Memo from Casablanca producer Hal Wallis to Max Steiner, composer:
On the Marseilles, when it is played in the Cafe, don’t do it as though it was played by this small orchestra. Do it with a full scoring orchestra and get some body to it.
They don’t make producers like that any more, folks.
It is one of the greatest scenes ever filmed. Without it, Ilse’s choice of men at the end might not make sense. You can already see the choice she will make in this scene. And so much of the power of the scene has to do with the giant almost martial swell of sound that erupts when the bar starts singing the Marseilles en masse.
Aljean Harmetz, author of The Making of Casablanca, writes:
Of the seventy-five actors and actresses who had bit parts and larger roles in Casablanca, almost all were immigrants of one kind or another. Of the fourteen who were given screen credit, only Humphrey Bogart, Dooley Wilson, and Joy Page were born in America. Some had come for private reasons. Ingrid Bergman, who would lodge comfortably in half a dozen countries and half a dozen languages, once said that she was a flyttfagel, one of Sweden’s migratory birds. Some, including Sydney Greenstreet and Claude Rains, wanted richer careers. But at least two dozen were refugees from the stain that was spreading across Europe. There were a dozen Germans and Austrians, nearly as many French, the Hungarians SZ Sakall and Peter Lorre, and a handful of Italians.
“If you think of Casablanca and think of all those small roles being played by Hollywood actors faking the accents, the picture wouldn’t have had anything like the color and tone it had,” says Pauline Kael.
Dan Seymour remembers looking up during the singing of the Marseillaise and discovering that half of his fellow actors were crying. “I suddenly realized that they were all real refugees,” says Seymour.
Madeleine Lebeau shouting “VIVA LA FRANCE” at the end, in tears, gives me goosebumps every time. Remember: she was a glorified extra and she got a closeup like that. Very rare. She had one scene with Bogart, as his upset lover, where he blew her off. But her real moment was at the end of the anthems. You got the sense her character was an opportunist, at first, willing to flirt with a Nazi to make Bogart mad. But during the national anthem, her true feelings exploded. She is the representation of every refugee in that room, every refugee fleeing through Europe at the very moment the movie was being filmed. Devastated, furious, and determined. Her heart-broken yet courageous shot is the button on the whole scene. Michael Curtiz knew what he was doing.
Here is the “dueling anthems” clip.
Listen for that “unrealistic” symphonic orchestra swelling. And take a moment to bow, with respect, towards Hal Wallis.
And keep a thought reserved for refugees everywhere.
I have some huge gaps in my reading history – and one of them is mid-late 20th century American authors. I have read Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger, Flannery O’Connor. But I have not read Philip Roth, I have not read John Updike (although maybe I read Witches of Eastwick, can’t remember), I have not read Saul Bellow. I am not particularly proud of this, it’s just one of those gaps that I become aware of from time to time. Like when I realized, “Why have I not read ANY Evelyn Waugh? This must be rectified.” I’m pretty good with the 19th century writers, and excellent with the modernists, and early 20th century people. I pick up the trail in the 80s and 90s. I love John Irving. I’ve read Don DeLillo, Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy. I don’t enjoy trendy fiction, so I tend to stay away from flavors-of-the-month unless they come highly recommended from a specific source (I don’t take book recs from just anyone.) You know, life is not particularly long and I am a giant and voracious reader, but even I miss stuff. Besides, I get on tangents that sometimes take up years of my life. For one entire year I read everything I could get my hands on about Central Asia. This year, I have read 10 books about Elvis (maybe more). So my ongoing Must-Read-Someday list gets put off. I have to go which way the wind takes me. However: Philip Roth haunts me. Saul Bellow haunts me. My brother loves Thomas Pynchon and I suppose I should give it a go, although Pynchon doesn’t quite haunt me in the same way. I have a feeling I will LOVE Saul Bellow. That’s the problem. I wish there were two or three of me. I could sic my second self on the novels of Saul Bellow, while my first self loses herself in every Elvis memoir ever written. But such is the life of a big reader.
Saul Bellow is so omnipresent in our culture that he is used as a reference point constantly, which shows his pioneering style and accomplishments (another reason to freakin’ read the guy already). I have assimilated him and what he is about through osmosis, but that is not enough. It would be like hearing the word “Joycean” thrown around every other day (as you do), and knowing what it means – even if you haven’t read a word of James Joyce. Sheila not down with that! I like to know things first-hand.
Joan Acocella’s essay on Saul Bellow just exacerbates the issue. Published in The New Yorker in 2003, it heralds the publication of Saul Bellow: Novels 1956-1964: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog (Library of America), the Library of America’s edition of the early novels of Saul Bellow (only the second time that the Library of America chose a living author to highlight). What is interesting and great about Acocella’s piece is that she analyzes Bellow’s development through his first two novels (Dangling Man and The Victim), pointing out their shortcomings and their strengths, theorizing that he was just gathering his forces, casting out his net for his voice, his “way in”, until finally he hit paydirt with The Adventures of Augie March. Acocella walks us through that process (and you know I’m all about process). What happens when a writer (seemingly) suddenly finds himself? What happens when he finds the confidence to let it all hang out? AND … what is it about Saul Bellow’s work that is so important, so ground-breaking, so essential to understanding the American experience?
I’ll get to Bellow one day. I can’t have him haunting me forever.
[Bellow], too, was a second-generation Jew, and he was entering a field, the English-language novel, in which Jews were felt to have no place. (When, after graduating from Northwestern, in 1937, he was thinking of doing graduate study in English, the chairman of the department said to him what Allbee says to Harkavy: “You weren’t born to it.” Do something else.) Today, Philip Roth can fill a novel with Newark Jews and posit their generational history as the story of America – indeed, call the book American Pastoral – and we don’t blink an eye. But such a situation was unforeseen in the 1940s. In that context, it was courageous of Bellow, who longed to enter the big leagues, to make anti-Semitism the subject of his second novel, but the only way he could see to do it was by imitating European models: Dostoevsky (the interiority, the Devil, the double), Flaubert (the factuality, the polished sentences). When he was older, he described both The Victim and The Dangling Man as “victim literature”, by which he meant that he was victimized, by his insecurities, as a Jewish nobody from Chicago: “I was restrained, controlled, demonstrating that I could write ‘good’.”
But he didn’t know that in 1947. All he knew was that he was vaguely dissatisfied with The Victim, and crushed by its poor sales. Then his luck changed. Viking, a prestigious firm, came after him, and offered him a flattering three-thousand-dollar advance on his next novel. He also won a Guggenheim fellowship, after having been turned down twice. He and his wife decided to spend the fellowship year in Europe. In 1948, they moved to France, where Bellow applied himself to a new book, called The Crab and the Butterfly. Only one chapter of that novel survives. According to James Atlas’s biography of Bellow, it is a bleak narrative about two men talking to each other from adjacent beds in a Chicago hospital. Bellow was soon having trouble with it. Furthermore, he hated Paris. The weather was gray; the French were snotty. “I was terribly depressed,” he said.
