy? This is pre-Youtube-clips. In 1972, Elvis’ status was unquestionable, but seeing him live had to be absolutely overwhelming.

Here’s an excerpt.

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Elvis! David!’, by Hendrik Hertzberg

A lot was wrong with Elvis Presley’s first-ever New York appearance, at Madison Square Garden last weekend. Somebody in the Presley organization misjudged the desires of the crowd, and as a result Elvis was preceded by a standup comedian called Jackie Kahane. No doubt Mr. Kahane’s patter knocks ’em dead inVegas, but New York is not Vegas and the Garden is not a night club. “Kids today …” said Mr. Kahane gamely, and lamely, as the audience clapped in unison. “I have a kid. Everything this kid eats turns to hair.” He was finally booed off the stage. There was fault to find with Elvis’s own performance as well. Instead of a rhythm section to back him up, he had a twenty-three-piece orchestra, a six-man rock band, and an eight-member chorus – a bit too much insurance, even for the Garden. The program was rigidly arranged and planned, allowing for little in the way of spontaneity, and it consisted largely of romantic ballads and sugary, easy-listening songs. The classics that most of the audience had come to hear – “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Hound Dog” – occupied only fifteen minutes of a fifty-minute program. The blandness was conceptual as well as musical, as when Elvis sang a non-controversial medley of “Dixie,” “All My Trials”, and “Battle Hymn of the Republic”. The gyrations that made the man famous were seldom in evidence. Instead, he offered a repertoire of stereotyped actions and heroic poses.

Oddly, none of this made any difference. The audience was ecstatic throughout. (It would have been ecstatic even if Elvis had sung nothing but Gregorian chants.) During the intermission before Elvis’s appearance, our companion, a young woman who still has her Elvis scrapbook packed away in a trunk somewhere, told us a story that made it all quite comprehensible. “When I was twelve years old,” she said, “I was riding in the car with my mother and brother, and a song called ‘I Want, I Need You, I Love You’ came on the radio. I immediately felt a certain twinge. My mother said, ‘This is that Elvis Presley they’re all talking about. I don’t see what all the fuss is about.’ My brother said the same thing. I just sat on the back seat and didn’t say anything. You see, I did know what all the fuss was about.”

The lights went down, the orchestra struck up what used to be called “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and is now called “The Theme from ‘2001,’” the audience began a full-throated scream, and Elvis appeared. He looked magnificent. His coal-black hair was fuller and drier than in days of old, and he wore a fantastical white costume studded with silver. He strolled back and forth on the stage, accepting the plaudits of the crowd like a Roman emperor. He looked like an apparition, and this was appropriate, because he has been a figure of fantasy for seventeen years. As the performance went on, it became impossible to avoid the conclusion that he is a consummate professional. He never cut loose, but he did not have to. The slightest gesture of his hand, the smallest inclination of his head set off waves of screams from the favored direction. The greatest ovation, except for the one that attended his initial appearance, came when he went into the first of his old songs, “Love Me.” “Treat me like a fool,” he sang. “Treat me mean an’ crool, but love me.”

Throughout, Elvis maintained a certain ironic distance from it all, sometimes engaging in a bit of self-parody. At the beginning of “Hound Dog,” for example, he posed dramatically on one knee, said, “Oh, excuse me,” and switched to the other knee. But he manifestly enjoyed the audience’s enjoyment, even as he indicated with a smile here and a gesture there that it all had less to do with him than with their idea of him. On our way out, we asked our companion if she had liked the show. “It was bliss,” she said. “I haven’t felt so intensely thirteen since – well, since I was thirteen.”

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“From the very beginning, [Elvis] was a conscious creative artist. He knew what he wanted to achieve.” – Peter Guralnick

Posted on June 4, 2013 by sheila

Well worth the time: Conan O’Brien talks to music historian/Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick about Elvis. Of course, they both dis the movies in the 60s, and I have made myself clear numerous times about my feelings about that (here’s just one example), but that’s a typical thing, seems to be the accepted view of things. I am determined to help change that, in my own small way. But that’s a minor disappointment. This is a rich and fascinating conversation, by two men who really know their topic. And better than know it, they love it.

Listen to how people talk when they talk about Elvis. Listen to the familiarity, the affection, the sadness at what-might-have-been. It’s an extraordinary connection he had with his fans. Guralnick talks about Elvis’ earliest recordings, the very beginning, in 1953, 1954. And while Elvis may not have been able to play the guitar (he really couldn’t, not then), and while there may have been better singers (there were), what he had was the ability to communicate.