Then, as he recalled, he experienced an epiphany: “I had a room in Paris where I was working, and one day as I was going there after breakfast, a bright spring morning, I saw water trickling down the street and sparkling.” The shining stream, he said, suggested to him the form of a new novel. Perhaps so, but a few other circumstances should be taken into account. This was the time, the postwar years, when American art came into its home country. Not just Bellow but many others walked out from under the shadow of the European masters and invented new, personal styles. Bellow was part of a Zeitgeist, and the stay in Europe encouraged his enlistment. The more he hated France, the more he loved America, and wanted to make an art that was like America – big and fresh and loud.
Furthermore, he had received a great deal of encouragement. When he was starting out, Bellow was friendly with New York’s intellectual community, both the Partisan Review crowd and a more louche gang in Greenwich Village. These people, many of whom were Jewish, and pained at the exclusion of Jews from America’s mainstream intellectual life, were very impressed by Bellow – by his brio, his erudition, his ambition, his seeming confidence. “He examined Hemingway’s style like a surgeon pondering another surgeon’s stitches,” Alfred Kazin remembered. The New York crowd stumped for him. When I read what Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about The Victim in Partisan Review – “It would be hard to think of any young writer who has a better chance than Bellow to become the redeeming novelist of the period” – it seems to me that she is hoping as much as describing. Manhattan’s young literati desperately wanted a redeeming novelist to rise from their ranks, and they all but begged Bellow to take the job.
Finally, simply, the time had come. For years, Bellow had been old; now, in his thirties, he could be young. He laid The Crab and the Butterfly aside and started a new novel, The Adventures of Augie March. He wrote the first half very quickly, revising little. “The book just came to me,” he said. “All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.”
Built after the devastating hurricane of 1938, which wiped out the entire town (and nearly the whole state of Rhode Island), it has stood all these years, withstanding the battery of countless storms and surf. But Hurricane Sandy, with the perfect-storm combination of a record-breaking storm surge, high tide, and a full moon, broke that sea wall. Giant chunks of concrete were blown back in huge geometric rectangles, like a cracked monolith. It’s amazing to see the little beach houses on stilts that did survive (although many of them are gone, too) – and imagine the strength and power of that surf to break thick concrete. There were men out there in the cold brisk day, working to fix our sea wall. I thank them.
She cannot be killed. She refuses to be killed. Every day is a struggle to protect this part of me.
I am thankful for the strength I have found over my life to keep protecting that joyous inner person, that dramatic obsessive spirit who trucks in fantasy and wish-fulfillment, dreams and art, not as an escape, but as a valid way to pass my time on this planet. Survival is the only thing that matters.
I’ve got excellent survival skills. I have depressive tendencies, but I also have firm boundaries. I know what is helpful, and I know what is harmful. I rarely mistake one for the other.
I have many things to be thankful for. I have an awesome family, great friends, and my career is taking off. But today I am thankful that I have had the strength and the gumption to make it my business, my only business, to protect that which is beautiful in me, that which is joyous, free, and hopeful. It has not been easy and I have not always been successful. But I will never lose that fight in an end-game way. I will never be submerged completely in the wave of evidence pushing me to drown in loss, regret, grief. Not now. Not ever.
Because that girl on the hill, by herself, in her Hi-top sneakers and corduroys, throwing her arms in the air, living out her fantasy of being Maria von Trapp (that isn’t a cow field near my house, those are the Alps, don’t you know), is me. There is no difference between that picture then and who I am now. I have more miles on me, sure. I have had to fight harder to stay in the dream, to “keep swimming” (thank you, Kerry). But she – that little girl up there – she’s the only person I have to honor, ultimately, the only person I owe loyalty to. Make her happy, make her proud, don’t let her down.
I’m not that much of a foodie, and so I am not familiar with M.F.K. Fisher’s food writing, although everything I have heard makes me want to read more. Joan Acocella wrote this essay for The New Yorker on the occasion of the release of the collected letters of M.F.K. Fisher in 1998. Joan Acocella, in true fashion, makes me care about a writer with whom I am not familiar at all. And she seems able to crack open for me, a novice, what it is that makes Fisher’s writing so compelling, so important. (If there are any Fisher fans out there, I would so love to hear from you about your favorites, and why!)
When asked why she chose to be a food writer, Fisher answered:
It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot think straightly of one without the others. So it happens that when I write about hunger I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one.
Acocella takes us through the details of Fisher’s life. Fisher wrote books, but it wasn’t until the 70s, with the women’s movement and the food revolution that her work really got a wide audience. She became famous. She was, to quote Acocella: “a prophet of the food/sex sacramentalism of the period. Today, six years after her death, her cult still flourishes. Seventeen of her twenty-six books are still, or back, in print, including a few that needn’t be.”
Fisher was a cook from the beginning. She grew up in Whittier, California (at the same time as Richard Nixon), and her father was the editor of the local paper. He also wrote for it and sometimes he had his young teenage daughter sub for writers on vacation, so MFK Fisher was writing sports columns and society columns, and no one knew the difference. She got married young. She started writing for magazines. Her marriage was not happy. She eventually moved back to California after her mother died to take care of her father. There was nearly a 20-year gap in her writing career. Then it started up again in the 60s, and she started publishing food books and cooking books, one after the other after the other.
I was most interested in the analysis Acocella provides below, especially in the paragraph starting with the words “She remained unbroken”, and it is one of the many examples of why I treasure Acocella’s writing. I also think that only a woman would make such a connection, only a woman would look at the bald facts and come to the conclusion she did. I appreciate her depth.
She was twenty-one. She was a writer already, she just didn’t know it.
Nor, beyond letter-writing, did she try it until about five years later, when she began to think of leaving Al. She knew she would need money, so she started writing magazine pieces. Soon she fell in love with a friend, Dillwyn Parrish, a painter from a family of painters. (Maxfield Parrish was a cousin of his.) She went off to live with him in Switzerland, and now she discovered something: sex. As comes out very gradually in the letters, this was not part of her relationship with Al. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he was “frightened and repelled by the actual physical act of love.” With Parrish it was different. He uncorked her. They gardened, they picnicked, they talked for hours on end. He painted, she wrote; she became a writer at last. This went on for a year. In 1938, Dillwyn developed an embolism in his leg, and the leg was amputated, but the pain didn’t go away. Soon his condition was diagnosed as Buerger’s disease, a fatal circulatory disorder. They moved back to the United States and got married, but they had no hope. “He can’t walk at all unless I hold him,” she wrote to a friend. “His pain is terrible to think of.” Finally, in 1941, after three years of anguish, he killed himself.
Fisher’s life went into a tailspin. A year after Dillwyn’s suicide, her brother David also committed suicide, the night before he was to go into the Army. The year after that, Fisher gave birth to an illegitimate child – her first daughter. (She told everyone the child was adopted. She never revealed who the father was.) Two years after that, on a trip to New York, she met a dashing book editor. Donald Friede, and though she seems never to have trusted him – he had already been through five wives – within two weeks she became the sixth. (She telegraphed a friend: “I ACCIDENTALLY GOT MARRIED SATURDAY TO DONALD FRIEDE.”) In 1946, she had his baby, her second daughter, Mary. But before long Friede’s publishing career was in ruins, and he was in the throes of a mental breakdown. In 1951, after six years of marriage, she divorced him.
She remained unbroken. From 1937 to 1949, through grief and hell, she published nine books. I guess we should pause for a minute over the fact that she became a writer once she had become a sexual being. But a minute is enough. Twenty-nine was not a late age for a woman of her generation to be publishing her first book, and, as I said, she needed money. The notable thing is not that sex opened her up but that the complications and disasters that followed did not close her down again. How to Cook a Wolf, that brave, happy book, was dictated to her sister Norah, at the typewriter, as Fisher, still in black grief over Dillwyn, paced up and down in the house where he had shot himself only months before. The Gastronomical Me, which followed a year later, was “conceived and written and typed in ten weeks”, as she did other work on the side and gestated a fatherless child.
Then came an experience, seemingly benign, that did almost break her. In 1949, her mother died. Her father now needed someone to run his house, and Fisher, his oldest child, decided she should do it. For four years, she remained in Whittier – a conservative town where she no longer felt comfortable – cooking, cleaning, running around after her daughters, and watching her father, who was dying of pulmonary fibrosis, hawk up phlegm and spit it into the fireplace. She had no one to talk to. She began having spells of depression and, if I read her correctly, severe anxiety attacks. She began seeing a psychiatrist.
During this whole period, she wrote next to nothing, apart from columns, including her father’s, for the Whittier News. (This was part of the deal. As long as she was there to help with the paper, he didn’t have to sell it, though he was far too old and sick to run it.) She stopped thinking of herself as a writer. Rather, as she wrote to Norah, she was “a genteel has-been now and then asked to speak ten minutes at an arty tea.” This state of mind continued long past her father’s death, in 1953. She who had published nine books in twelve years brought out not a single new book in the twelve years after she moved into her father’s house. Those who lament the dissolution of the American family – kids with no way to get to Girl Scouts, aging parents put into nursing homes – should remember what it was that kept the American family together: women’s blood.
I feel dead beat and never want to write another line – I hate hate HATE journalism. I want to write a light book before I do my vast ghost story but I have no lightness in me.
Letter to Ottoline Morrell, Dec. 28, 1922
Thank you so much for the diary. Its blue watered silk is a special joy to me as I hate leather anywhere except on my feet.
Letter to S.K. Ratcliffe, March 21, 1923
I have tried to leave H.G. innumerable times, but never without his following me and asking me to come back. I have as a matter of fact left him in the moment but I am dreading another attempt to get me to come back. It is also as I have a steady monogamous nature and would have been the most wifely wife on earth extremely difficult not to take on the job again. My one hope therefore of getting and keeping clear is to get to America! Therefore this news does depress me. I would be glad if you would tell me all about it. I have a book (about 30,000 words) in my head, Second Thoughts on Feminism which I could write – if I keep free – in 2,000 word articles – which would make it plain where I stood and how unlikely it was that I should preach anything too revolutionary.
Letter to John Middleton Murry, May 30, 1923
I would like to tell you how deeply I feel the loss of Katherine Mansfield. It has meant more to me (and many of our generation) than I would have thought any but a personal bereavement could mean. She gave one the pleasure of feeling absolutely unstinted admiration.
Letter to sister Winifred Macleod, Nov. 3, 1923
The Statue of Liberty is a washout – she gets her stays at the same place as Queen Mary.
Letter to sister Winifred Macleod, Nov. 3, 1923
I simply cannot convey to you how unlike America is to what it says it is and gets other people to say it is. I have been in three places now – New York, Springfield (Mass.) – and here [Philadelphia] – everywhere the women are hideous and beyond all belief slovenly. A certain number are good looking between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five – they get even that good looks simply by force of slimness and careful management – There are very few good looking women of thirty – the middle aged women are repulsive wrecks – bad skins, and untidy though elaborately dressed hair – and at all ages the most terribly bad carriage. They wear very expensive and solid clothes which they huddle round them in such a way as to spoil all their lines – and they walk and dance with their feet wide apart. Almost every woman not theatrical who has spoken to me has worn an untidily adjusted hairnet dragging over her forehead and round the nape of her neck. Their utter and complete lack of sex attraction is simply terrifying. Not that it matters – for the men seem entirely lacking in virility. They wear spectacles almost as commonly as the Germans – and they are beyond belief slow. The mechanical side of life here whirls – telephones, taxis, trolleys, but a pale humanity patters along in the midst of it. (The only attractive and thoroughly male personality I met in New York was my publisher George Doran – an elderly man – between sixty and seventy – and he turned out to be a Canadian.) They are slow in speech, slow in movement, slow in thought. The irritation of receiving a telephone message from an American is almost past belief – the service is incredibly quick and good – one is connected at once – and then a slow, dry voice drawls interminably.
Letter to sister Winifred Macleod, Nov. 3, 1923
I spoke in the evening to four or five hundred people – the College Club – and gave them a lecture on the novel – how more and more people are writing in fiction the kind of lyrical emotion they would have reserved for poetry before with special references to Conrad and Katherine Mansfield. It was a fairly closely wrought thesis, and they loved it – came crowding to me afterwards and saying quite interesting things and asking interesting questions. The thing that startled me and will give you an idea of how odd the atmosphere of New England is that several of them said things like – “I must tell you something – I hope you won’t think it odd of me to say it. But you did look so beautiful against that rose-coloured curtain. And how lovely your dress is.” Can you imagine anything so queer – said with a curious earnestness?
Letter to sister Winifred Macleod, Nov. 3, 1923
I went back from Springfield with two notabilities – a “Mayflower” woman – the trouble is Mayflower doesn’t mean a thing except that your ancestors like to take their Bible reading seriously; it doesn’t give you any breed at all. I don’t suppose democratic pioneering does for an aristocratic type – you have to have the element of leadership.
Letter to sister Winifred Macleod, Nov. 3, 1923
The journey from Philadelphia here (I am finishing this letter in Chicago) took eighteen hours – The first six followed alongside the Susquehanna and Julietta Rivers. Nothing in the world could convey the wistful beauty of American river scenery – the serenity of the wooded heights – wave-like in their skyline – the beauty of the wide shallow waters. I was adopted in the train by a charming old Texan, who called me “Ma’am,” paid me old-fashioned compliments (“If I may ask, Ma’am, how is it that such a charming lady as yourself have escaped matrimony?”) insisted on treating me to all my meals, and escorted me to my hotel here. The amount of attention one gets from men here would turn one’s head if one didn’t look round at the sallow hags of American women and realise that the standard is very different from Europe !