And that is something that cannot be taught. Or, perhaps it can. Harry Connick sure gave it a try in his most recent coaching gig on American Idol. Those kids may be able to hit high notes and fly up and down the scale, but they do not know what they are singing about, they don’t care either (a sin, in the Religion of Art), and have no idea that what their job is, what their job REALLY is, is to communicate. In order to do that, you need to know what you are singing, and why. It’s very simple. Sorry you missed the memo. (I think of Taylor Hicks singing “Living for the City” as though it was a party song, as though “whoo-hoo, gonna have a great time in the city tonight” was the message of the song. The song is a raging furious indictment of racism, bigotry, and oppression. Take that smile off your face, Hicks. I can’t watch that performance without getting angry.)

You think Etta James is great just because of her voice? You’re wrong. It’s because of her ability to communicate WITH her voice. Plenty of people have good voices. Dime a dozen. Listen to the great performances. Watch Judy Garland sing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” on her TV show, and watch what it means to communicate. You don’t even need to know the backstory, that JFK had just been shot, although knowing that is fascinating context. But even without that, her emotions and her need to say something are poured into her tiny quivering frame and it takes everything she’s got, every bit of her life experience, her career experience, her show-biz chops, to get it OUT of her. Without falling apart. Falling apart, though, is not her job. She would fail if she fell apart. The need to communicate something is larger than her need to have a small private experience of grief and loss. She knows that. So watch.

What she does with her voice is extraordinary, but you could turn the sound down on that performance and watch it as a silent movie and STILL get what she was trying to communicate.

I wrote a bit of a manifesto on this topic. Interestingly enough, it started with an American Idol “performance” and led to Elvis Presley.

It’s called It’s Got To Cost You Something. If you are not willing to pay the price, in gesture, commitment, openness, then you have no business asking us to take time out of our lives to watch you.

More than anything else, I would say that if you want to be a performer, then you must be willing to leave something of yourself up there on that stage. And you have to know that you won’t get it back, but also, that there is more to give. Give it away. You won’t get it back. But give it away. That’s your job.

Elvis knew that from the start.

If you have the time, please watch this fascinating conversation between Conan and Guralnick. It’s a goldmine.

Posted in Music | Tagged | 19 Comments

Stuff I’ve Been Reading

Posted on June 4, 2013 by sheila

– I have been loving my friend Dennis’ dispatches from the TCM Classic Movie festival. I want to go to that one someday, maybe next year. Please read this post, about seeing Deliverance (and all the main players were there). Dennis is such a good writer.

– A really interesting piece by Glenn Kenny, about the recent brou-haha surrounding the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, Blue is the Warmest Color. Kenny hasn’t seen the film, but he’s talking about the controversy among critics.

— I love this Mother’s Day Elvis piece by my pal, Troy, over at the great Mystery Train. It starts: “I am a second-generation Elvis fan.”

— After a long hiatus, Hyperbole and a Half is back, with the second part of her Depression series. I can say, without too much exaggeration, that that is one of the best pieces about Depression I’ve ever read. That is what it is like. If you suffer, and someone doesn’t “get it”, just send them that link. And here is part 1.

— I absolutely love Messy Nessy Chic’s Historical Sass series. I just fall into those pictures!

— “The mantis shrimp is the harbinger of blood-soaked rainbows.”

— Manhattan Thoughts on a Hot Evening: The Self-Styled Siren showing why she is one of the best writers (and thinkers) out there.

— My dear friend Alex just graduated from grad school and I could not be more proud of her. Please read this recent extraordinary essay called “Seeing Reba”. She always makes me cry.

— My great friend Cara Ellison just moved to England. One of the first things she did upon disembarking from the plane was to attend the Sylvia Plath’s Ariel performance, with different actresses reading through the posthumously published Ariel. The event was hosted by Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s daughter with Ted Hughes. Here is Cara’s wonderful post about it.

— I have been having a lot of fun reading all of the great tributes out there to the great Jean Stapleton, who just passed away at the age of 90. My God, what a talent. I very much enjoyed this LA Times appreciation of her. I will never forget seeing the episode “Edith’s 50th Birthday” when I was a kid. It was overwhelming. A man attempted to rape Edith Bunker, in her own home. I have seen the episode since, and it is still overwhelming. The acting is so good that it has to represent some kind of high watermark for television sit-coms. I’m still blown away by it.