Letter to Sinclair and Gracie Lewis, Dec. 9, 1923
I met a peach of an elderly clubwoman in Milwaukee who pleased me very much by telling me that it didn’t really matter if the young American girls got tight at dances and stripped to the skin – “because the American man is, beyond the comprehension of you Europeans – PURE.” So there. The Clubwoman I’ve hated worst yet was one who penetrated to my room at the Drake and for one hour and a half read me the poems of her deceased daughter, aged twelve, collected under the title “Lovely Thoughts of an Angel Child.” You can guess what lovely thoughts this angel child had. I love America and I loathe it. I can understand that people like you must be in an amazing state of conflict about it.
Letter to H.G. Wells (her pet name for him was “Cat” and “Jaguar”, among other things):
I’ve been shepherding Emma Goldman who is a very sensible body. She has a lot of very interesting facts about the treatment of intellectuals. Shaw won’t see her, and the Daily Herald and Labor Party people are rude to her before she begins to speak. Clever, flexible Jaguar that has always kept himself out of these fossilising party influences.
Letter to Max Beaverbrook, autumn 1924
The Express published today a story about Emma Goldman in which your (not inappropriately) rabbit-witted subordinates laid stress on her anarchist record, and mentioned casually that she had returned from Russia disillusioned with the Bolshevists. The effect of that article was distinctly unfavourable to Emma Goldman. Now, not only is Emma Goldman worth six of you (or three of me) but she is the most powerful Anti-Bolsh eyewitness I have yet encountered. Her effect as an Anti-Bolsh speaker ought to be tremendous. (Some of us are getting up a Queen’s Hall meeting for her.) I know that your interest in politics is restricted to personal gossip, but you might try to understand and sympathise with people who are interested in deeper issues. If you attack her as an anarchist she (being as pigheaded as a mule) will probably get defiant and declare that she still is an anarchist and queer her own and the Anti-Bolsh pitch. Therefore it would be seemly and consistent with its own politics if the Daily Express and the Evening Standard refrained from attacking Emma.
Letter to John Gunther, France, summer 1926
I have been having a real old-fashioned nervous breakdown, and it hasn’t seemed to me that it mattered where anybody was as all people on this globe seemed equally miserable anywhere. This nervous breakdown earned its keep, I think, because I am now so tough that I could keep my head up and see where I collapsed and why, and I have found out something useful. My breakdown was due to Lettie. And it was due to the fact that she hasn’t a thought about me that goes more than two centimetres below the surface which isn’t dislike and shame. She wishes I didn’t exist. She thinks I look awful. She thinks my career is a despicable failure… She is constantly embarrassed by my conversation and my manner. She treats Anthony as if he were the most appalling freak because he is mine. She actually has delusions about him. She alleged to me quite solemnly just before she left that he was so dark that of course it would be a handicap to him all through his life because people would think he had coloured blood in him. She is nearly crazy with an elder sister desire to call her little sister down. And that is a force that all my life has been depressing and annoying me. I am perfectly sure that is that and nothing in the way of a morbid neurosis which makes me dread going back to England. It isn’t, as my family has always conspired to make me believe and as H.G. in his sadism loved to tell me, that I am a neurotic who cannot stand up to life, but that I am healthy and I have been preyed on by neurotics till they have bled me nearly white.
Letter to John Gunther, Dec. 1926
I fancy I wrote you the last time I saw Jerry. Didn’t I tell you that the deplorable Bille was married to her Yiddish boss and having her honeymoon at the Biltmore of chaste memory and had disconcerted the bridegroom by manifesting herself as a dyed-in-the-wool dope addict? It is morphine and I understand of years’ standing. Jerry consoled himself by an affair with a woman called Catherine Brodie (Jerry doesn’t know I know this) who is almost as offensive as Billie except that she has a good figure. She has a face like a skull and all her light chitchat is of her husband’s strange sexual habits. I rather weary of Jerry’s crescendo of undesirable females.
Letter to John Gunther, Dec. 1926
I oddly don’t want to tell you who my lover is. Not one soul knows of it. He is a Californian, and a banker, and a terrific gambler, and he is so illiterate that he reads poetry and remembers it and gets a kick out of words , and he is broke one day and a millionaire the next, and he has been in love with me for three years without knowing me. I don’t know if it’ll last.
Letter to Vyvyan Holland (Oscar Wilde’s son), July 1927
I feel my bad luck is comic.
Letter to John Gunther, fall, 1927
This flat has a lovely view, but a bathroom that only a virgin could tolerate.
Letter to Jonathan Cape, Dec. 1927
The essay “Strange Necessity” (god dammit) has gone from 6,000 to 30,000 words. It begins with a discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses which is probably the first estimate to be done neither praying nor vomiting. In it I come to the conclusion that though it is ugly and incompetent it is a work of art. That is to say it is necessary. Then I go on to discuss what is this “strange necessity, art” which is so inclusive of opposites? – as for instance the paintings of Ingres and the books of James Joyce? This leads to an analysis of literature and the discovery of a double and vital function it fulfills for men. Firstly it makes a collective external brain for man; secondly it presents certain formal relations to man which suggest a universe more easy in certain respects than the one he knows.
Letter to Letitia Fairfield, New York, autumn, 1928
The gang warfare here (especially in Brooklyn) is becoming as bad as Chicago – and everybody is simply thrilled and amused by it. Nobody reads anything but murder stories – and all the plays are about crime. The other night some people took me to a nightclub and we got in just as the police were taking charge of it because Texas Guinian’s brother had struck a chorus-girl there the night before and during the day she had died. All these horrors simply amuse people, though the crime is just as sordid as it is anywhere else.
Letter to Sylvia Lund, South of France, August 31, 1929
I would give anything in the world to own this particular villa, which is just as I like it – the property of an old opera singer, entirely decorated with portraits of herself. It must be so funny to sit in a room with portraits of yourself for the last 40 years candidly showing the change from black to red that came about 1895 and the change from red to gold that came about 1902.
Letter to Sylvia Lund, August 31, 1929
I must confess I love France more and more – though what an insane people! We have neighbors in the next villa who glower at us and insult us in every way to such a degree that in England would make one go to the nearest police station to report the presence of lunatics.
Letter to Bertrand Russell, Sept. 1929
[H.G.’s] behaviour seems to me insane. I am aware from my knowledge of him that he has a violent anti-sex complex like Tolstoy’s – You punish the female who evokes your lust. But it seems to me to be reaching demented extremes. I hear from the lady with whom he lives at present (whom is quite mad) that he frequently hits her and gives her black eyes, and so on, which is surely not done in our set. (This was not cited as evidence of cruelty, but as evidence that they were living a rich and satisfying life.)
Letter to Irita Van Doren, autumn, 1929
I found I could write of nothing but my sick loathing for every blighter writing except James Joyce whom I think a pretentious nitwit but who has guts, guts of the moonlight, beautiful guts, as Lewis Carroll nearly wrote.
Letter to Irita Van Doren, autumn, 1929
As a result of the reflection of this on my material affairs I became engaged to a man named Cohen, but I couldn’t go through with it. Since then however I have discovered that earth has few negative pleasures greater than not being engaged to a man named Cohen.
Letter to Henry Andrews (she would marry him a couple months after writing this letter – this was her husband for decades, until his death), spring, 1930
I liked your last long letters so much. I was amused by the young man who took you out to dinner to talk about his love-affairs on the sound assumption you knew a great deal about love. He sounded so much less nice than you are that I can’t help feeling a little sorry for the girl. But this involves me in being sorry for all girls – except myself. I am glad you are so nice about Harriet [Cohen]. She has had such a strange story – of people getting near her and winning a place by her simply in order to gratify something jealous in themselves by refusing her the tenderness and honour that she ought to have – that that self-assertion is pardonable. It is, I know quite well, as “shymaking” – to use Evelyn Waugh’s word – as anything I know, and you are a darling to get behind it.
Letter to George Bye, West’s American agent, August 30, 1930
But do you think I will ever fit into the Outlook? It seems so damned earnest.
Letter to George Bullett, Dec. 11, 1930
I am so glad you quoted and approved the passage about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, because I think it was such a great and endearing effort of Lawrence’s mind, and I am very conscious of how it wasn’t honoured by the world in the horrible reviews I am getting of this book – not that I attach any great importance to it as far as my own literary powers are concerned, because I write it as my monthly letter to the American Bookman and it was entirely Secker’s idea to reprint it. What I hate is the sniggering about Lawrence and the actual candid joy in his death which is expressed in review after review – particularly in the illustrated weeklies and the provincial papers. The tone is savage and indecent. There is a kind of lewd hysteria about it – which declares itself more unpleasantly still in the personal letters, most of them anonymous, that I am receiving. [Lawrence] was right – he was and is hated. And that he was hated by vile people makes one revere him more – but the frightful vitality of their vileness, and the amount of it, makes one despair – if it wasn’t for such pleasant reviews as your own.
Letter to Henry Andrews (her husband: their pet names for one another were “Ric” and “Rac”. Rebecca also used “Rac” as a term for “woman” and “Ric” as a term for “man”.) This anecdote makes me laugh out loud. The punchline is not just a joke – the actual Prince of Wales (Edward, who abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson) was actually at this party.
Yesterday I went to dinner with Anna May Wong and Joe – and we had a lovely dinner but Anna May Wong is too stupid to be a useful Rac. Old Joe said, “Anna May, you look so lovely you’ve made me fall in love with you,” and instead of taking this as tummy-rubbing she said gravely, “Oh, Mr. Hergesheimer, I hope not, that would spoil our friendship. For I am very much in love with someone else.” We went on to Lilly’s party – which was very pretty but not very good – the food was inaccessible and we couldn’t go home at a reasonable hour – for why? There was a superb dialogue – Mrs. Gilbert Miller (a horrid very snobbish daughter of Julius Bache) came in and rustled over to Lilly and said – “I am so sorry – will you forgive me – we had a guest and when he heard where we were going to he did so want to come – I do hope you won’t mind me bringing him – I know it’s so awkward having this sort of guest at a party because of all the curtseying – you see it’s the King of Greece.” Lilly lethargically replied, “I wouldn’t mind a bit if he’d only get out of the doorway – he’s standing right in the way of the Prince of Wales.”
“If a kid came to ask me how to prepare for a screen career, I guess what I’d say would be to go to school, learn to handle liquor, mix with people, get into trouble, work in lots of different jobs, and always remember his reactions to things and people. That is the best equipment in front of a camera.”
Bernard Lansky, Memphis retailer, and owner of the flashy clothing store Lansky Brothers, on Beale Street, has died. Mostly famous for his most-famous lifelong customer (Elvis started buying clothes there in high school), Lansky was an influential member of the Memphis business community and helped provide all of the musicians flowing in and out of town at that time with the sharp wardrobes that would mark the rise of honky-tonks, rock and roll, and rhythm and blues. Elvis’ taste for flashy pink suits with black striped pants and “chartreuse fucking shirts” (to quote Sam Phillips) made him stand out, which was obviously the point. No matter what else happened, Elvis was determined to be “unignorable” (to steal Dave Marsh’s word). Bernard Lansky would see Elvis, a pimply teenager, hanging around outside, peeking in through the windows at the clothes.
One of Lansky’s favorite Elvis stories was how he first met the future King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Presley was a teenager working as an usher at a nearby theater and liked to window shop at Lansky’s.
“He said, ‘When I get rich, I’m going to buy you out,'” Lansky said in a standard version of the story. “I said, ‘Don’t buy me out. Just buy from me.’ And he never forgot me.”
Elvis shopped at Lansky’s his entire life. Naturally, once he became a superstar, he couldn’t shop during regular hours. He couldn’t do anything during regular hours. So he would have his buddies go to Lansky’s and pick up stuff they knew he would like, or he would have Bernard Lansky stay open all night so Elvis could stop by and basically buy the entire store.
Lansky Brothers was on Beale Street for decades before moving to the Peabody Hotel, where it still is today. The building on Beale Street is empty (at least it was during my visit), but there are faded photographs in the windows of Elvis shopping, trying on clothes, getting fitted, pics of Elvis in some of the famous suits made for him by Lansky.
Elvis had a distinctive style of dress even before he was famous. Picture that shy weird boy peeking through the window after school, and thinking, “Some day I am going to be dressed in head-to-toe pink with black accents”, in a world where his fellow students were wearing jeans and checked button-down shirts, and you can get an idea of how out there Elvis was for his time.
Some clearly candid poses.
Loyalty is a rare quality in anyone, but even rarer among stars, where it is easy to go so far away from your roots that you forget, you may never find your way back. Elvis had a ton of problems in his life, but that was not one of them. He rented homes in Beverly Hills, but his home base was Memphis, where he had lived since he was 13. He was doing the same things for fun, at the same damn venues, when he was 36 as when he was 16. It’s all a bit boring to think about, but picturing Elvis’ fame and the stress that such fame would place on a sensitive ego, it makes sense.