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The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Beckett’, by Jane Kramer

Posted on June 3, 2013 by sheila

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Next up on the essays shelf:

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks) is a collection of “The Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker, grouped by decade, which is a lot of fun because you can see how the “voice” of the magazine developed, and how “The Talk of the Town” has grown and changed over the years.

A fantastic meeting of the minds, in 1964, and Jane Kramer was there to observe and report in this great “Talk of the Town” piece.

Samuel Beckett, by the 1960s, was famous and already famously reclusive. You could not get him for an interview. He never spoke of his work. His plays, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, in the 50s, had announced him as a new and important voice, avant-garde, pulsating with ominous significance and existential angst, which was a reflection of the anxieties of the post-War world. (Although you’d never get him to say something like that.) They’re great plays. If you know anything about Beckett then you probably know that he has one of the more draconian Estates out there (comparable to Joyce’s, although even more so). If you do a Beckett play, you do Beckett’s version, otherwise you do not do it. He kept tight control over all of his works, and that control has continued after his death. It has led to some interesting battles.

BUT. Let me get to this “Talk of the Town” piece. Beckett’s American publisher Barney Rosset set up a subsidiary company called Evergreen Theatre, where the playwrights/screenwriters he represented could make their short films. It was all very exciting, and vaguely European. The studio system was collapsing, European films were filling the art-houses of America, and the public was eager for something different, challenging. Of course they were all still flocking to the drive-ins to see stuff like this, but there was this whole other underground starting to burgeon and flourish. Mr. Rosset, and his Evergreen Theatre, had big plans. They were going to film three short works by three giants of the day: Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter. And Samuel Beckett’s Film was the first one they shot. (And, if I’m not mistaken, the only one. They spent a lot of money, and lost a lot of money.)

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An awesome team was put together. Alan Schneider, a big-wig theatre director and member of the Actors Studio, was the director. He had directed a ton of Beckett’s theatrical productions. The great Boris Kaufman was the director of photography. A young guy named Joe Coffey was the cameraman, and he would go on to shoot Kramer vs. Kramer, Fame, The Cotton Club, Birdy. And they convinced the legendary Buster Keaton to take the lead role of “O”. (Keaton was not their first choice. Beckett wanted Zero Mostel.) Buster Keaton, by the mid-60s, was appearing in all of these Bikini Beach Blanket movies, an exercise in absurdity if ever there was one. But hey, a job’s a job, and Keaton was nothing if not practical. Beckett maintained control over what was happening. Schneider was his “eye”, but it was Beckett’s vision that was to be expressed.

They shot in New York City, and it was deathly hot, and Keaton had a lot of exterior business, running through a junky vacant lot. Much has been made of Keaton’s oblivious attitude towards pain. He either had a high tolerance for it, or pain didn’t register to him at all. He began his career as a wee tot, being man-handled and thrown about on vaudeville stages by his father. His father would pick up the kid and throw him into the orchestra pit. The audiences roared. Keaton’s poker-face developed early, and was always part of his strange otherworldly presence. It was a blank face and so you could project emotions onto it. He did not insist on his own interpretation. I find much of his stuff to be damn-near tragic, but that could just be my own projection. That’s the beauty of it.

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Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett

There’s a great piece by Kevin Brownlow about an interview he got with Beckett, about Film, and Brownlow knew that this was a rare opportunity indeed. Beckett never talked to no one about nothin’. There’s some great stuff there, and some great anecdotes about Keaton during the 1964 filming of Film, like this, from Beckett on Keaton:

His movement was excellent – covering up the mirror, putting out the animals – all that was very well done. To cover the mirror, he took his big coat off and he asked me what he was wearing underneath. I hadn’t thought of that. I said “the same coat” He liked that.

I like that, too! Keaton would be dead in two years.

Film is only 17 minutes long. It is about a man who fears being perceived. He cringes away from being seen. He wears a scarf over his face. He turns his pets’ heads away from him. He puts a blanket over the mirror. We know that it is Buster Keaton in this film, and we don’t see his face until the final moments. That seems to me to be a shame – depriving us of his face – but it’s part of the big reveal at the end. There’s some wonderful bits of business. I love the bit about him putting the cat and dog out of the room, in particular.