Elvis getting dressed for his Russwood Park show in Memphis, July 4, 1956. Photo by Alfred Wertheimer
Elvis loved Lansky Brothers. They helped him create his look that got everyone talking, along with everything else about him. Elvis was superstitious, and also faithful. He had been chosen. It was his responsibility to be grateful and humble about it. It was also his responsibility to be good to people who had been good to him. He never forgot a slight, it’s true. But he also never forgot a kindness. (Lansky, for example, did not respond to teenage Elvis’ boast that he would one day “buy the store out” with “Please. You’ll never amount to that much.” or a sarcastic “Yeah, I had dreams once, too.” He accepted Elvis’ grandiose version of his own future, out of kindness, obviously, and the instinct of a good businessman, and signed up with it: “Don’t buy me out. Just buy from me.” Picture what a comment like that would mean to Elvis, and how it participated in his daydreams of his future.) Bernard Lansky was kind to Elvis, but more important than that: he opened a door into a world that Elvis wanted to enter, and Elvis wanted to enter it young. He dressed like he was “somebody” before he ever was (of course, though, we’re talking about Elvis, who became famous at the age of 19, so boy didn’t have long to wait.)
Elvis in high school. See what I mean?
There were many factors in play that helped create the phenomenon of Elvis, and much of it was not in his control (things like youth demographics, more powerful radio signals, and peacetime leisure, not to mention television) – but the things that were in his control (song choice, onstage behavior, offstage behavior, persona-creation, fan relationships) he took on with gusto and specificity. He knew he had to give the audience something extra. He said that repeatedly. Otherwise they could just stay at home and listen to his records, why even bother coming out and seeing him?
Notice the belt.
Go to Memphis today and you can still see the building where Lansky’s once was, on a slightly tilted sidewalk, with a battered awning along the side of the building. Nobody goes in or out. But it is a landmark. There is a plaque. There are music notes on the windows, and a collage of photos of Elvis in his famous clothes, provided for him right there in that location. You can stand in the same spot Elvis did as a teenager, peering in at the racks of beautifully colored pink and green and yellow jackets and pants, and dreaming himself up … and out.
Elvis, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black, and, I believe, Elvis’ cousin, getting dressed backstage at the Mosque Theatre for their show, June 1956. Photo by Alfred Wertheimer.
Daydreams are important. Daydreams are crucial. What Elvis dreamed for himself came true 100-fold. His imagination was fluid and susceptible and he saw Lansky’s clothes as the embodiment of his dreams for himself. It was as influential as listening to Dean Martin or the Blackwood Brothers. Elvis always wanted the whole package. He never wanted his life to be narrow. His dreams were huge.
We all need help along the way, especially dreamers. It’s hard. Because it’s hard to convince people to get on board with your dream, especially if it is an outrageous one (“I want to be world-famous and make millions of people happy”. It is my belief that Elvis held this dream very consciously. Nothing “just” happened. I think he had it planned all along, and that’s a hell of a secret to keep from people. It’s not that he was better or more talented, although he was that too. It’s just that he dreamed harder than anyone else.)
Elvis had a gift, and while he kept it private, he also had a way of gathering people around him who also believed. He would commandeer them at times, basically kidnapping his friends to go on tour with him, but beyond that, with other musicians, with jewelers, with horse-dealers, with car-dealers, with book-dealers … Elvis sought out what he wanted, and wanted it with such ferocity that businessmen, serious capitalist people, would devote their lives to giving Elvis what he wanted. He was a good customer. These men all realized that.
Elvis shopping for shirts in Manhattan, March, 1956. Photo by Alfred Wertheimer.
And so they tolerated being woken up at 3 in the morning by Elvis, asking if he could have 25 custom-made gold TCB medallions made and delivered to him the next day, or could he please get the car he wanted delivered in 10 minutes, or what about getting rare copies of esoteric philosophical books delivered to him by the caseload at short notice because he was about to get on the Lisa Marie to go to Vegas for 6 weeks. Elvis ran these people ragged. He made unreasonable demands. He would not take no for an answer. But business is a two-way street and businessmen who know which side their bread is buttered on will do what they can to please a customer like Elvis.
Elvis meeting with a jeweler in NYC backstage at the Steve Allen Show. Elvis bought his first diamond ring (the horseshoe one) from this jeweler.
And it is important to remember: you don’t get to be as successful as Elvis was by being patient, and learning how to wait for things. Elvis was so impatient that on his way home from Vegas, or wherever, by train, he would often get off in Houston, rent a car and drive to Memphis. Elvis, that makes no sense. But it made sense to Elvis. He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. He was unreasonable in that regard. If really successful people have one thing in common, it is that. They know what they want, and they go out and get it. End-stop. Whether it be world-wide fame, or a pink Cadillac or a diamond horseshoe ring or 25 TCB medallions, ordered at 3 in the morning and delivered by noon the next day. Or pink pants with black stripes down the side.
Elvis was loyal. He bought the same shit from the same people for 20 years. Business is a relationship and Elvis understood that better than most.
Bernard Lansky was 85. He never retired. He continued to open clothing shops around Memphis, many of which are still open. He was known as Clothier to the King (and that is the title of the book he wrote with his brother). Bernard Lansky was the one the Presley family reached out to when Elvis died, and it was he who chose the all-white suit Elvis was buried in.
Lansky used to say, “I put his first suit on him, and I put his last suit on him.”
Rest in peace.
Lansky Brothers as it is now. That is the sidewalk where Elvis used to stand, nose pressed up against the glass.
Music notes, on the windows of the deserted shop on Beale Street
Picture of Lansky Brothers back in the day, in the windows of the now-deserted shop.
Elvis in Lansky Brothers, looks to be 1955 here.
Elvis’ closet at the Audobon Drive house, Memphis, 1956. Photo by Alfred Wertheimer.
My friend David has always said that my life is a literary conceit and while this is a heavy burden to bear (I don’t want my life to line up in themes and leitmotifs) it is amusing sometimes to notice it. Sometimes this just has to do with coincidence, it is true. I don’t go much for “oooh, look at how everything MAKES. SENSE” but sometimes there does come a moment when I have to say: “Okay. This is totes bizarre.”
So here are the facts:
1. I have been a big fan of the singer/songwriter for Bleu for about 5 years. Some of his songs really helped me get thru some rough times in 2009.
3. In the last three, four days, which have been wretched beyond belief, wretched even by my standards, I have been listening to him nonstop.
4. I put up a Bleu video on FB on Tuesday of one of my current favorites, “Save Me”, a song I’ve been listening to repeatedly. “Why don’t you save me? Save me from myself?” That is the question.
5. I follow him on Twitter and after I Tweeted about him on Tuesday, he responded, Retweeted my Tweet to his followers, and then “followed” me. I was excited.
6. On Wednesday, I suddenly thought: “Huh. Let me check out his schedule.” (I’m not a big “go out and hear music” or “go to concerts” person – not for any real reason, seriously, I’m just a moron.) So I go to his website and see that he is currently touring, and he’s all over the place – Virginia, Pennsylvania, California – but I saw that the next day – the very next day – he was playing in NYC. (Normally, in the way things usually go, I’d check the website and see that he had played the day before in NYC and I would have a moment of shame wishing I had known about it.)
I bought a ticket.
So while I don’t go for being all “isn’t that amazeballs” over coincidences, this was a particularly nice one, and I like how it all went down.
New York is still deep in the throes of recovery. Businesses and schools have been thrown into chaos. There are those who have lost their homes, who are now living in shelters, and waiting to rebuild. It’s getting cold out. It’s a very tense time and New York and New Jersey still need help. Bleu does work with Why Hunger which, in partnership with FEMA, have been helping get food to those who need it, and Bleu’s show last night, at Rockwood Music Hall was a fundraiser for Why Hunger. It’s a very good organization and are really working in the nuts and bolts of the catastrophe here, so if you are looking for a way to help (and we still need help), consider donating to Why Hunger.
Rockwood Music Hall is a small venue (my sister Siobhan played there once), with a dark cozy beautiful vibe. There is a tiny balcony running around the upper level, with tall bar tables and bar stools. There are windows right out onto the street. I got myself a seat up front. The band Air Traffic Controller (Bleu produced their last album) opened for Bleu. It’s a small stage, and the band members were: Lead guitarist, bassist (who also played the mandolin on occasion), stand-up bass guy, drums, viola player, violin player, and cellist. No shit. They were all on top of each other, and the cords covered the stage floor, and it filled my heart with happiness: Musicians doing their thing, being awesome, living the dream. They were terrific, and I loved Casey Sullivan’s voice (she was the bassist). She wore a little black derby and was totally awesome.
At one point, I saw Bleu walk into the bar from the back. Instantly recognizable with the huge muttonchops. He was wearing a pink jacket. It’s a funny thing, listening to someone’s songs on eternal repeat for an entire wretched week. You start to identify, you start to relate, this person feels real to you, he is speaking directly to you. This is the thing that musicians have with their fans that can’t be manufactured, although many try. Bleu has a devoted fan base. He was an early devotee of Kickstarter campaigns and has financed one entire album and publicity campaign with donations from fans, and is currently in the middle of another campaign. His journey has been an interesting one, with a major label CD (Redhead, an awesome album), a bunch of side projects (many with Mike Viola, a musician I have written about before – and – dovetail – my sister Siobhan O’Malley opened for Mike Viola once!), and a voice that slides right into my subconscious. His songs are often quite funny, but he can also lay his heart bare. He’s clever, but not self-consciously so. There’s a certain goofy pop-star aspect to Bleu (I think I read an article once where he said he loved Britney Spears and felt no shame about it), and it makes his performance-style extroverted and generous. He’s a showman, basically. An old-school showman, with muttonchops, sneakers, and a pink jacket. And boy can he sing. There are many different voices in his repertoire. He can scream hard and loud and macho (and on tune) like Dave Grohl. And he has a falsetto to die for (many of his songs are almost entirely in his falsetto). His range is impressive. His influences vast. Sometimes I hear almost a melancholy dance-hall influence in his stuff, other times it is clear that he adores Cheap Trick. But most of all: he is himself. He is an authentic artist, and I get that from his CDs, but it was even more clear to me seeing him in person.
He took the stage. He’s such a giant to me that it was wonderful to see him so close, on a small stage, with a crowd of maybe 50 people there. This is the test of a talent, ultimately. This is what was so incredible and riveting about Elvis’ “sit-down sessions” in the 1968 NBC special. Elvis was so huge, so otherworldly almost, that to see him in a casual informal jam, and still be as good as anyone has ever been on the planet ever … is still startling today. Elvis always loved the bells and whistles, from the get-go. He wore a gold lame suit. He had his name painted on his car, and etched on his guitar, as a 21-year-old man. Later, he went in for capes and jumpsuits and melodramatic crescendoes of the theme from 2001 to announce his entrance to the stage. But the 1968 special proved that although Elvis’ tastes may have run in that direction (and they did), he didn’t need them to “show up”. And I mean “show up” in the way Ellen Burstyn uses the term. “Show up” means to be present, with all your talent, fears, hopes, dreams, yearnings, anger, everything … and to be able to do it … in front of people. Years ago, I saw a special about Madonna (she was in England, living with Guy Ritchie at the time), and to promote her new album she went to a Virgin Records Store and did an acoustic set and it was painful to watch. Painful. I am a fan of Madonna, but without the trappings, without the sound and lights, she was completely defenseless. She had nothing to rely on. I actually felt bad for her. I didn’t judge her or anything like that. I just felt that she was not equipped to do … what Elvis did in 1968.
Bleu, of course, is not as famous as Elvis or Madonna, but that is part of the point I am trying to make. He’s huge to me, and he is huge to his fans. At a certain point, the level of fame is irrelevant. You either can “show up” or you can’t. I’ve been to tiny shows with small audiences and felt the singer couldn’t “show up”, and you know it on a gut-check level: “This person doesn’t have it.” Talent like that shows up whether you’re playing for 50,000 or 50, but the real test is the 50. Bleu communicates with his devoted fan base through social media (he is very active on all fronts), and you get the sense that although he is the Star, we are all in this together. We, the devotees, are a part of his success. He does not take that for granted. He is in the middle of another fan fundraising campaign, and he said that the response left him “emotional”, and you could feel the truth of that in his body language and in the look on his face. It’s a beautiful thing: to feel like you are a part of someone’s well-deserved success.
The first song he launched into was “No Such Thing as Love”. It was on the short list of songs I hoped he would play, but still somehow I was not prepared for the wave of emotion that came over me at the first chord. The lyrics are deeply poignant and relevant to me: “There’s no such thing as love … but all the same I wish there was…” Hearing it live though was a whole different ballgame than hearing it on the one recorded version I have. Bleu is interesting: he has this control panel at his feet, and he sings into an old-school mike (very like this one. Hm.) which records his voice, and then, through a deft tap-tapping of his feet on various levers and buttons on the control panel, plays his voice back, so it becomes his own back-up singers. This is used to brilliant effect in “No Such Thing as Love” (as you can see in the clip at the bottom of the post, from another show). I had seen clips of Bleu use this control panel, it’s quite a sight (tap-tap-tapping feet, creating this rich huge sound that makes it seem like there are 10 people onstage rather than one or two), but to see him in person was strangely emotional and I am still trying to figure out why.
I think it has to do with “showing up”.
In my life, in my career, in my friendships, and in my love life, I am only interested in people who are able to “show up”. You know it when you see it. It has the unmistakable stamp of authenticity. And it doesn’t look a certain way. It could be someone laughing uproariously, clutching their stomach, unafraid of making a scene, or looking foolish. It could be someone obsessing over the details of their painting, and focusing in on the angle of her shoulder, the light on the side of her cheek. It could be the way someone listens. They’re present, they are wholly involved in listening, they are not focused on self. All of this encompasses the vastness of “showing up”.