I’ve always been a bit confused at people who find Beckett un-clear, or ambiguous. His stuff has always seemed straight-up clear to me (and sometimes even obvious). Especially this film with Keaton. It seems totally obvious to me what is going on, it’s all there in Keaton’s body language, the camera placement, and the progression of events.

You can view the film here.

Beckett – Film (1964) from Luigi Morganti on Vimeo.

So Jane Kramer, writer for The New Yorker, heard that Beckett was in town for the shoot, and they were filming in a studio on the upper East Side. She went and visited the set. There is one exterior shot, and then the majority of the film takes place in the bleakest apartment known to man. (It reminds me of This Gun for Hire and Le Samourai, with the pets, the bird in the cage, the bleak surroundings.) Kramer sat on the sidelines and talked to Beckett a little bit, and watched the filming.

It is an indelible snapshot of two gigantic characters of the 20th century, Beckett and Keaton, and I am grateful that it exists.

I will excerpt a bit from the end.

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Beckett’, by Jane Kramer

Schneider strode by and off the set, and we followed. We asked him about the film.

“It’s really quite a simple thing,” he said. “It’s a movie about the perceiving eye, about the perceived and the perceiver – two aspects of the same man. The perceiver desires like mad to perceive, and the perceived tries desperately to hide. Then, in the end, one wins.”

We asked Mr. Schneider who did win, and he said that he thought the perceiver won. “You know, people come in here and ask Sam ‘What do you mean?’, trying to make him something obscure, befuddling, inscrutable. Well, I think he’s the most crystal-clear poet – notice, I say poet – writing today. ‘Godot’? ‘Endgame’? They’re lucid. Maybe it’s just that we’re afraid to hear what they’re trying to say.”

Mr. Schneider strode on, and we turned back to Mr. Beckett, who was listening to a young woman from the studio. “Sam, the teen-agers love your novel ‘Murphy’,” she said. “They laugh and laugh.”

Beckett smiled. “Well, it’s my easiest book, I guess,” he said. He then told the woman that he was returning to Paris, where he lives, as soon as the film is finished.

“You should have been around for the exteriors,” said Coffey, who had walked over to the crate. “We shot under the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was perfect. The street we were on was semi-demolished and desolate. It looked as though the street was all that existed, all there was – a world blocked off.”

Beckett nodded in agreement. “Pearl Street, it was,” he said.

Coffey edged away from the crate and beckoned to us. “You know, Sam’s incredible,” he said. “He grasps his own work visually. He can think cinematically. He spotted Pearl Street as the place right away, when we were driving around.”

Coffey looked admiringly over at Beckett, who was now engrossed in wordless conversation with Mr. Keaton. Keaton, with a disarming dead pan, was digging into one of his trouser pockets, looking for change. He dug deeper and deeper, through the proverbial hole in the pocket and straight down to the cuff. Upon reaching the cuff, he pulled out a quarter, held it up triumphantly, and handed it to Beckett. Beckett threw back his head and laughed.

“Sam, they released ‘The General’ again, you know, with foreign subtitles,” Keaton said at last, in a low, gravelly voice. “It went all over Europe, and all of a sudden everybody loved it. A German lady even sent me flowers.” He paused thoughtfully. “Now, why couldn’t she have sent them forty years ago?”

Beckett laughed again. “You could’ve used them then.”

“O.K., let’s go, Buster!” Schneider called, as Kaufman wheeled the camera into place for another take.

Beckett left his crate. He reappeared a moment later on the scaffolding, looking over a makeshift rail, chin in hand.

Keaton, his face averted, was groping along the wall, clutching the green blanket. When he reached the mirror, he flung the blanket over it, blocking out all reflection.

“Cut!” called Schneider. “How was that? All right, Sam?”

“Exactly,” Beckett said quietly.

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The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Nichols, May, and Horses’, by John McCarten

Posted on June 2, 2013 by sheila

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Next up on the essays shelf:

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks) is a collection of “The Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker, grouped by decade, which is a lot of fun because you can see how the “voice” of the magazine developed, and how “The Talk of the Town” has grown and changed over the years.

The comedy duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May casts a long shadow. They met at the University of Chicago in the 1950s (Nichols tells a very funny story about the first time he saw her: he was in some Shakespeare production, and he was very bad, and the show was bad, and he remembers looking out and seeing this girl in the front row with a gloriously contemptuous look of hatred on her face, hatred for the entire endeavor. That was his first sighting of the woman who would be his comedy soulmate.) They performed in the burgeoning Chicago comedy scene, with people who would eventually be legends, like Del Close. They performed in ensemble comedy teams, and trios, but it was immediately apparent that the two of them had a chemistry that needed no other characters. They were a natural duo.