And that’s a bit of what I felt was going on as Bleu started his show, in his eerie floating falsetto, and the tap-tapping of feet on the control board, launching the harmonized echo. This is a man so freely in the zone of his work that I felt like I was in the presence of something pure. Work is always pure to me, when it is pursued freely and single-mindedly. That’s what I saw. It pierced my heart. And that’s all even before I succumbed to the story the song was telling, a story of yearning, of beyond-the-pale yearning, of hurt looking for hope, of a determination to still believe, all evidence to the contrary.
He sang some new songs, ones I hadn’t heard before, which was thrilling, and he sang many that I knew. At times I looked around at the rapt crowd. There were tons of people standing before the stage, and there were those up on the balcony, and those on the sideline like me. A couple of people were taking pictures (myself included, obviously) but I didn’t see any of that obnoxious “let me just hold my phone up in the air for the entirety of the concert so I can capture the moment which I am not even fully experiencing because I am so busy trying to capture it” behavior. Bleu was so present that we became present. People were in the room with him.
Bleu is a light-hearted and available presence. His songs can be quite dark, and a couple of them have an almost stalker vibe (the man understands sexual obsession), but his persona is natural and open and funny. He drank apple juice. He mentioned his “two ornery cats”. He thanked the fans in a heartfelt manner for supporting him. He talked about Why Hunger. There was a flow, between the chatter and the songs, and I felt that this was a man in the zone. I know he has his struggles like anybody else, but when he is “at work”, he is perfect.
He sang “Dead in the Morning”, off his last album, which is a joyous and macabre anthem (“I’ll be dead, I’ll be dead, I’ll be dead, I’ll be dead, I’ll be -de-eh-ead …”), and he had onstage with him a standup bass player (Bleu, glancing at it: “I tried playing that once and it was like trying to play my couch”), a viola player, and a cellist, and all other sound came from himself and his maneuvering of the control board at his feet. It was a MASSIVE sound. The place rocked out. It was like we in the crowd became one organism. I don’t even know what the hell happened. The song was a force of energy and it was big enough to take over the entire space and pour out into the streets.
At some unspoken cue, all the lights went out and he clicked one of his magic buttons somewhere, on the ground or elsewhere, and this happened to his guitar.
It was so goofy, surreal and sweet.
See what I mean about showman? It’s the same thing as Elvis painting his name on his car and wearing gold lame. You want to be in front of people? You had better be willing to “show up”. Being extroverted can often be just a matter of being willing to let the inside of you come out. An interior-directed person can sometimes be self-conscious about the “big gesture”. This is true of actors and certainly true of musicians. Bleu obviously takes great joy from technology, and uses it to its fullest capacity in his career. He is an inquisitive spirit, and tenacious. He is coming into his prime in the internet age. He had a record deal. He is now out in the wilds, unprotected, on his own. But honestly, that is the best place for him to be. He seems to feel that way too. Watch him working his own sound board while he is performing. It’s profound. It’s the wave of the future.
Oh yeah, and sometimes the lights on his guitar would go red. This was so pleasing to me, so funny. Pointless, really. But it’s my favorite kind of humor: pointless, wrapped up in the joy of doing whatever you want to do.
The last two songs he sang he sang with no mike. The place was small enough. He sang “How Blue” (you can see a clip of him singing it below), and it is one of his best songs. He sings it almost entirely in his falsetto, which gives an eerie and emotional effect. All of the lights were off, and he sang, un-miked, with his blue-lit guitar and we were all silent and still, and it’s one of those special moments of connection that doesn’t happen often in live shows.
But that was just the beginning. The last song he sang was “Searching for the Satellites”, off his Redhead album, a highly-produced (but no less effective than his others) album. On the recorded version, there’s a huge chorus backing him up, and his voice soars and roars over it. It sweeps up into his high falsetto and then comes roaring back down into his chest register. He has great control. But last night’s show was a different version. The song lives, no matter the trappings. He stepped off the stage, blue-lit guitar strapped around him, and stood on the floor with the crowd. Behind him the cellist accompanied him, the viola, and he sang the song straight up and unadorned. You could have heard a pin drop in that room. People were swaying, as if in a trance. He conducted us in the back-up parts, which, by the end of the song, we could add without being prompted by him. We were soft and open and sweet, singing softly, together. It was unbelievable. A unique experience. I couldn’t help but think about the horrible month our city has had, and how we are barely coming up for air. Every person in that room was affected by Sandy in some way. Sandy was acknowledged multiple times from the stage: it was the Event that needed to be talked about. To ignore it would be to ignore the energy in the room: a group of New Yorkers needing like hell to have a night out and be normal. And, with Bleu conducting, we sang together. It’s a quiet song, not a rousing foot-stamping number: an elegiac ballad about lying on your back looking at the stars, searching for the satellites. It seemed, at times, that Bleu could not get any quieter … but then he did. And we got quieter in our listening. Our energy pulled down and in, focusing in on him without any distractions. There was nothing else in the world other than what was happening in that space, between us. We were creating it together.
Amazingly, I just searched online for a clip of Searching for the Satellites, and someone up in the balcony last night recorded the song, and has already placed it on Youtube.
I was down on the floor, in the darkness behind the people swaying in the front row. You can see the tiny glow of the candles on the small bar I was leaning up against. At times I get a glimpse of myself back there, and I can also hear my big laugh at something he says in the beginning. While it is great to have the clip, and I just watched it again, the memory of the moment does not reside in the clip. The moment was larger than can be represented in a video clip: the space in that room was vast, undulating, and yet we all felt connected. I am certain we all felt connected. Although a Youtube clip cannot capture the feeling of a moment, I can hear that feeling in our voices singing in unison. I can feel it again. There it is. The softness, the availability, of human beings at their best.
It’s Bleu who brings that out. And he does it with confidence, joy, and ease. You never feel him reach. It’s there at his fingertips, whenever he needs it.
I know I needed it last night. That’s why I was there. I was so blue (“soooooo blue”, to quote his song). And in that weird goofy open space he created, the blue-ness was okay. The man’s name is Bleu. It’s a literary conceit. My blue mood was what I brought to the show. We all brought something. And there was something perfect about the show ending in a glow of blue light, shimmering off of his everyday guitar, turning it into something magical and talismanic, lighting up his muttonchops, lighting up the space around him which, although small, was actually so so huge.
by Joan Acocella. 
, the Library of America’s edition of the early novels of Saul Bellow (only the second time that the Library of America chose a living author to highlight). What is interesting and great about Acocella’s piece is that she analyzes Bellow’s development through his first two novels (
and 
), pointing out their shortcomings and their strengths, theorizing that he was just gathering his forces, casting out his net for his voice, his “way in”, until finally he hit paydirt with 
. Acocella walks us through that process (and you know I’m all about process). What happens when a writer (seemingly) suddenly finds himself? What happens when he finds the confidence to let it all hang out? AND … what is it about Saul Bellow’s work that is so important, so ground-breaking, so essential to understanding the American experience?