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The Chicago scene can be pretty macho (then and now), and women often found themselves on the periphery, playing support staff to the more aggressive males. Seriously: go to an improv show now in Chicago and you’ll see some of that going on. In her book, Tina Fey writes about her first season on Saturday Night Live and how, during rehearsal, it was decided that one of the male cast members would play a female in a scene. Tina Fey was like, “What is wrong with this picture. There are women in this cast. This has got to change.” It did. But stuff like that needed to be addressed, and still does.

In that world, Mike Nichols and Elaine May were drawn to one another like magnets, and what they were able to create together helped change the world of comedy. They were totally cool, first of all: a harbinger of what was to come in the culture. They were young, beautiful, and totally insane. It was modern, what they were doing. One would almost say it was ahead of its time, although that isn’t strictly true. Chicago has long and deep sketch-comedy roots and there was a whole community of people experimenting with form and structure (now familiar to all of us, because of things like Second City and Saturday Night Live). But there was something interesting, fresh, and modern about a male and female making comedy together. George Burns and Gracie Allen set the standard. Mike Nichols and Elaine May took it into the Modern Age.

They came up in the Golden Age of Television, when people like Steve Allen and Ed Sullivan highlighted comedians on their popular TV shows. Nichols and May’s sketches were character-based, rather than a series of one-liners. They set up situations and then let them play out and still, to this day, they are not only uproariously funny, but psychologically acute. They don’t make you think so much as they make you gasp, “Ohhhhh. I know this. This is so true.”

It’s perfect. A perfect progression.

In the late 50s, the duo appeared on the Steve Allen Show. They began touring. Their popularity grew. They put out one album, and then put together a show of all of their sketches called An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, which premiered on Broadway in 1960. It was a smash hit. The recording of that Broadway show was nominated for a Grammy.

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This “Talk of the Town” piece is from 1960, during the Broadway debut of the comedy duo. John McCarten meets up with both of them at the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden. I’m posting just a small excerpt of what is a highly entertaining piece, where you can sense the loopy wit of these two, their irrepressible comedic sensibilities (every single moment is an opportunity for some wisecrack), and the appeal they must have had to the public at the time. I wish I had been around for that first wave. You must have sensed that something new, something fresh, was coming down the pike. Harbingers of the future.

For example: watch what happens in the excerpt below. It’s improvisational in nature: this is not scripted dialogue. But there’s a joke to be made, and Elaine May, watching, listening, responding, is aware that a “button” needs to happen on the little “scene”, and her final comment is that “button”. She was willing to wait for it. She knew her time would come.

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Nichols, May, and Horses’, by John McCarten

Having read in the program of the show called “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May” that Mr. Nichols had represented the United States on an Olympic equestrian team, we suggested last week that the partners join us at a session of the National Horse Show, at Madison Square Garden. When we met them at the entrance to the place, Mr. Nichols was quick to inform us that he hadn’t been on any equestrian team in any Olympics, and Miss May told us that whatever interest she’d once had in horses had ended when she fell off one a couple of years ago on a Central Park bridle path and twisted all kinds of ligaments in her left arm.

“The horse was just walking,” Miss May said, “and I kind of slid off him, and you should have seen the hurt look he gave me.”

“Nobody ever falls off a walking horse,” said Mr. Nichols. “You could fall down on the floor more easily than you could fall off a walking horse.”

“Look,” said Miss May. “I fell off this horse, and he was embarrassed, and I was embarrassed, and so there. I had my arm in a cast for a long time.”

Mr. Nichols, a blond and most amiable young man of twenty-nine, conceded the fall, and Miss May, who is brunette, rosy, and ebullient, seemed pleased.

“Now, about this Olympic business,” we said.

“Oh, that,” Mr. Nichols observed. “You see, when the program said that Elaine is a distant cousin of Ed Sullivan – we’re all cousins if you take it right back to Adam – I thought it would be only fair for me to look pretty distinguished, too. Actually, I’ve known quite a few horses in my day, and I’ve ridden in horse shows in Chicago. I don’t want to put on any side, but I was an instructor at the Claremont Riding Academy, up on West Eighty-ninth Street, when I was going to high school in Manhattan.”

“It was one of those Claremont horses I fell off,” said Miss May.

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